Hellenic Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  “I know what you mean. And I’d rather not say. Can you live with that?”

  “Of course,” he said, smiling. “Angels must keep their secrets.”

  “I’m not an angel. I may not even be a good person. Now finish up and let’s get going.”

  * * *

  We took a cross-town bus to the Kifissia region of Athens. Kifissia was always where one found the wealthier citizens, and apparently that much had not changed, although there does seem to be a disconnect between wealth and acreage nowadays.

  We ended up on a tree-lined street with villas on both sides that I was assured by my young companion cost a great deal of money. I have a great deal of money and I own an island. I grant that there are differing degrees of wealth, but still. These were some pretty smallish houses.

  The villa we stopped at was a mixture of stucco and yellow panel siding set off from the street by a wooden fence and a small lawn. As with everything else on the street, it didn’t look like much.

  “We should have called ahead,” Piotr said quietly, balking at the last second.

  “It’ll be much more fun this way. You say they’re retired?”

  “Yes, for many years.”

  “Good. Then they should both be home.”

  I let myself in through the gate, and walked to the front door. Piotr lost his nerve entirely and stayed on the sidewalk.

  I do not, as a rule, get involved in family politics. It’s almost always messy, generally revolves around distant slights I don’t have a hope of understanding, and all parties tend to be ridiculously unreasonable. Plus, depending on the family, it can get you killed. But I didn’t have a choice this time, not if I wanted to finish what I came to Greece to do.

  I rang the bell. After a moment, a short, elderly woman answered the door. She was plump, with curly hair that had probably been black in some distant past, but had since gone a shade of gray that was very nearly blue.

  “Can I help you?” she asked expectantly.

  “Hi. You must be Linda.”

  She looked confused, trying to figure out where she must have met me before. “Pardon?”

  “This is the home of Linda and Kargus Iouannou, isn’t it?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “And you’re Linda Iouannou?”

  “I-I’m sorry, do I know you? Are you selling something?”

  “No, and no. I’m here to help out my young charge, who is standing some distance behind me because he is afraid to come any closer.”

  She squinted at the sidewalk. “I’m sorry, I don’t have my glasses on . . . you say you’re here to . . .”

  “Help him. You see it appears he’s your grandson Piotr, the child of Maria Iouannou and Nikolaus Mnemnios.”

  She touched her chin with her hand in a gesture that registered as surprise, happiness, and fear, all at the same time. “I’m sorry, I . . .” she said quietly, haltingly. “I can’t. My husband . . .”

  “Is Kargus home?”

  “Yes!” she whispered urgently.

  “Why don’t you call him? I’m sure he’d like to meet the boy.”

  “No! He would . . .”

  “Linda? Who’s at the door?” a booming voice asked from within the recesses of the villa.

  “It’s . . .” she started to answer, but then faltered when she realized she had no decent excuse to be standing there, letting the central air conditioning out. He was at the door before she could come up with anything.

  “Oh, hello. Can we help you?” he asked, pleasantly enough.

  Standing not quite straight, Kargus Iouannou was at least six foot five. He had a jutting chin that was bearded in a lively mixture of dark browns and light grays. His mane of darker hair cascaded over his shoulders despite a receding hairline at the front. He was dressed in a casual shirt and jeans, but I could tell that underneath was an impressive musculature. I had found what I was looking for: Kargus Iouannou was a satyr.

  “Hello. You must be Kargus. Call me Greg.”

  He looked at me, then at Linda, then back at me again. “And?”

  “Oh. Right. I’m here with your grandson. He’s a little shy, but he’s . . .”

  “No,” he interrupted. “No, no. I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t help you.”

  He tried shutting the door, which would have worked better without my foot in the way.

  “Piotr, will you get over here?” I called.

  Kargus yanked the door back open and glared at me. “What is the matter with you?” he demanded.

  “I could ask you the same,” I said. “He’s family, and he needs . . .”

  “I don't care what he needs!” Kargus shouted. “He does not set foot in this house!”

