Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

Crotus and Nephele looked toward Ampelus, who could approach Thessalonica more closely than they. The satyr nervously masturbated itself. “Not be easy,” it said, its rusty voice worried. “People round the city, things in the woods--”

  George looked at the sky. The sun would soon be down, hurrying toward the southwestern horizon on this cold near-winter day. “Would it be easier” --by which he meant safer-- “to travel at night?”

  “No!” Ampelus spoke with great certainly, and kneaded its own tumescent flesh to emphasize the point. “Things worser at night. Eyes glow, they see like owls, they . . . No.”

  Realizing the hour made George also realize how worn and hungry he was. “Will you take me to that village, then?” he asked. “That should be safe.”

  “I doubt we should reach it ere the sun’s chariot leaveth the sky,” Crotus said. “Are you fain to pass the night with us, George who feareth not that which dwelt in this land long ago and abideth here yet?” Unlike Ampelus, the male centaur plainly did not want to go anywhere near where men dwelt. Fear of wine, George thought, and then, or is it lust for wine?

  “Yes, of course. Thank you.” The shoemaker bowed to the centaur. He did his best to tell himself getting back among men, even backwoods pagans who probably didn’t know the Emperor’s name, was better than passing his time with creatures whom Bishop Eusebius and almost all his fellow Christians back in Thessalonica reckoned fit only for exorcism. That was the right thing, the proper thing, to think. He couldn’t make himself believe it. His curiosity was itching too fiercely. How many modern men got a chance like this? For that matter, how many men in ancient days had got a chance like this?

  Crotus and Nephele went ahead at a pace he could not match. Ampelus led him through the woods to what might easily have been a hunters’ encampment. It was almost disappointingly prosaic: several neat lean-tos (some of them outsized, to accommodate centaurs), with a fire in the middle, a large pot bubbling over it.

  Little by little, strangenesses surfaced. The knife Nephele used to cut up the rabbit and add it to the stew was bronze, with a bone handle. The pot into which the female threw the pieces of meat had a delicate perfection of shape potters these days didn’t even attempt, and was ornamented with capering satyrs in black on a red background. George didn’t know how old that made it-- Leo might have--but knew it was very old indeed.

  Ampelus walked over to the pot. Nephele gave the satyr a look that warned it not to steal any stew. But that wasn’t what it had had in mind. It pointed to one of the satyrs the potter had painted, then to its own chest. “Me,” he said proudly.

  For a moment, George thought that only an idle boast.

  Then he took a closer, more careful look. The potter had labeled each dancing satyr. Beside the one at which Georges guide had pointed were Greek letters: AMTIEΔOΣ. The shoemaker stared at the ancient portrait. It was a good likeness.

  Another satyr came into the encampment, carrying a couple of squirrels by the tail. “Ha, Stusippus!” Ampelus said. “Here is George, this man I tell you I meet yesterday.”

  It hadn’t been yesterday. It had been months before. George started to say as much, then abruptly closed his mouth. Here was a creature with a picture from at least as many centuries before the Incarnation as had passed since. No wonder the recent past blurred together for it.

  “Friendly man--I remember,” Stusippus said. The new satyr’s features were less manlike than Ampelus’, its erection even larger. “Man with wine.”

  “I have no wine today,” George said, and Stusippus’ phallus drooped for a moment, as Ampelus’ had done at the same sad news.

  “Give thou me thy meat there,” Nephele said. Stusippus handed the female the squirrels without making the bawdy comment George had expected. Nephele still had that knife in hand.

  More centaurs drifted into the camp. A couple of females--Lampra and Xanthippe, their names were-- brought in baskets of roots, while Lampra’s mate (husband? George didn’t know), Elatus, had a dead pig tied onto its back with vines. More fires were started. More delicious smells rose into the evening air.

  With Xanthippe frolicked something George had never imagined, a baby centaur. Again, he wondered whether to think of it as a foal or a child. He watched, fascinated. “What’s it called?” he asked the young one’s mother, whose light roan coat and golden human hair and horse’s tail might have given it the name Xanthippe.

