The Forest of Forever Read Free Page B

Dryads, but somehow never forgetting the manners, the innate gentleness, taught to him by his own Dryad mother and his Minotaur father.
    He presented the flowers and Kora took them from his hand. His tail made furious swishes and he stamped his hooves from sheer nervous tension.
    The violets had started to wilt—he had held them too long and too tightly in his big hot fist—but Kora received them as if they were roses. She said little; she rarely said much. Stillness seemed to envelope her like a wedding garment (for Beasts thought of weddings, not orgies, when they courted Kora, just as they thought of orgies not weddings when they courted her mother or me). But she smiled and touched him affectionately on his horns.
    “Dear Eunostos. They’re lovely.” She was being tactful; Dryads hate to see any vegetable life uprooted, cut, and otherwise mutilated. We would rather leave flowers on their bushes and bushes in the ground. If we eat acorns, it is only to keep them from the squirrels and to give us energy when we depart from our oaks.
    Impulsively he seized her hand and drew her after him with an irresistible tug. She dropped the violets, the wind spread her hair and billowed her ankle-length gown, and she burst into sudden laughter.
    “You laugh like wind chimes,” Eunostos said. “The ones the Centaurs hang in their windows.”
    “Was I laughing?” she asked. “I didn’t even notice.”
    Why couldn’t she have said, “I was laughing because I am glad to be with you”? But that was Kora, utterly artless and therefore supremely artful.
    “Where are we going, Eunostos?”
    “To a secret place.”
    Bion started to follow them; with his eight legs, he could easily have matched their pace. But Partridge stopped him with a loud bleat.
    “Don’t, you idiot. They want to tryst.” Partridge did not have a woman, but his plump body concealed a generous romantic soul, and he liked to imagine his friends in an endless drama of amorous adventures.
    Bion lowered his feelers and started to sulk. Telchins can understand our simpler words and “idiot” had stuck in his craw. Partridge patted him on his metallic flank.
    “I didn’t mean idiot, I meant simpleton,” he apologized. His own vocabulary was limited and he supposed that “simpleton” indicated a simple rather than a stupid creature. Fortunately, the word was new to Bion, who appeared mollified. Together they took up a vigil under the tree to await the return of their friend.
    Eunostos led Kora along paths between cypress trees and through copses where rabbits stared at them with more curiosity than fear and blue monkeys scampered in search of grubs. Once, they surprised a Paniscus who had turned a tortoise onto its back and was poking it with a stick. Eunostos seized the stick and righted the poor animal and sent him toddling to safety. The Paniscus, whose name was Phlebas, shouted an obscenity and Eunostos flung him onto the grass with a butt to his midriff.
    “Grapes that aren’t picked shrivel into raisins,” Phlebas shouted after them; but Eunostos was too happy to puzzle over the metaphor.
    In a blackberry thicket, a Bear Girl dropped her pail and started to follow them. She had no need for clothes or adornments: there was fur on her head that looked like a small round cap through which her ears protruded like jaunty feathers, fur on her body which might have been a winter coat, and a round fur tail like a large hazelnut. But she did at least wear a chain of black-eyed Susans around her neck. Eunostos, though he liked the Bear Girls, did not like being followed at such a time.
    “I saw a ferocious bear in the cypress grove,” he said. It was enough to send her flying for refuge. Though the Girls claim descent from the goddess Artemis and a gentle brown bear, they insist that later bears, forgetting that notable union, have come to regard them as a rare delicacy. (However, there are no recorded instances of a Girl being devoured by anything but a