Hellenic Immortal (18 page)

I’d been wrong. The jump up wasn’t nearly the same thing as falling down. Falling down was a good deal faster and decidedly more frightening. Picturing my legs snapping in two, I tucked them under me and hoped that the others were capable of cushioning our landing sufficiently as I didn’t care to weather the rest of eternity with a pronounced limp. I needn’t have worried; the landing was unexpectedly gentle.

Once the rest of the group made it over the wall, we walked a little further until coming upon their settlement.

It was a small village. I counted about fifty or sixty inhabitants and more than two dozen dwellings that amounted to little more than three-sided lean-tos somewhat similar to the tepees later used by Native Americans. All of the men in the village were as naked as the bunch that had taken me there, but all of the women were clothed. I found this odd until I realized that the women were all human. That was odd, too, but in an entirely different way.

Gylin put his arm around me and slowly led me through the settlement. Everyone there had been in the midst of doing something—chatting, carrying water, tending a fire, cleaning—up until they spotted me. Apparently, my being there was a fairly big deal.

By the time we reached the main building, nearly everybody in the village had come out to see me, albeit at a safe distance just in case I was rabid. The children looked scared, the adults mostly curious. They talked to one another in Gylin’s strange guttural language.

Presently, an older version of Gylin stepped out of the building, said building only differing from the others in size. Next to him was a human woman who looked at least fifty years of age. (I had no way of telling how old the men were, being a new species to me.)

“Welcome,” the elder male said, as Gylin stepped away from me.
 

I was now totally surrounded and standing alone. Possibly, I was about to be eaten. “Thank you for your welcome.” I offered my hand.
 

The elder stared at the open palm, confused. The woman beside him whispered something in his ear. He nodded slowly, then stepped forward and extended his own hand. We shook.

The woman spoke to me in the Minoan tongue. “You’ll have to excuse them. They don’t have handshakes. And none have ever quite mastered the language you and I speak.”

We ended our handshake, and I focused my attention to the woman who’d spoken to me, the only person in the camp who seemed capable of conversation. “If you don’t mind my asking, what manner of beings are these?”

“They are the satyros,” she explained. “But the much more interesting question is, what manner of being are you?”

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It turned out the satyros had been watching me for over thirty years and were aware that I did not age. So while I looked like a man and acted like a man—albeit one with better survival skills than most of those who fled Minos after the great eruption—clearly I was not. The consensus was that I was a god of men. It was also not particularly satisfying as I didn’t act very godlike, but it was the best anybody could come up with.

One thing they were certain of was that I was reasonably harmless, and so I became a living training exercise for their young. Whenever a male child was of age, they’d send out a scout team to find me and then the youngster was told to get as close to me as he could without being detected. Poor Liakhil was the first to fail.

The women were indeed human; for some reason there were no actual female satyrs. The mating of a human female and a satyr male could either produce a human female or (much more commonly) a satyr male. At the time, this made no more sense to me than anything else. Now I have biology textbooks that tell me this is impossible, which is why I don’t read biology textbooks.

The female elder of the village was named Mara, wife of Poleyt. Along with most of the women there, she’d come from Minoan stock. Her family had survived the blast and made it to the mainland, and had managed to eke out an adequate existence in the wild for a few years before tragedy struck. When I asked her over dinner one evening what that tragedy was, she asked, “In your time on Minos, did you ever hear of the Toah-Har?”

I had. When parents needed to quiet a child, they would threaten him or her with a visit from the Toah-Har. The approximate modern equivalent would be the bogeyman. “The creature that would come in the night,” I offered, “and eat bad children.”

“Essentially, yes.”

“You’re saying your family was slain by the Toah-Har?”

She smiled. “No, wanderer. I am saying I don’t know what else to call it; the only thing I can compare it to is the nightmare creature of a child. We numbered fifty people or more before that night, and scarcely eight remained by sunrise the following day. And we would have all been lost to the elements if the satyros hadn’t come for us.”

In this time, I could think of a half-dozen large creatures that possessed the malevolence and facility to kill forty-odd people, but so far as I was aware none of those creatures lived in these woods.

“Do the satyrs know what it was?” I asked.

Mara glanced at her husband, who either looked her off, or had indigestion. I was not good at reading their expressions at this time.
 

“The Toah-Har of Minos is what they call it as well,” she said, with just enough peculiarity to give me the impression she wasn’t telling me the truth.

“Poleyt, I’ve lived in the forest for many moons and never have I seen a thing that could do this.” My tact was a bit rusty, but I knew enough not to openly state that I was thinking the most likely suspect was a band of satyrs. Knowing their need for women to maintain their race, it would make sense for them to attack the adults in the night and then “save” the rest and blame the deaths on some indefinable primitive force. If I were a tribal leader facing the gender inequity, I might do the same thing. In fact, I did just that more than once.

Poleyt stared me down, something satyrs are naturally good at. “I know you have not, because you are still alive.”

Most of the conversations I had with Mara and the rest of the village’s inhabitants were decidedly more cheerful, and I enjoyed my time with the satyrs. I stayed for about a month, learned to master the basics of their tongue, and picked up a few hunting tips. For my part, I shared some of the more interesting stories of my life up to that point—they were particularly amused by the story of the Hammer of Gilgamesh—and convinced them pretty soundly that I really was just a guy who didn’t happen to get any older.

