Hellenic Immortal (34 page)

Also, we never indoctrinated children into the way of the Mysteries. Are you kidding? The Greeks didn’t even like children, but they would never give a child a hallucinogen on purpose.

And there were never this many mystai.

Ariadne explained that all of the people there had been accepted into the California version of the Mysteries already, and were no longer technically considered mystai, which meant that none of them should have been participating in this part of the ritual. But since Gordon had taken his oaths in the U.S. and then traveled to Greece to retake them, he felt that everybody else should experience the same thing, and bringing the kiste, the center of the Greek Mystery Cult to the U.S. was easier than bringing the U.S. members to Greece. Thus, a hundred new mystai.

We didn’t have a role to play for the bulk of the ceremony, so we got to sit in the snow on the forest floor next to the stage. Hippos had rejoined us, his hands also bound. It looked like his experience as a prisoner had been much worse than ours.

“Nice eye,” I muttered. The left side of his face was swollen, and the eye was nearly shut.

“Thank you,” he said. “I fear my people are not going to be very helpful regarding your cause.”

“I get that, yeah. Anything broken?”

“Bruised ribs, but I don’t believe any breaks.”

“I still have that icepack in my pocket, if you want it.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Gordon was standing atop the altar in front of the tent, which was still closed. Gesturing with his thyrsos and wearing his loose white robes (cold weather doesn’t seem to bother the insane as much as it does the sane for some reason) he led the chants. It was in Greek, but nobody seemed to be having any trouble repeating it. I wondered if they even knew what they were saying.

From our vantage point we could also see Peter. He was sitting underneath the stage and doing something with his hands. I couldn’t quite make it out.

“What’s he doing under there?” I asked Ariadne, who was slightly closer.

“I think he’s calling the dryad.”
 

“Yes, but how? I don’t hear anything.”

Gordon reached the benediction and signaled to Boehan, and then the satyrs were traveling down the rows with the kykeon. The momentary quiet just emphasized the point that if Peter was calling the dryad, it wasn’t with an audible sound.

Or perhaps it was a sound that wasn’t audible to humans.

“Do you hear it?” I asked Hippos.

He nodded. “It’s some manner of woodwind, but nothing I have ever heard before.”

I squinted at Peter who was rocking side to side in a vaguely rhythmic fashion. The torchlight from the stage was not helping my night vision at all, but I did finally catch a glimpse of the stick in his hand.

“It’s a recorder,” I said.

“A tape recorder?” Ariadne asked.

“No, no, like a flute. I guess a Pan flute would have been too ironic.”

The distribution of the kykeon was carried out quickly and efficiently, and soon each of the mystai had a bowl in front of them that was at least half-full of the awful stuff.

In the old days, the bowls were filled one-by-one and blessed individually. Here the entire community held their bowls over their heads and waited for the hierophant to utter the sacred words—a phrase that literally meant “swallow for your life”, but had an idiomatic meaning along the lines of “drink up!” It had no formal ceremonial purpose. It was like having the priest shout
Cheers!
before drinking the sacramental wine.

As I thought about how amusing this was, and how difficult it would be to explain to the people with me that had probably been celebrating the Mysteries this exact way their entire lives, someone caught my eye.

It was one of the mystai. The front row was only about twenty feet away from us and with everyone dressed with their hoods up, robes on, and their winter clothing underneath, I could barely tell male from female. But since they were all acting in some measure of unison—bouncing up and down together, chanting together, kneeling together—any variation was immediately notable.

A few rows in and just to my right, there was a man who didn’t want to try his drink. He acted like he was drinking, but what he was really doing was pouring it into the snow in front of him. I looked around at the satyrs, but it seemed I was the only one who caught it.

I was nearly certain he had wanted me to notice him.

After polishing off their kykeon, the mystai placed their bowls before them and huddle down on their knees, heads bowed and chanting as they waited for the visions, which would be coming along presently. I stayed focused on my new friend. He prostrated himself along with the others, but after a ten count he lifted his head slightly and locked eyes with me, or so I assumed since the hood still blocked a decent view of his face.

