Hellenic Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  “No, really.”

  “I’ll explain later. Start cutting.”

  Gordon’s chants got faster and louder, which was amazing given the lack of a microphone. Then I realized he wasn’t the only one chanting. The satyrs had joined in.

  “They are following the rhythm of the flute,” Hippos related.

  “Even though Gordon can’t hear it?” I asked.

  “Perhaps he can.”

  “Okay!” Ariadne said. I pulled my wrists apart and the twine fell away.

  “Thanks. Wish me luck.”

  I rolled heels over head backwards into the temporary shelter of the woods and found my feet. Looking around, I could see the satyrs were too busy chanting loudly and stomping their feet—Gordon was now keeping time with his thyrsos as well—to notice I was missing. If ever there was a time for me to disappear into the woods and save myself, this was that moment.

  I wish I could tell you I never considered it.

  * * *

  Getting under the altar was pretty easy. It was really just a set of planks holding up a small wood platform, with four steps in front leading to the center of the stage. Peter was sitting directly beneath it and behind the stairs. In the shadows of the torches on the stage, he was nearly invisible. Which worked out fine for everybody. Gordon, in particular, benefited from the impression he was calling the god of the forest all on his own.

  I stepped past a wooden support beam and came up right behind him. He needed to be stopped, but there was a risk that the satyrs—and possibly mad Gordon—could hear the flute’s music. They would notice if I stopped it. But at the same time, it couldn’t continue.

  I had to hope all the noise they were making was enough to drown out the sound in their own ears. I only needed a few minutes.

  Peter was concentrating so hard, he didn’t know I was there until my left hand was covering his mouth and my right hand was snatching the flute from him. I tossed it to the ground and held him while he struggled, taking care to keep his mouth shut. He was feverish and weak and easy enough to contain. Then, in time with Gordon’s rhythmic pounding on the stage, I put my right hand on the back of Peter’s head and drove his face into a support beam. He crumpled to the ground, unconscious but alive. (Probably.) I figured Mike would want him when we were all done. I removed his brown mystai robe and slipped it on.

  The flute was interesting. It was a small hollow stick that had been carved with great care by somebody who had obviously done it a few times before. I wondered if Peter had simply stolen it from the Yamomamo, or if they’d given it to him; I suspected the former. It was made of a light wood and was very easy to snap in two.

  Hopefully, I’d stopped him in time.

  I snuck out from beneath the stage. Nobody was waiting there to kill me, and Gordon and the satyrs were chanting merrily along. So far, so good. I hoisted myself up behind the tent and lifted the corner of it to get inside.

  I was the only one in the tent, thank goodness. It was just me and the kiste. Even in the meager light from the torches on the other side of the tent walls, I could see that it had survived the centuries well; nearly as well as I had. Being considered important by a religious group is an excellent way to travel through time.

  “Hello, old friend,” I greeted. It didn’t answer, but it was just a box.

  I felt around the front for the locking mechanisms. Ariadne had been correct that it took a very specific combination of switches to unlock the box. These switches—which looked like simple iron bars installed to support the front—were slid left and right in a certain order to allow the top to be opened. But there were two combinations. I worked the second one, and felt the bottom quarter of the front of the box fall open like a mail chute. I reached inside.

  After all these centuries, the secret of the kiste was still there.

  I re-closed the box but left the locks as they were. Then I took a better look at the inside of the tent on the off-chance someone had left a spare TEC-9 for me.

  It was a square framed street fair-type tent, the kind you usually find someone selling homemade jewelry out of. It was held up by lightweight metal bars and had no floor. So removing it was going to be a fairly simple matter. I just wasn’t sure what to do after that.

  Right on the outside of the tent was a well toned madman with a cadre of armed satyrs at his beck and call. I couldn’t take all of them out at once, but maybe I didn’t have to. If I could disable Gordon—or kill him, although that would probably take too long with my bare hands—the shock of the act might buy me a little time.