  He slammed the door harder, and this time my foot didn’t do much to stop it.

  “You see?” Piotr said quietly. He’d made it halfway up the path past the gate. “We should go.”

  “The hell we should. Don’t move.” I banged hard on the door until Kargus reopened it.

  “My wife is calling the police!” he said. “Now get out of here!”

  Another reason not to get into the middle of family squabbles is that I just don’t have the patience for them. It was at this point that my lack of patience got the better of me. I reached across the threshold, grabbed Kargus by the collar, and yanked him out. Don’t ever do this to a satyr. “You are Kargus of the Iouannou clan from the forests of the Eastern Peleponnese, and you have a responsibility to this child!”

  “My back,” he groaned. “You crazy . . .”

  “Look at him, Kargus! Look hard!”

  Finally, he did. And when I saw his eyes widen, I let him go.

  “Zagreus protect us,” he muttered.

  “You’d better hope so,” I said. “Now can we please enter?”

  * * *

  Kargus led us past the entryway and into a large dining area that looked out on a back yard taken up primarily by a swimming pool. The home was decorated sparsely, mostly with religious iconography that most Christians wouldn’t know exactly what to make of. The pièce de résistance was a statuette of Dionysos holding his thyrsos and looking very naked atop a dais in a small enclosure built into one wall of the dining room. It was a replica, but a pretty good one. Below it, on the floor, was a wicker kalathos filled with dried fruit. It could have been mistaken as an oddly shaped cornucopia. I was definitely in the right place.

  Kargus sat, and so we did as well. Poor Piotr looked terribly confused, and kept shooting me glances. I tried to appear reassuring. In a moment, Linda—having not actually called the police—came in with a tea set. She sat and we all waited for Kargus to do something, but he just sat with his hands over his face.

  It took a moment before I realized he was weeping.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said to nobody in particular. “When I saw the news reports I should have put it together.”

  “Did you know this would happen to me?” Piotr asked.

  “It isn’t that simple,” I said.

  “But you said this came from my mother’s side of the family,” he said to me.

  “It did, boy,” Kargus said.

  “My name is Piotr.”

  “Piotr. Yes.”

  “A lovely name,” Linda joined in.

  I explained, “Piotr, your grandfather is a satyr. Do you know what that is?”

  Piotr laughed. “Sure, it’s . . . but they’re myths. They aren’t real.”

  “Just like werewolves?” I pointed out.

  “Werewolves?” Linda asked.

  “Piotr, when the daughter of a satyr decides to mate with a human male . . . usually, nothing unusual happens. That is, she either has a human male child or a human female child. But sometimes she has something different. Sometimes the satyr in her blood makes something like you. It’s so rare I’m sure your grandfather didn’t even consider it.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

  “No, boy, it’s not okay,” Kargus said. “I have a sacred responsibility to watch
for such an outcome. In the olden days, we would have prepared you for this at a much younger age so you would be ready when it came. So you would not run afoul of your baser instincts. But you must . . . when your mother, our Maria died . . . we did not want this for her. We wanted her to marry another . . . another . . .”

  “Another satyr,” I finished. “To continue the line.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I am ashamed. I let my anger at your father affect my judgment. I should have been available to support you.”

  “That’s all right,” Piotr said. “I had an angel to protect me.”

  Kargus looked at me. “He is referring to you?”

  “I had what you might call an intervention.”

  “So you did this to his face.”

  “Yes. I apologized later.”

  “I am impressed,” he said, adding, “What sort of man are you?”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Linda piped in. “But my grandson is a werewolf?”

  * * *

  Once we explained everything to Linda, what followed was one of those lengthy, awkward reunion moments I don’t usually have time for, but which couldn’t be helped. I left the three of them alone to catch up, stepping out to the patio to appreciate the magnificent pool. I noted with amusement a large statue dedicated to Poseidon at one end. It was amusing because I never knew a satyr who liked water. I remember a number of them who cursed the sea-gods on a regular basis, especially during floods.

