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 wolf; it takes a strong stomach to digest so much fur.)
Finally they came to a clearing and a huge tree trunk which had once belonged to the largest, oldest tree in the forest. It was Eunostos’s former home, which a year ago had been blasted by lightning. It was then that Eunostos had lost his parents and, as far as we knew, he had not lived in that sorrowful place since their death.
“But Eunostos,” Kora cried. “You’ve cut away all the burned branches and left just the lower part of the trunk. It looks like a small round fort. It was one of those trees left over from the time when the Titans lived on Crete, wasn’t it? Everything grew bigger then. Are you living here now?”
“Not yet,” he said mysteriously. “Come inside,” and he led her through a door, which swung on a wooden hinge, and they stepped inside the trunk. It was roofless and hollow, of course, and on one side he had planted a vegetable garden, where carrot stalks stood like palace guards and cabbages lolled like plump eunuchs, and on the other side, flowers—wild roses and columbine—were the kings and queens of the place.
“But how lovely!” Kora said. “And a little house between the two gardens!” It was a simple round hut with bamboo walls, but so graceful that Kora must have wondered how a seemingly awkward boy could have bent the bamboos to the shape of a peaked crown and cut the windows to look like crescent moons and the door, a great half moon. In the first room, a fountain bubbled out of a pool in the clay floor and cooled the air like a breeze from snow-haired Mt. Ida. There were gemstones on the sandy bottom, gifts from Bion—cornelian, amethyst, beryl—and a little fortress made of seashells which Eunostos had dug from the earth, relics of a time when the Great Green Sea had covered a part of the forest.
“A turtle lives in the fort,” said Eunostos. He admired turtles: they were so self-contained—so like Kora and unlike himself.
Nor had he neglected the practical necessities of day-to-day living. After all, the chief characteristic of the Minotaur is that he has an eye for beauty but a hoof for hard work (call him an artisan instead of an artist, if you will; but thus he avoids the overpreciousness of the mere aesthete). Close to the fountain, but out of its spray, was a cross-legged bamboo chair with pillows.
“Zoe sewed the pillows,” he confessed, “though I stuffed them.” He knew that Dryads liked pillows stuffed with moss, which otherwise encumbered their trees.
“There’s also a couch,” he added somewhat tentatively, lest Kora suspect him of dishonorable intentions. “In the next room.” It was made of wolfskin stretched over a bamboo framework and raised on sturdy hooves. “And a red-brick hearth and cooking pots and, see, a well-stocked larder!” He pointed to a jar of roasted acorns, a tray of snails soaked in olive oil, a cheese of bear’s milk, a basket of delicate sparrow eggs, and a weasel pie. “Zoe made the pie. I’m no cook. I hope you are.”
“Eunostos, I love your house.”
“Our house,” he corrected. Surely she can cook, he told himself. Zoe must have taught her.
Kora said nothing. She sat down in the chair and hid her face in a pillow and began to cry. Her tears were silent but very copious.
Eunostos, who was not used to tears, especially from the reticent Kora, knelt beside her and lifted her hair and kissed her on the tip of her pointed ear. It is a Dryad’s most sensitive area and only someone who loves her takes such a liberty.
“You don’t like my house,” he said without reproach. “It’s too small, too rustic. It comes of my being an orphan, I expect. I don’t have taste.”
“Your house is delightful.”
“Then it’s me. I’m too rough for you. My hooves are dirty, my mane needs trimming.”
She stared up at him with eyes so green that even her tears could not keep them from looking like malachites. “No, Eunostos. It’s none of those things.”
“I’m too young for you then? Callow and inexperienced? But I’ve been on my own for a whole year now, and orphans grow up fast. I’ve”—and a note of pride crept into his voice, while his chest expanded by at least three inches—“I’ve been wenching with the boys.”
“I know you’ve been wenching with the boys. Do you think my mother doesn’t tell me such things? You needn’t apologize.”
“I wasn’t exactly apologizing,” he stammered.
“I don’t hold it against you. What’s a young bull to do when he hasn’t any family of his own?”
“If I’m not too rough and I’m not too young—”
“You haven’t said anything about love.”
“But I’ve shown you how I