  Reaching under the robe, I felt around until I found the zipped inner pocket of the parka I’d been wearing for the past couple of days and pulled out the now-body-temperature chemical icepack. With the sharp end of the broken flute I poked a hole into the center of the pack and squeezed until some of the contents started to drip out. Holding it in my right hand, I took two deep breaths, said a quiet prayer to the oldest god I could remember, and lifted the square base frame of the tent.

  The tent flew up and fell off the back of the stage and nobody shot me, which was great. It probably helped that with my hood pulled up they couldn’t recognize me.

  Startled, Gordon stopped chanting and banging his thyrsos, and when he stopped, so did the satyrs. The mystai, in the middle of their religious epiphanies, took very little notice.

  I tossed the pieces of the flute at Gordon’s feet.

  “Who dares?” he raged loudly. He swung the thyrsos at me, which I anticipated, catching it with the palm of my left hand.

  With my right, I slammed the chemical pack into his face.

  I don’t know much about chemistry. The last time I was given a primer on the subject was in the fifteen hundreds and it was given by an alchemist who later died of mercury poisoning, so his knowledge was far from comprehensive, or necessarily correct. What I do know is that it’s almost never a good idea to get chemicals in your eyes.

  Gordon grabbed his face as I yanked the thyrsos away. At first he just looked sort of surprised that his face was wet. And then he started screaming and clawing at his eyes. He fell to his knees. With a kick, I knocked him off the stage altogether.

  I heard a rustling of robes to my right as one of the satyrs drew on me.

  “Stop!” I commanded, pointing the thyrsos. Behind him, I saw Mike sprint for the edge of the woods. I didn’t see Ariadne or Hippos anywhere, but I was now surrounded by satyrs holding semi-automatic weapons, and other than possibly getting in front of bullets for me, I didn’t expect any help from them.

  But the order worked, for the moment, as nobody fired. With a flourish, I held the thyrsos up and smashed the pinecone end against the stage until it shattered.

  “Who are you?” Boehan shouted.

  I took two steps back so that I was standing beside the kiste. “I am Epaphios Choreios!” I shouted the words in Greek, trying to sound as impressive as I could. “I am Thyoneus Lyseus! I am Philopaigmos Agrionos! I am Dionysos the sojourner and I have killed more of your kind than you can ever imagine, satyr Boehan!”

  I slapped the top of the kiste and the front popped open again. Thrusting the end of Gordon’s staff into the opening, I pulled out the secret of the kiste, now attached to the top of the stick. It was the Hammer of Gilgamesh. I pulled back my hood.

  “Now bow before your god!”

  * * *

  Back when people in Greece actually called me by all of those names on a regular basis, just about the only god-like thing I had going for me—aside from not aging—involved my thyrsos. It was actually Gilgamesh’s Hammer shoved onto the end of a stick, as he’d suggested so long ago, and I hung onto it because I liked the idea of having something that was unequivocally unique, at least as far as I knew at the time.

  So I never carried a true thyrsos, which is not to say a thyrsos wouldn’t have made for an excellent symbol for the god of wine.

  What I failed to appreciate for all of those years was how constant exposure to the rock had
driven the king of the Sumerians insane, and how that insanity would also impact anyone who hung out with me for too long. It’s why most of my relationships for a few centuries ended with the sentence . . . and then she just went crazy one day.

  It wasn’t until a particularly drunk bacchanal celebrant asked me to bless his drink that I figured it out. I waved the rock over his wine, he ended up hallucinating, and I smacked myself in the forehead for being so dense.

  My blessing the drink of the Eleusinians—then an early stage Dionysian Mystery Cult— became a regular feature of their biggest seasonal event, but the problem was remembering to show up. I wasn’t always in the area, and there were no calendars worth a damn, or timepieces, and forgetting about a ceremony put together to worship you is just embarrassing.

  So after I nearly missed one entirely, I asked the hierophant to build me a box. And thus was the kiste—which, by the way, just means chest—created. The box was built with a false bottom with small holes in the floor, and Gilgamesh’s rock was put in the gap. Knowledge of the secret compartment died with the box’s manufacturers and the hierophant, leaving me the only owner of the information. From that point onward, foodstuff kept in the box had a special kick to them, and when one enterprising hierophant decided to bastardize Egyptian beer with barley stalks—wine grapes didn’t keep well enough—kykeon was born.