From somewhere in the crowd, a woman screamed. She sat up and started babbling—what the Christians might call speaking in tongues, but which sounded to me remarkably similar to an old Slavic dialect. Then came the moaning, the laughing, and the shouting, as the others began their own spiritual journeys. I remembered how incredibly funny a crowd of hallucinating people could be. It was one of the best parts about the Mysteries. Much better when they were also naked, but whatever.

The prostrate supplicant who’d discarded his kykeon took his cue from the people around him and started flailing about and acting goofy. And in the middle of his gyrations, he tossed something at me. It struck me right in the chest—which hurt— and fell in the snow between my crossed legs.

I picked it up. It was a pocketknife. Inscribed on the side were the initials M.L.

Mike Lycos had made it to the party.

“Ariadne,” I muttered, “take this. Cut me loose.”

Gordon began chanting something new. This wasn’t from the text of the Mysteries. “Bring forth the old gods!” he boomed, in English and then in Greek and back again. Peter, still blowing away on his flute, made some changes to his finger work.

Hippos reacted.
 

“Did the sound change?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he answered. “It is more . . . urgent now. I expect the first melody was to awaken the creature and this new piece is to call it.”

Ariadne opened the knife. “Where did this come from?”
 

“It apported here from the spirit world,” I said.

“No, really.”

“I’ll explain later. Start cutting.”

Gordon’s chants got faster and louder, which was amazing given the lack of a microphone. Then I realized he wasn’t the only one chanting. The satyrs had joined in.

“They are following the rhythm of the flute,” Hippos related.

“Even though Gordon can’t hear it?” I asked.

“Perhaps he can.”

“Okay!” Ariadne said. I pulled my wrists apart and the twine fell away.

“Thanks. Wish me luck.”

I rolled heels over head backwards into the temporary shelter of the woods and found my feet. Looking around, I could see the satyrs were too busy chanting loudly and stomping their feet—Gordon was now keeping time with his thyrsos as well—to notice I was missing. If ever there was a time for me to disappear into the woods and save myself, this was that moment.

I wish I could tell you I never considered it.

*
 
*
 
*

Getting under the altar was pretty easy. It was really just a set of planks holding up a small wood platform, with four steps in front leading to the center of the stage. Peter was sitting directly beneath it and behind the stairs. In the shadows of the torches on the stage, he was nearly invisible. Which worked out fine for everybody. Gordon, in particular, benefited from the impression he was calling the god of the forest all on his own.

I stepped past a wooden support beam and came up right behind him. He needed to be stopped, but there was a risk that the satyrs—and possibly mad Gordon—could hear the flute’s music. They would notice if I stopped it. But at the same time, it couldn’t continue.

I had to hope all the noise they were making was enough to drown out the sound in their own ears. I only needed a few minutes.

Peter was concentrating so hard, he didn’t know I was there until my left hand was covering his mouth and my right hand was snatching the flute from him. I tossed it to the ground and held him while he struggled, taking care to keep his mouth shut. He was feverish and weak and easy enough to contain. Then, in time with Gordon’s rhythmic pounding on the stage, I put my right hand on the back of Peter’s head and drove his face into a support beam. He crumpled to the ground, unconscious but alive. (Probably.) I figured Mike would want him when we were all done. I removed his brown mystai robe and slipped it on.

The flute was interesting. It was a small hollow stick that had been carved with great care by somebody who had obviously done it a few times before. I wondered if Peter had simply stolen it from the Yamomamo, or if they’d given it to him; I suspected the former. It was made of a light wood and was very easy to snap in two.

Hopefully, I’d stopped him in time.

I snuck out from beneath the stage. Nobody was waiting there to kill me, and Gordon and the satyrs were chanting merrily along. So far, so good. I hoisted myself up behind the tent and lifted the corner of it to get inside.

I was the only one in the tent, thank goodness. It was just me and the kiste. Even in the meager light from the torches on the other side of the tent walls, I could see that it had survived the centuries well; nearly as well as I had. Being considered important by a religious group is an excellent way to travel through time.

