The Forest of Forever Read Free Page A

plump, hairy, and sandy from the warren in which he lived; thistles stuck to his flanks and his breath reeked from the stalks of onion grass he was even now nibbling. But Eunostos loved him because Partridge was something of an outcast among his own people, being rather too fat for their rough and tumble ways and too gentle to like those ways even had he not been fat.
    Between them, eyeing the tree and catching vibrations with his feelers, crouched Bion, the Telchin, a three-foot, antlike being who lived under the ground, cut gems with his metal-hard pincers, and made bracelets and rings, anklets and necklaces, as well as various beauty aids like kohl and carmine, which he traded to the Dryads and Bear Girls in return for hazelnuts and wheaten bread. He was much more intelligent than a monkey or a cat, though rather less than a Beast. To Eunostos he was, like Partridge, a friend.
    “Go on,” nudged Partridge. “Call her.” He munched furiously on his onion grass.
    “Kora.” It was less a call than a whisper.
    “Eunostos, give her a good bellow.”
    “KORA, I’ve come to visit.” He brandished a spray of violets and peered hopefully at the porch which circled the trunk and the upper room.
    A leather door-hanging rustled to the side and Kora appeared on the porch. Her gown of green linen was embroidered with white narcissi, and her face was white, too, like the unveined marble which has lain in the earth since the Great Mother lived on the island, before the coming of Men and Beasts. Her hair, the color of ivy in sunlight, tendriled about her shoulders. She wore neither rings nor anklets nor bracelets, but only a pendant around her neck: a Centaur of hammered silver which she presumed to be a likeness of her father. It was not a single attribute, however, which caught Eunostos’s eye; it was an aura of remoteness, of inviolability. She was like an unexplored cave or a silent underground river: secret and alluring and a little frightening.
    At eighteen, she seemed to Eunostos decidedly an older woman and therefore the more to be desired. Had she not been beautiful, she might have been called a spinster. (Yes, we have them, poor things, even in the Country of the Beasts, along with a delightful number of rakish bachelors.) As it was, she had often been called aloof, disdainful, and frigid—but never undesirable. In truth, she was none of these things. She was simply waiting. For what, she could not have told you.
    “Eunostos,” she called down to him. “Have you come to call on mother?”
    “I’ve come to call on you.” It was his first such admitted call, though ostensibly he had visited her mother Myrrha often during the past few months, in spite of the fact that she was as garrulous as a sparrow at sunrise. “This time you come down to me.”
    His tail lashed furiously; he was very nervous.
    She hesitated. She’s heard those stories about my wenching, he thought, not without a certain pride. At fifteen, it is pleasant to be thought a sly young rogue.
    “Very well.”
    Eunostos was grateful that she did not linger coquettishly in her tree to change her robe or sweep a tortoiseshell comb through her hair. She never seemed aware of her own beauty, except as a kind of nuisance which brought uncountable Centaurs, from striplings right up to senile old Moschus, to knock at her tree. In six twinklings of a firefly, she emerged from the door at the foot of the tree.
    “Give her the flowers,” hissed Partridge, so concerned for his friend that you could forgive him his onion breath and thistled flanks. He was none too bright but he knew what to do when a Dryad stood in her doorway. For that matter, Eunostos knew what to do with the more accessible Dryads. My friend Myrtle had taught him the facts of life when he was eleven. For the last year, he had been an orphan, knocking about the woods on his own, making his home in caves and warrens or under trees, living it up with the young Centaurs and making free with the