The Forest of Forever Read Online Free PDF

silver fish. She had watched him speak to a girl with painted nipples—a brazen girl, to be sure—and then she had followed him as he fled from the palace and took refuge in a grove of tamarisk trees.
    She had tried to call to him but she had not even known his name. Still, he had seemed to hear her. He had ardently embraced a tamarisk tree and her own body had throbbed with a sweet anguish for which she had no name.
    “Kora!”
    A Paniscus stood in her path. Phlebas. He was much the largest of the Panisci. He looked an old fifteen, his horns were long and crooked, and his haunches bristled with coarse red hairs.
    “Where are you going?”
    “To Centaur Town.” She spoke curtly because his question was curt, though she rather pitied his hoof-loose, aimless life.
    “Why not come to my house?”
    “I’m out to barter this linen cloak for a mattock.” Panisci neither bathed, nor trimmed their hair, nor washed their hooves. They looked as if they had wallowed in everything swept out of a house after a thorough housecleaning. She would have liked to give him a bath, but she knew that he would resist water as a fish resists the land. Poor little ragamuffin, she thought, ashamed of her original pique. With no adults to guide him, was it any wonder that he lived and looked as he did? It did not occur to her to be frightened of him. The Panisci had never bothered her in the past, except for Phlebas’s suggestive remark about a grape which shrivels into a raisin.
    He snatched at the cloak but she whipped it out of his grasp. He grinned at her. “I could barter it too. Give it to me.”
    She quickened her pace. She could easily defend herself against a single Paniscus. His horns were sharp, but in spite of her seeming fragility, she was agile enough to avoid them. Suppose, however, that he had brought his friends? He sauntered from the path but almost at once the bushes on either side of her began to crackle. A hoofbeat, the swish of a tail, a lewd snicker. She began to run. She had left the oaks of the Dryads, and among the cypresses, those funereal cones with their bronze-tinted leaves, there was no one to help her, not even a friendly Centaur.
    She burst into a clearing. Thank Zeus she was out of the trees, usually her friends, but now a possible ambush. In the blaze of the morning sun, among the daisies and buttercups, what could harm her? Wolves skulked only in the dark and vampire bats moved like shadows among shadows. But regardless of sunlight and sunbright flowers, a band of Panisci—eight of them—emerged from the trees and, with smiling faces and slow, deliberate steps, surrounded her. Children, yes; but children in bands can be murderous. They joined hands and she found herself in a living prison.
    “What do you want?” she cried, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.
    A snicker, a bleat; otherwise, silence. They began to circle her as if they were enacting some strange rite to the Lady Moon. Round and round they moved, swung, reeled, until she became quite dizzy from the sight of them.
    “Is this what you want?” She flung the linen cloak to Phlebas.
    “Yes,” he said, snatching it out of the air and draping it around his hairy shoulders to cavort over the grass like a tipsy maenad.
    Perhaps, she thought, I can make a break through the hole he has left in the chain.
    “And this?” She tossed him her ring, an intaglio chiseled by the Telchins.
    “Yes!” There was no chance for a break. Now they all loosed their hands, but only to snatch at her, slap at her, prod her with hairy fingers.
    “What else, you dirty little boys?”
    Phlebas threw back his head and his laughter was like the bleating of a dozen goats. He did not laugh like a child.
    * * * *
    The Panisci were much too lazy to build their own houses. They used the tunnels and warrens and other constructions deserted by the giant beavers which had once lived in the country but which had been the first casualties in the War with the Wolves.