The tunic pinched me in seven places. I felt like a snake imprisoned in his old, discarded skin. “I can’t move,” I said. “I can’t breathe. I think I’m going to suffocate. And,” I added delicately, “you forgot to leave access for my tail.”
“Hush. All it needs is a bit of taking out.” She proceeded to pinch and pat me as if I were no more animate than a side of beef. “Or else you could reduce, if only the party were next week instead of in two nights.”
“I can’t postpone it,” I snapped. “Besides, I’m not fat, I’m muscular.” I guided her hand to the stomach as firm and hard as a coconut.
“You’re right. Sheer muscle. I’ll have to let out the waist.”
As soon as I entered the den, I saw a change. Ever since Thea’s arrival, the room had been orderly: No more unwashed dishes stacked by the grainmill; for that matter, no more mill, which now scattered its flour beside the fountain. The change at the moment, however had been added rather than subtracted. In the glow of a freshly lit lamp, three dove-shaped vases nested among the roots and bristled with poppies out of my garden. The sad little heads of my flowers stared reproachfully from every corner of the room, five heads to a dove.
“You’ve killed them,” I cried. “You’ve cut their throats.” “Housed, not killed. In the garden, nobody noticed them.”
“I did. Every day. Here it’s like putting them in jail.”
“I shall try to be a kind jailer,” she smiled, straightening a flower.
At the mention of jailer, I recalled my own imprisonment in the tunic. Her alterations had not improved the fit, nor had she remembered the access for my tail, which pressed stiffly against my back like a sun-dried reed. As soon as she turned her back to straighten another flower, I filled my chest with air, hoping to burst my belt and split the tunic. I only increased my discomfort. I stared with envy at Icarus in his new loincloth, which was green and unembroidered. He looked both spruce and comfortable. Thea herself wore a blue, divided skirt almost to her ankles, each side falling in tiers embossed with gold-leaf. Her hair, combed as always to hide her ears, rippled in three rivulets down her back like cascading autumn leaves with faint twinkles of summer’s departed green. On her middle finger she wore the agate ring which the Telchin had already finished incising, not only with a blue monkey but with a Cretan maiden who is unmistakably Thea, receiving from her pet the gift of a crocus. From my whispered description of her garden at Vathypetro, the artist had realized the scene beyond my expectations. After cutting the figures, he had filled them with microscopic particles of lapis lazuli. A scene of play, you would think, but the austere blue stone imparted a dignity ind sadness which seemed to say: playful moments endure only in stone.
“It’s exquisite,” she said, caressing the ring as if it were an amulet to ensure fertility. She came to me and, standing en tiptoe, grasped my horn and drew my cheek to her lips. “Dear Eunostos, you are like a brother to me. I’m glad I had the tunic to give you in return. Otherwise, I could never have accepted such an expensive gift.”
Above our heads the cowbell tinkled the arrival of our guests.
“We must let them in,” said Thea.
I shook my head. “I had better meet them alone. Moschus needs plenty of room on the stairs.” I did not want her to hear their comments about my tunic.
But one of my workers, roasting a late chop in the garden, had already opened the door, and Zoe thumped down the stairs like a sack of coconuts. Moschus labored behind her, managing his four legs with obvious difficulty, and I half expected to see him lose his balance and tumble head over hooves. At the end of her descent, Zoe caught me in a huge embrace. I submitted rather than responded. Not that I scorned a friendly hug. More than once we had frolicked away the night in the windy heights of her tree. But Thea was watching us with cool, unblinking eyes.
“Thea,” I said, “I want you to meet my friends, Zoe and Moschus.”
“Little Thea,” cried Zoe, opening her arms for another engulfment, and I feared for Thea’s ribs.
Smiling thinly, Thea offered her hand. “Eunostos has told me about you.”
Zoe looked at her as if with recognition. “Your ears,” she said. “Are they—?”
Thea evaded the question. “And Moschus,” she said, as she reached to steady him down the last stair. “How good of you to come.”
