Hellenic Immortal (17 page)

“DO NOT BE AFFRIGHTED,” THE GOD SAID TO SILENUS. “LIKE ALL OF THE BEASTS OF THIS WORLD, THIS SATYR IS MY BROTHER.”

From the archives of Silenus the Elder. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne

I didn’t start to relax until after I’d made the connecting flight in Seattle that took me out of the country. Before I was out of reach of the FBI, I couldn’t be completely positive Mike was right, and it was really okay to travel.

   
Logically, it made perfect sense. Emotionally, I was less sure, and sometimes emotions can do funny things to the logic centers of one’s brain. For instance, most of my trip from Sacramento to Seattle was taken up concocting an involved fantasy about how Mike could
think
things were all clear for me, but was being misled in that regard by people who suspected that he himself was untrustworthy. (To that end, he
was
untrustworthy. But if they already knew that, it made no sense to set up some kind of sting operation to catch me, in order to catch him, if they already had him. Better to catch him and find out how to subsequently catch me. This didn’t occur to me at all until later.) This fantasy scenario became a matter of near-certainty by the time I was on the ground, and didn’t truly dissolve until I got off the flight and did not end up surrounded by gun-wielding government operatives.

So I was on my way to Amsterdam. If I had one ounce of sense in my head, I’d be stopping there and maybe hanging out for a century or two. But that was just where I was meeting up with a second connecting flight to Athens.

This was maybe not one of my better ideas.

*
 
*
 
*

After Mike had left Cassandra’s patio, I’d made my way back inside to see how she was doing and found her still on her couch, eyes open, enjoying the kind of relaxation I haven’t achieved since I was a practicing Buddhist, which was a very long time ago.

“So?” she had asked. “What do you think?”

I stood in the doorway and sipped at her liqueur bottle. “Do you remember it?”
 

“I do.”

In the beginning, she not only couldn’t remember her own prophecies, she couldn’t even recall having been in a trance. Which fit; the older oracles of history could recall their prophecies exactly, but the younger ones had trouble with it. It was something I assumed one got better at with time.

“What do
you
think?”
 

“It’s not for me to say,” she’d said, dodging me, which I hated.

“C’mon, it’s me. I know the rules, and how I’m supposed to be the one to figure it out, so you can skip that. You heard what I heard. I’m asking what you thought about it.”

Sitting up unsteadily, she gave it her best shot. “You’re in danger.”

“Yeah, I thought so, too. Of the end-of-the-road variety.”

“There were two paths. One led directly to this woman. The other . . .”

“ . . . probably leads indirectly to her. Can’t escape one’s destiny, right?”

She waved her hands dismissively. “Of course you can. Don’t be ridiculous. I gave you what might happen.”

I took another sip. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“I do! There is no such thing as predestination.”

I skipped the irony inherent in such a proclamation coming from an actual oracle and went on to a better point. “Have you ever given a prophecy that did not turn out to come true?”

“No, but I refuse to accept that they are all inescapable. And if there is any man who can escape his, it’s the one man who has also managed to cheat death for a thousand lifetimes. You, my dear Spencer, are the exception to every other rule. Why not this one as well?”

“You mentioned two paths.”

She took a casual puff of the hookah and said, “ ‘Seek the source.’ The first part of the prophecy is one path. That’s the second. That’s how I see it.”

“Unless they’re different bends on the same path.”

“You know how it goes. I don’t know if I am looking at anything in any particular order. But that part felt different.”

“Source of what?”

“I’ve no idea, darling.”

By the time I’d found my way to her guest bedroom (she made no attempt to invite me into her bed, and I made no effort to work myself into it) and slept off the magnificent quantity of alcohol I’d downed, I realized what the source was. And that was what got me on the plane to Athens.

