Hellenic Immortal

by Gene Doucette

The new adherents were brought before a large iron box—called the kiste—the box was opened and the sacred items were revealed to them. Only those who were properly sworn in knew how to open the box, as the process was fairly involved and entirely counter-intuitive. I knew how to do it, but I doubted anybody else alive did, and I further doubted anybody else would be able to figure out how, even today. But that might be pride talking; I’d designed it myself.

  But that was only for the boring part of the ceremony. The much more entertaining part—the private part, the part nobody knows about because the participants were sworn to secrecy—went to Dionysos, god of wine, dance, orgies, theater and, well, everything that makes life on this planet fun, plus death and madness, the two more obvious consequences of having too much fun for too long. This is how all religions should work, incidentally; after having a nice big sacred ceremony, a nice big party should always follow. The Greeks found a way to do that and still claim the Bacchanal was a religious rite, which is another reason I miss old Athens.

  In the third century A.D., when the Romans broke up the party once and for all, the kiste was presumed lost. But if it wasn’t, the place to begin looking for it was Eleusis—the source.

  Assuming there were still satyrs living in Athens, I knew exactly where to start.

  * * *

  My first encounters with satyrs date back to before the death of Karyos, but after the destruction of Minos, in that hazy century or so in which I wandered the woods of the southern Greek peninsula. I had heard rumors from as early as the days of the Sumerian empire, of wild men in the woods who stood upright but hunted like pack animals. I didn’t put too much stock in it.

  Most every old civilization looks at others—members of the same species but not of the same tribe—as wild men. It’s a common rationalization, because when you reduce someone else to a level of something like an animal, it makes them easier to kill. So I tended to dismiss the rumors, which worked out fine for me up until the day I found myself face-to-face with a wild satyr.

  I don’t recall specifically what I was doing on that day, but I’d wager it had something to do with hunting or eating, as that was the extent of my activities during that time. Whatever I was doing, it was interrupted by a noise. It wasn’t a large noise—a faint rustling is all—and it was the sort of sound most people would have dismissed as being part of the natural background of a growing forest. I knew better, because I’d been in the forest for quite a while and could make the distinction.

  “Is someone there?” I asked, in the Minoan tongue. As a rule, game runs away and predators attack, and whatever had made this noise had done neither. I was presuming something sentient and probably human.

  I pushed back a few branches and found myself staring down at something I’d never seen before.

  He seemed human from the waist up, but his entire lower section was covered in hair. Unshod, it appeared his feet had only three toes. He was naked, and from the expression on his face, he was nervous. Were he human, I’d take him to be no more than seven years of age.

  I tried to put on a nonthreatening smile. “Hello. What might you be?”

  Then his father stepped out of the brush behind him. He was much more impressive.

  Like the child, he was covered in a thick layer of dark brown hair from his waist down. His chest was bare, but his shoulders were covered with wispy hair that was a bit lighter than the rest. Likewise, the knuckles on his hand were hairy, as was almost his entire face. A thick beard ran up his protruded jaw, nearly obscuring his ears and meeting up with a fantastically unkempt mane of hair atop his head. His eyebrows were like things unto themselves, tapering upward and outward so dramatically that they appeared to be horns.

  He put a protective hand on the boy’s shoulder and drew him slowly away, never taking his brown eyes off me.

  He spoke, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying as it was no tongue I’d ever heard before. His voice had a low, growling canine sort of timbre.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, making an effort to show the palms of both hands so it was clear I had no weapons.

  “You speak island words,” he growled. It was difficult to understand—he was putting the emphases in the wrong places—but I got it okay.

  “Yes. I came from there. How did you learn it?”

  He looked me up and down, a little unsure. “My son,” he said finally. “Too young to . . . be quietly.”

  “He will learn.” I offered my hand, and my strange new friend studied it carefully, but did not take it. Handshakes were not common with his people, apparently. So when that failed, I pointed to my own chest instead. “Human,” I said. Then I pointed to him.

  “Gylin,” he responded. At first I thought I was dealing with a race of Gylins, up until he pointed to his son and said, “Liakhil.”

  He didn’t give me a chance to explain that I was trading species names and not surnames.

  He pointed to the west and said, “Come, Hu-man, we eat. Okay?”

  * * *

  As we trudged through the forest, a remarkable thing happened—other satyrs began popping up out of nowhere. I thought I knew how to disappear when it came to hiding in woods; I clearly had no idea what I was doing. One of them stepped out right next to me. Had he chosen to stay hidden, I wouldn’t have known he was there, and he was barely an arm’s-length away. I wondered how long they’d been watching me, given that detecting them when they didn’t want to be detected was clearly not within my abilities.

  We were gradually joined by a dozen others of roughly the same size and build of Gylin; Liakhil was the only child among the group. I gathered that this was Liakhil’s first foray away from their home. He had probably disappointed his father by getting himself noticed by the likes of me.

  Another thing I noticed as we walked silently through the underbrush, was that the legs of my new friends were somewhat more distinctive than I’d first realized. Their ankles were higher than they are on humans, by about a hand’s-width. I wondered what sort of advantages this physical difference imparted. I soon found out.

