Hellenic Immortal (3 page)

I collapsed onto the bed in the dark.

This had not turned out to be anything like the getting-my-mind-off-things vacation I was expecting.

After Clara left, I spent a couple of days consoling my resident pixie, Iza—she was possibly more upset about it than I was—and talking to an ex-pat Russian named Tchekhy on the phone.

Tchekhy is not the best person in the world to go to for advice, unless you need advice on how to break the law without getting caught. He does my passports for me. But as one of the few living people aware of my unique nature, he was the only sentient being I could reach easily that also spoke in polysyllables. (Pixies are notoriously simple-minded.)

“You need to get off that island,” he suggested wearily after what was the third or fourth day of hashing out my relationship problems.

“That may be a good idea,” I agreed. “Where do you suggest I go?”

“I would recommend a place as opposite to where you are as possible.”

“Europe?” I guessed. Conveniently, the same place Clara went.

“No,” he said quickly, clearly thinking along similar lines. “How about Las Vegas?”

In my mind, Vegas was a bright, shiny place with excitement and glamour and enough to do to keep me occupied for a good decade or two. And plenty of bars.

It had been about forty years since the last time I was in a casino (Vegas then too, in the sixties, when it was much sleazier) which was just long enough for me to forget the dirty secret—there may be no more depressing place on the planet than the floor of a casino. Although there was an outside chance I had simply forgotten how to have fun.

On top of that, there was Ariadne’s warning, which had only made me feel worse.

I needed to get the hell out of Vegas, but one of the cardinal rules when it came to disappearing was that you had better know whom it is you are disappearing from first. And I had no clue how to resolve that.

As I lay on the bed and my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized there was something resting on the bureau that hadn’t been there the last time I was in the room. I turned on the light.

Resting atop a silver room service tray was a bottle of red wine, a bottle of mineral water, and a small ceramic bowl. Leaning against the bowl was an envelope.

I took a look at the wine bottle first. According to the label, it was a dry red from Thessalia. Greek vintage.

It was about as subtle as the drachma.

The envelope contained a small place card, which I opened. A folded piece of paper dropped out. I picked it up and unfolded it, and nearly fell over at what I saw.

Something you need to understand about the Greeks—they liked their wine, and by that I mean they were willing to risk blindness, madness, or death in order to continue drinking it. If you think I drink a lot, that’s only by modern standards. In Athens, I was modest.

The problem was the drink itself. It took many centuries for mankind to figure out how to make wine that wouldn’t kill them. But since I was the only one who could wait that long, what the Greeks did was cut their version of wine with water. And then they threw parties that lasted for two to five days in order to drink that wine. (The word
moderation
wasn’t invented until Christianity was.) It was the responsibility of the host to decide how much water to add to the wine, which was a big deal because it had to be weak enough so everyone could partake all night without dying, but strong enough so everyone got good and drunk.

So that’s what the water and the wine—and the bowl—were for. The piece of paper was something else.

Athenian drinking sometimes involved religious ceremonies, and in that case the wine and water had to be combined in a very specific way with some very specific chanting at very specific times. The note described one such ceremony, for the god Dionysos. The reason I almost fell over is that nobody had performed this ceremony in two and a half thousand years, and I was nearly positive I was the only one who could possibly still know about it.

In hindsight, I don’t think there’s any way to logically justify what I did next, but as I mixed the water and the wine in the bowl, held it up to my lips and began to drink, it made all the sense in the world.

SIL. IS IT NOT TRUE THAT A MAN WHO DRINKS STEADILY IS A MAN WHO ONLY THINKS HE IS HAPPY?

DION. IT IS SO. BUT IF A MAN THINKS HE IS HAPPY THERE NEED BE NO OTHER EXPERT. FOR WHOSE OPINION WOULD HE ACCEPT ABOVE HIS OWN?

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

It may be my fault that anyone even knows about wine. Not that I invented it—I’m not nearly that clever—but I did tell an awful lot of people about it. (As an aside, I am probably not the best source when it comes to who invented what. For a long time, I thought I invented the wheel.) Wine was a good idea, and I like to share good ideas when I find them, because it means the product of those ideas are easier to find the next time I pass through town. Like cooked meat.

   
The Minoans
may
have invented wine, as I was on the island of Minos when I had my first taste. It wasn’t particularly good by later standards. Grapes grew on Minos just fine and the concept of fermentation was fairly well understood, but Minoans were by nature an impatient bunch, and nobody had realized that the longer you aged wine, the better it tended to taste. And even with that gradual realization came the difficulty of putting it into a properly sealed container. So it tasted like sour grape juice. Still, it packed a decent kick and showed real promise.

This was not, incidentally, my first introduction to alcohol. Beer showed up earlier. The Sumerians managed to pull that off which, if you have any idea what the Sumerians were like, you’d find it as amazing as I do. And their beer was awful, but beer it was. Later, the Egyptians picked up on it and did a fine job of perfecting the process. But Minos was a long way from Egypt, and I never quite got the hang of making beer, so I was grateful that somebody had come up with a new drink.

The man who handed me the wine—and who showed me how to make my own—was a slave named Argun. He belonged to the family of a person who today might be called a navy admiral, and whose name I’ve actually forgotten. Argun was a good guy. I never learned how he ended up a slave, but it probably came about as a result of one military conquest or another. (Back then the terms
slave
and
prisoner of war
were almost always interchangeable.) Had I been a landowner, I probably would have tried to make some wine myself right away, but I was a fisherman and the only thing I owned was my boat.

