than those of a child like me. I started down the ladder.
“Stay, Eunostos,” she said. “It will be your last chance to see the children.”
I balanced awkwardly on the third rung from the top and rested my chin on the porch. “I’m not to be invited again?”
“They are going away.”
“How can you go with them?” I knew that no Dryad could leave her tree for more than a few days. Its wooden walls sustain her as salt water sustains a dolphin.
“Their father is taking them to Knossos without me.”
“To the cities of Men!” I cried with dismay. Remember that Beast children fear Men as much as human children fear Beasts. I imagined the babies spitted on sharp spears and served up at a banquet, or lowered on giant fish hooks to bait sharks.
“Their father will protect them,” she said. “But they will miss us, won’t they, my little Bull?”
“Can they live outside the tree?”
“Aeacus thinks so. He says they have not grown dependent on the tree as I have. That’s why he wishes to take them now, before they do.” She drew me into her arms as if I were one of her own children.
“Don’t be sad,” I said, though her news was the worst I had heard since the death of my mother. I rested my horns against the leaf-sweet fragrance of her breast.
Neither of us heard Aeacus climb the ladder. He was not angry; he had no reason for anger. But he looked like a staring pharaoh carved from stone. He drew me from Kora’s arms and placed me on the ladder. His fingers were very hard, almost like coral, though he did not hurt me. As I started down the ladder, I screamed:
“You shouldn’t take them away from their mother!”
For six mornings I went to Kora’s tree, placed an ear to the trunk, and listened to Thea’s cries resounding through the bark. But no one appeared on the porch to ask me up the ladder, and when I knocked at the door on the seventh morning, Aeacus answered and closed the door in my face.
The next day I met him in the forest. You have seen the twin panniers on the backs of donkeys? They are baskets for carrying produce home from the market or kindling from the woods. He had rigged such panniers for his children and placed both Thea and Icarus on his back. In spite of the vines which strangled the branches above her head, Thea was poised and smiling, but Icarus was crying almost for the first time.
I sprang out of the trees like the goat-god Pan when he frightens travelers. “Where are you taking my babies?” I demanded in what I meant to be an ear-splitting bellow. But I was small at the time—I lived on roots and berries between the rare occasions when my father remembered to hunt. No doubt my roar emerged as a squeak. Aeacus looked at me vaguely and went on his way as if I were no more significant than a toadstool. I lowered my head and butted him with my horns, expecting to catch the babies if they threatened to spill. He staggered but kept his balance and did not spill them. Turning, he seized my horns and flung me into the bushes. The fall left me stunned.
In seconds, or minutes, I am not sure which, I opened my eyes to hairy haunches and cloven hooves. A Paniscus, looking about twelve but possibly as old as a hundred, was dousing my face with milk from a split coconut. I did not remember to thank him, but sprang to my feet and searched frantically for signs of Aeacus and the children.
“Did you see him?” I cried. “The man from the Cities?”
“Nothing but squirrels.” He sulked, hurt no doubt because I had not thanked him for reviving me and sacrificing the milk from his coconut.
I ran toward Kora’s tree to see if she knew that Aeacus had taken the children. Perhaps, I thought, she will keep me in their place, and then I felt terribly ashamed at having so selfish a wish at such a time.
A score of Beasts had surrounded the tree: Dryads in great dishevelment, among them Zoe, Moschus and two other Centaurs; Panisci and Bears of Artemis; and even some Thriae, who flock to misfortune as readily as to honey. The tree was a pillar of fire. Branches crackled and fell in a swarm of sparks like glowing bees; the watchers shielded their heads with upraised arms and drew back from the yellow, lashing coils. The high porch had shriveled like a dead insect and begun to peel from the trunk. Yet the verdurous branches still struggled valiantly to hold their greenness against the encroaching fire, for the tree was young by the reckoning of the forest and three times her lightning-blackened branches had sprouted leaves.
“We must save her,” I cried, running toward the ladder.
Zoe stopped me. “It was she who set the fire. We must leave her with dignity.”
“But he’s getting away with her babies!”
“Let him go. He was never a Beast.”
“But the babies are half Beast.”
“Perhaps they will come back when they learn to know themselves.”
Icarus hugged me when I had finished the story. “Eunostos, we did come back! You got your babies again.”
“Yes,” I said, “and this time I mean to keep you.” I looked at Thea and awaited the inevitable reprimand. She was certain to take her father’s side, and already I was angry with her, remembering how she had laughed as that hateful man had carried her out of the forest.
At last, she said, “You can’t blame him for leaving when he did. He was only thinking of us.”
Icarus turned on her angrily. “But he left our mother.”
“She always knew he would have to leave her,” said Thea. But her eyes had filled with tears, and not, I guessed, for her father.
“Thea,” I said. “I didn’t—”
Pandia seized my hand. “There is someone watching us.”
“A bear?” I smiled.
“Do bears wear helmets?”
Chapter VI
THE LOVE OF A QUEEN IS DEATH
The death which comes at the end of a long life, in a warm bed surrounded by loving children, is a lying down and not a darkness; it is not to be feared. But a slow and agonizing death in the fullness of youth is dreadful to men and dreaded even by gods. It was such a death which confronted the forest, though its rightful span was a thousand tearing winters and a thousand springs of healing violets and resurrecting roses.
No one knew at the time; no one knew that the death throes began when Pandia saw the helmet. How could a warrior have entered the forest, I asked, without being seen by the guards? No conch shell had blown to alert the Beasts. Perhaps, suggested Thea, Pandia had glimpsed a spying Paniscus and mistaken his horns for the boar’s tusk of a helmet. Still, the mere possibility of Achaean infiltration left us with little appetite for the rest of our picnic. Returning to the Field of Gem Stones to recover our basket, we walked back to the house in thoughtful silence.
The following morning it was almost possible to forget the revelations and alarms of the preceding day. Breakfasting on bread, cheese, and carob pods, Thea did not refer to my unexpected embrace or to my story about her parents.
She fed me some choice pods from her own plate and then withdrew to the shop to watch the Telchines cut some intaglios, while I remained in the garden, wondering what I should plant in place of my carrots. Perhaps a row of pumpkins, as big and friendly as the domestic pigs of the Centaurs. The day was benign; a blue monkey perched on the wall, waiting for Thea to feed him carrots. He would have a long wait.
Icarus emerged from the stairs. His hair was tousled from sleep and very long, rather like a nest in which baby mice have played. He had not yet donned a loincloth.
“Eunostos,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” Fifteen years sat lightly on his face, but the weight of a lifetime burdened his voice.
“You miss Perdix, don’t you?” I said, trying to ease his very evident burden. The day before the picnic, he had suddenly announced that he had given Perdix his freedom—left him beside a carob tree in the forest. “To find a
