Hellenic Immortal (25 page)

DION. SILENUS, I HEAR WORD THAT I AM NOW THE GOD OF MADNESS.

SIL. IT IS SO.

DION. WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS?

SIL. DO YOU NOT TRAVEL WITH MANY MAD-WOMEN?

DION. I HAVE DONE SO, YES.

SIL. AND DID YOU NOT SAY TO ME THAT YOU YOURSELF HAVE BEEN MAD ON OCCASIONS PAST?

DION. I DID.

SIL. AND IS NOT THE FINAL NIGHT OF THE NORTHERN FESTIVAL DEVOTED TO YOUR DRINK AND BLESSED IN PERSON WITH YOUR MAD TOUCH?

DION. I SEE YOUR POINT. BUT I HAVE ALSO BEDDED MANY WOMEN. COULD YOU NOT HAVE MADE ME THE GOD OF THAT INSTEAD?

From the dialogues of Silenus the Younger. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne

“When the Romans cut off our access to the Ploutonion and destroyed the Telesterion, the rituals continued, but were adjusted to fit the new reality of the times,” Kargus said over a large draft of beer. We were sitting in the back of a profoundly disreputable tavern in the center of Athens, well after our confrontation in his back yard. We were waiting to meet his hierophant, who had not yet deigned to arrive.

   
“That was when? The third century?” I asked. “A.D., I mean.”

“Thereabouts,” he shrugged.

Incidentally, it’s still strange for me to think in terms of B.C. and A.D. (Or, B.C.E. and C.E.) Most modern people look at time as a folded piece of paper, with the numbers running down one side to the crease and up the other side, the crease being the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. I don’t see the fold, just one long strip of paper. “But the kiste, the sacred objects . . . they never left the Telesterion. Was there warning?”

“In a manner of speaking; we had the prophecies,” he said.

Handing him my satyr name—Philopaigmos—had lightened his attitude considerably. Given there was apparently more than one of me, he seemed to be treating this entire matter as something of a joke. It was sort of annoying. I didn’t care for him reciting everything in the manner of someone repeating an oft-told lesson. It was clear from his mannerisms that he was sure I knew all of this already and this was some sort of elaborate theater on my part to pretend otherwise. Since it was the only way for me to get information, I let it slide. Eventually, I was going to have to figure out how to prove to him I actually was who I said I was without first punching him in the nose. Never punch a satyr in the nose.

“Which prophecies were these?” I asked.

He looked aggravated. Or excited. It wasn’t one of their better emotions. “Greg,” he said, not willing to call me by my older name, “I don’t know where you’ve gotten your information, but even the real sojourner would know of the prophecies. If . . .”

He trailed off, deciding not to finish the sentence. The beer may have been getting to him. “If he were real,” I finished for him.
 

“My faith does not require that I accept his eventual return,” he said simply.

“Is that what the prophet said? That I would return?”

A prophet is kind of like an oracle, except without the drugs. This is not necessarily a good thing. An oracle needs assistance to get into a special state of mind, and that assistance is what makes it possible for most oracles to lead normal lives outside of work. A prophet spends almost all of his or her time in that special state of mind. In other words, the prototypical prophet is utterly insane. This does not make them very good company. Most prophets I’ve known led unhappy and very short lives that ended violently. That the Eleusinians had gotten a hold of a good one was lucky.

“Very well,” he sighed. “In the final days before the destruction of the Telesterion, two manuscripts from the prophet were prepared. One elucidated all of the greater and lesser Mysteries for the first time so they would not be lost to history. This was in response to her first great prophecy in which she foresaw that the Mysteries were doomed. The second manuscript was every word she uttered for the next five years.”

“That’s a lot of papyrus.” I finally understood where the wine recipe Ariadne had left in my hotel room had been copied from.

“And at least seven scribes, based on the hand.”

“You’ve seen them?”

“I have. They are largely unimportant. Were it not for the one correct prediction that saved the cult itself, the scrolls would have been abandoned long ago. It was in those scrolls that the return of Philopaigmos was prophesized.”

“Just . . . a return?”

“No. There was some matter of saving us all. It was interpreted for much of history to mean restoring the Telesterion, but who knows.”

