He wondered what sort of penance Bishop Eusebius would set Father Luke for associating with these beings. He did not wonder whether Father Luke would associate with them if it meant saving Thessalonica. He was sure the priest would come. Which left the next question: how to get him to come?
“Of necessity, ‘twill be you delivering word he is wanted,” Crotus said. “Saints hem Nephele and me and the rest of our land so close, it were the end for any of us to venture forth from these hills, as hath been previously intimated to you. Being of ruder substance, Ampelus and his fellows may fare farther abroad more readily, but cannot think to enter into the city where so many are of your opinion.”
“Mm.” George rubbed his chin. “Since it’s surrounded by the Slavs and Avars, I can’t think about entering it, either. Can you help me come close enough--maybe through the hills my land don’t usually travel anymore-- to give me some chance of getting in?”
“It may be so,” the male centaur answered. “I cannot speak with certainty, not here, not yet. But the thing must be essayed, lest all fail.”
“New things in woods, things in those hills,” Ampelus added fearfully. “Things with wings, to spy and see. Things with teeth and claws, to bite and kill.”
“You can speak of them, can’t you?” George asked. The satyr and the two centaurs nodded. Watching Nephele nod was worth the candle, even if the female’s voice was as deep as his. Refusing to let himself be distracted, he went on, “I’m surprised you don’t want to see those powers win at Thessalonica. They’re more your kind than . . .” Now he used silence to indicate God, Whom he would not name here.
“Not so,” Crotus said, “for their people lack all knowledge of and belief in our kind. Did they win, did they defeat even that which hath reduced us to our present estate, they would on the instant then proceed to hunt us to extinction: not a slow fading but a quick and bitter end.”
“He hath courage, to speak on what reboundeth not to his advantage,” Nephele said, tempering the compliment a moment later by adding, “Courage, or a signal want of good sense.”
“How soon can you try to get me back into the city?” George asked. “My family--” He broke off, thinking of his family for the first time since Menas slammed the postern gate in his face. As far as they knew, he was probably dead. He hoped someone had seen him escape into the woods, but even if someone had, so what? The most reasonable guess was that the Slavs would have hunted him down regardless. Had he been up on the wall watching someone else run, that was what he would have believed.
Crotus and Nephele looked toward Ampelus, who could approach Thessalonica more closely than they. The satyr nervously masturbated itself. “Not be easy,” it said, its rusty voice worried. “People round the city,
George looked at the sky. The sun would soon be down, hurrying toward the southwestern horizon on this cold near-winter day. “Would it be easier” --by which he meant safer-- “to travel at night?”
“No!” Ampelus spoke with great certainly, and kneaded its own tumescent flesh to emphasize the point. “
Realizing the hour made George also realize how worn and hungry he was. “Will you take me to that village, then?” he asked. “That should be safe.”
“I doubt we should reach it ere the sun’s chariot leaveth the sky,” Crotus said. “Are you fain to pass the night with us, George who feareth not that which dwelt in this land long ago and abideth here yet?” Unlike Ampelus, the male centaur plainly did not want to go anywhere near where men dwelt.
“Yes, of course. Thank you.” The shoemaker bowed to the centaur. He did his best to tell himself getting back among men, even backwoods pagans who probably didn’t know the Emperor’s name, was better than passing his time with creatures whom Bishop Eusebius and almost all his fellow Christians back in Thessalonica reckoned fit only for exorcism. That was the right thing, the proper thing, to think. He couldn’t make himself believe it. His curiosity was itching too fiercely. How many modern men got a chance like this? For that matter, how many men in ancient days had got a chance like this?
Crotus and Nephele went ahead at a pace he could not match. Ampelus led him through the woods to what might easily have been a hunters’ encampment. It was almost disappointingly prosaic: several neat lean-tos (some of them outsized, to accommodate centaurs), with a fire in the middle, a large pot bubbling over it.
