Hellenic Immortal (35 page)

So I never carried a true thyrsos, which is not to say a thyrsos wouldn’t have made for an excellent symbol for the god of wine.

What I failed to appreciate for all of those years was how constant exposure to the rock had driven the king of the Sumerians insane, and how that insanity would also impact anyone who hung out with me for too long. It’s why most of my relationships for a few centuries ended with the sentence . . .
and then she just went crazy one day
.

It wasn’t until a particularly drunk bacchanal celebrant asked me to bless his drink that I figured it out. I waved the rock over his wine, he ended up hallucinating, and I smacked myself in the forehead for being so dense.

My blessing the drink of the Eleusinians—then an early stage Dionysian Mystery Cult— became a regular feature of their biggest seasonal event, but the problem was remembering to show up. I wasn’t always in the area, and there were no calendars worth a damn, or timepieces, and forgetting about a ceremony put together to worship you is just embarrassing.

So after I nearly missed one entirely, I asked the hierophant to build me a box. And thus was the kiste—which, by the way, just means chest—created. The box was built with a false bottom with small holes in the floor, and Gilgamesh’s rock was put in the gap. Knowledge of the secret compartment died with the box’s manufacturers and the hierophant, leaving me the only owner of the information. From that point onward, foodstuff kept in the box had a special kick to them, and when one enterprising hierophant decided to bastardize Egyptian beer with barley stalks—wine grapes didn’t keep well enough—kykeon was born.

It’s actually sort of amazing nobody had found the secret of the kiste after all this time, but then tinkering with sacred objects is generally frowned upon.

*
 
*
 
*

Hippos stepped forward from behind the stage. His hands were freed, no doubt thanks to Mike’s pocketknife.

“
He speaks the truth
!” he barked. “
Bow down
,
you ignorant fools
.”

Ariadne appeared beside me. “Nicely done,” she whispered.

“Not too corny?” I asked.

“A little corny.”

“
This is the man who was brought into camp this morning,
” Boehan shouted. A few of the satyrs had complied and were kneeling, but Boehan was having none of it. “
He is no god!
”

To prove this, he raised his weapon and prepared to open fire. Before he could, a shot rang out, and he fell forward. I looked in the direction of the shot and saw Mike down on one knee, with his revolver drawn, standing just beyond the tree line.
 

Seizing the opportunity, I shouted, “
You see what happens when you doubt?
” Hopefully, most of the satyrs were too confused to notice the guy in the corner with the gun.

The gunshot caught the attention of a few of the mystai, who couldn’t have followed most of what we were saying in Greek. They were high on kykeon, but a gunshot is a gunshot. A murmur went through the crowd and I prepared to address them in English. Hopefully, I thought, there was time to get these people out of here.

But it was too late for anything like that.

A loud shriek pierced the air. Actually, calling it a shriek is misleading. It sounded like two oaks being rubbed together. I looked in the general direction of the sound, but couldn’t see anything except trees.

And then one of the trees moved.

THE GOD SMILED AT SILENUS. “I CAN BEST A MAN IN COMBAT, OR TEACH HIM TO MAKE WINE AND DRINK WITH HIM UNTIL THE SUN RISES, SETS, AND RISES AGAIN. BUT IF HIS MIND IS SET, I CAN NO MORE CHANGE IT THAN COMMAND THE FOREST TO WALK. SUCH IS THE STUBBORNNESS OF MANKIND.”

From the archives of Silenus the Elder. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne

It probably hadn’t been standing there for very long, mainly because it didn’t seem to me like the type of creature who spent a lot of time deep in thought. Perhaps its first instinct, when coming upon the campfires, was to camouflage itself.

   
And it was quite a remarkable camouflage. The dryad looked to be about fifteen feet tall. When motionless, it appeared to be nothing more than a wide-based tree trunk, the top of its head obscured by the low branches of the pine trees. But when it moved, it . . . unfolded.

Its center expanded like an accordion until it was twice as wide, with long, thin arms stretched from the center of its torso. The hands looked like long thin twigs. It stood up on squat legs that had been tucked underneath. There was no telling where the torso ended and the head began until it opened its mouth to emit another shriek.

Everyone in the compound turned with the second roar from the dryad. (This one was deeper, and sounded like high winds racing through a hollow log.) Even the drugged-out mystai seemed to understand that this was not simply another hallucination, as those closest to it began to scatter, and a loud murmur of crowd panic settled upon the scene.

“Yes . . .” I heard Gordon whine. He was lying on the ground, just at the edge of the stage. He’d covered his face in snow in an effort to neutralize the chemical bath I’d given him. “The Great Protector comes!”

The dryad put one hand on the trunk of the nearest tree, and immediately the nub of a branch sprouted out. All at once those green patches of grass we’d found in the snow made perfect sense. It wasn’t that the creature’s footsteps were revealing the grass; the grass below was growing up towards the creature’s feet.

And then it sprang forward.

I have seen things in my lifetime that move quickly, are deadly, and very large. Vampires, old ones, can move extremely fast and are known to be deadly when provoked. But they tend to be man-sized. Dragons were capable of growing to nearly the same height as the dryad, but the larger they got, the slower they moved. I had never seen anything move like this god of the woods.

Its motion was jerkily unreal, like a stop-action monster from a fifties movie. But it was decidedly efficient. It covered twenty feet in only a few seconds. The twig-like fingers lashed out and raked through the crowd of people—they were already running and screaming, as one does—and struck down four with one blow. Blood arced through the air.

Hippos jumped to the forest floor and picked up Boehan’s gun. “
Shoot it, you slugs!
” he shouted. He began firing over the heads of the mystai, trying to hit the creature without hitting them. These poor people didn’t know which way to run; away from the killer tree or away from the loud semi-automatic.