  “Demetrius,” the female centaur answered. Its voice was deep as Nephele’s.

  George’s jaw dropped. “After the saint?” he said. Could the pagan creatures have been trying to gain the protection of God, Whose name they could not say?

  But they knew deities of their own. “After the great mother goddess,” Xanthippe said severely.

  “Oh.” George was relieved and disappointed at the same time. “How old is it?” he asked, wondering if centaurs grew according to the pattern of horses or men.

  Xanthippe shrugged. Time meant no more to centaurs than it did to satyrs. “I don’t know.” Its voice was--not indifferent, but uninterested. “A few hundred years.”

  “Oh,” George said again, and said no more. Would Demetrius be ranging these hills a thousand years from now? If the Slavs and Avars weren’t driven away, the youngster wouldn’t be. Otherwise . . George tried not to think of the thirty or forty years that were the most he could expect to remain on this earth. But his soul would exist forever. Did Demetrius have a soul? One more thing George did not know and never would.

  He missed bread with his supper, and he was used to drinking wine, not the clear, cold water bubbling up from a spring near the fire. Other than that, the meal was as good as any he’d ever eaten, with hunger a relish sharper than garlic.

  After everyone had eaten, Xanthippe chanted Pindar’s Second Pythian Ode, to Hiero of Syracuse. George did not understand why it had chosen that particular piece till he realized it spoke of the creation of its race. Crotus and Nephele, little Demetrius, and Elatus all got up and danced to the song that had been written ages before George’s great-great-grandmother was born. But anyone of them, save perhaps Demetrius, might have seen Pindar. The shoemaker’s shiver had nothing to do with the cold.

  The centaurs and satyrs had drifted fallen leaves in their shelters to serve as beds. Ampelus and Stusippus invited George in with them. The three of them crowded their lean-to, and the satyrs’ phalluses kept prodding at him as he burrowed into the leaves. The pagan Greeks, he remembered uneasily, had found unnatural vice neither unnatural nor a vice, and so their powers would not, either. But the satyrs did not seek to molest him. He was glad he’d had no wine for them.

  Shortly thereafter, he was glad to be in bed with the satyrs, a gladness that had nothing to do with carnality. Without them, he would have shivered the whole night through. With them, despite their phalluses and other minor annoyances such as their hooves kicking him in the shins, he was warm enough. He burrowed into the leaves and slept.

  “What a strange dream,” George said the next morning. He rolled over to tell it to Irene. Leaves rustling under him made him open his eyes. He was looking into Ampelus’ face.

  “Morning,” the satyr said: more an announcement than a greeting.

  “Good day,” George said, wondering if it would be. He got to his feet and started brushing leaves off his tunic and out of his hair. If the satyrs and centaurs slept like this, he wondered why they weren’t perpetually covered with bits of their mattresses.

  He discovered the answer to that moments later. Ampelus and Stusippus had a bone comb. The first thing they did after getting out of their bed was to take turns combing each other free of dried leaves. George knew a couple of brushmakers down in Thessalonica. If they brought their wares up into the hills, they might do a good business.

  Since he had less hair to fret over than any of his companions, and since he also had no one to groom him, he decided to make himself useful by stirring up the fire. His breath smoked as he built the blaze up again; the heat from the ne
w flames was welcome.

  “For this we thank you,” Crotus said, coming up behind him. Where George had been warming his hands in front of the fire, the male centaur bent forward so it could beat the bare crown of its head. Brushmaker. . . Hatmaker. George added to his mental list of artisans who might be useful here among these creatures of an outworn creed.

  What did creatures of an outworn creed do about breakfast? At home, George was ready to face the day after bread with olive oil and a cup of wine. His chances of getting any of those things here in this sylvan encampment didn’t look good.

  What he got were sun-dried apples and apricots, washed down with more water from that stream. It was cold enough to make his teeth ache, but almost as sweet as the fruit the centaurs gave him.

  Once he’d eaten and drunk, he asked, “Shall we go on to one of those villages now?”