Little by little, strangenesses surfaced. The knife Nephele used to cut up the rabbit and add it to the stew was bronze, with a bone handle. The pot into which the female threw the pieces of meat had a delicate perfection of shape potters these days didn’t even attempt, and was ornamented with capering satyrs in black on a red background. George didn’t know how old that made it-- Leo might have--but knew it was very old indeed.
Ampelus walked over to the pot. Nephele gave the satyr a look that warned it not to steal any stew. But that wasn’t what it had had in mind. It pointed to one of the satyrs the potter had painted, then to its own chest. “Me,” he said proudly.
For a moment, George thought that only an idle boast.
Then he took a closer, more careful look. The potter had labeled each dancing satyr. Beside the one at which Georges guide had pointed were Greek letters: AMTIE?O?. The shoemaker stared at the ancient portrait. It was a good likeness.
Another satyr came into the encampment, carrying a couple of squirrels by the tail. “Ha, Stusippus!” Ampelus said. “Here is George, this man I tell you I meet yesterday.”
It hadn’t been yesterday. It had been months before. George started to say as much, then abruptly closed his mouth. Here was a creature with a picture from at least as many centuries before the Incarnation as had passed since. No wonder the recent past blurred together for it.
“Friendly man--I remember,” Stusippus said. The new satyr’s features were less manlike than Ampelus’, its erection even larger. “Man with wine.”
“I have no wine today,” George said, and Stusippus’ phallus drooped for a moment, as Ampelus’ had done at the same sad news.
“Give thou me thy meat there,” Nephele said. Stusippus handed the female the squirrels without making the bawdy comment George had expected. Nephele still had that knife in hand.
More centaurs drifted into the camp. A couple of females--Lampra and Xanthippe, their names were-- brought in baskets of roots, while Lampra’s mate (husband? George didn’t know), Elatus, had a dead pig tied onto its back with vines. More fires were started. More delicious smells rose into the evening air.
With Xanthippe frolicked something George had never imagined, a baby centaur. Again, he wondered whether to think of it as a foal or a child. He watched, fascinated. “What’s it called?” he asked the young one’s mother, whose light roan coat and golden human hair and horse’s tail might have given it the name Xanthippe.
“Demetrius,” the female centaur answered. Its voice was deep as Nephele’s.
George’s jaw dropped. “After the saint?” he said. Could the pagan creatures have been trying to gain the protection of God, Whose name they could not say?
But they knew deities of their own. “After the great mother goddess,” Xanthippe said severely.
“Oh.” George was relieved and disappointed at the same time. “How old is it?” he asked, wondering if centaurs grew according to the pattern of horses or men.
Xanthippe shrugged. Time meant no more to centaurs than it did to satyrs. “I don’t know.” Its voice was--not indifferent, but uninterested. “A few hundred years.”
“Oh,” George said again, and said no more. Would Demetrius be ranging these hills a thousand years from now? If the Slavs and Avars weren’t driven away, the youngster wouldn’t be. Otherwise . . George tried not to think of the thirty or forty years that were the most he could expect to remain on this earth. But his soul would exist forever. Did Demetrius have a soul? One more thing George did not know and never would.
He missed bread with his supper, and he was used to drinking wine, not the clear, cold water bubbling up from a spring near the fire. Other than that, the meal was as good as any he’d ever eaten, with hunger a relish sharper than garlic.
After everyone had eaten, Xanthippe chanted Pindar’s Second Pythian Ode, to Hiero of Syracuse. George did not understand why it had chosen that particular piece till he realized it spoke of the creation of its race. Crotus and Nephele, little Demetrius, and Elatus all got up and danced to the song that had been written ages before George’s great-great-grandmother was born. But anyone of them, save perhaps Demetrius, might have seen Pindar. The shoemaker’s shiver had nothing to do with the cold.