  We reached the apparent end of our journey when we came upon a particularly thick patch of plant life. From a distance it didn’t look any different than any other portion of the forest, but once we got up close, I saw that the tangle of vines, moss, and low-branching trees was all but impassable. Had I come there alone, I’d have probably thought nothing of it and simply been shunted sideways until a clearer path was discovered. That, I reflected, was exactly the point.

  Gylin spoke in his own tongue to a couple of his fellow adults, who nodded. Then they walked to one side and jumped more or less straight up. I believe my jaw dropped at approximately the same speed at which they ascended, as the height they attained far exceeded anything I could ever hope to pull off myself. Both were soon out of view and somewhere within the forest ceiling. Gylin then instructed Liakhil to follow. The stripling’s jump wasn’t quite as impressive—better still than anything I could do—and he ended up dangling from the side of the wall of vines. He climbed from there and disappeared from view as well.

  Gylin looked at me. “Jump?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “Climb?”

  He smiled. Or I think it was a smile. If he were an animal, I’d take it as a teeth-baring threat. Then he gestured to two of the others, who stepped beside me. I wrapped my arms around their respective shoulders, they wrapped their arms around my torso, and I said a quiet prayer to the Minoan god of accidental death and dismemberment. Then we all bent our knees and pushed off.

  The degree of force I applied personally to the jump didn’t make a good deal of difference, but my two new friends didn’t need my help. We rocketed through the upper canopy of the forest almost as quickly as if we were falling from the trees and to the ground. When we reached the acme of our ascent, they grabbed onto a series of vines that were possibly there for just this purpose. And with their help, I reached up and did the same.

  Directly ahead was op
en space. With one of them first showing me how it was done, I worked hand-over-hand through the opening and crossed over, past what was now very clearly a deliberate wall of plants, and onto the other side. Then I was dangling over open space and an apparently fatal drop to the ground below. I saw that the two adults who’d gone before us were standing on the forest floor with Liakhil, watching expectantly. I didn’t think they were there to catch me, but it was nice to imagine they might try, should I lose my grip.

  I didn’t have to worry about that, though, as I was rejoined by the two who had helped me up there in the first place. They flanked me once more, grabbed my torso, and instructed me through head gestures to let go of the ceiling and take hold of their shoulders. I did, with some trepidation, as I knew what was coming next.

  I’d been wrong. The jump up wasn’t nearly the same thing as falling down. Falling down was a good deal faster and decidedly more frightening. Picturing my legs snapping in two, I tucked them under me and hoped that the others were capable of cushioning our landing sufficiently as I didn’t care to weather the rest of eternity with a pronounced limp. I needn’t have worried; the landing was unexpectedly gentle.

  Once the rest of the group made it over the wall, we walked a little further until coming upon their settlement.

  It was a small village. I counted about fifty or sixty inhabitants and more than two dozen dwellings that amounted to little more than three-sided lean-tos somewhat similar to the tepees later used by Native Americans. All of the men in the village were as naked as the bunch that had taken me there, but all of the women were clothed. I found this odd until I realized that the women were all human. That was odd, too, but in an entirely different way.

  Gylin put his arm around me and slowly led me through the settlement. Everyone there had been in the midst of doing something—chatting, carrying water, tending a fire, cleaning—up until they spotted me. Apparently, my being there was a fairly big deal.

  By the time we reached the main building, nearly everybody in the village had come out to see me, albeit at a safe distance just in case I was rabid. The children looked scared, the adults mostly curious. They talked to one another in Gylin’s strange guttural language.

  Presently, an older version of Gylin stepped out of the building, said building only differing from the others in size. Next to him was a human woman who looked at least fifty years of age. (I had no way of telling how old the men were, being a new species to me.)

  “Welcome,” the elder male said, as Gylin stepped away from me.

  I was now totally surrounded and standing alone. Possibly, I was about to be eaten. “Thank you for your welcome.” I offered my hand.

  The elder stared at the open palm, confused. The woman beside him whispered something in his ear. He nodded slowly, then stepped forward and extended his own hand. We shook.

  The woman spoke to me in the Minoan tongue. “You’ll have to excuse them. They don’t have handshakes. And none have ever quite mastered the language you and I speak.”

  We ended our handshake, and I focused my attention to the woman who’d spoken to me, the only person in the camp who seemed capable of conversation. “If you don’t mind my asking, what manner of beings are these?”

  “They are the satyros,” she explained. “But the much more interesting question is, what manner of being are you?”

  * * *

  It turned out the satyros had been watching me for over thirty years and were aware that I did not age. So while I looked like a man and acted like a man—albeit one with better survival skills than most of those who fled Minos after the great eruption—clearly I was not. The consensus was that I was a god of men. It was also not particularly satisfying as I didn’t act very godlike, but it was the best anybody could come up with.

  One thing they were certain of was that I was reasonably harmless, and so I became a living training exercise for their young. Whenever a male child was of age, they’d send out a scout team to find me and then the youngster was told to get as close to me as he could without being detected. Poor Liakhil was the first to fail.

