Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

  Their like, yes. But whether he would have seen precisely these stones, those oaks, that set of brambles ... with every step he took, he grew more doubtful of that. For the life of him, he could not tell where he was in relation to the city. He couldn’t hear the Slavs coming after him, either. At first, he’d thought that was because he and the satyr had outdistanced them. Now... he didn’t think that was all.

  As if picking the thought from his mind, the satyr nodded. “You not in hills you know,” it said. “You beyond hills you know.” It went on quickly, reassuringly: “Can go back. Go back now, be hunted to death. But can go back. Mortals go back, forth many times.” It hesitated then. “Not go back, forth so much now, on account of--” It could not say the name.

  Despite its forced muteness, George understood. He was in the fairyland that had been receding from this country ever since men began following Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christian men would reckon they could not cross into that world, that plane, whatever the proper term was, without imperiling their souls. He supposed he was imperiling his soul.

  “Who does go back and forth these days?” he asked.

  “Men, women follow old ways. Some yet, yes,” the satyr answered. “Up in hills, deep in hills, where ... not come yet.” Again, the silence implied the new dispensation. After a moment, the satyr added, “Those others, the ones with wolves and such” --George presumed he meant the powers of the Slavs-- “they live in this kind of hills, too. They share with us a kind of being.”

  God--the God George had worshiped all his life-- presumably either shared a kind of being (essence, the shoemaker thought, the word is essence--but what would a satyr know of theological terms, save perhaps for those dealing with fornication and lewdness?) with the powers of the Slavs and Avars or else altogether transcended those powers. George had always believed the latter; now he was less sure.

  The farther he went, the stranger things felt. The strangeness did not lie in what he could see or hear or in the way the ground pressed his feet through the soles of his shoes. With every breath he took, though, he felt himself farther from Thessalonica, and that had nothing to do with getting away from the city stink. It suddenly occurred to him that Mt. Olympus lay only thirty or forty miles south and west of the Christian city in which he’d always dwelt.

  Did the gods of whom Homer sang still live there? A few weeks before, he would have said no, and laughed at the idea. Now . . . now he wondered. He’d thought before that the epic poems might give those old gods a sort of half-life even in a Christian world.

  But when he asked the satyr, it shook its head. “If up there, not come down. Pretty women no get Zeus--get me instead.” It rubbed itself once more, smiled lasciviously, and rocked its hips forward and back. “How they laugh and squeal, pretty women!”

  The great god was gone, conquered by God, Who was greater. The homely, earthy satyr remained, still a part, even if a hunted part, of the world George knew. He wondered how the Slavic powers would look after a couple of centuries of struggle against Christianity. Unfortunately, he did not have the luxury of waiting around to find out.

  Another little wingety thing peeped out at him from behind a bush, then let out a high-pitched squeak. The satyr waved; its horselike tail came up in greeting. The fairy waved back, then flew off deeper into the woods. “Ours,” the satyr said.

  “Yes, I’d worked that out, thanks,” George answered, as surprised by how much he was taking all this for granted as by anything else on a day he would cheerfully have traded for any other three bad days in his life. “Where are we going, exactly?”

  “To a place,” the satyr answered, which made George wish to boot it in its hairy hind end. “Near a village,” it amended, perhaps sensing his discontent. “To friends.”

  “When we get to this place near a village, what will we do?” George asked, being of the cast of mind to seek answers as far out ahead of possibly needing them as he could.

  “Eat,” the satyr said. “Maybe drink wine. Village has wine.” He stared reproachfully at George.

  Angry, the shoemaker almost cursed the satyr in the name of God. That would surely have made the creature flee, and as surely would have dropped George back into the mundane woods and lulls around Thessalonica. He had no chance of getting back into the city on his own, not with the Slavs and Avars stall besieging it. Finding a village would be a matter of luck; finding one the invaders hadn’t wrecked would be a matter of much more luck. With autumn sliding rapidly toward winter, finding food and shelter enough in the woods to make it on his own would be more than a matter of luck. It would be a matter of divine intervention.

