“How did you manage that?” George exclaimed.
Ampelus laughed some more, though the laughter looked as if it hurt. “Went up in back of filly Nephele, tried to screw. If I do it, I think I have good time. If I don’t do it, I make Nephele, all the centaurs so mad, they give over talk talk talk.”
“You get it in?” Ithys demanded.
By way of reply, Ampelus sadly rubbed at that hoof-shaped bruise. Though the satyr healed with the speed characteristic of immortals, George suspected it would wear that mark for a good long while.
Sure enough, though, Nephele burst out of the woods a few minutes later. The glance the female centaur aimed at Ampelus should have annihilated the satyr more thoroughly than any kick, no matter how ferocious. Ampelus, however, only leered back, which made Nephele more furious than ever.
Father Luke spoke quickly: “Have you decided, then, whether you will drink the wine to try to save Thessalonica?”
Distracted, Nephele turned away from Ampelus. “Oh,” the female centaur said. “That.” Anger cooled somewhat, it spoke now with more than a little hesitation. “Aye,” it said at last. “We are decided. Let it be as you say, priest of the new. We shall do this thing, and run wild upon the earth, and madness shall overtake us, and, if it be fated, we shall overfall the folk and powers that have come down into this land.”
“In the name of--” Father Luke checked himself before he named the Name the centaur could not bear to hear. “In my name, and in the name of Thessalonica my city, I thank you.”
“And while we run mad,” Nephele went on as if the priest had not spoken, “if it be fated, mayhap I shall run across a certain wretch with horse’s tail and billygoats nature, and mayhap tear the said wretch limb from limb beyond any hope of healing, even though that wretch belong to a race said to be undying. Mayhap this too shall come to pass.”
George would not have wanted to be on the receiving end of a threat like that, not when Nephele so obviously looked forward to the prospect. If it bothered Ampelus, the satyr didn’t show it. “Maybe you just get drunk and happy. Maybe we go someplace and--”
Nephele flung a stone. Ampelus’ dodge was, and needed to be, supernaturally quick. The satyr darted in among the trees. A volley of well-hurled stones followed. George didn’t think any of them hit.
Lete was overrun with centaurs. The townsfolk, pagan though they were, had stared when Crotus and Nephele accompanied George and the satyrs to Gorgonius’ shop. Now George would not have been surprised if the centaurs here outnumbered the human population of Lete.
From where had all the creatures come? How had they gathered here so quickly, when the shoemaker had seen but few signs of them up till now? He’d tried asking Nephele, but the female centaur gave him no answer he could understand. His own best guess was that her kin had traveled by way of the hills beyond those he knew, and that paths long in his own mundane world might prove shorter there. He did not know that for a fact. He did not know whether any humanly graspable facts were there to be known.
Lete might not have seen centaurs for a long time. Lete might never before have seen centaurs in profusion. But, when those centaurs began gathering around the couple of taverns in the town, the people of Lete, pagans as they were, knew what that was liable to mean. A lot of those people expressed their opinion of what was about to happen, or was liable to happen, by fleeing for their lives.
The proprietor of one of the taverns, a dour little man who looked better suited to be a gravedigger, came out of his establishment to look at the centaurs, who stared hungrily back at him. Seeing Father Luke in the front ranks of the creatures alongside Crotus and Nephele, the taverner called to him: “Do you know what will happen when these centaurs get themselves a bellyful of wine?”
“No,” the priest answered cheerfully, “not in any great detail. Do you?”
“Detail?” The fellow stared at him. “I don’t care anything about the details. You crazy--” He might have said,
“That’s the idea,” Father Luke said, cheerful still. “How would you like to be a Slav or an Avar and have a pack of drunken centaurs come thundering down on you when you didn’t expect it?”
“Oh.” The taverner started to say something else, but again checked himself. He very visibly did try to imagine himself a barbarian caught by surprise under such circumstances. The expression he donned after making that mental effort was merely dyspeptic, a considerable improvement on the way he’d looked before. They won’t be happy, will they?”
“We hope not,” George said. “That’s the idea: to make them unhappy, I mean. Why don’t you bring some wine jars and dippers out here? Your place looks crowded for centaurs, you don’t mind my saying so.”
Dour glowering returned to the taverner’s face. They’ll drink me dry. Who’s going to pay me for all this?”
“If you don’t bring out the jars and dippers, they’ll go into your tavern, drink you dry, and probably wreck the place, too,” George noted. “Wouldn’t you say keeping the building and furniture in one piece counts for something?”
The taverner’s lips moved. George could not make out what he was saying. That was liable to be just as well. The fellow went back into his shop. George worried. If no wine was forthcoming, the centaurs were liable to storm and sack the place.
But then the taverner reemerged, carrying a large jar. He stabbed the pointed end into the ground so it stood upright. By the look he gave George, he would sooner have stabbed him. George felt a certain amount of sympathy; he wouldn’t have wanted to give away all the shoes he’d made over several months, either. Nor was the taverner saving his own town; the Slavs and Avars had shown no interest in Lete. If, however, the other choices were worse . .
Out came the taverner again, with another jar of wine. Seeing him give up, his colleague also began bringing out jars of wine. Behind George, the centaurs leaned forward, like a forest with the wind blowing through it. They might not have tasted wine since the long-ago days, but they remembered--and they hungered.
George turned to Father Luke. “Once they start drinking, how will we turn them toward Thessalonica? If they go mad or do whatever they do here, that doesn’t help us much.”
“I don’t quite know.” The priest’s face was drawn and worried. “One way or another, we’ll manage. We’ll have to manage. Can’t you feel how close the Slavs and Avars are to doing whatever they’re about to do?”