  “If you be so eager to return to your own kind, we can do’t for you,” Crotus said, “however wary of villages we may be on account of the temptations of the vintage brewed therein. But if you would liefer bring us this holy man of whom you spoke not long ago, were it not wiser to seek to return to the town whence you came?”

  “If you think you can get me back inside Thessalonica in spite of the Slavs and Avars all around, I’m game, but I don’t see how you’ll do it, especially since you can’t come close to the city yourselves.”

  Crotus frowned. In a way, George knew a certain amount of intellectual pride at having perplexed the supernatural being. In another way, he wished the centaur had had an easy answer waiting. Crotus said, “We shall do all in our power to aid you, the more so as the holy man seemeth to be of the sort the situation requireth. That there may be risk in this course, both from the new-come powers and from the one against which we cannot stand--this we understand. We weigh here dangers one against another. In no direction standeth none.”

  “I think you’re right about that,” George said slowly. He thought for a little while himself, then said, “All right, if you think you can get me down to Thessalonica and into the city, we’d better try it. And the sooner, the better.”

  “There I deem you have bitten through the meat straight to the bone,” the male centaur said. “My land is but rarely inclined to take quick action, the passage of time being of small import to us. Thus it was that. . what you follow established itself in our land, we feeling no urgency toward expelling ... it till too late. And now we are all but banished ourselves. May we prove wise enough to learn from one error and not commit a second of like sort.”

  “People don’t often learn from their mistakes,” George said. If these immortal creatures did, they deserved to be reckoned demigods.

  “Nor satyrs, either, they being prisoners to their lusts,” Crotus answered. “We dare hope ourselves the wiser. We are no longer wine-bibbers, having learnt from sore experience how such enrageth us.”

  They could have stood around for the next several days, talking about the ramifications of moving and not moving. George realized Crotus would talk about ramifications for the next several days, and not notice the flowing time. Harshly, the shoemaker said, “Let’s get moving, then, if we’re ever going to.”

  “I cry huzzah for mortal celerity,” Crotus said. “On to Thessalonica!” It went back to the lean-to it shared with Nephele and talked with its mate for a while, then with the rest of the centaurs, and at last with the satyrs, who seemed to require less in the way of instruction and debate than its own kind. However much it tried to hurry, more than an hour went by before George, all the centaurs (even little Demetrius), and the satyrs started down from the hills toward the city.

  In purely physical terms, going down was easier than coming up had been. But purely physical terms were far from the only ones that mattered. For one thing, George was not entirely certain he remained in the hills he knew. For another, after a while he began to feel as if every step he took required a distinct effort of will. When he remarked on that, Nephele tossed its head and replied in that disconcerting baritone:” “ ‘Tis but a cantrip of the barbarians circling round the city, and hardly one of potency overwhelming.” Its sniff declared the Slavs and Avars should have done better.

  The spell’s potency might not have been overwhelming to the female centaur, but it was of different substance from George, who found the going ever harder. And then, suddenly, he had no trouble at all setting one foot in front of the other, and went along as ready as he might have done on the street outside his shop in the city. “That’s better,” he said.

  Only when the words were out of his mouth did he notice that his companions had stopped, as if they’d walked into Thessalonica’s wall. After a moment, Ampelus and Stusippus gathered themselves and came toward him. The centaurs needed longer than the satyrs, and advanced as if pushing their way through glue, not air.

  “What’s wrong?” George asked. “Did that cursed Avar priest make the spell stronger? He’s not to be taken lightly, that one.”

  “The barbarian?” Crotus had to fight to get the words out one by one. “Nay, that was naught of his doing. Meseems you are prayed for inside the city toward which we fare.”

  George thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand Of course he was prayed for back in Thessalonica. His wife and children would be in St. Elias’ now--if they weren’t in St. Demetrius’. His friends would be in one church or another, too, if they weren’t up on the wall.

  And their prayers had succeeded in weakening the spells the Slavs and Avars had been using to keep him from approaching Thessalonica. The only trouble with that was, the prayers also seemed to have weakened the supernatural beings aiding him. That wasn’t good. He had doubts about being able to get down from the lulls with the centaurs and satyrs helping him. Without them, he had no doubts: he wouldn’t make it.