  The women were indeed human; for some reason there were no actual female satyrs. The mating of a human female and a satyr male could either produce a human female or (much more commonly) a satyr male. At the time, this made no more sense to me than anything else. Now I have biology textbooks that tell me this is impossible, which is why I don’t read biology textbooks.

  The female elder of the village was named Mara, wife of Poleyt. Along with most of the women there, she’d come from Minoan stock. Her family had survived the blast and made it to the mainland, and had managed to eke out an adequate existence in the wild for a few years before tragedy struck. When I asked her over dinner one evening what that tragedy was, she asked, “In your time on Minos, did you ever hear of the Toah-Har?”

  I had. When parents needed to quiet a child, they would threaten him or her with a visit from the Toah-Har. The approximate modern equivalent would be the bogeyman. “The creature that would come in the night,” I offered, “and eat bad children.”

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “You’re saying your family was slain by the Toah-Har?”

  She smiled. “No, wanderer. I am saying I don’t know what else to call it; the only thing I can compare it to is the nightmare creature of a child. We numbered fifty people or more before that night, and scarcely eight remained by sunrise the following day. And we would have all been lost to the elements if the satyros hadn’t come for us.”

  In this time, I could think of a half-dozen large creatures that possessed the malevolence and facility to kill forty-odd people, but so far as I was aware none of those creatures lived in these woods.

  “Do the satyrs know what it was?” I asked.

  Mara glanced at her husband, who either looked her off, or had indigestion. I was not good at reading their expressions at this time.

  “The Toah-Har of Minos is what they call it as well,” she said, with just enough peculiarity to give me the impression she wasn’t telling me the truth.

  “Poleyt, I’ve lived in the forest for many moons and never have I seen a thing that could do this.” My tact was a bit rusty, but I knew enough not to openly state that I was thinking the most likely suspect was a band of satyrs. Knowing their need for women to maintain their race, it would make sense for them to attack the adults in the night and then “save” the rest and blame the deaths on some indefinable primitive force. If I were a tribal leader facing the gender inequity, I might do the same thing. In fact, I did just that more than once.

  Poleyt stared me down, something satyrs are naturally good at. “I know you have not, because you are still alive.”

  Most of the conversations I had with Mara and the rest of the village’s inhabitants were decidedly more cheerful, and I enjoyed my time with the satyrs. I stayed for about a month, learned to master the basics of their tongue, and picked up a few hunting tips. For my part, I shared some of the more interesting stories of my life up to that point—they were particularly amused by the story of the Hammer of Gilgamesh—and convinced them pretty soundly that I really was just a guy who didn’t happen to get any older.

  * * *

  The satyros population in the woods of Greece was a good deal greater than just that one small village, although I doubt they were ever as populous as man later became in those same lands. Learning their tongue served me very well in the subsequent years, because although there were many different satyr tribes—most considerably less efficient and peaceful as Poleyt’s—they all spoke the same language. Knowing that language marked me as a friend to an otherwise violent race of beings.

  In addition to their marvelous leaping ability, satyrs hunt and kill with the effectiveness of a pack of wolves, only with opposable thumbs. It’s a bit trite to claim they are half-animal and therefore more prone to violence, but in some ways that was true. Pity the army of men that sought to do away with the satyrs of the wood. I witnessed that onc
e; a Greek general with a number of bad habits, one being a powerful hatred of the satyros, who decided to send half a regiment into the northern woods. His soldiers were armed with swords and the satyrs with wood staffs and their fists. Despite that, no man walked out of the woods alive. (Coincidentally, the general’s name was Kuster.)

  When the Greeks settled down into the more civilized pre-Socratic culture, I was instrumental in introducing the wayward satyrs to the men of Athens less likely to have genocide on their minds. By then, whatever societal structure that had once existed in the community of the satyros had broken down considerably, and they were forced to accept that mankind was a necessary evil, especially if they wanted to get their hands on womankind.

  And the fact they needed human women would always be a problem. The lesson I took from Mara’s tale of the Minoan Toah-Har was that satyrs in need of women are not to be taken lightly. So I’d go out of my way to bring a few satyrs along to every bacchanal I could. I would also bring women to the woods with me. This might strike you as hard to imagine, but consider that if you were a woman in Athens in those days, your prospects were really not very good at all. Just in terms of finding someone willing to have sex with you was a huge undertaking. After a while, a guy covered with hair from the navel on down started to look pretty good.

  When the concept of the bacchanal became subsumed by the somewhat more religious concept of the Mystery Cult, the satyrs continued to garner invites, often at my personal insistence. One of the great things about the cults was that they were open to everybody, human or not. We even had a couple of vampires. Soon the cults were more important to the satyros than they were to the humans—perpetuation of the species and all that; a few were even run by satyrs.

  So in a way, the only reason there are still some satyrs around today (assuming there are) is because I liked them and wanted to keep them around.

  If anybody knew whether the old cult—the real one, the one with access to the sacred items and to the correct ceremonial procedures—was still around, it would be the satyrs, because it was the one group with an unbroken lineage to the ancient times.