“But your queen must remain to be tried before a court of Beasts,” he concluded. “She is an evil woman who has almost caused three deaths. Moschus, bring her before me.”
“Can’t.”
“Moschus!”
“Not unless you want her like this.”
Moschus pointed; the rest of us looked. And there lay Saffron in a sheath of wax, which had hardened over her body like a shroud.
She was becomingly but unmistakably dead.
You may think me a hard, merciless woman, but she had threatened Kora and me and wanted to drown Eunostos in the vat of wax. I have never spared pity for the pitiless, especially when they die through their own misdeeds.
“I know just the place for her,” I said, lifting her now somewhat weightier bulk and reentering that hateful hive.
In a deserted hive, in the hexagonal central room, there is a pedestal which is no longer without its statue. Bear Girls and young Centaurs often visit the place out of curiosity. The golden skin of Saffron shines through the wax and you might mistake her for a figure carved from amber. She is much more beautiful than in life, even with her wildly tangled hair and her staring eyes. They call her the Golden Gorgon.
When I emerged from the hive, Eunostos was pleading with Kora. He had knelt to her, all six feet of matchless Minotaur, a glory of mane and horns, of youth and might and tenderness; and she, a white lotus bending to touch his head.
“And you’ll marry me then and come to live in my stump?”
“Yes, Eunostos. You saved my life.”
I looked into her eyes but I did not see Eunostos. I saw her dream. I saw death.
PART TWO
CHAPTER VIII
Eunostos’s trunk resounded with preparations for the wedding. He had wanted to gather flowers and twine them above the door to his bamboo house, but no-Kora did not like them broken from their plants. The roses and columbine remained in his garden; the yellow gagea in his favorite meadow. But at least the Bears of Artemis had garlanded his windows with chains of black-eyed Susans and formed a big red heart of the berries above his door.
Eunostos himself, with help from me and the Centaurs, had prepared the feast. Tables groaned beneath baked dormice and roasted woodpeckers, honey cakes and loaves of wheaten bread sprinkled with sunflower seeds. And poor, fat Partridge had fermented a beverage of onion grass which Eunostos had accepted graciously but carefully segregated from the skins of wine and beer. The air was sweet not only with the delicacies of the table, but with fragrances from the underground workshop of the Telchins: a hint of myrrh, and intimation of sandarac, an essence of lavender, marjoram, and thyme.
Eunostos waited: it was not yet time for his friends to arrive, for friends and groom to fetch the bride from her tree, for Chiron to officiate over the ceremonies, for the wedding to be consummated in the bamboo house while we, the guests, roistered in the garden and shouted bawdy jests through the window.
Eunostos waited and, since most bridegrooms are as nervous as a Dryad at the sight of an ax, I waited with him.
“Eunostos,” I said, noticing the twitch in his tail, “it’s not as if you lacked experience. A Bee queen and all those Dryads-you haven’t a thing to fear.”
“But Kora is so-ethereal,” he said.
I was getting a little tired of Kora’s ethereality. “Treat her like any other woman. It’s just what she needs.”
“Eunostos, Zoe, did you hear the news?” It was Partridge, puffing more than usual.
“How do we know if we’ve heard it unless you tell us?”
“A Man, a Cretan. Right here in the country. Wandered in between the cliffs. Wounded, too!”
“He’s broken the covenant,” I said. “Chiron will be furious.”
“He’s probably in a daze,” Eunostos said, doubtless remembering his own recent wounds. “Zoe, will you stay here to greet my guests? I’m going to help him.”
“On your wedding day?”
“What if you hadn’t helped me when the Panisci beat me up?”
“Oh, very well,” I grumbled. I am not as heartless as I sound. I remembered Kora’s dream.
Aeacus, brother of Minos, king of Crete, sighed in the palace courtyard and dipped his hand in a pool of silver fish. Palm trees leaned above him, drooping their fronds like great green birds with many wings. Saffron crocuses rippled a golden fleece. Egyptians live in the past: they look at the Pyramids and yearn for departed majesties. Achaeans live in the future: they look at their bronze-heeled chariots and yearn for tomorrow’s battle. But Cretans live in the moment, poised like a blue lotus on the stilled waters of time, perfectly content, untroubled by memory or anticipation; a joyous people. And Aeacus till now had been the happiest as well as the handsomest of princes, with all the prerogatives and none of the burdens of royalty.
But Aeacus sighed, and a lady of the court, Metope, looked at him in astonishment. She was abloom in a flaring skirt and brandished her bare breasts like melons ripe to be plucked.
“Aeacus,” she said. “Tonight the ladies of the court will dance the Dance of the Cranes beside the River Kairatos. And afterwards they will choose their lovers from the men who have come to watch them. Do you want to come?”
“No.”
“No!” she repeated, incredulous. “You no longer find me pleasurable?”
“At the moment nothing pleases me.”
“Cruel Aeacus! You speak like a Hittite instead of a Cretan. Have I developed a wrinkle since I last looked in my mirror?”
He peered into her face and detected a faint little network of lines beneath her eyes. But this time he remembered to speak like a Cretan instead of a Hittite.
“No, dear Metope, there are no new wrinkles. Nor old ones. The fault lies with me, not you. Your face is as smooth and pink as the inside of a conch shell, and much more soft. Lately I’ve been-somewhere else.”
“Where, Aeacus? Where would you rather be than Knossos? Thebes, Memphis, Babylon…?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come to the dance then. It will bring you back to us. It will make you laugh again.”
“Very well, I will come.”
He was not affronted by her invitation. In Knossos, the women were as bold and amorous as the men. Besides, he had already lain with her in a meadow of asphodels and on a stone couch mountained with pillows and called her, in flattering light and under the influence of wine, a mortal incarnation of the Great Mother.
He shook himself free of his sighs and laughed. “Yes, I will come.
She looked at him with a frank, level gaze of a race whose women hold equal footing with men. “Laughter becomes you. It shows your teeth, which are white like the shells on the beach. You make me think of abundance, of pomegranates in a luxuriant field. We’re small, we Cretans. Yet there’s still a richness about you. It’s more than your bronze chest and roseate cheeks. More than your lyre-sweet laughter. More than your supple hands, so full of gifts for the children of the court. You yourself are a gift, the rarest of all. Did you know that you are loved above
