The Forest of Forever Read Free

over the floor to Kora’s feet, and tossed her the cloth. She smiled indulgently down at him, the smile of a young woman for a mere lad of fifteen, and, avoiding his flanks, proceeded to dry his mane.
    “Queens, workers, and drones—we saw them all,” he said, gazing up at her with adoration.
    “Never mind about the drones,” said Myrrha. “They’re good-for-nothing sluggards who loll in the hives or under the trees. It’s the women you have to watch. I heard about them—the queens, that is—from my late husband. They’ll snatch the threads from your loom if you give them a chance.”
    “The drones must do something,” suggested Eunostos. “Or the queens wouldn’t keep them around.”
    Myrrha raised a reproving eye at him. Like many free-living women, she was prudish in the company of her daughter. “As I said, it’s the queens who are the trouble-makers. I wonder what they want in the Country of the Beasts. We have so little for them to steal.”
    “I expect the storm blew them here by accident,” I said. “Let’s hope they don’t stay.”
    We soon turned to other subjects. Happy subjects, on the whole, though it always saddened me to visit the home of two menless women. Myrrha still enjoyed frequent, if itinerant, lovers, but Kora at eighteen was the oldest virgin in the country and a cause of concern for her mother.
    Since I myself was a trifle old for Eunostos, I had resigned myself to yielding him to Kora. In fact, I was quietly engineering their union, since he was the last Minotaur and it seemed to me that Kora, once cured of her virginity, could bear him noble sons. You understand, of course, that the offspring of a Minotaur and a Dryad are not hybrids: the sons are Minotaurs, the daughters are Dryads. There are several races in the Country of the Beasts, but each race is either male or female with the sole exception of the Centaurs, who have their own females but also enjoy the women of other races. Humans have questioned why the Great Mother created so many races with a single sex and compelled them to mingle if they wished to multiply. The answer is clear: she likes variety. She likes for opposite to attract opposite. She wants her many-faced, many-figured children to value difference as well as familiarity.
    “Now you must have some wine and honey cakes. Will blackberry do?”
    “Admirably.”
    “You may have a cup, too, Eunostos. My, aren’t you the young bull now!” (I did not tell her that, since he had been orphaned, Eunostos never drank milk when he could get wine, and much preferred beer; it came of his running with loose company.) “When I finish this robe for Kora, I must weave you a loincloth.” She fetched a flagon from her cupboard and proceeded to fill some wooden mugs.
    “My husband carved them,” she said, “and I wouldn’t change them for silver.”
    The clay oven glowed; the scent of raisin-eyed cakes pervaded the room; hospitality was a tangible presence, like a Centaur’s pet pig. I did not even hear the dripping of the water clock. How could I know that it was the last peaceful time the four of us were to spend together?
    “Eunostos, will you see me home?” I finally asked, when the parchment in the windows no longer glowed with the afternoon sun.
    By this time Eunostos was quoting a poem to Kora, and Kora was listening with a faint appreciative smile; but I had the oddest feeling that it was not Eunostos she heard.

CHAPTER II
    EUNOSTOS STOOD at the foot of Kora’s tree and debated if he should call her name. If he knocked at the door in the trunk, Myrrha would answer and inflict an interminable monologue on him before she called her daughter from the upper room. Beside him was his friend Partridge, the Paniscus, who lent him advice and support. Partridge was thirty. Like all of his race of Goat Boys he had failed to develop, both physically and mentally, beyond the age of fifteen; but in Partridge’s case, mentally at least, it was closer to twelve. He was