  He kept on following the satyr, then. Surely coming across it in the woods had been a matter of divine intervention. He would have felt easier about that, though, had he had a better notion of which divinity was intervening.

  “What’s the name of this village?” he asked after a while.

  The satyr shrugged. “The village. One of the villages.” It took a few more steps, then added, “Pretty women.” As far as it was concerned, that counted for more than such merely human things as names.

  They came out into a small clearing. A rabbit bounded across it, flup, flup, flup, little black eyes wide with fear. George wished for his bow. If you could get close enough to kill a rabbit with a sword, you could get close enough to kill it with your bare hands. George knew he wasn’t that kind of woodsman.

  A rock hissed through the air, almost as fast as if flung by a catapult. It caught the rabbit in midbound. George heard bones shatter. The rabbit let out a shrill, startled cry. It tried to leap again after it thudded to the ground, but its hind legs didn’t want to work. Bleeding, it dragged itself along with its forepaws.

  Clattering hooves in the brush at the edge of the clearing made George tighten his grip on his sword and bring up his shield--had the Avars pursued him even here, as the satyr said they might?

  But it was not Avars who burst from the screen of bushes. George was glad he had his hand clenched on the swordhilt; that made it harder for him to cross himself, which would have frightened the centaurs away. He watched, fascinated, awed, as they came out into the clearing. The one that had thrown the rock was a roan male; its human torso had thick red hair on the chest, while a red beard grew from its cheeks and chin. George had never imagined a bald centaur, but this one was.

  Its companion was smaller, slighter, darker, and so fervently female from the navel up as to make George wish he were part stallion himself. The noise the satyr made reminded him that it was part stallion, even if to a lesser degree than the two centaurs. George wondered whether they had laws against such out-of-kind couplings. If they did, the satyr, by its reaction, cared not a fig for them.

  George kept staring as the centaurs cantered across the field to pick up the rabbit, which had stopped moving. Not all the staring had to do with the way the female centaur’s breasts bobbed as it moved, either. Satyrs were rare around Thessalonica, yes. Centaurs were more than rare. He’d thought the swelling power of the Lord had long since driven them from the world of men.

  “ ‘Twill be fine, cony in a stew of leeks and turnips,” the male centaur remarked, his voice a bass deeper than any man’s, his Greek so archaic George had to think before he could be sure he understood it.

  “Aye, thou hast reason, in good sooth,” the female replied in the same old, old dialect. That dialect was not the only reason her voice startled the shoemaker, for it fell in the same baritone registers as his own. All the same, he couldn’t help wondering whether the Biblical prohibitions against bestiality applied to creatures such as these.

  Then he had another curious thought, not too far distant from the first. Along with those splendid, humanlike breasts, the female centaur also had a set of teats at the bottom of its horsy belly. When it had a baby or a foal or whatever the right word was, where did it nurse? George knew what his choice would have been, but he reminded himself he wasn’t a newborn centaur.

  “
Hunting is so poor these days,” the female said with a sigh.

  “Aye, for the newcomers do most savagely chase and slay all the small deer they chance to run across, leaving but their leavings for us who have since time out of mind made these woods our home,” the male said. George supposed it meant the Slavic wolves and other such powers. Had George been a wolf, he wouldn’t have cared to run up against the male centaur, but a partly supernatural wolf might think different.

  When he’d seen the Avars so confidently planted on their horses, they’d put him in mind of centaurs. Now, seeing the real thing, he wondered what the Avars would make of them. Would they be jealous? Or would they assume the centaurs were meant to be their slaves, simply because they hadn’t been lucky enough to be born Avars? That fit in with what he’d seen of the fierce nomads from off the distant plains.

  The centaurs had their own measure of that lordly arrogance. Only after they’d finished with their own business did they deign to notice the satyr and his human companion. “Who is it that cometh with thee, Ampelus?” the male asked. That thee, unlike the one the female had used with the male, was patronizing, even insulting, not intimate. “A man from the city below, not so?”