The centaurs and satyrs had drifted fallen leaves in their shelters to serve as beds. Ampelus and Stusippus invited George in with them. The three of them crowded their lean-to, and the satyrs’ phalluses kept prodding at him as he burrowed into the leaves. The pagan Greeks, he remembered uneasily, had found unnatural vice neither unnatural nor a vice, and so their powers would not, either. But the satyrs did not seek to molest him. He was glad he’d had no wine for them.
Shortly thereafter, he was glad to be in bed with the satyrs, a gladness that had nothing to do with carnality. Without them, he would have shivered the whole night through. With them, despite their phalluses and other minor annoyances such as their hooves kicking him in the shins, he was warm enough. He burrowed into the leaves and slept.
“What a strange dream,” George said the next morning. He rolled over to tell it to Irene. Leaves rustling under him made him open his eyes. He was looking into Ampelus’ face.
“Morning,” the satyr said: more an announcement than a greeting.
“Good day,” George said, wondering if it would be. He got to his feet and started brushing leaves off his tunic and out of his hair. If the satyrs and centaurs slept like this, he wondered why they weren’t perpetually covered with bits of their mattresses.
He discovered the answer to that moments later. Ampelus and Stusippus had a bone comb. The first thing they did after getting out of their bed was to take turns combing each other free of dried leaves. George knew a couple of brushmakers down in Thessalonica. If they brought their wares up into the hills, they might do a good business.
Since he had less hair to fret over than any of his companions, and since he also had no one to groom him, he decided to make himself useful by stirring up the fire. His breath smoked as he built the blaze up again; the heat from the new flames was welcome.
“For this we thank you,” Crotus said, coming up behind him. Where George had been warming his hands in front of the fire, the male centaur bent forward so it could beat the bare crown of its head. Brushmaker. . . Hatmaker. George added to his mental list of artisans who might be useful here among these creatures of an outworn creed.
What did creatures of an outworn creed do about breakfast? At home, George was ready to face the day after bread with olive oil and a cup of wine. His chances of getting any of those things here in this sylvan encampment didn’t look good.
What he got were sun-dried apples and apricots, washed down with more water from that stream. It was cold enough to make his teeth ache, but almost as sweet as the fruit the centaurs gave him.
Once he’d eaten and drunk, he asked, “Shall we go on to one of those villages now?”
“If you be so eager to return to your own kind, we can do’t for you,” Crotus said, “however wary of villages we may be on account of the temptations of the vintage brewed therein. But if you would liefer bring us this holy man of whom you spoke not long ago, were it not wiser to seek to return to the town whence you came?”
“If you think you can get me back inside Thessalonica in spite of the Slavs and Avars all around, I’m game, but I don’t see how you’ll do it, especially since you can’t come close to the city yourselves.”
Crotus frowned. In a way, George knew a certain amount of intellectual pride at having perplexed the supernatural being. In another way, he wished the centaur had had an easy answer waiting. Crotus said, “We shall do all in our power to aid you, the more so as the holy man seemeth to be of the sort the situation requireth. That there may be risk in this course, both from the new- come powers and from the one against which we cannot stand--this we understand. We weigh here dangers one against another. In no direction standeth none.”
“I think you’re right about that,” George said slowly. He thought for a little while himself, then said, “All right, if you think you can get me down to Thessalonica and into the city, we’d better try it. And the sooner, the better.”
“There I deem you have bitten through the meat straight to the bone,” the male centaur said. “My land is but rarely inclined to take quick action, the passage of time being of small import to us. Thus it was that. . what you follow established itself in our land, we feeling no urgency toward expelling … it till too late. And now we are all but banished ourselves. May we prove wise enough to learn from one error and not commit a second of like sort.”
“People don’t often learn from their mistakes,” George said. If these immortal creatures did, they deserved to be reckoned demigods.
“Nor satyrs, either, they being prisoners to their lusts,” Crotus answered. “We dare hope ourselves the wiser. We are no longer wine-bibbers, having learnt from sore experience how such