  After a time alone on the patio, Kargus stepped out to join me. He had, bless him, an extra beer in his hand.

  “I believe my wife will be spending the rest of the day hugging her grandchild,” he said with a wry smile.

  I accepted the beer. “I’m glad.”

  “And I am saddened by it. I had no idea how much my decision had burdened her.”

  “You come from a proud people. She knew what she was getting into.”

  “Indeed.”

  As he stood beside me, I caught for the first time the telltale bend in his legs where there should not be a bend.

  “I wanted to thank you again for rescuing Piotr before he hurt anybody.”

  “I think he was in more danger of hurting himself than anyone else.” I took a long sip of the beer. “Besides, I had an ulterior motive.”

  “I suspected as much,” he said.

  I smiled. “Kargus, I need to meet with your hierophant.”

  He stared at me for a long time. “I know of no such person.”

  This was a lie, but an understandable one. “I saw the kalathos, filled with the sacred fruits,” I said. “And the iconography on the walls. Your kind still practices the Mysteries, as you have for over three thousand years.”

  “The Mysteries are dead,” he said flatly.

  “That’s what I thought too, but I recently came to believe otherwise.” From my pocket, I extracted the photograph I had taken off Ariadne’s wall and handed it to him. He held it for a long time, and if I hadn’t known what to look for, I’d have said he displayed somewhere between little and no emotions whatsoever.

  You have to spend a lot of time with a satyr before learning how to read one. They are, by human standards, a remarkably stoic race. For instance, a raised eyebrow on a satyr is the approximate equivalent of a man jumping up and down, waving his arms, and screaming.

  A couple of hairs on his bushy gray eyebrows flicked in a certain way I’d come to identify as anger, which was not the reaction I had anticipated.

  His hand was around my throat in half a second. I don’t know what he would have done to me had I allowed the hand to remain there, but as I was already jabbing my fingers into a very particular spot just below his ribcage, I didn’t have to find out. In people this would be the solar plexus, and I imagine it is in satyrs, too, but it’s higher on them as they have a slightly smaller ribcage. You have to know exactly where to hit them. I make a habit of learning as many weaknesses as I can in the non-humans I come across.

  All the air shot out of him and he collapsed into my arms, nearly taking both of us into the pool.

  “I’ve got you,” I muttered, pushing him back and helping him into a lawn chair. It was right then that Linda popped her head outside.

  “Kargus, are you okay?” she asked, alarmed.

  “It’s his back,” I said.

  Kargus nodded and waved over his shoulder, which was the only form of communication he had to work with at the time.

  “I have him,” I reassured her.

  “A . . . all right.” She did not appear mollified.

  “I’m fine, woman,” Kargus managed to choke out with his first breath of air.

  Linda disappeared back inside.

  “She’s calling my doctor . . . right now,” Kargus said quietly. He held up the photo. “Are you he that took it?”

  “Took the photo?”

  “Took the kiste.”

  I pulled a second lawn chair next to his and sat down. “It’s missing.”

  “Not missing; stolen,” he growled.

  I took a drink from the beer. (Yes, I had disabled a six foot five satyr, caught him, and hoisted him into a chair without dropping my beer. If you think that’s unlikely, you don’t know how I feel about beer.) “It has been a while since I practiced the Mysteries, Kargus,” I said, “but isn’t the month of Boedromion soon?”

  A little pucker appeared in his cheek, which generally meant surprise. “Who are you?”

  “Who I am is something I would rather discuss with your hierophant.”

  Kargus leaned forward. He no longer looked as if he might kill me, so I let him. “You are a stranger to me,” he said. “You carry with you a photo of an object only a chosen few even know the existence of. Notwithstanding the kindness you have shown to my grandson, why should I even consider exposing my hierophant to you? She will think me mad.”

  I didn’t particularly want to drop my name if I could avoid doing so, but he had made a pretty good point. I also could not ignore the gender of his hierophant. Instinctively, I felt it had to be Ariadne.