*
 
*
 
*

By the time of the birth of Christ, there were hundreds of different mystery cults in Greece, but the one I was interested in—the most famous one—took place in the Attic region: The Eleusinian Mystery. (
Mystery
in this context means something slightly different now than it did then. The root word is
mysterion
, which in Greek just meant rite or ceremony.) Each year at harvest, the Eleusinians held their celebratory rites, thanking Demeter, goddess of the harvest for the blessings she’d bestowed that year on their crops. The conclusion of the ceremony was the formal initiation of new supplicants. The ceremony was a little like the Christian baptism, but with less water and more drinking.

The new adherents were brought before a large iron box—called the kiste—the box was opened and the sacred items were revealed to them. Only those who were properly sworn in knew how to open the box, as the process was fairly involved and entirely counter-intuitive. I knew how to do it, but I doubted anybody else alive did, and I further doubted anybody else would be able to figure out how, even today. But that might be pride talking; I’d designed it myself.

But that was only for the boring part of the ceremony. The much more entertaining part—the private part, the part nobody knows about because the participants were sworn to secrecy—went to Dionysos, god of wine, dance, orgies, theater and, well, everything that makes life on this planet fun, plus death and madness, the two more obvious consequences of having too much fun for too long. This is how all religions should work, incidentally; after having a nice big sacred ceremony, a nice big party should always follow. The Greeks found a way to do that and still claim the Bacchanal was a religious rite, which is another reason I miss old Athens.

In the third century A.D., when the Romans broke up the party once and for all, the kiste was presumed lost. But if it wasn’t, the place to begin looking for it was Eleusis—the source.

Assuming there were still satyrs living in Athens, I knew exactly where to start.

*
 
*
 
*

My first encounters with satyrs date back to before the death of Karyos, but after the destruction of Minos, in that hazy century or so in which I wandered the woods of the southern Greek peninsula. I had heard rumors from as early as the days of the Sumerian empire, of wild men in the woods who stood upright but hunted like pack animals. I didn’t put too much stock in it.

Most every old civilization looks at others—members of the same species but not of the same tribe—as wild men. It’s a common rationalization, because when you reduce someone else to a level of something like an animal, it makes them easier to kill. So I tended to dismiss the rumors, which worked out fine for me up until the day I found myself face-to-face with a wild satyr.

I don’t recall specifically what I was doing on that day, but I’d wager it had something to do with hunting or eating, as that was the extent of my activities during that time. Whatever I was doing, it was interrupted by a noise. It wasn’t a large noise—a faint rustling is all—and it was the sort of sound most people would have dismissed as being part of the natural background of a growing forest. I knew better, because I’d been in the forest for quite a while and could make the distinction.

“Is someone there?” I asked, in the Minoan tongue. As a rule, game runs away and predators attack, and whatever had made this noise had done neither. I was presuming something sentient and probably human.

I pushed back a few branches and found myself staring down at something I’d never seen before.

He seemed human from the waist up, but his entire lower section was covered in hair. Unshod, it appeared his feet had only three toes. He was naked, and from the expression on his face, he was nervous. Were he human, I’d take him to be no more than seven years of age.

I tried to put on a nonthreatening smile. “Hello. What might you be?”

Then his father stepped out of the brush behind him. He was much more impressive.

Like the child, he was covered in a thick layer of dark brown hair from his waist down. His chest was bare, but his shoulders were covered with wispy hair that was a bit lighter than the rest. Likewise, the knuckles on his hand were hairy, as was almost his entire face. A thick beard ran up his protruded jaw, nearly obscuring his ears and meeting up with a fantastically unkempt mane of hair atop his head. His eyebrows were like things unto themselves, tapering upward and outward so dramatically that they appeared to be horns.

He put a protective hand on the boy’s shoulder and drew him slowly away, never taking his brown eyes off me.

He spoke, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying as it was no tongue I’d ever heard before. His voice had a low, growling canine sort of timbre.

“I don’t understand,” I said, making an effort to show the palms of both hands so it was clear I had no weapons.

“You speak island words,” he growled. It was difficult to understand—he was putting the emphases in the wrong places—but I got it okay.

