The Forest of Forever Read Online Free PDF Page B

And being thieves, the Panisci hid the tunnel mouths with bushes and stones to confuse their pursuers.
    Phlebas’s band occupied a lodge of mud and branches in the middle of a small lake originally dammed by the beavers. In the time of the beavers, the lodge had contained both a dry shelf and a covered pool, but the Panisci, disliking water, had filled the pool with mud and they reached the lodge by scrambling through a tunnel under the lake and then ascending sharply into a round, low room which appeared to be not so much decorated as littered. The original inhabitants, a blunt though circumspect race, would have been horrified to see the heaps of decaying leaves which took the place of beds, the moth-eaten wolfskin laid on a slab of wood which might, with a wrench of the imagination, be called a table, the crude earthen pots, half of them overturned in puddles of juice, the other half reeking with rancid milk or olive oil. The only attractive objects appeared to have been stolen. A gown which had come from the loom of a Dryad. A pruning fork which Chiron had missed last week from his vineyard. Gems from the workshop of a Telchin. And there—What was that shimmering tunic of unknown material which someone had carefully smoothed and hung on the wall? It was certainly not wool or linen.
    As for the inhabitants, there must have been a dozen Panisci, no, thirteen, and there were four Bears of Artemis—shameful little hussies—who were keeping company with the Goat Boys. Since both Boys and Girls attained a physical development of from twelve to fifteen and since puberty comes to the Beasts at eleven or twelve, they sometimes formed unions which were rarely lasting—in fact, the Boys often shared a Girl in common—but which might produce offspring. Two of the four Girls were absentmindedly cradling infants: a cub and a kid.
    The Girls were outcasts from their own race. They lacked the fastidious charm of their more civilized sisters who lived in hollow logs and wove berry chains to make a decent living. Their paws were red and coarse, their fur was long and unkempt. The necklaces they wore were not of black-eyed Susans but strand upon garish strand of metal and other bright oddments stolen or dug from the earth or found in stream beds. They were a brazen lot, these Girls. They looked at Kora as if she had come to steal their men and it shocked her to see such knowing stares on such young faces. It was even rumored that they chewed the leaves of the hemp plants, which the Centaurs had imported from their travels in the East, and enjoyed exotic visions or fell into a drugged stupor. Indeed, one of the Girls was huddled in the corner, oblivious to her comrades and looking as if she were watching a private vision. Someone spoke to her but she neither moved nor changed her expression.
    “Eirene’s out of it,” another Girl said.
    “Well, she’ll miss her supper.”
    “Do you think she cares? I’ve a mind to join her.”
    “The weed can wait. After the fun.”
    Kora, it seemed, was the fun. Phlebas flung her into their midst as a hunter might have flung a haunch of venison to his hungry comrades. The thought occurred to her that she might be intended for dinner. She knew that they preferred vegetables—grass, roots, the lower branches of trees, preferably vegetables stolen from the Centaur gardens—but that they ate almost anything, including leather sandals. Well, she thought, with that wry, self-depreciating humor which sometimes salted her dreams. Half of them will go hungry. There isn’t enough of me for thirteen portions.
    But they did not have her in mind for dinner. Not yet, at least. Having little to occupy them and being children or at least childish, they were curious creatures, and a Dryad in their lodge was an object of intense curiosity. They ogled her and poked her—she slapped their hands. They pinched her and prodded her—she kicked one of them in the shin and sent him limping across the