I nodded and drank up some of my own beer, a strong, dark brew that I liked quite a lot, which was why it was the third one I’d had. “I think I was in Carthage around then.”
 

Kargus made a grunting noise I’d come to associate with disbelief.
 

“I was,” I insisted. “By then Greece was a minor satellite of the Roman Empire, and the Romans were . . . well, I didn’t care for them. I’m surprised the cults even lasted to the third century.”

Kargus scoffed. “You are terrible at this.”

“I’m not pretending. Look, to be honest, after I left Athens I figured everyone eventually just gave up and went home. Not that the rituals weren’t fun. Do you know what’s in the kiste?”

“Excuse me?”

“With your lineage, you must be an initiate. Do you?”

Kargus spoke cautiously, and with a considerable increase in gravity. “I know what we place within the kiste, and why, and what is done when it is removed.”

“Ah, but that isn’t what I asked, is it?”

At the start of Boedromion—which is the name of a month, not a ceremony—the kiste is supposed to be filled with a variety of foodstuff that each hold ceremonial significance. The food doesn’t get withdrawn until the rituals of Eleusis, fourteen days later. But there was something that never left the box, and Kargus didn’t know what that was. If he did, it would have made proving my identity to him that much easier.

He lifted an eyebrow ever so slightly. “You are an odd one, Greg.”

“Perhaps I am. Now tell me; how many Philopaigmoses have there been?”

He smiled. It’s one of the few expressions they have that looks human, because they had taught themselves to do that. It’s hard to pick up human women if you don’t know how to smile on a detectable level. “Dozens. None lasted much longer than it took for those paying attention to recognize the claimant was aging. They ranged from the amusingly misguided to the incredibly dangerous.”

“But why?” I asked. “Or rather how? I didn’t even realize the Mysteries had survived until recently, so your secret has been . . . well kept.” Not to say I had been looking. “If it was the satyros that kept the Mysteries alive, how would a human male know enough to make such a declaration?”

“That was the mistake many of our kind made in the past. Who would claim to be who was not? How would they know? But politics are what they are. In the early days, a claimant was generally coached by one of us.”

“A puppet.” I thought of Pisistratus’s temporary Athena.

“Exactly. But now we have many humans in the cult, so there is really no telling. And these things have consequences.”

Kargus looked away, and I wondered exactly how much he wasn’t telling me. But the pieces were all there, and when I put them together, I got the picture. A man who claimed to be Philopaigmos the sojourner was somehow responsible for the kiste’s absence.

“How will the ceremony proceed this season without the kiste?” I asked, after a time.

“We are in the month of Boedromion right now,” he admitted. “There will be no ceremony for those of us still in Athens.”

“They are taking place elsewhere?”

Kargus grumbled something unintelligible into his beer before looking up again. “There are some that feel the Mysteries should serve a more public purpose. And another kind of god.”

That was a statement that deserved much more clarification, but I could tell I wouldn’t be getting one, so I tried to find my way around it. “I never saw the gods as being the most important thing about the Mysteries. It’s a celebration of harvest, and life. It’s not all that versatile.”

“Versatile?”

“It used to be a harvest celebration, and now it’s being honored by people far from farmlands.”

“And nature,” he suggested. “And the gods.”

“The gods were incidental,” I insisted.

Kargus laughed. “My friend, I take back what I said earlier. You make a fine Philopaigmos. I am sure you will do well.”

This was sarcasm, which I could live with. It was the rest of it that gave me pause. “Do well? In what sense?”

“There is a process for when one such as yourself turns up making declarations. It’s nothing to worry about.”

I looked around the room—I’d stupidly sat with my back to the door—and realized we were in the midst of at least three satyrs aside from Kargus, all younger and less likely to be nursing a bad back.

“They will take you to the new Telesterion for the test,” Kargus added. “Nothing the true Philopaigmos would have issue with.”

Another satyr walked into the tavern. He was older than the rest, but looked supremely fit. I didn’t like my chances with any of them. The elder locked eyes on the one nearest to me and nodded. All three of the satyrs stood.