The other satyrs had been torn between bowing to me, shooting me, and wondering what in Zeus’s name was bearing down on the crowd. Hippos’ entreaty seemed to help them resolve their confusion. They joined in and began shooting as well.

It didn’t appear to make any difference. TEC-9’s are not the sort of thing you use to gun down something from a distance, but I had to think at least a few of the bullets were finding their mark, and yet the dryad continued its charge into the crowd. It was a slaughter.

We had to get everyone to safety first and then worry about how to kill it. But where are you safe from a forest god in the middle of a forest?

“On a lake,” I said to myself.

I jumped off the stage and found Hippos. “Get the people onto the ice!”
 

He stopped shooting long enough to think about this. “Yes,” he agreed. “I believe you are right.”

Hippos, I decided, would make a great field general. Seconds after handing me his gun, he’d gotten the other satyrs organized. Four of them positioned themselves between the dryad and the fleeing crowd, while Hippos, Dyanos, and the other four started to corral everyone onto the lake.

“Adam, what in Christ’s name is that?” Mike asked. He’d run to the altar when the shooting had begun and basically looked like he just found out the Easter Bunny was real.

“A dryad,” I explained. “It’s the same kind of thing that killed Lonnie Wicks.”

“A dryad? Seriously. Isn’t he supposed to be a naked girl or something?”

“You can tell it that if you want.”

“No thanks. How do we kill it?”

“Working on it.”

The bullets were definitely impacting the dryad, but they were about as effective as they might be to a real tree. The creature’s claws, meanwhile, were devastating. One of the satyrs protecting Hippos’ back stood still for a half second too long and had his head removed with a backhand swing. This inspired the remaining satyrs to move more quickly while still shooting. Meanwhile, Hippos was finding it difficult to convince all of the stoned mystai to get onto the ice, and probably wished he’d kept his gun. Fortunately, Dyanos and the others still had theirs, and began firing over people’s heads to convince them to congregate in the proper direction.

Then a second satyr from the defensive line fell. With the guns doing no damage, the only thing keeping the creature from the mystai was all the jumping around the satyrs were doing. And that was only working because they were really annoying it.

“What do we know about it?” Mike asked. “It has to have a weakness.”

“Gordon,” I said, as another of the satyrs fell, or rather flew. We were going to run out of satyrs soon.

Gordon was still on his knees at the foot of the stage. Ariadne was beside him, and when Mike and I reached her, she was calmly wrapping a cloth around his eyes.

“He’s blind,” she explained.

“It’s so beautiful,” Gordon said happily.

“He’s not deaf, right? He can hear the screams?”

“The Great Protector will save us all,” he insisted.

“Not deaf, but maybe delusional,” Ariadne offered.

I knelt beside him. “Tell me more, Gordon. Tell me all about the Great Protector.”

“She is in touch with all the plants of the world,” Gordon babbled. “She wills life from lifelessness, green from brown . . .”

“Yeah, okay, I’ve seen that happen already. But how do you kill it?”

“Why would I want to kill her?” he asked.

“Because she’s about to kill you!”

He bowed his head for a second, a gesture of resignation. “She can’t be killed. As long as her forest lives, so does she.”

“Great. Where’s a logging company when you need one?”

In the field of battle, Hippos and his men had managed to get the last of the living congregants onto the ice and had gone back to shooting at the dryad full time. There were only four satyrs left. If they were smart, they’d get on the ice with the others and leave us to fend for ourselves.

Thankfully, they were not smart. Quickly running out of land, Hippos gave the signal and he and the other three living satyrs—Dyanos, I noted, was not among them—broke off the attack and ran, leaving nothing but a little ice between the dryad and over eighty defenseless people.

“If it crosses the lake, they are all dead,” Hippos shouted at me as soon as he was in earshot.

“It won’t,” I assured him.

The dryad did take one step onto the ice, which seemed to hold under its weight. But it hesitated.

“Why’s it stopping?” Mike asked.

“The water is the realm of the onead, and the mountains belong to the naiad. I figured if dryads are real, there’s probably some truth behind the boundaries as well.”

“So I guess we can’t hope it trudges into the center, breaks through and drowns, huh?”

“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t breathe,” I said.

Stopped at the water line, the dryad howled again with the sound of a hurricane wind shearing off a tree branch, and turned around.

I shifted uneasily. “Uh-oh.”
 

“The water looks like a good idea from here,” Mike suggested.

“I agree.” But this was not a stupid dryad. It put itself between us and the lake.

“Well, shit,” Mike said.

I took a look around to see who was left. Peter, I could see, was still unconscious underneath the stage. With his luck, he’d probably be the only one to survive this attack. Gordon and Ariadne remained where they were, useless to me, but good targets for the dryad. That left me, Mike, Hippos, and three satyrs who were probably almost out of bullets. And nobody had a howitzer or a small nuclear device, which was just poor planning. We could probably delay the inevitable by scattering, but I didn’t care for the odds. And once it was done with us, it could sit on the shore and wait for sunrise to melt the lake if it wanted to. Maybe that was giving it too much credit, but maybe not.

The dryad started marching our way, slowly.

Hippos turned to me. “Now would be the time for an idea, sojourner!”

“I’m working on it,” I said.

Cassandra’s prophecy came back to me:
The tree of life will strike
,
red on white
,
red on white
!
Godhood reclaimed marks the sojourner’s end and the pretender’s fall
.
Seek the source
!

I’d sought the source by visiting Greece, so that was pretty clearly done. And the tree of life stood before me now, spattering red blood on white snow all over the place, so there was nothing much left to say about that. But that middle sentence was tricky. If the pretender was Gordon and the sojourner was me, the dryad was the one reclaiming godhood, in which case I was screwed.