“Hello, old friend,” I greeted. It didn’t answer, but it was just a box.

I felt around the front for the locking mechanisms. Ariadne had been correct that it took a very specific combination of switches to unlock the box. These switches—which looked like simple iron bars installed to support the front—were slid left and right in a certain order to allow the top to be opened. But there were two combinations. I worked the second one, and felt the bottom quarter of the front of the box fall open like a mail chute. I reached inside.

After all these centuries, the secret of the kiste was still there.

I re-closed the box but left the locks as they were. Then I took a better look at the inside of the tent on the off-chance someone had left a spare TEC-9 for me.

It was a square framed street fair-type tent, the kind you usually find someone selling homemade jewelry out of. It was held up by lightweight metal bars and had no floor. So removing it was going to be a fairly simple matter. I just wasn’t sure what to do after that.

Right on the outside of the tent was a well toned madman with a cadre of armed satyrs at his beck and call. I couldn’t take all of them out at once, but maybe I didn’t have to. If I could disable Gordon—or kill him, although that would probably take too long with my bare hands—the shock of the act might buy me a little time.

Reaching under the robe, I felt around until I found the zipped inner pocket of the parka I’d been wearing for the past couple of days and pulled out the now-body-temperature chemical icepack. With the sharp end of the broken flute I poked a hole into the center of the pack and squeezed until some of the contents started to drip out. Holding it in my right hand, I took two deep breaths, said a quiet prayer to the oldest god I could remember, and lifted the square base frame of the tent.

The tent flew up and fell off the back of the stage and nobody shot me, which was great. It probably helped that with my hood pulled up they couldn’t recognize me.

Startled, Gordon stopped chanting and banging his thyrsos, and when he stopped, so did the satyrs. The mystai, in the middle of their religious epiphanies, took very little notice.

I tossed the pieces of the flute at Gordon’s feet.

“Who dares?” he raged loudly. He swung the thyrsos at me, which I anticipated, catching it with the palm of my left hand.

With my right, I slammed the chemical pack into his face.

I don’t know much about chemistry. The last time I was given a primer on the subject was in the fifteen hundreds and it was given by an alchemist who later died of mercury poisoning, so his knowledge was far from comprehensive, or necessarily correct. What I do know is that it’s almost never a good idea to get chemicals in your eyes.

Gordon grabbed his face as I yanked the thyrsos away. At first he just looked sort of surprised that his face was wet. And then he started screaming and clawing at his eyes. He fell to his knees. With a kick, I knocked him off the stage altogether.

I heard a rustling of robes to my right as one of the satyrs drew on me.

“Stop!” I commanded, pointing the thyrsos. Behind him, I saw Mike sprint for the edge of the woods. I didn’t see Ariadne or Hippos anywhere, but I was now surrounded by satyrs holding semi-automatic weapons, and other than possibly getting in front of bullets for me, I didn’t expect any help from them.

But the order worked, for the moment, as nobody fired. With a flourish, I held the thyrsos up and smashed the pinecone end against the stage until it shattered.

“Who are you?” Boehan shouted.

I took two steps back so that I was standing beside the kiste. “
I am Epaphios Choreios
!” I shouted the words in Greek, trying to sound as impressive as I could. “
I am Thyoneus Lyseus! I am Philopaigmos Agrionos! I am Dionysos the sojourner and I have killed more of your kind than you can ever imagine, satyr Boehan!
”

I slapped the top of the kiste and the front popped open again. Thrusting the end of Gordon’s staff into the opening, I pulled out the secret of the kiste, now attached to the top of the stick. It was the Hammer of Gilgamesh. I pulled back my hood.

“Now bow before your god!”

*
 
*
 
*

Back when people in Greece actually called me by all of those names on a regular basis, just about the only god-like thing I had going for me—aside from not aging—involved my thyrsos. It was actually Gilgamesh’s Hammer shoved onto the end of a stick, as he’d suggested so long ago, and I hung onto it because I liked the idea of having something that was unequivocally unique, at least as far as I knew at the time.