Songs_of_the_Satyrs (18 page)

He played a lively tune, tapping a hoof with the rhythm, and Feena danced around the ashen coals that smoked beneath the stag’s carcass. His flute bore magic and any song had the power to bewitch a mortal, but Salton had no magic to bewitch a dryad.

“Why do you turn your back?” she asked.

“I am shy.”

“You needn’t be.” Feena leapt and pranced about the coals to a song in her head. “Why would I laugh at such sweet sounds. You must play for my father and sisters when we dance in the clearing.”

“I want nothing more.”

“I’ll speak to Father. He’ll think differently when he hears you play.”

Salton laid down his flute. “Could you love a face like mine?”

“I could love the man behind it, if he no longer threatened my family.”

“There was no other way.”

“You didn’t try. You could have befriended us, entertained us with your music. Other satyrs have done so.”

“Perhaps I acted rashly, but your father is stubborn.”

“Cautious. As he must be. He cares only for my welfare.”

“As do I. Come see the bed I’ve prepared before the flower petals lose their fragrance.”

He took her hand and led her into his cave. His hooves clicked against the stone floor. He lit two torches, whose light revealed the pallet covered with flowers. Feena crouched to admire his work. Her beauty glowed in the wavering, yellow light. Salton stood in silhouette, his ugliness for a moment blotted out.

Feena stretched out atop the flower petals, which curled around her shoulders and hips like water. She rolled her head, taking in the myriad scents and then beckoned Salton to join her. He caressed her and bathed her with his lips, repeating “I love you” after each kiss. He could hold back no longer and mounted her, fulfilling his longings of many years. He thrust gently, taking her virginity, and as they moved together, she writhed beneath him and moaned with what Salton assumed to be passion.

Her cries multiplied. Her movements became erratic. Her fingers dug into Salton’s shoulder blades. Equating her response to his prowess, he redoubled the fury of his lovemaking, his hooves clacking against the floor in time with his thrusts. Feena cried a long, diminishing scream, and then her arms went lax, sliding off Salton’s shoulders. Her eyes rolled back as white as snow, and she vanished, leaving Salton to thrash about in the pool of flower petals, unfulfilled and alone.

He leapt to his hooves, cursing whatever magic Lerhem had used to summon his daughter and defile their agreement. He grabbed his flute and ran toward the hemlock grove, shouting curses. “I’ll strip all the bark from his bole,” he swore, “and set a fire at its base.”

Dusk fell as he ascended the knoll to the grove, hoarse from running and shouting. The sun burned red to the west above the treetops. Salton stopped. The fading light flooded the grove unfiltered. Seven stumps, their tops hewn roughly with axes, sweeping to points and ridges like snow-covered mountains, marked what had once been. Sticky rivers of sap oozed from the wounds and trailed to the ground where woodchips lay scattered around each stump. Gold and green needles littered the ground, the hallowed ground of Salton’s love.

The great trees lay where they had fallen, all pointing east as was the woodsmen’s custom, some paean to the gods that Salton did not understand. He stumbled among the remains and counted six logs. The woodsmen had shorn the branches from two of them.

He knelt beside Feena’s stump. They had taken her. He roared, wrapping his arms and legs around her decapitated trunk, and mixed his tears with her sap until the sap liquefied and Salton’s tears and Feena’s blood ran together.

He rose when the moon shone overhead, its gray light touching upon the hallowed ground for the first time in centuries. The grove was silent and empty. Feena’s words echoed in his head.
You brought the woodsmen. We shouldn’t leave them alone.
But he had seen the woodsmen work before. Tomorrow, they would bring horses and more men.

He followed the trail left by Feena’s log, where the woodsmen had dragged it through the forest. The trail reeked of Feena. When he stepped from the woods into the garden behind the woodsmen’s cottage, a pair of dogs barked, but Salton silenced them with a few notes from his flute.

Stepping over the sleeping dogs, he searched the yard but Feena’s bole was gone, too valuable perhaps to leave unsecured. Following her scent brought him to the woodpile where her smaller branches had been stacked to cure with the other firewood, pieces of his beloved reduced to kindling, fuel for the family’s cook fires.