  It’s actually sort of amazing nobody had found the secret of the kiste after all this time, but then tinkering with sacred objects is generally frowned upon.

  * * *

  Hippos stepped forward from behind the stage. His hands were freed, no doubt thanks to Mike’s pocketknife.

  “He speaks the truth!” he barked. “Bow down, you ignorant fools.”

  Ariadne appeared beside me. “Nicely done,” she whispered.

  “Not too corny?” I asked.

  “A little corny.”

  “This is the man who was brought into camp this morning,” Boehan shouted. A few of the satyrs had complied and were kneeling, but Boehan was having none of it. “He is no god!”

  To prove this, he raised his weapon and prepared to open fire. Before he could, a shot rang out, and he fell forward. I looked in the direction of the shot and saw Mike down on one knee, with his revolver drawn, standing just beyond the tree line.

  Seizing the opportunity, I shouted, “You see what happens when you doubt?” Hopefully, most of the satyrs were too confused to notice the guy in the corner with the gun.

  The gunshot caught the attention of a few of the mystai, who couldn’t have followed most of what we were saying in Greek. They were high on kykeon, but a gunshot is a gunshot. A murmur went through the crowd and I prepared to address them in English. Hopefully, I thought, there was time to get these people out of here.

  But it was too late for anything like that.

  A loud shriek pierced the air. Actually, calling it a shriek is misleading. It sounded like two oaks being rubbed together. I looked in the general direction of the sound, but couldn’t see anything except trees.

  And then one of the trees moved.

  THE GOD SMILED AT SILENUS. “I CAN BEST A MAN IN COMBAT, OR TEACH HIM TO MAKE WINE AND DRINK WITH HIM UNTIL THE SUN RISES, SETS, AND RISES AGAIN. BUT IF HIS MIND IS SET, I CAN NO MORE CHANGE IT THAN COMMAND THE FOREST TO WALK. SUCH IS THE STUBBORNNESS OF MANKIND.”

  From the archives of Silenus the Elder. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne

  It probably hadn’t been standing there for very long, mainly because it didn’t seem to me like the type of creature who spent a lot of time deep in thought. Perhaps its first instinct, when coming upon the campfires, was to camouflage itself.

  And it was quite a remarkable camouflage. The dryad looked to be about fifteen feet tall. When motionless, it appeared to be nothing more than a wide-based tree trunk, the top of its head obscured by the low branches of the pine trees. But when it moved, it . . . unfolded.

  Its center expanded like an accordion until it was twice as wide, with long, thin arms stretched from the center of its torso. The hands looked like long thin twigs. It stood up on squat legs that had been tucked underneath. There was no telling where the torso ended and the head began until it opened its mouth to emit another shriek.

  Everyone in the compound turned with the second roar from the dryad. (This one was deeper, and sounded like high winds racing through a hollow log.) Even the drugged-out mystai seemed to understand that this was not simply another hallucination, as those closest to it began to scatter, and a loud murmur of crowd panic settled upon the scene.

  “Yes . . .” I heard Gordon whine. He was lying on the ground, just at the edge of the stage. He’d covered his face in snow in an effort to neutralize the chemical bath I’d given him. “The Great Protector comes!”

  The dryad put one hand on the trunk of the nearest tree, and immediately the nub of a branch sprouted out. All at once those green patches of grass we’d found in the snow made perfect sense. It wasn’t that the creature’s footsteps were revealing the grass; the grass below was growing up towards the creature’s feet.

  And then it sprang forward.

  I have seen things in my lifetime that move quickly, are deadly, and very large. Vampires, old ones, can move extremely fast and are known to be deadly when provoked. But they tend to be man-sized. Dragons were capable of growing to nearly the same height as the dryad, but the larger they got, the slower they moved. I had never seen anything move like this god of the woods.

