Hellenic Immortal (26 page)

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

Hippos didn’t respond, and the younger ones with him were either not at liberty to speak, or were mute or something. I decided I was tired of expecting a bullet in the back of the head.

Body language in satyrs, as I’ve pointed out, is a little harder to read than it is in people, but men carrying guns read the same in every species. Specifically, I could tell the one behind me and on my left had never actually fired a gun before and was nervous about having one in his hands. This would be the same one who couldn’t decide how to deal with both the gun and the seatbelt in the car. I had no chance at all of overpowering him and getting it, but I didn’t have to; I just needed him to keep thinking about that gun rather than me.

So when we reached a slight bend in the path, rather than stride forward, I planted one foot and drove my weight backward, then swung my elbow down and made contact with his gun hand. The impact wasn’t nearly sufficient to knock the gun to the ground, but it didn’t need to be, because for that half second all he was thinking about was not dropping it.

And that was all I needed to disappear.

*
 
*
 
*

If you had asked me a week earlier if it made sense to hide from a party of satyrs in a wooded area, I would have suggested you had a better chance of hiding from a shark in a shark tank. But if the modern satyr lives in a city and drives a car, he probably wouldn’t be able to hunt for his food or move silently through the forest floor, or vanish into the underbrush like his ancestors.

Whereas I could still do all of those things.

*
 
*
 
*

I left a loud, clean trail for my first thirty seconds in the woods, something anybody with functioning eyes and ears would be able to follow easily. This may seem counterintuitive, but assuming they were smart enough to follow the path, I knew where they were up until they reached the point where the trail stopped.

Had these satyrs known what the hell they were doing, I would have been caught before those thirty seconds were up. All it would have taken was for one or two of them to take to the trees and follow me from the top of the canopy. But the modern versions thought like humans and humans stay on the ground, hold their guns out in front of them, and run toward the sounds. If I weren’t counting on them to be inept, I would have cried.

Predictably they followed the path, making enough noise to be mistaken for a stampede. Two of them walked right past me, close enough that were I so inclined, I could have grabbed one by the arm. I was not so inclined; they may have gone soft, but I still didn’t like my odds in hand-to-hand combat.

“I found his shoes,” one declared, which meant he had reached the end of my trail. I had to kick off the shoes because it’s extremely difficult to move about silently with them on; I needed the feel of the ground under my toes.

My decision to discard footwear was met with great confusion. “Why would he do that?” I heard, followed by, “I have no idea.”

I stifled a laugh. Laughter is generally frowned upon when trying to hide.

“Pretender!” a loud, deep voice boomed. It was Hippos, and it sounded like he was still on the footpath. That left one satyr unaccounted for. “You are several kilometers from shelter and the night is cold.”

“And he has no shoes!” shouted one of the young ones helpfully.

I made my way closer to the path. One of the tricks to hiding in the woods is to actually keep moving, especially if someone’s actively looking for you. The satyrs of yore could stay motionless for hours and be completely unseen by man or animal, but neither man nor animal was expecting them so it was permissible. In my situation, staying put only meant giving my pursuers an opportunity to find me by process of elimination.

“We have no plans to harm you,” Hippos declared. “And you’re going to freeze to death out here.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?” I asked him.

He and the two in the woods all darted towards my voice, which was fine because I wasn’t standing where the voice came from. (There are a few different ways to do this and it’s complicated, but you know how a sand dune will completely mask the sound of the ocean until you reach the top of it? It’s like that. Kind of.)

I continued, turning in another direction and offering a new place for them to hone in on. “I survived for over two centuries alone in these woods, satyr. I can last a few nights. Can you?”

It would have seemed as if my voice was coming from four or five different directions. I could see Hippos at the edge of the path, looking up in case I was hiding in the trees. I was actually about ten meters from him, at eye level.

“I can have twenty more here in under an hour, “ he countered. “You’ll eventually run out of places to hide.”

Well that was true enough, especially if one or two of them knew what they were doing. I was sort of hoping someone came to their senses and realized I was who I said I was, so I didn’t have to spend the next two weeks playing commando. But Hippos was not going to be the one to make that leap.

I could hear someone coming down the path. At first I thought Hippos’s reinforcements had already begun to arrive until I remembered I had been missing a satyr in my head count. He must have been sent ahead. And he’d brought someone back with him—someone shorter, and probably human. I couldn’t see who, but I had a guess.

A quiet conversation on the pathway ensued, and I could tell by the rising tenor on Hippos’s end of it that he wasn’t happy. I waited, and listened to the two in the forest as they made enough noise to warn everything with ears in a two-mile radius that they were there. I seriously considered finding a sharpened stick and killing them one at a time just to prove a point.

The conversation ended. I could see long, black hair, and when I moved slightly closer to the path, the rest of her came into view. She was wearing a loose raincoat over a white chiton, and sandals, which was a disconcerting blend of styles.

My favorite memories of chitons on women—and I have quite a few—involved warm weather, a great amount of wine, and a lot of debauching. Ariadne looked like she had stepped right out of one of those memories.

Except for the coat. London Fog, I think. But, it was cool out.

“Sojourner,” she called, in English. It sounded strange, as I’d been speaking Greek for the better part of a month. “Adam. You know who I am.”

“Hello, Ariadne,” I greeted. She lifted her chin at the sound of my voice and smiled.

“That is a clever trick.” Ariadne turned to Hippos. “Your ancestors taught him this, Hippos. These are ways even you have forgotten.”

Hippos muttered something I couldn’t entirely make out, but which included a word that sounded like
ninja
. He didn’t look as impressed as he probably should have been.

“Are you their hierophant?” I asked.

Ariadne turned to face the woods again. “I am.”
 

I took two steps closer to the road. “You’re sure about that?”
 