  “Yes, from the city, the city where they fight the new people, the new things,” the satyr--Ampelus--answered. “The city with saints inside.”

  That made both centaurs scowl, reminding them of the marginal life they--and the centaur--led in an ever more Christianized world. The male dipped its shiny head to George. “We welcome you to this fastness to which our. . . acquaintance hath brought you. Know that I am Crotus, and with me you see my wife Nephele.”

  George gave his own name, then said, “I didn’t know centaurs still roamed these hills.”

  “They are ours,” the female said, drawing itself up with formidable pride. “Not enough saints hath . . . your city” --Nephele could not speak the names of God or Christ any more than the satyr could, and had to talk around them-- “to drive us hence altogether. Nor shall the savage strangers force us to flee, however fierce they be.”

  “They very fierce. They very many,” Ampelus said. “How we stop them?” The satyr had fewer words and a far less elegant way of speaking than the centaurs, but seemed to George to have a better grasp on the way the world outside this backwoods retreat worked.

  Crotus said, “Thou, satyr, art less afflicted than we by the powers we do not name, and so hast wider compass of vision”--the very thought that had just gone through George’s mind. “But if one deem a difficulty impossible of solution, unsolved it shall surely be forevermore. Nor dost thou reckon our case hopeless, I warrant, else thou hadst not brought here this mortal, this George.”

  Ampelus shrugged. The satyr’s erection jounced up and down. Nephele’s reaction might have been amusement or disgust; George had no practice reading the sounds centaurs made. After a moment, Ampelus said, “He give me wine once. I save him, hoping he maybe give me wine again. But he has no wine this time.” As nothing else had done, that made its phallus droop for a moment.

  “As well that he have none!” Nephele exclaimed. “Wine for you satyrs is as it is for men: a little foolishness, a little sleep, a little headache, and then all in readiness to be done over again. Not so for us, whom the slightest taste of the blood of the grape inflameth to madness.”

  “Wine is sweet,” Ampelus protested. “Wine is good.”

  “Aye--for thee,” Crotus said. “When the scent of the fermenting vintage wafteth from the villages wherein the men trample the grapes ...” A look of terrible longing filled the centaurs face. “I needs must hie me off deep into the woods then, lest instead I rush forward to guzzle and . . .” It fell silent again. The day was chilly. Sudden sweat sprang out on its forehead even so.

  “Will someone please take me to one of these villages?” George asked. “Maybe I can find a way to get back into Thessalonica. If I can get down to the seaside, if I can find a boat. . .” He didn’t think any of that was likely to happen, but it was the best his imagination had been able to do.

  Satyr and centaurs ignored the request. In that disconcerting baritone, Nephele asked, “How is it, George of Thessalonica, you have no fear of our kind, and neither seek you to compel us to flee your presence with signs against which we may not stand?”

  “Why would I do that?” George asked in return. If the female centaur thought he wasn’t afraid, that only proved the pagan powers were a long way from omniscient. Hoping Nephele wouldn’t notice he was responding to only half the question, he went on, “Ampelus saved my life. He didn’t have to do that. I owe him a debt.”

  “Wine!” the centaur cried. “Jars and jars and jars of wine!”

  “We stand in need of a better bargain than that,” Crotus said stiffly.

  “Is no such thing,” Ampelus said, but then corrected itself: “Is maybe one, but cannot bring jars and jars and jars of pretty women.”

  Nephele set hands on . . . no, not on its hips, but the place where the narrowness of that human waist swelled out to meet the equine body that carried it. “Enough of japes and jests and fribbles,” the female centaur declared, giving the satyr a severe look that altogether failed to dismay it. When Nephele went on, it was to George: “So many of your fellows would raise against us that which we cannot face or deny our existence altogether.”