I was on Minos because it was one of the few places in the civilized world that supported a merchant class. (Another such place was—again—Egypt, but I’d been run out of there. Long story.) A culture with a merchant class was important because merchants got to come and go without any concern as to their larger status in society, since that was something determined based on familial connections. I had no connections that anybody would be prepared to recognize, so I was always on the lookout for cultures that were advanced enough to support trade and commerce.

Unfortunately, I never amounted to much more than a fisherman on Minos. Not because of any personal shortcomings, but because of the sudden death of the Minoan culture. This happened thanks to a very large volcanic eruption on the nearby island of Thera, and it ruined a lot of plans for a lot of people.

*
 
*
 
*

It’s a little hard to grasp this from a modern perspective, but you have to understand that the ancient world was nearly deserted. By that I mean you could walk for weeks without coming across another member of your own species. On that same walk, you could also come across hundreds of other species of creatures, some of which were quite large, a few rather fearsome, and one or two that tasted very good when cooked over an open fire. Likewise, except for the desert regions, the world was covered with plants such as trees, moss, and grasses as far as the eye could see, which wasn’t very far as the trees were generally in the way.

So once I fled Minos in my little boat and landed on the shore of the southern Greek peninsula—it would be called Sparta a little while later—I couldn’t just walk to the nearest village, or hook up with a passing tribe of hunter/gatherers. Statistically speaking, the odds of running into anybody who habitually walked upright were very small.

At that time in my life, community involvement of any sort was exceedingly rare, so I had no problem being on my own. If I came across a settled tribe while wandering, I might ingratiate myself, but not at the expense of hanging out with a culture I found unpleasant. I liked the Minoans, for example, and I enjoyed my time in Egypt. But the Sumerians, aside from their fantastic annual fertility rites, were a people I actively avoided—just like a dozen smaller tribes I have no name for, and who had nothing to offer me but trouble and very bad body odor.

My point is, on reaching safety and finding no welcoming party for me, I simply dragged my boat onto the beach, grabbed my few belongings, walked into the tree-line, and made do from there.

*
 
*
 
*

I think I must have spent over a century in the Greek woods (which, I probably don’t need to point out, weren’t called Greek anything at the time) living off the land and killing what I needed in order to keep going. Hunter, regardless of what you may have heard otherwise, is the oldest profession on earth, and it’s something I still excel at, although my skills are rusty and rarely of use to me anymore.

My wanderings eventually took me as far as the foot of Mount Parnassus—or as the satyrs called it, Big Damn Hill—and it was only then that I encountered another human. He had walked into one of the traps I’d set for game—a decidedly less arduous affair than open plains hunting, let me just say—and ended up hanging by his ankle from a tree, looking altogether unhappy about the state in which he’d found himself. That he’d been stuck that way for at least a half a day before I discovered him probably had something to do with his general discontent.

I came upon him in the early evening. From his upside-down perspective, I must have looked like a large upright monkey, or more likely a satyr, who also roamed certain parts of the wood. I’d done little to groom myself over the previous century, and I only cut my hair when it got long enough to impede my ability to run.

My saying hello didn’t help, because the last language I’d spoken was Minoan, a precursor to the Mycenean tongue. He didn’t speak either language, as his response clearly indicated.

“Do you want me to get you down?” I asked, trying to sound helpful. His reply was gibberish to my ears, but based on the delivery included a generous dollop of curse words. “Okay. Calm down. And cover your head.” I put my own hands over my head to give him an idea of what I meant, and then I untied the vine from the tree base.

He did not cover his head, so his landing wasn’t terribly graceful. However, he also wasn’t too far from the ground in the first place, and he did land on soil rather than rock. (If he’d walked another thirty paces he would have been hanging from a different trap over a very large boulder). So his consternation was a bit over the edge, if you ask me. He hopped to his feet and— gesticulating wildly—screamed at me in words I had no hope of grasping, although from the tone it was obvious he wasn’t inviting me home for supper.

My new friend was shorter and broader than me. He wore a loose-fitting cloth that covered his chest and nether region (except for when he was hanging upside-down) cinched around his waist with a rope belt. On his feet were sandals, and that, more than anything else, suggested he hailed from someplace moderately civilized. Contrastingly, I was almost naked and covered with nettles, and I’d given up on my sandals almost as soon as I had lost sight of the shoreline. What clothes I did have were crafted from the pelt of a wolf, and I’d worn them for so long they probably looked like they were a part of my own body.

I stood still and let him yell at me. As the first human I’d seen in a very long while, I was anxious to find out where he’d come from and what he was doing in the woods below Parnassus.

When he paused to take a breath, I said to him, “Hello. What is your name?”

He tilted his head, almost surprised that I had the gift of speech. Possibly he thought the words I’d said earlier were just random noises, and only now was he realizing I knew an actual language. Then he made a noise that sounded something like
boogada-boogada!
and took two forceful steps toward me. He was attempting to scare me off. Instead of scampering away, I took two steps towards him, and that just about did it. He bolted.

“Wait!” I shouted. But of course that might as well have been
Die!
for all he knew, and he kept on running.

Alone again, I realized how very much I missed being able to sit down opposite another human and compare experiences. Long periods of isolation from the tribe of Man always got me feeling this way eventually, to the extent that even the most mundane of long-ago conversations began to take on a certain romantic quality in hindsight. And when you’re looking back longingly at a centuries-old discussion on the subject of who farted, it’s time to go find someone to talk to.