  He saw how vulnerable they were to the power of God. As a Christian, that made him proud. As someone trying to save his own neck, it worried him. If he was going to keep on being proud, he hoped he’d soon be able to start worrying less.

  “The weakness passeth,” Xanthippe said after a bit, tossing its head in an impatient gesture a horse without human excrescences might have made. “The petition, methinks, was not aimed straight against us, else the hurt had been greater.”

  Gaining strength with her, the other centaurs also came on. Down the game tracks they went with the satyrs and George. He was thoughtful and quiet. The prayer had surely been aimed at the Slavs and Avars. It had weakened their spell, to be sure, but he doubted it had done them the harm it had his companions. That meant those companions were weaker than the powers of the Slavs and Avars. He’d known as much, but didn’t care to be reminded of it.

  Little by little, the shock of God’s power wore away. The satyrs took to playing with themselves again. That amused Demetrius, the immature centaur, who, having seen such things for only a few centuries, still found them funny. George didn’t laugh. He took the masturbation as a sign the satyrs remained alarmed, even if at the Slavs and Avars, not at the Lord.

  Smiling like a good dog, the first wolf stepped out from between two trees half a bowshot in front of George. It was, obviously, no ordinary wolf. It was bigger than a wolf had any business being, its teeth were longer and sharper, its very stance fiercer and more alert than an ordinary wolfs could have been.

  Ampelus, who had been walking alongside of George, sprang nimbly back with a gasp of fright. The shoemaker gasped, too, and made the sign of the cross. He’d already done it before he remembered the company he was keeping. But the satyr had said he’d watched a Christian priest make the holy sign when confronted by a Slavic wolf-demon. It hadn’t been aimed at Ampelus, and so had had no effect on him.

  Nor did the satyrs and centaurs flee George now. But the sign of the cross, though it made the wolf draw back a pace and turned that doglike smile into a snarl, did not rout it. George remembered that the wolf the priest had met had killed him in short order. He yanked out his sword. This wolf would not have such an eas
y time. He had more defenses than the spiritual alone.

  The wolf snarled again, as if angry at itself for yielding even slightly to the strength of the Christian sign. Then it sprang for him. He raised his shield. If the wolf knocks me down, he thought, I have to keep the shield between those teeth and my throat. Maybe I’ll be able to stab it before it bites too many chunks out of me.

  From behind him, a rock flew through the air and caught the wolf-demon on the tip of its nose. Its agonized yelp was sweet music in George s ears. It skidded to a stop and stared past him to the centaurs, as if it had never imagined they would do such a thing to it.

  Another stone hit it, this one in the chest. It staggered, threw back its head, and loosed one of those horrifying howls George had heard corning out of the forest from the walls of Thessalonica.

  The shoemaker crossed himself again. Growling deep in its throat, the wolf retreated a few paces. Perhaps because it was hurt, the sign of the cross had more power over it than had been true a moment before. It howled again, this time more in pain than to cause fear among its foes. George took a step toward it, and it drew back once more.

  “Move aside, that we may pelt the creature according to its deserts,” Crotus called.

  “I don’t care about its pelt,” George heard himself answer: his mouth ran wild and free, disconnected from such wits as he had. “Besides, this is my fight, too.” He advanced on the wolf, which backed away from him.

  But now other howls rose in answer to those the creature had loosed. Other wolves came out of the woods to stand with the first, and still others made leaves rustle in the forest to either side of the path. Such creatures could surely have traveled silent as a thought, had they so chosen. But they must have wanted George and his companions to know they were there, so as to put them in fear. George stared now this way, now that. He and the satyrs and centaurs were outflanked.

  “We have to go back!” George shouted.

  Ampelus and Stusippus scampered away toward the encampment from which they’d set out that morning. All the centaurs, though, stared at George with blank incomprehension. That look told him more clearly than anything else could have why even the pagans of ancient Greece, without the power of God behind them, had been able to drive the powerful creatures deep into the hill country: the very notion of retreat seemed alien to them, however necessary it might be.