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The satyros population in the woods of Greece was a good deal greater than just that one small village, although I doubt they were ever as populous as man later became in those same lands. Learning their tongue served me very well in the subsequent years, because although there were many different satyr tribes—most considerably less efficient and peaceful as Poleyt’s—they all spoke the same language. Knowing that language marked me as a friend to an otherwise violent race of beings.

In addition to their marvelous leaping ability, satyrs hunt and kill with the effectiveness of a pack of wolves, only with opposable thumbs. It’s a bit trite to claim they are half-animal and therefore more prone to violence, but in some ways that was true. Pity the army of men that sought to do away with the satyrs of the wood. I witnessed that once; a Greek general with a number of bad habits, one being a powerful hatred of the satyros, who decided to send half a regiment into the northern woods. His soldiers were armed with swords and the satyrs with wood staffs and their fists. Despite that, no man walked out of the woods alive. (Coincidentally, the general’s name was Kuster.)

When the Greeks settled down into the more civilized pre-Socratic culture, I was instrumental in introducing the wayward satyrs to the men of Athens less likely to have genocide on their minds. By then, whatever societal structure that had once existed in the community of the satyros had broken down considerably, and they were forced to accept that mankind was a necessary evil, especially if they wanted to get their hands on womankind.

And the fact they needed human women would always be a problem. The lesson I took from Mara’s tale of the Minoan Toah-Har was that satyrs in need of women are not to be taken lightly. So I’d go out of my way to bring a few satyrs along to every bacchanal I could. I would also bring women to the woods with me. This might strike you as hard to imagine, but consider that if you were a woman in Athens in those days, your prospects were really not very good at all. Just in terms of finding someone willing to have sex with you was a huge undertaking. After a while, a guy covered with hair from the navel on down started to look pretty good.

When the concept of the bacchanal became subsumed by the somewhat more religious concept of the Mystery Cult, the satyrs continued to garner invites, often at my personal insistence. One of the great things about the cults was that they were open to everybody, human or not. We even had a couple of vampires. Soon the cults were more important to the satyros than they were to the humans—perpetuation of the species and all that; a few were even run by satyrs.

So in a way, the only reason there are still some satyrs around today (assuming there are) is because I liked them and wanted to keep them around.

If anybody knew whether the old cult—the real one, the one with access to the sacred items and to the correct ceremonial procedures—was still around, it would be the satyrs, because it was the one group with an unbroken lineage to the ancient times.

The hard part would be finding them.

SILENUS:

OF ALL THE GODS THAT WALK,

WHY IS IT DEMETER YOU DO SO ACHE TO GREET?

DIONYSOS:

I HAVE MET THE OTHER GODS AND HAVE SEEN THEIR FICKLE IMPIETY.

THAT THEY WOULD CARE MORE FOR THE POLIS OF MORTAL MAN

THAN THE WONDER OF ALL THAT IS

BETRAYS THEM AS NO BETTER AND PERHAPS FAR WORSE.

DEMETER CARES FOR THE SOIL AND THE FRUIT AND THE WOOD.

IF THERE IS ANY GOD WORTHY OF YOUR AFFECTION IT IS SHE.

SILENUS:

MORE SO EVEN THAN THE AFFECTION I SHOW FOR YOU?

DIONYSOS:

MORE THAN THAT, YES; TRULY, I AM NO GOD FOR YOU.

From The Tragedy of Silenus. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne

A comparatively brief flight took me from Amsterdam to Athens. I didn’t have to wait for luggage; I didn’t have any. What I did have was all of my cash once again taped to my body so that I didn’t have to claim it on my way out of the U.S. By the end of the twenty-hour trip, I was possibly the least comfortable person on the planet, what with the duct tape and all.

   
So the first thing I did was buy a large satchel at one of the airport stores—conveniently, they took U.S. dollars. Then I stepped into the nearest bathroom and tore off the tape that was vying to become a permanent part of my body, trying not to scream while doing so. This required some self-control.

I exchanged some of the bills for Euros at a money counter, and then stepped out into the Athens night.

Well, not precisely. The airport was outside of Athens. Looking around, I couldn’t even tell whether I was north of the city or south. My disorientation would only increase with time.

The cab ride to the city proper took about forty-five minutes, during which time I entertained myself by polishing my Greek in a conversation with George the taxi driver. George was kind enough to recommend a decent hotel that was cheap but had air conditioning, which is a very good thing to have in Greece in the summer time. Trust me, a day in the Athens heat and you’re thinking those chitons and sandals were a pretty damn good idea.

The city itself was nothing like I remembered. This should come as absolutely no surprise to anybody, given I hadn’t been there in almost two thousand years, but still. Moments like this remind me why I’m so fond of the United States; it’s the only place I can go without becoming irredeemably confused. I’m sure if both of us are still around in another four thousand years, I’ll feel the same about the States as I do about Europe.

What was immediately evident upon my re-entrance to Athens was that it had managed to catch up with the twenty-first century, even if I had not. The streets were paved, the buildings were tall, and the cars were everywhere. There wasn’t a single recognizable structure in sight. George, ever helpful, was kind enough to shout out the occasional historical landmark, but whenever I turned to see, I found something that didn’t look a thing like what he’d named. And it went on that way until we spotted the Parthenon in the distance. That made me feel better until the moonlight broke from the clouds and I saw how crumbled it was. I had outlasted stone, and if that’s not a humbling discovery I don’t know what is.

George dropped me off at the Hotel Attalos. After some brief dickering with the desk, I managed to secure a room that looked directly out at the Acropolis. However crumbled, it still helped me feel more at home.

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