CHIRON hurried, a little late, down the corridors of tamarisk, yew, bay, and kermes oak. Beneath the cedars and silver firs, whose hushed heads were shadows permeated with Olympian blue, a vigorous underwood of arbutus, wild pear, cornel, box, and andrachne filled with scents of flower and sap and new twig the middle air of the forest. Branches of bloom here and there dashed color across the shifting caverns of forest space that enclosed the haste of his canter. He slowed. The ragged and muted attendants of air escorting his high head slowed also. These intervals of free space-touched by the arching search of fresh shoots and threaded by the quick dripdrop of birdsong released as if from a laden ceiling rich in elements (some songs were water, some copper, some silver, some burnished rods of wood, some cold and corrugated fire)-were reminiscent for him of caverns and soothed and suited his nature. His student’s eyes-for what is a teacher but a student grown old?-retrieved, from their seclusion in the undergrowth, basil, hellebore, feverwort, spurge, polypody, bryony, wolfs-bane, and squill. Ixine, cinquefoil, sweet marjoram and gilliflower he lifted, by the shape of their petals, leaves, stems, and thorns, from their anonymity in indiscriminate green. Recognized, the plants seemed to lift crisply in salute, hailing the passage of a hero. Black hellebore is fatal to horses. Crocuses thrive for being trod upon. Without his willing it, Chiron’s brain rehearsed his anciently acquired druggist’s knowledge. Of the plants called strykhnos, one induces sleep, the other madness. The root of the former, white when dug, turns blood-red while drying. The other some call thryoron and some peritton; three-twentieths of an ounce make the patient sportive, twice this dose induces delusions, thrice the dose will make him permanently insane. And more will kill him.

Thyme does not grow where a sea-breeze cannot reach. In cutting some roots one must stand to windward. The old gatherers maintained the peony root must be dug at night, for if a woodpecker observes you, you will suffer prolapsus ani. Chiron had scorned this superstition; he had meant to bring men out of the darkness. Apollo and Diana had promised to guide him. One should draw three circles around mandrake with a sword, and, at the cutting, face west. Chiron’s white lips smiled within the bronze fleece of his beard as he remembered the intricate scruples he had scorned in his quest for actual cures. What mattered about mandrake was that, mixed with meal, it assuaged gout, insomnia, erysipelas, and impotence. Of wild cucumber the root palliates white leprosy and mange in sheep. Of germander the leaves, pounded in olive oil, dress fractures and spreading sores; the fruit purges bile. Polypody purges downwards; the driver-which retains its virtue for two hundred years- both upwards and downwards. The best drugs come from places that are wintry, face the north, and are dry-in Euboea, the drugs of Aigai and Telethrion have most virtue. All perfumes save iris come from Asia: cassia, cinnamon, cardamon, spikenard, storax, myrrh, dill. The poisons are native: hellebore, hemlock, meadow-saffron, poppy, wolfs-bane. Chamaeleon is fatal to dogs and pigs; and if one wishes to discover whether a man that is sick will live, he should be washed with a paste of chamaeleon mixed with oil and water for three days. If he survives the experience, he will live.

A bird above him released a swift metallic song that seemed to be a signal. “Chiron! Chiron!”: the call sprang up behind him and overtook him and, skimming past his ears, outraced him in its bodiless speed of joy to the ragged cave-mouth of sunstruck air that waited at the end of the forest path. He came into the clearing and his students were already there: Jason, Achilles, Asclepios, his daughter Ocyrhoe, and the dozen other princely children of Olympus abandoned to his care. It had been their voices. Seated in a semi-circle on the warm orchard grass, all hailed him gladly. Achilles looked up from sucking the marrow from the bone of a faun; his chin was smeared with crumbs of wax from a honeycomb. The boy’s fine body had in it a hint of fat. Across those broad blond shoulders lay like a transparent mantle a suggestion of feminine roundness that gave his developed mass a slightly passive weight, and weakened his eyes. Their blue was too beryline; their gaze both questioned and evaded. Of all Chiron’s students, Achilles gave his teacher the most trouble yet seemed most needful of his approval and loved him least bashfully. Jason, less favored, slightly built and younger-appearing than his years, yet had the angular assurance of independence, and his dark eyes declared a calm intention to survive. Asclepios, the best student, was quiet and determinedly composed; in many respects he had already surpassed his master. Torn from the womb of faithless Coronis slain, he too had known an unmothered childhood and the distant protection of a divine father; Chiron treated him less as a pupil than as a colleague, and while the others romped at recess the two of them, old at heart, side by side delved deeper into the arcana of research.

But Chiron’s eyes rested most fondly on the reddish-gold hair of his daughter. How rich with life this girl was! Her hair waved and interweaved: herds of horses, seen from above. His life, seen from above. It was in her that his plasm was immortal. His gaze foundered on her head, already a woman’s head, wantonly crowned: his own seed-he saw down through her into the stamping, angry child, long-legged, wide-browed, who had arisen from the infant that Chariclo had nursed beside him on the moss, in the days when stars spoke at the mouth of the cave. The girl had been too intelligent to take her childhood easily; her tantrums had grieved their pride in her. More keenly than her father, Ocyrhoe was tormented with prescience, a torment of which not all his drugs, not even all-heal uprooted at midnight of the shortest night from the rocky ground about Psophis, could relieve her; so when she taunted him, however shrilly and cruelly, he felt no rage, and submitted meekly, hoping to earn her forgiveness for his inability to work her cure.

In the chorus of greeting, each child’s cry was an individual tint known to him. In sum the polyphony formed a rainbow. His eyes wavered on the warm edge of tears. The children opened each day’s session with a hymn to Zeus. When they stood, their bodies, clad lightly, were not yet differentiated into wedges and vases, attacking and containing, tools for Ares and Hestia, but were the same in silhouette, though of various heights: slim pale reeds of a single pipe harmoniously hymning the god of existence pure.

“Lord of the sky,

Wielder of weather.

Brightness of brightness,

Zeus, hear our song!

“Fill us with glory,

Crest of the thunderhead,

Shape us with gradualness,

Source of the rain!”

The light and fitful breeze swayed and scattered the song much as young girls toss scarves.

“Radiance beyond itself,

Sun above Apollo,

Earth below Hades,

Sea upon sea,

“Grant us proportion,

Arc of the firmament,

Curve of the gilliflower;

Zeus, let us thrive!”

The centaur’s grave voice, uncertain in song, joined in the final petition:

“Brightness of brightness,

Sky of our mortality,

Home of our hopes,

Height of our fear,

“Send us a sign,

A sign of benevolence,

Show forth thy government:

Answer our song!”