chided. “I might have been luring you down to eat.”
“But you said you wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Don’t believe everything you’re told. If I had been a Cyclops, I would have smiled and coaxed and stirred you in the pot!”
“What should I have done?”
“Argued a bit. Asked for proof of my good intentions. Found out what I meant to do with you.”
“But you didn’t eat me, and I saved time and questions. I want you to meet my sister.”
My heart sank like a weight from a fisherman’s net. The sister of such a brother was certain to be a lady. Let me say at once: wenches have always liked me, but ladies shut their doors. I would frighten her, she would call me (or, being a lady, think me) uncouth and uncivilized. She would want me to comb my hair, shave my chest, and trim my tail. She would wince when I swore, glare if I tippled beer
“Oh,” I said, “I don’t think she will want to meet me.”
“She will be delighted. She thought she was going to have to pleasure you.”
We walked to meet her while Icarus told me about their adventures. The meeting was to change my life.
Chapter III
THE TRUNCATED TREE
Do you know the pottery called Kamares Ware? Thin as in eggshell, swirling with creatures of the sea: anemones, flying fish, and coiling octopi. You would think that the merest touch would crack the sides, and yet in a hundred years the same cup can still hold flowers or wine or honey. That was Thea. The littleness of her, the soft fragility, stirred me to tenderness. At the same time, I saw her strength. Her slender waist, slim as the trunk of a young palm tree, rose into powerful breasts like those of an Earth Mother; her tiny hands were clenched and raised like weapons.
Icarus ran ahead of me and took her hand. “Don’t be afraid,” he cried. “He wants to be our friend.” He added, rather proudly: “Even though I bashed him with a rock.”
I stood awkwardly, shifting my weight from hoof to hoof, and wondered what I could say to reassure her. “He’s right,” I blurted. “I want to be your friend, and you won’t have to pleasure m-m-me,” I stammered into silence. To mention pleasuring to a lady—well, it was just such tactless remarks, together with my physiognomy, which had branded me as a boor for most of my twenty-six years. I awaited the lifted eyebrow, the frigid smile, the stinging slap.
She took my hand—paw, I should say, since her small fingers could not encircle its girth. I returned the pressure as shyly as if I were holding a thrush’s egg.
“Sir,” she said, “we have come to your face without invitation. May we remain as grateful guests?”
“I don’t live here,” I cried with some vexation. “I have a comfortable house in the forest.” Had she been the Dryad Zoe, words would have tripped from my tongue with the ease of fruit from a cornucopia, and my own eloquence would have put me in mellow spirits. As it was, I was desperately frightened of her and trying to hide my fear with a show of petulance.
“May we then—” she began.
“Follow me,” I growled, turned my back, and strode toward the mouth of the cave. When I did not hear them directly behind me, I paused and looked over my shoulder. They were limping and stumbling across the rough stalagmites. Thea had bruised her knee and Icarus had taken her hand. I went back to them, lifted her in my arms, and ordered Icarus to ascend my back.
“You don’t mind carrying a snake too?” he asked.
“Snakes,” I said, “are symbols of fertility and domesticity. They bring growth to the fields and fortune to the house. Besides that, they are somebody’s ancestors.”
“Great-great-uncles,” said Icarus. He started to wave his arms and shout, “Giddyap!”
“With two riders, I am doing well to lope,” I said. “If you want to gallop, I suggest you find a Centaur. Bend down now or you’ll bump your head.”
“Better than goose feathers,” he mumbled, making a pillow out of my hair, and Thea lay in my arms as lightly as a sleeping child. It came to me with startling suddenness that I had gone to the cave in search of dinner and found a family. To a confirmed and somewhat dissolute bachelor like myself, the new responsibility was terrifying.
At the mouth of the cave, I set them down on the moss and caught my breath.
“What big trees,” cried Icarus, looking at the forest which stretched around us like tall Egyptian obelisks. “Big enough to hold houses in their branches.”
“Or in their trunks,” I said. “That’s where the Dryads live.” There were cedars with clustered needles and small cones, wide-spreading, many-acorned oaks with bark like the cracked, discarded skin of a snake; and cypresses, lithe and feminine, their leaves misting with sunlight.
“How sad they look,” said Thea, pointing to the cypresses. “Like women. The women of all ages who have known the wrenchings of childbirth or the caged swallow which is unrequited love.”
“And yet,” I said, “they look as if they have borne these things proudly and willingly. It is courage you see as well as sadness.”
“Of course,” she agreed. “You must forgive me for sounding morbid. Ever since we lost our home, I have felt as if— as if sadness had fallen on me like a hunter’s net!”
I understood her needs. She wanted a house to shut her from forests, Achaeans, and—who knows?— Minotaurs. She wanted a warm hearth, a father, and perhaps a husband (for she was ripe for marriage).
“Little princess,” I said. “We will soon be safe in my house. There you will not feel lost.”
She smiled at me with a sweetness older than Babylon, older than the pyramids at Gizeh which house the mummified bodies of Egyptian pharaohs. The sun of the late afternoon kindled her hair to a smoky radiance. Why do you fight the forest, I thought. The brown of your hair is the rich soil from which the barley grows; it is the trunk of a tree or the wing of a thrush. The green is the first tentative blade that reaches for sunlight; it is leaves and grass and the young grape. Brown and green. Earth’s two colors. Why do you fear the forest?
Then, through the blue smoke of time, I remembered my own boyhood. In the branches of a tree, I saw a small girl weeping, and a small boy who laughed and waved his pink fist, and the Dryad, their mother, who leaned to the sunlight and combed her hair. And him, not a Beast, but a man.
To reach my house we followed a secret path whose signs were a woodpecker’s nest and a mound of yellow hill-ants, a stone in the shape of a fist and a blackened stump. Sometimes we walked in a darkness of tangled limbs which withheld the sun except for a few golden icicles; in a closeness of air which dampened and weighted us as if we were walking die bottom of the sea. High in the trees, blue monkeys flickered like fish, and only their cries reminded us that we walked in a forest of trees instead of coral and holothurians. Thea waved to them gaily and coaxed their leader to sit on her shoulder, draping his tail like a necklace around her throat.
“I had one in Vathypetro.” She smiled. “They don’t seem part of the forest. They are tame like Egyptian cats.”
“Too tame for their own good,” I said. “Sometimes they get themselves eaten by bears.”
“Look,” cried Icarus suddenly. “A sea of flowers and a little brown fort in the middle.”
“Yellow gagea,” I said, adding modestly, “the fort is my house.”
The house had once been a mountainous oak, broad as the Ring of the Bulls at Knossos, but thanks to a bolt of lightning, only the trunk remained to a height of twenty feet, like the walls of a palisade with a walkway and narrow embrasures near the top in case of a siege. I went to the door and rang the sheep’s bell which hung above the lintel.
Behind the red-grained oak I heard the quick pattering steps of a Telchin as he came to raise the bolt. In the forest, it was always necessary to lock one’s door. According to an old proverb, “Where locks are not, the Thriae are.” The shy Telchin did not wait to greet us. He and his race are frightened of strangers, though among themselves they boast and wench and fight at the drop of a toadstool.