He knelt before Feena’s remains, took up his flute and played a tune in a minor key that leapt and fell with a building frenzy. At first his body tingled, then it ached, then his blood burned through every vein, a poison to him and any creature.

With the last of his failing strength, he gashed his neck with his claws before collapsing across the stack of Feena’s branches. His blood boiled out of his neck and soaked the wood with toxins. The satyr’s body diminished and evaporated. Salton’s flute lay where he had dropped it, beside the woodpile and free of blood.

***

“Doran. Doran,” called his father from outside.

His mother nodded, so Doran left his porridge to attend his father.

“Old Mrs. Cowper wants two bundles of wood. Take a satchel. She’ll have seven onions for you.”

He nodded and hurried inside to fetch a bag. An errand meant a trip through the village, a chance for something out of the ordinary to happen. His mother bade him to count the onions, and as he passed through the doorway, he met his older brother carrying firewood.

“The new hemlock,” said the eldest brother to his mother. “Father says it’s ready. That it’ll burn sweet and hot.”

“What?” said Doran. “I should be here when it burns.”

“There’s plenty of it to burn, little brother. We have all winter.”

“Your brother’s right,” said his mother. “Now you have a reason not to tarry.”

Doran frowned. Arguing would get him nowhere. He stomped outside where he’d tied the bundles of firewood and slung them over his back. He took off for the village, resentment driving his legs to a trot. He had led them to the hemlock grove. He should be the first to smell the wood burn.

Inside his tunic, the flute he had found beside the woodpile months before thumped against his chest with each stride. At least he had held the gold coins that the man at the mill had given his father for the logs. His father said they were now a rich family.

His trot slowed to a walk. He greeted the neighbors he passed but to their surprise did not stop to talk. The old woman Cowper put seven onions in his satchel, one at a time with a trembling hand. He set off for home, intending to follow the road and brook no distractions, but a sweet, young voice at a turn in the lane stopped him.

Amilee, the blacksmith’s daughter, beckoned to him from a stand of birches. Doran left the path for the trees. What was some smoking wood to Amilee’s bosom and lips? He had kissed her once, a hurried peck, but the memory had lingered for days. Her family guarded her virtue like a king his crown jewels. The father had ambitions for her marriage and a woodsman’s son did not figure into them.

But maybe, Doran thought, with the wealth of the hemlocks, his prospects had risen.

“Why haven’t you come to see me,” Amilee said, “to tell me all about the hemlocks?”

“You know why I don’t come to see you.” They threaded their way deeper among the birches. As always, she teased him without mercy.

“You should ask my father to be an apprentice.”

“And sweat over a hot fire all day?”

“And see me every day.”

“Apprentices aren’t rich, Amilee, but a finder of golden hemlocks is.”

“Will you find more? I would love to see one.”

“I don’t know. I might have a knack for it, so maybe.”

Doran sat beneath two birches whose boles joined at the ground. Purple and yellow wildflowers stared at the sun amid the grass cropped short by flocks of sheep on the common pasture. Amilee tucked her skirt under her legs as she joined him. Her black hair was braided into plaits tied behind her head. As an unmarried woman, she did not cover her hair.

“How did you find them?” she asked.

“It’s a secret.”

“Even from me?”

Doran touched the flute as he scratched his chest. “Listen to this. I’ve been practicing.” Notes tumbled from the flute as Doran blew into the reeds and some coalesced into a melody.

Amilee giggled. “You plan to be a bard now?”

Doran ignored her. Amilee swayed, weaving to the current of the song; her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. Doran played more as the music inspired him and Amilee seemed to enjoy it. She scooted closer, pressed her bosom against his arm and crossed her legs over his. The heat of her breath inflamed his cheeks like the bellows in her father’s forge.

He stared at the tops of her breasts exposed above her bodice and followed their curves to the crease in between. So close he could touch them with the slightest move of his hand from the flute. Her softness stirred his heart to beat in rhythm with his playing.

