I embraced her. To me, the action seemed as natural as taking a shower in the hot plume of my fountain or kneeling in my garden to measure the bud of a poppy. But possessed as I was by the god (or demon), I forgot my strength. Perhaps I was rough; certainly I was sudden. She lay in my arms like a fawn pierced by an arrow. I have broken her back, I thought. Crushed her fragility with my brutish lust, as if I had taken a swallow’s egg in my palm and closed my fingers.
“Thea,” I groaned, loosening my grip but still supporting her body. “Are you—”
With unhurried dignity, she disengaged herself from my arms. “Eunostos, I am ashamed of you. You are acting like Moschus.”
Better to be insulted, railed against, slapped, than chastised like a naughty child or a mischievous Centaur. Moschus indeed!
Angrily I blurted: “He kisses everyone he meets at the first chance. You’ve shared my house for a month, and I haven’t touched you until today. But I’m not a eunuch.”
“I look on you as a brother. I told you that.”
“But I don’t want to be your brother. I don’t feel fraternal at all. Besides, you already have Icarus. I want to be—”
“My father? It’s true you’re ten years older—”
“No, that’s worse. I don’t like your father anyway.”
“You don’t like him? But you never met him. He’s a kingly man!”
“I do know him,” I said. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but I knew him before you were born.”
She gasped. “In the forest?”
“And I knew your mother, the Dryad.”
“I don’t think I want to hear about her.”
“I can’t tell you about your father without mentioning your mother.” I called loudly: “Icarus, Pandia!”
They hurried over the ridge with dirty hands and a basket of stones between them.
“Is it bears?” whispered Pandia with terror-rounded eyes. “Are we going to be eaten?”
“Not bears,” I said. “Something I want to show you.”
A mile from the Field of Stones, in a small clearing green with moss and fern, I showed them a fire-blackened stump which had once been a royal oak. Through the gutted walls, you could see the ruined beginnings of a staircase, spiraling around the trunk and ending abruptly in air.
“Your mother’s tree,” I said. And I told them about Aeacus, their father.…
I was nine years old when he came to the forest. My father had built a house of reeds in a tamarisk grove, and after my mother was killed by lightning, we lived alone with the feathery trees shutting away the sunlight and shutting us in with the shadows of our loss. Except at night when I needed a place to sleep, I kept away from the house, preferring to roam the woods where I had gathered chestnuts with my mother and listened to her stories about the coming of out people from the Isles of the Blest. It was in the forest that I met Aeacus—dagger in hand, blood on his beardless face, eyes vacant like those of a Strige’s victim. I learned later that he had come into the mountains pursuing Achaean pirates. He and his men met and killed them just beyond the forest, but only Aeacus had survived the skirmish. Wounded and delirious, he had wandered into the forest, but strength had failed him and he sank to his knees like a murderer before a judge, dropping his dagger, blinking without awareness.
I crept out of the undergrowth. “May I help you, sir?” I asked from a safe distance, for he was a Man and therefore dangerous.
“He cannot speak.” A tall Dryad had come to stand beside me.
“Your dress is sunlight!” I cried.
“Sunflowers.” She smiled. “Every morning I weave it anew, since the petals endure only for a day. Like love.”
“And your hair is a green waterfall. It sings around your shoulders.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “it has learned its song from the trees in which I live. Listened to woodpeckers nesting in the branches, or those smaller birds, the wind-ruffled leaves. But now we must help our friend.”
“He’s a Man,” I whispered. She did not look as if she understood the danger.
“And therefore the more to be pitied.”
His hair, worn long and drawn behind his head in a fillet, was a wonder of darkness, and his face was as white and smooth as the alabaster from which the Cretans carve the thrones of their kings: such a face as the artisan god, Hephaestus, might carve in his underground workshop—unflawed by toil, untouched by time.
Each of us took an arm and supported him to her tree. She did not invite me to enter the trunk. She smiled when she saw my disappointment; for I had heard of the marvels within a Dryad’s tree: the winding stairs cut into the trunk, the secret doors which opened onto rooms where noiseless spiders weave in the light of glowworms, the platforms among the branches, where the Dryads comb their tresses to the soft fingerings of the sun.
“You must not enter, Bull Boy. I am bringing sorrow into my tree, and you have enough of your own.”
“He will do you injury?”
“Perhaps.”
“Why do you shelter him then?”
“I have lived too long in sunlight.”
No Man can enter the forest without alerting the Beasts. All of us, even the light-fingered Thriae and the careless Panisci, take our turns patrolling the narrow access to the world of Men. Everywhere else the cliffs uprear impassable walls (except for my cave, which no one dares to invade). When Aeacus entered the trees, I was not the first to see him. Even as Kora helped him into her house, a conch-shell boomed a warning to all the Beasts, and the next day Chiron, king of the Centaurs, arrived at her tree to question her about the stranger.
“I am going to bear his child,” she said.
Chiron was stunned. A human father and a bestial mother! Would the child be a Man or a Beast? Shaking his mane, he left this foolish Dryad to the sorrow of her own choosing.
I was ten years old at the birth of Thea, eleven when Icarus followed her into the tree and laughed with his first breath. High in the branches, a porch surrounded the trunk, with a bench and a bamboo rail. I used to stand on the ground and wait until Kora appeared with the babies.
“Eunostos,” she called one morning. “Come and visit with me.
“Through the door?” I asked, hoping at least to glimpse the interior.
“Up the outside ladder.”
I saw with dismay that her hair looked as withered as broken ferns, and her gown was woven of brown leaves instead of sunflower petals. She lifted Thea into my arms.
“Is she breakable?” I asked doubtfully.
“Not unless you drop her out of the tree.” She laughed.
At first Thea was crying. “I expect it’s my hair,” I said. “The color has frightened her.”
“No,” she said. “It’s the forest. She always cries when I bring her onto the porch.”
I took her tiny hand and placed the fingers on one of my horns. “See,” I said. “It won’t hurt you. It is like a carrot.”
She fell asleep in my arms.
“I want to hold Icarus too,” I said. “One baby for each arm. They will balance each other.” He was much the fattest baby I had ever seen. When no one held him, he would lie in the crib which his mother had hollowed from the shell of a tortoise and coo at friendly woodpeckers or empty air. He made me think of a fledgling which has gorged itself on worms and grown so plump that it has no wish to fly. It would rather stay in the nest and wait for the next worm.
Without telling their mother, I adored both of them— Thea because she was sad, Icarus because he was plump and joyful. Sometimes Kora would let me look after them when she followed Aeacus into the forest (it must have broken her heart to see him walk to the edge of the trees and stare wistfully at the farms across the meadow). I fed them nectar which I squeezed out of honeysuckle blossoms and made up stories in which I rescued them from wicked bears and slavering wolves. They seemed attentive, both of them, and never fell asleep until I had finished my story, though few of my words could have been intelligible to such young ears.
Soon after Icarus’ first birthday, I climbed to the porch and discovered Kora in tears. Since the death of my mother, I had seen my father cry and I knew that the tears of adults were wetter, saltier, and much, much sadder