“Isn’t he pretty,” cried Zoe, discovering Icarus in time to hide her embarrassment over Thea’s rebuff. “Eunostos, you should have sent me word. I would have worn sandals.” She was barefoot as usual and dressed in a gown as dingy and mottled as an old wineskin. When she held out her hand to Icarus, her shell bracelets jangled like tin gew-gaws from the Misty Isles. Icarus ignored the hand and gave her the kind of hug she had given me. A radiant smile suffused her face and flaunted the three gold teeth which a Babylonian dentist, her three-hundredth lover, had left her when they parted. She patted the boy on the head.
“Head’s not as big as I thought.” She laughed when his mass of hair depressed beneath her fingers. “But there’s plenty of room for brains.” She looked at me and winked. “Though there might be some things I could teach him, eh, Eunostos?”
Icarus was fascinated. The generosity of her breasts, like an overhanging cliff, magnetized his gaze; he seemed to expect a landslide. “I’m a good pupil.” He grinned.
Then she turned to me. “Eunostos, have you gotten fat?”
“Certainly not,” I said. In truth, I had lost six pounds since Thea’s arrival.
“Then why do you hide your belly in that—tunic, is it called?”
“Lavender,” snickered Moschus. “Embroidered (heh!).”
“It’s a present,” said Thea. “From me.”
“One of the city styles, I expect,” said Zoe. “Well, it’s good to keep abreast of the fashions. But, Eunostos, I miss that manly chest.”
But Zoe and Moschus were not our only guests. A minikin figure, no more obtrusive than a shadow, crouched at the foot of the stairs. I recognized Pandia, one of the Bears of Artemis.
“She met us in the woods and wanted to come,” apologized Zoe. “Since she doesn’t drink, you’ll hardly know she’s here.”
She was four feet tall. Her hair was short; in fact, it was fur, but neatly trimmed so that it resembled a felt cap. She wore a fillet of sweetbriar, a necklace of green acorns, a tunic of woodpecker feathers caught at the waist by a belt of rabbit skin, and a pair of kidskin sandals from my own workshop. Her nub of a tail protruded from a small hole in the back of her tunic. Before the coming of Men, it was said, the goddess Artemis had visited Crete and given her love to a bear. Just as the offspring of Pan are the little hooved Panisci, so the offspring of Artemis are the stub-tailed bears, and the two tribes, who keep their childlike bodies throughout their long fives, mix and propagate from the age of fourteen. Pandia, though, was no more than the ten years she looked.
“Do you mind?” she asked in a small but husky voice. “I heard about the party from one of your workers and came to watch. I don’t drink, you know.”
“She came to keep me company,” said Icarus, though he himself had every intention of drinking. “We’ve already met from a distance. The day Thea and I crashed in the glider.” You might have thought that a boy of fifteen would disdain the company of a little girl, but Icarus never seemed to notice the difference in people’s ages. He had a remarkable gift for making youth feel mature and old age young. Foregoing Zoe and her monumental cliffs, he drew Pandia to a bench with moss-armed cushions.
“Here we can watch without getting stepped on,” he said.
“When I saw you crash,” she was saying, “I expected to find just bodies and have to beat off the crows! Then the soldiers came and dragged you off to their camp.”
Among my other guests, conversation had died; rather, it had not survived the first stiff exchange of formalities. Zoe’s exuberance had faded to a wan smile, and Moschus, who had misinterpreted Thea’s help on the stairs, had fixed the girl in a silent, lecherous stare.
“Time for a drink,” I called like any practiced host, and pointed to a large, pitch-covered goatskin of beer, with an upraised hoof for a spout. I handed Zoe a cup and lifted the skin.
“You know I don’t need a cup,” she said, and took the skin from my hands. Tilting her head, she placed the foot to her mouth and threatened to empty the contents with one resounding gurgle. A thin trickle of beer meandered down her neck and vanished between her breasts like a freshet between two mountains.
“Here, let Moschus have a drink,” I said at last. “He looks parched.”
Interspersing his gulps with appreciative “heh’s,” Moschus drank his fill and relinquished the skin.