“I can’t feel anything but how close we are to getting trampled when the creatures decide they’re not going to wait anymore,” George said. Father Luke smiled at him, but wanly.
Crotus started shouting in a dialect even more archaic than the one the male and the other centaurs used when talking with mortals. George could catch a word here and there, but, while he was getting that one, three or four more would go by that had no meaning for him. They meant something to the centaurs, though. Several large, burly males pushed their way through the crowd and took up stations by the growing rows of wine jars.
To Father Luke and George, Crotus said, “They are pledged to resist the lure of the wine as best they can, to aid others in drinking whilst abstaining themselves. So far as it may be prevented, the madness shall not lay hold of all of us at once.”
George and the priest beamed at each other. The sober centaurs could send the rest of their kind in the required direction--if they stayed sober, and if the others, once drunk, paid any attention to them. George was glad they were there. Of one thing he was certain: drunk, the mob of centaurs would have paid no attention to him.
At last, everything was to Crotus’ satisfaction. “Let us taste the wine!” the male cried, a sentence that had not changed much over time. The rest of the centaurs did not cheer, as George had expected them to do at that welcome exhortation. Instead, a deep sigh ran through them, as when a lover spied his beloved after the two of them had spent a long time apart.
Crotus was the first to fill a dipper. Instead of also being the first to drink, the male centaur, oddly ceremonious, passed the dipper to Nephele. The female savored the bouquet of the wine for a moment, then poured the dipper down. A shudder ran through both the human and the equine halves of the centaur’s body. Its eyes slid almost shut. A low, soft sigh escaped its lips. If that wasn’t ecstasy, George had never seen ecstasy.
And, when Nephele’s eyes opened again, they had fire in them. The transformation was abrupt, and a little terrifying. All the planes and angles of the centaur’s face were different. Every one of them screamed
Father Luke saw that, too. He did his brave best not to seem alarmed. In a conversational tone of voice, he asked, “Do you know the writer on magic named Philotechnus, George?” When George shook his head, the priest went on, “One of the bits of advice he gives is,
Nephele roughly flung the dipper back to Crotus. The male centaur refilled it and drank. George watched in astonishment: the change in Crotus was even greater than that in Nephele had been. The male centaur seemed large and more . . . predatory than had been true only a moment before. If it turned that fearsome gaze on George, he told himself he would make the sign of the cross at the creature--better to drive it off than be torn limb from limb.
And then George wondered if the sign of the cross would do any good against a centaur maddened by wine. He could see Father Luke wondering the same thing. All at once, he understood in his belly what Philotechnus’ maxim meant.
More and more centaurs drank. More and more centaurs underwent that transformation, awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time. Hoarse shouts rose into the sky. The more drunken centaurs there were, the more the horse shouts gained in volume and ferocity.
Even Demetrius, still the only centaur colt George had seen, took a dipper of wine and was remade in the savage image of its elders. Demetrius put the shoemaker in mind of a fox cub worrying at a bone too big for it, but that didn’t mean, or didn’t have to mean, the small centaur wasn’t dangerous in its own right.
“How do we go down toward Thessalonica?” Luke asked.
“I think we’d better have the males who aren’t drunk tell the rest to get going,” George said. He wasn’t anxious to draw to him the notice of the centaurs who had been drinking.
“That isn’t what I meant,” the priest said. “How do
“Oh,” George said, and then, “Well, how do you feel about being cavalry, Your Reverence?”
“Riding a centaur, do you mean?” Father Luke said. George nodded. The priest went on, “Riding a drunken centaur? Riding a maddened drunken centaur? Of all the things in the world, the only one I’d less rather do, I think, is stay up here in Lete.”
George nodded again. He started to go up to Nephele, to ask if the female centaur would bear him down the long and winding road that led back to Thessalonica. Then, remembering what Ampelus had tried to do to Nephele, he sheered off. He could think of only one way to hold on as he rode, and feared the female centaur would take it as an undue liberty.
He went up to Crotus instead. “Will you carry me to Thessalonica?” he asked. “Will one of your friends carry Father Luke?”
Crotus’ eyes were tracked with red. Slowly, slowly, they focused on George. “Thessalonica,” the centaur said, one thick syllable at a time, as if it had never heard the word before. Then its head went up and down. “Oh, aye, the new town.” George did not think of it as a new town, but George did not personally remember its founding, as Crotus no doubt did. The male went on, “And you, mortal, you are … ah, who you are returneth to me: the follower of the new.” The centaur looked ready to tear him to pieces for being a follower of the new. But then more memory seemed to make its way through the haze of wine. “And we are … we are in alliance. Alliance with bad against worse. A hard path, but the only one left to us.”
Without another word, Crotus squatted down on all fours (or rather, on four out of six). George scrambled onto the centaur’s back. Crotus shouted for Elatus; the other male stood nearby. Elatus squatted, too. Father Luke hurried over and mounted his unorthodox--in both the literal and theological senses of the word-- steed.
“Thessalonica!” Crotus shouted in a huge voice. “Thessalonica! The foe awaiteth. Thessalonica!”
In a moment, the whole great band of centaurs had taken up the cry, baying like so many wolves: “Thessalonica!” Down the hillside they poured, a drunken mob of supernatural creatures. Beneath Georges fundament, Crotus’ musdes heaved and rippled. The shoemaker clung to the centaur’s human torso with one hand and to Perseus’ cap with the other. If he needed to draw his sword and fight he wouldn’t be able to hold on then. He hoped--how he hoped!--it wouldn’t matter.