  “All right,” I said. “Your people used to call me Philopaigmos the sojourner. Will that help?”

  Kargus laughed. “Not another one.”

  DION. SILENUS, I HEAR WORD THAT I AM NOW THE GOD OF MADNESS.

  SIL. IT IS SO.

  DION. WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS?

  SIL. DO YOU NOT TRAVEL WITH MANY MAD-WOMEN?

  DION. I HAVE DONE SO, YES.

  SIL. AND DID YOU NOT SAY TO ME THAT YOU YOURSELF HAVE BEEN MAD ON OCCASIONS PAST?

  DION. I DID.

  SIL. AND IS NOT THE FINAL NIGHT OF THE NORTHERN FESTIVAL DEVOTED TO YOUR DRINK AND BLESSED IN PERSON WITH YOUR MAD TOUCH?

  DION. I SEE YOUR POINT. BUT I HAVE ALSO BEDDED MANY WOMEN. COULD YOU NOT HAVE MADE ME THE GOD OF THAT INSTEAD?

  From the dialogues of Silenus the Younger. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne

  “When the Romans cut off our access to the Ploutonion and destroyed the Telesterion, the rituals continued, but were adjusted to fit the new reality of the times,” Kargus said over a large draft of beer. We were sitting in the back of a profoundly disreputable tavern in the center of Athens, well after our confrontation in his back yard. We were waiting to meet his hierophant, who had not yet deigned to arrive.

  “That was when? The third century?” I asked. “A.D., I mean.”

  “Thereabouts,” he shrugged.

  Incidentally, it’s still strange for me to think in terms of B.C. and A.D. (Or, B.C.E. and C.E.) Most modern people look at time as a folded piece of paper, with the numbers running down one side to the crease and up the other side, the crease being the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. I don’t see the fold, just one long strip of paper. “But the kiste, the sacred objects . . . they never left the Telesterion. Was there warning?”

  “In a manner of speaking; we had the prophecies,” he said.

  Handing him my satyr name—Philopaigmos—had lightened his attitude considerably. Given there w
as apparently more than one of me, he seemed to be treating this entire matter as something of a joke. It was sort of annoying. I didn’t care for him reciting everything in the manner of someone repeating an oft-told lesson. It was clear from his mannerisms that he was sure I knew all of this already and this was some sort of elaborate theater on my part to pretend otherwise. Since it was the only way for me to get information, I let it slide. Eventually, I was going to have to figure out how to prove to him I actually was who I said I was without first punching him in the nose. Never punch a satyr in the nose.

  “Which prophecies were these?” I asked.

  He looked aggravated. Or excited. It wasn’t one of their better emotions. “Greg,” he said, not willing to call me by my older name, “I don’t know where you’ve gotten your information, but even the real sojourner would know of the prophecies. If . . .”

  He trailed off, deciding not to finish the sentence. The beer may have been getting to him. “If he were real,” I finished for him.

  “My faith does not require that I accept his eventual return,” he said simply.

  “Is that what the prophet said? That I would return?”

  A prophet is kind of like an oracle, except without the drugs. This is not necessarily a good thing. An oracle needs assistance to get into a special state of mind, and that assistance is what makes it possible for most oracles to lead normal lives outside of work. A prophet spends almost all of his or her time in that special state of mind. In other words, the prototypical prophet is utterly insane. This does not make them very good company. Most prophets I’ve known led unhappy and very short lives that ended violently. That the Eleusinians had gotten a hold of a good one was lucky.

  “Very well,” he sighed. “In the final days before the destruction of the Telesterion, two manuscripts from the prophet were prepared. One elucidated all of the greater and lesser Mysteries for the first time so they would not be lost to history. This was in response to her first great prophecy in which she foresaw that the Mysteries were doomed. The second manuscript was every word she uttered for the next five years.”

  “That’s a lot of papyrus.” I finally understood where the wine recipe Ariadne had left in my hotel room had been copied from.