  Its motion was jerkily unreal, like a stop-action monster from a fifties movie. But it was decidedly efficient. It covered twenty feet in only a few seconds. The twig-like fingers lashed out and raked through the crowd of people—they were already running and screaming, as one does—and struck down four with one blow. Blood arced through the air.

  Hippos jumped to the forest floor and picked up Boehan’s gun. “Shoot it, you slugs!” he shouted. He began firing over the heads of the mystai, trying to hit the creature without hitting them. These poor people didn’t know which way to run; away from the killer tree or away from the loud semi-automatic.

  The other satyrs had been torn between bowing to me, shooting me, and wondering what in Zeus’s name was bearing down on the crowd. Hippos’ entreaty seemed to help them resolve their confusion. They joined in and began shooting as well.

  It didn’t appear to make any difference. TEC-9’s are not the sort of thing you use to gun down something from a distance, but I had to think at least a few of the bullets were finding their mark, and yet the dryad continued its charge into the crowd. It was a slaughter.

  We had to get everyone to safety first and then worry about how to kill it. But where are you safe from a forest god in the middle of a forest?

  “On a lake,” I said to myself.

  I jumped off the stage and found Hippos. “Get the people onto the ice!”

  He stopped shooting long enough to think about this. “Yes,” he agreed. “I believe you are right.”

  Hippos, I decided, would make a great field general. Seconds after handing me his gun, he’d gotten the other satyrs organized. Four of them positioned themselves between the dryad and the fleeing crowd, while Hippos, Dyanos, and the other four started to corral everyone onto the lake.

  “Adam, what in Christ’s name is that?” Mike asked. He’d run to the altar when the shooting had begun and basically looked like he just found out the Easter Bunny was real.

  “A dryad,” I explained. “It’s the same kind of thing that killed Lonnie Wicks.”

  “A dryad? Seriously. Isn’t he supposed to be a naked girl or something?”

  “You can tell it that if you want.”

  “No thanks. How do we kill it?”

  “Working on it.”

  The bullets were definitely impacting the dryad, but they were about as effective as they might be to a real tree. The creature’s claws, meanwhile, were devastating. One of the satyrs protecting Hippos’ back stood still for a half second too long and h
ad his head removed with a backhand swing. This inspired the remaining satyrs to move more quickly while still shooting. Meanwhile, Hippos was finding it difficult to convince all of the stoned mystai to get onto the ice, and probably wished he’d kept his gun. Fortunately, Dyanos and the others still had theirs, and began firing over people’s heads to convince them to congregate in the proper direction.

  Then a second satyr from the defensive line fell. With the guns doing no damage, the only thing keeping the creature from the mystai was all the jumping around the satyrs were doing. And that was only working because they were really annoying it.

  “What do we know about it?” Mike asked. “It has to have a weakness.”

  “Gordon,” I said, as another of the satyrs fell, or rather flew. We were going to run out of satyrs soon.

  Gordon was still on his knees at the foot of the stage. Ariadne was beside him, and when Mike and I reached her, she was calmly wrapping a cloth around his eyes.

  “He’s blind,” she explained.

  “It’s so beautiful,” Gordon said happily.

  “He’s not deaf, right? He can hear the screams?”

  “The Great Protector will save us all,” he insisted.

  “Not deaf, but maybe delusional,” Ariadne offered.

  I knelt beside him. “Tell me more, Gordon. Tell me all about the Great Protector.”

  “She is in touch with all the plants of the world,” Gordon babbled. “She wills life from lifelessness, green from brown . . .”

  “Yeah, okay, I’ve seen that happen already. But how do you kill it?”

  “Why would I want to kill her?” he asked.

  “Because she’s about to kill you!”

  He bowed his head for a second, a gesture of resignation. “She can’t be killed. As long as her forest lives, so does she.”

  “Great. Where’s a logging company when you need one?”

  In the field of battle, Hippos and his men had managed to get the last of the living congregants onto the ice and had gone back to shooting at the dryad full time. There were only four satyrs left. If they were smart, they’d get on the ice with the others and leave us to fend for ourselves.