“Tell me, Kargus. What happens to the ones who fail the test?”

“I don’t know, actually,” he said, standing as well. “I imagine they just send them on their way.”

A hand fell hard on my shoulder, and I stood up to avoid the discomfort of being yanked to my feet. He had a gun tucked into his belt, and he made sure I saw it.

“Send them on their way, you say?”
 

Kargus smiled. “What else would they do?”

*
 
*
 
*

If you ever wondered what the vehicle of choice is for a party of satyrs, it’s a Ford Explorer. And the back seat isn’t nearly as roomy as you might think it is when you’re the only human in the car and you’re crammed between two of them.

It took us a while to clear the city, which was persistently devoured by traffic no matter what the hour was. We were heading north.

The lead satyr’s name was Hippos, and that was the extent of what I knew. I had tried striking up a number of conversations, but nobody was interested in speaking, or even making eye contact. It was kind of unnerving, and mildly reminiscent of those scenes in mob movies where some unfortunate is driven off to the woods to be shot.

That seemed to be the general idea here. Once we got on the highway, I realized we were heading roughly in the direction of Mount Parnitha. From what I recalled from the various hotel maps I’d had the chance to review, it was one of the few places left in the region that looked vaguely like it did when I last lived here. Woods, in other words.

The young one to my left kept fiddling with the gun in his waistband. It seemed the seatbelt pressing up against it was causing him discomfort.

“I hope for your sake the safety is on,” I said, watching him adjust himself.
 

He glared at me and went back to staring out the window.
 

“I’m just saying that’s not the best place to carry a gun. You should slip it into a pocket or something.”

“Be quiet,” Hippos hissed from the passenger seat.

“You know your ancestors would be outraged to see your kind with guns,” I said to him.

He looked at me with disgust. “Our ancestors were here before there were guns. And what would you know of it, pretender?”

Well. At least he’d gotten around to calling me a pretender. Not that his feelings toward me weren’t already sort of obvious. “I know they didn’t care at all for metal. I don’t suppose these are wooden guns.”

“They’re very real guns,” he countered. “And you should take care not to speak as if you know anything about us. You’ll only make yourself look foolish.”

I leaned forward, which was more or less the only emphatic motion I had at my disposal. “When the soldiers first came to the great woods with metal swords and armor, the satyros fought them back with sharpened wooden staffs and guile. After the battle, one of the satyr warriors picked up a discarded sword and brought it to the elder of his clan. The elder wondered what type of wood the sword was as he took it in his hands. He noted it was cold to the touch, like water, but hard like rock and sharp like a thorn, and heavier than the hard wood of his walking stick. ‘This is a tool of the Duh-ryadyh,’ the elder had said fearfully. And then he ordered the young warrior to bring it to the edge of the woods and bury it. Only then would the tribe be protected from the wrath of their angry destroyer-god. And for centuries after, each time the satyros found metal in the woods they did exactly that.”

Hippos said nothing, but turned to glare at me.

“Don’t speak as if you know anything about me,” I urged him. “You’ll only make yourself look foolish.”

*
 
*
 
*

The rest of the drive—it seemed to be over an hour once we hit the highway but was probably less—went by mostly in silence. The main road diverged onto a smaller one, and a smaller one still, and soon we were on a dirt path with trees dangerously close to scraping the side of the vehicle. I couldn’t think of a much better place for a body dump, other than perhaps the ocean, which would have been a much longer drive. In my favor, I was nearly positive they weren’t going to shoot me in the car.

We attained a flattened clearing, a spot that could hold twenty or thirty cars, but at the time was empty. It was the cult’s new Eleusis. In the old days, the mystai would spend an entire day just walking there; today’s version hiked in air-conditioned SUV’s.

The satyros had gotten soft, and that was a possible advantage.

The driver—I’m nearly positive they called him Frank, which is not a very popular name for a satyr or a Greek—parked near the opening of a small footpath and shut off the car.

Hippos turned. “Out,” he commanded us.

A few minutes later, we were walking up the path. The moon was bright, if no longer full, but it didn’t help visibility all that much, as the forest was still impressively thick. Not as overgrown as it had been back in ancient times, but close.