  “Aye.” Bitterness edged Crotus’ voice. “And should the denial become universal, it becometh also sober truth: another reason for our clinging to the peaks and other lands wherein our being is more certain.”

  George had never wondered what the growth of Christianity looked like from the viewpoint of creatures pushed to the wall by the new faith. Along with other such abstract questions, though, that one would have to wait. He found a question anything but abstract: “If you have these weaknesses, how do you propose to come down and fight the powers of the Slavs and Avars?”

  “We need help.” Nephele spoke unhappily, but without hesitation. “Thus your coming is welcome, even if Ampelus aided it for reasons of his own rather than to promote the general welfare.”

  “I do what I do,” Ampelus said. “I like to do what I do.” The satyr rocked his hips forward and back again, aiming that enormous phallus at Nephele. The female centaur ignored it. George wondered whether that sprang from remarkable aplomb or standards of comparison different from those he was used to using.

  “What is your craft, mortal?” Crotus asked. “Are you by any chance a priest of. . . ?” Again, the male used a pause to do what it could not.

  That almost made George laugh. “No,” he answered. “I’m only a shoemaker.” That sounded as ordinary as any trade possibly could, till he realized none of the beings with whom he was talking had any need for what he did. He shook his head like a man caught between dream and reality; the difference of his new companion’s feet brought home to him that dream was reality here.

  “ ‘Tis too much to be hoped for that any priest should find our kind fit for aught but exorcisms,” Nephele said. “So many woods and streams and paths barred to us on account of words from that book.” It glared at George as if that were his fault.

  In a way, he supposed it was. He was a Christian man. His belief gave the priests some part of their power, just as lack of belief threatened to doom centaurs and satyrs and other failing creatures of pagan days. But-- He brightened. “I think I know a priest who would come here,” he said.

  He wondered what sort of penance Bishop Eusebius would set Father Luke for associating with these beings. He did not wonder whether Father Luke would associate with them if it meant saving Thessalonica. He was sure the priest would come. Which left the next question: how to get him to come?

  “Of necessity, ‘twill be you delivering word he is wanted,” Crotus said. “Saints hem Nephele and me and the rest of our land so close, it were the end for any of us to venture forth from these hills, as hath been previously intimated to you. Being of ruder substance, Ampelus and his fellows may fare farther abroad mor
e readily, but cannot think to enter into the city where so many are of your opinion.”

  “Mm.” George rubbed his chin. “Since it’s surrounded by the Slavs and Avars, I can’t think about entering it, either. Can you help me come close enough--maybe through the hills my land don’t usually travel anymore-- to give me some chance of getting in?”

  “It may be so,” the male centaur answered. “I cannot speak with certainty, not here, not yet. But the thing must be essayed, lest all fail.”

  “New things in woods, things in those hills,” Ampelus added fearfully. “Things with wings, to spy and see. Things with teeth and claws, to bite and kill.”

  “You can speak of them, can’t you?” George asked. The satyr and the two centaurs nodded. Watching Nephele nod was worth the candle, even if the female’s voice was as deep as his. Refusing to let himself be distracted, he went on, “I’m surprised you don’t want to see those powers win at Thessalonica. They’re more your kind than . . .” Now he used silence to indicate God, Whom he would not name here.

  “Not so,” Crotus said, “for their people lack all knowledge of and belief in our kind. Did they win, did they defeat even that which hath reduced us to our present estate, they would on the instant then proceed to hunt us to extinction: not a slow fading but a quick and bitter end.”

  “He hath courage, to speak on what reboundeth not to his advantage,” Nephele said, tempering the compliment a moment later by adding, “Courage, or a signal want of good sense.”

  “How soon can you try to get me back into the city?” George asked. “My family--” He broke off, thinking of his family for the first time since Menas slammed the postern gate in his face. As far as they knew, he was probably dead. He hoped someone had seen him escape into the woods, but even if someone had, so what? The most reasonable guess was that the Slavs would have hunted him down regardless. Had he been up on the wall watching someone else run, that was what he would have believed.