The Forest of Forever by Thomas Burnett Swann Page B

them I have sighed, for my unborn children. The tree had whispered of—something.
    * * * *
    An hour’s march from where he had left the boy, in the midst of a rocky, pitted meadow, he met the Achaeans. The pits disgorged warriors, the rocks came to life, and the little Cretans found themselves beleaguered before they could draw their daggers.
    Draw them they did at last, and then it was an equal fight. Like blue monkeys beset by dogs, they fought the big-bodied, blond intruders, nimbly sidestepping their sword thrusts, thrusting with their own daggers, until a single Achaean limped from the field, and Aeacus stood alone among his fallen men, too tired to give chase, scarcely strong enough to support his own weight, wounded—if not to death—at least to a dazed benumbment.
    He looked at his slain friends in the midst of the field and looked around him dazedly and saw that he was not far from two great cliffs with a forest narrowed between them like a wedge. He caught the healing fragrance of bark and oak leaves and heard the faint rustling of water. Perhaps he could find a stream and bathe his wounds and return to bury his friends. Could he walk so far?
    Dimly he recognized the forest. The Country of the Beasts, where no Cretan ventured, half from fear and half from remembering a covenant made before the beginning of recorded time, before there had been any scribes to scratch history on clay tablets, that this one forest belonged inviolably and eternally to the Beasts.
    Still, the trees whispered to him: cone-shaped cypresses, smoothed and sculptured as if by the nimble fingers of the Great Mother, and tumultuous oaks whose branches seemed little jungles. “You may break the covenant,” they seemed to say. “Enter our deepest shadows and learn our mysteries and yes, our terrors, but even terror can be beautiful.”
    The sun gaped like a wound; the limbs were succoring hands which comforted and promised to heal even while they threatened to hold.
    He stumbled into the forest.
    He lay on the ground, eyes closed, poised between sleep and waking. He heard the rustle of bushes. Painfully he opened his eyes and saw a young boy, no, a young bull. No, a brawny bull-boy with silken red hair punctuated by horns. He tried to raise his hand. The boy stepped back from him with evident alarm.
    “I can’t get up,” Aeacus said. He lay in his own blood and wondered with more curiosity than fear if he were going to die. The boy circled him, approached, confirmed his helplessness, and spoke in a deep but musical Cretan.
    “Shall I help you up?”
    Aeacus deliberated. “I don’t know. I might start to bleed again. Perhaps you could first bind my wounds.”
    “Let me bind your wounds.”
    She had come so quietly that Aeacus and evidently the Minotaur boy (for that seemed to be his race) had not even heard her approach. She had come through the trees, or out of a tree, it was hard to say. She was taller than Cretan ladies and she wore, in place of their bell-shaped skirts and open bodices, a loose flowing gown the color of leaves and a necklace of orange berries. Her hair was green like her gown, swept above her head in a knot, and held by a silver pin in the shape of a grasshopper. Her ears, thus revealed, were delicately pointed. The boy looked at her with surprise and doubt.
    “We can take him to my house,” he said.
    “Mine is closer, Eunostos. But first I must clean his wounds.” She knelt beside him and touched damp moss to a cut on his shoulder. The relief was immediate, but whether from the moss or the administering hand, he could not be sure.
    “And what shall I do?” asked the Minotaur boy, seemingly aggrieved at being replaced as the rescuer of this wounded stranger. Aeacus liked him.
    “After he has rested,” she said, “you shall help me carry him to my house. We shall make a litter from sticks and vines and carry him as hunters carry a stag, though much more gently, of course.”
    “What is your name?” Aeacus