Amilee knocked the flute from his mouth as she smashed her lips against his, pushing with her legs as if to climb into his body. Doran had spied on his brother with a girl once, so he knew something of what to do, but Amilee took him for a ride. He held on to her, simultaneously aroused and put off by her aggression. He’d thought her a virgin; coy as a spring flower, maybe; but still a virgin.

Amilee turned her back as she tightened the lacings to secure her bodice. A red bruise marred her shoulder where he had bitten her. She fiddled with her sleeve to cover it but the fabric slid down after each attempt and the bruise peeked over the edge of the linen, like a red fox at the entrance of its den. Her bosom trembled as she sniffled.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

She turned to him and her eyes filled with tears. One spilled over her lashes and streaked down her plump cheek. Never had she looked so beautiful and vulnerable, no longer the teasing flirt perpetually out of reach. He wanted to feel her again. He sat up and reached for her shoulder. Amilee slapped his hand away, striking his wrist so hard that he yelped. She jumped to her feet, pulled up her skirt, and dashed through the birch trees toward the road.

Doran rubbed the red mark on his wrist, wondering what he had done wrong. When he saw the bag of onions, he cursed himself and the girl. How long? The sun had passed noontime. His mother would be furious if she wanted those onions for supper, and she would tell his father to use a switch on him.

He took three long strides through the birches, stopped, cursed, and came rushing back to find his flute among the crushed wildflowers.

No smoke rose from the chimney as he approached the cottage. Very odd for midday. A sick sense of dread ushered away his fears of punishment when he stopped before the partially open door, hanging idly from its hinges. No talking, no clatter, no noise at all spilled from the house.

He pushed the door and it creaked. He had never heard it creak before, had never opened the door to silence. He stepped inside and let loose the bag of onions, which thudded on the floor. One rolled out and stopped against his brother’s arm. His family lay across the floor boards, their faces swollen and purple, their eyes bulging. An acrid smell fouled the room and wisps of yellow smoke wavered in the sunlight streaming through the windows. His eyes burned and he doubled over coughing.

He backed out the door and tripped, falling over and tumbling away from the cottage. As he lay on his stomach retching, he felt the flute against his breastbone . . . the flute that he’d found beside the woodpile, beside the hemlock wood.

After I graduated and successfully applied for a position with the Institute of Practical Cosmology I was sent to a remote part of Wales to operate an experimental telescope with the intention of confirming or refuting one of the oddest hypotheses of the origin of life.

Accordingly, I set off one cold day into the mountains on a rattling old locomotive that crawled along the rusting warped rails of a narrow-gauge railway. I was the only passenger in the gloomy carriage and I soon began to entertain doubts as to the ultimate wisdom of the abstruse career I had chosen. But it was far too late to turn back.

It might seem rather perverse to locate an important observatory in any of the so-called Celtic lands, for they are notorious nurseries of rain, mist, fogs, and other brumal inconveniences. The clouds rarely part and there is a joke that the inhabitants have no idea what the sun and moon look like. Once I laughed at the absurdity of that. Not now.

But the telescope that was my destination was a radical new type, fully cloud proof, or so Professor Regardus insisted. He had designed it himself over a period of nine years and considered it his greatest accomplishment. Perched on the peak of Mochyn Budr Mountain and immensely long, the longest telescope ever conceived, it actually poked
through
the blanket of water vapors into much clearer, purer skies.

I huddled more snugly into my coat, pulled my hat down over my ears, and rubbed my gloved hands together. The bleakness of my surroundings was so complete that I stopped looking out the window. It was unbearable for more than a few moments at a time. I shut my outer eyes and replayed in my mind the scene prior to my departure.

***

A walnut-panelled office in one of the older wings of the Institute was the lair of my personal tutor, Professor Bo Regardus, highly respected among his colleagues both for his imagination and precision. I stood before him on a rug of curious design, an ultraviolet spiral with frayed edges. Was it supposed to represent a distant galaxy?

But the man perched on the oddly shaped chair behind the impractical rhomboid desk seemed oblivious to the peculiar furnishings around him, doubtless because of familiarity. He stared at me with eyes full of a subtle humor that I found slightly disturbing.