“Yes. I came from there. How did you learn it?”

He looked me up and down, a little unsure. “My son,” he said finally. “Too young to . . . be quietly.”

“He will learn.” I offered my hand, and my strange new friend studied it carefully, but did not take it. Handshakes were not common with his people, apparently. So when that failed, I pointed to my own chest instead. “Human,” I said. Then I pointed to him.

“Gylin,” he responded. At first I thought I was dealing with a race of Gylins, up until he pointed to his son and said, “Liakhil.”
 

He didn’t give me a chance to explain that I was trading species names and not surnames.

He pointed to the west and said, “Come, Hu-man, we eat. Okay?”

*
 
*
 
*

As we trudged through the forest, a remarkable thing happened—other satyrs began popping up out of nowhere. I thought I knew how to disappear when it came to hiding in woods; I clearly had no idea what I was doing. One of them stepped out right next to me. Had he chosen to stay hidden, I wouldn’t have known he was there, and he was barely an arm’s-length away. I wondered how long they’d been watching me, given that detecting them when they didn’t want to be detected was clearly not within my abilities.

We were gradually joined by a dozen others of roughly the same size and build of Gylin; Liakhil was the only child among the group. I gathered that this was Liakhil’s first foray away from their home. He had probably disappointed his father by getting himself noticed by the likes of me.

Another thing I noticed as we walked silently through the underbrush, was that the legs of my new friends were somewhat more distinctive than I’d first realized. Their ankles were higher than they are on humans, by about a hand’s-width. I wondered what sort of advantages this physical difference imparted. I soon found out.

We reached the apparent end of our journey when we came upon a particularly thick patch of plant life. From a distance it didn’t look any different than any other portion of the forest, but once we got up close, I saw that the tangle of vines, moss, and low-branching trees was all but impassable. Had I come there alone, I’d have probably thought nothing of it and simply been shunted sideways until a clearer path was discovered. That, I reflected, was exactly the point.

Gylin spoke in his own tongue to a couple of his fellow adults, who nodded. Then they walked to one side and jumped more or less straight up. I believe my jaw dropped at approximately the same speed at which they ascended, as the height they attained far exceeded anything I could ever hope to pull off myself. Both were soon out of view and somewhere within the forest ceiling. Gylin then instructed Liakhil to follow. The stripling’s jump wasn’t quite as impressive—better still than anything I could do—and he ended up dangling from the side of the wall of vines. He climbed from there and disappeared from view as well.

Gylin looked at me. “Jump?”
 

“I can’t,” I said. “Climb?”

He smiled. Or I think it was a smile. If he were an animal, I’d take it as a teeth-baring threat. Then he gestured to two of the others, who stepped beside me. I wrapped my arms around their respective shoulders, they wrapped their arms around my torso, and I said a quiet prayer to the Minoan god of accidental death and dismemberment. Then we all bent our knees and pushed off.

The degree of force I applied personally to the jump didn’t make a good deal of difference, but my two new friends didn’t need my help. We rocketed through the upper canopy of the forest almost as quickly as if we were falling from the trees and to the ground. When we reached the acme of our ascent, they grabbed onto a series of vines that were possibly there for just this purpose. And with their help, I reached up and did the same.

Directly ahead was open space. With one of them first showing me how it was done, I worked hand-over-hand through the opening and crossed over, past what was now very clearly a deliberate wall of plants, and onto the other side. Then I was dangling over open space and an apparently fatal drop to the ground below. I saw that the two adults who’d gone before us were standing on the forest floor with Liakhil, watching expectantly. I didn’t think they were there to catch me, but it was nice to imagine they might try, should I lose my grip.

I didn’t have to worry about that, though, as I was rejoined by the two who had helped me up there in the first place. They flanked me once more, grabbed my torso, and instructed me through head gestures to let go of the ceiling and take hold of their shoulders. I did, with some trepidation, as I knew what was coming next.