She glared at Hippos. “You were in no danger,” she insisted. “It’s very complicated. Let’s say that false claimants to your name have proven unusually damaging of late.”

“The kiste is missing,” I elaborated.

“It’s not missing. We know exactly where it is.”

Well, that was a mite confusing. “Explain.”
 

Ariadne sighed. “I’d rather not air our political problems by shouting at a forest all evening, in any language. Why don’t you come out and we can sit down and have a proper conversation? Our retreat is just beyond the ridge.”

That did sound sort of nice, and much better than spending the night in the woods. “Tell me first why your adherents believe the kiste has been taken,” I asked.

“Because it has.”

“But not by the hierophant of the order.”

“As I said, it’s complicated.”

I stepped out of the tree line about three meters in front of her. “You have a schism,” I guessed.

She spun at the sound of my direct voice, saw me, and smiled. “Yes,” she confirmed. “Thank you for coming.”

She genuflected formally, a gesture more at home in the Christian faith, but nice anyway. “Don’t do that,” I said. “But I do have a favor to ask.”

“Of course.”

“I wonder if one of those satyrs lost in the woods out there could bring me my shoes.”

SIL. I SEE, DIONYSOS, YOU HAVE RETURNED FROM THE FESTIVAL.

DION. I HAVE.

SIL. AND WAS IT PLEASANT?

DION. IT WAS DISAPPOINTING. I HAVE LITTLE USE FOR CEREMONY.

SIL. BUT YOU APPRECIATE THEIR IMPORTANCE, DO YOU NOT?

DION. THIS IS NOT TO BE AN INTERROGATORY DISCUSSION. CEREMONIES ARE IMPORTANT BECAUSE IT MAKES MAN FEEL BETTER ABOUT ACCOMPLISHING SOMETHING ARBITRARY. THAT IS, IF HE HAS PERFORMED THE CEREMONY CORRECTLY, THEN HE MUST BELONG. THE CELEBRATION THAT FOLLOWS THE CEREMONY, WHEN ALL CONGRATULATE ONE ANOTHER FOR DOING THEIR ARBITRARY THING CORRECTLY, THIS IS WHAT INTERESTS ME. IT IS THE CELEBRATION THAT IS THE TRUE RELIGIOUS EVENT.

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

For something that was the heart of a religious order, the Eleusinian retreat was surprisingly humble. Were I to stumble upon it independent of my escorts, I’d probably assume it was a summer camp for children, and maybe that was the idea.

   
“It isn’t much,” Ariadne said. She was walking next to me. We were flanked by the four satyrs, but now I wasn’t quite as concerned about the whole bullet in the back of the head thing. “But it beds as many as can attend.”

“I think I was expecting something a little more ostentatious,” I admitted. “Not the Vatican or anything, but . . .”

“Yes, but we’re trying
not
to draw attention. Don’t worry; there’s more to it.”

The cabins, I soon discovered, were built around a natural depression in the hill we were climbing, which hid the main building from view. And that building was a miniature Telesterion.

From the outside, it might have looked like a temple of some kind, and so it was. But not like any kind of temple someone from the modern world would understand. For one thing, it had no walls. The main structural features were the flat roof and the two-dozen ionic columns holding that roof up. Stairs led up to the floor on three sides, which had the effect of turning the entire interior (if one could call an area with no walls an interior) into an altar. The original structure was a third larger and completely freestanding—this version was built into a hill—but it was a good enough replica to take my breath away for a few seconds.

This was the feeling I wanted when I came back to Greece—the sense of going home to something that had never gotten old and passed away.

Ariadne was staring at me, as I’d apparently stopped walking. “Better?”
 

“Better,” I answered.

“We were going on some very old descriptions. I always wondered how accurate it was.”

“Well done. Except for the curtain.” A white stage curtain was hung just inside the outer ring of columns, hiding the interior.

“Ah, well . . . it’s cooler up here on the mountainside than in Eleusis. It also affords us some privacy, and keeps in the heat from the fire. We open it on the final night, no matter the weather, though.”

“Fire?”

“Dinner, even,” she smiled. “Hopefully it isn’t cold. I was expecting your arrival to be less complicated.”

*
 
*
 
*

Ariadne and I were the only ones to enter the Telesterion. Hippos and his men took positions outside, either to guard anyone else from entering, or to prevent us from leaving. I would have been more concerned with the latter, were I not busy appreciating the interior.

They had done a very nice job of approximating the look, and more importantly the feel of the place. Someone expecting a traditional religious experience would have anticipated chairs or pews, but there were none. Likewise, there was no additional altar. At the center of the vast room was a large fire pit that provided most of the illumination—the rest came from a ring of torches along the outside. The firelight flickered across the columns, which cast a fascinating variety of shadows.

The earthen wall at the far end was wet and mossy, and had a small concavity built into it. It was where the kiste would have rested. I felt its absence acutely, even though I’d never experienced the ceremony here.

Amidst all of this was a discordant domestic setting. Next to the fire was a table and two chairs, and not far beyond that an open bedroll.

“Are you still impressed?” Ariadne walked past me to the table. She picked up a goblet of wine and poured out two glasses.

“I am,” I admitted. Noting the bedroll, I asked, “Have you been sleeping here?”

“Lately, yes.” Gesturing to one of the chairs, she added, “Please.”

She slipped out of her jacket, dropping it carelessly on the floor. As I had seen when I first glimpsed her from the woods, she was wearing a chiton and plain wood sandals underneath; traditional clothing from a long-gone era. Except the chiton was form fitting, which was a nice modern touch as was the gold filigree laced into the collar that met behind her neck in a clasp. I watched her as she sat down behind her glass of wine. The bottom of the chiton rose to well above mid-thigh, and I remembered exactly how she first caught my attention.