Songs_of_the_Satyrs

by Aaron J. French

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Hmmm,” said Kantzaros. “Better than ‘that’s nice’ I suppose.”

  The glass was empty and she put it down clumsily, noting that the brew had already reached her limbs.

  “And this one?” she said, indicating the other parcel.

  “That one’s for January the fourth.”

  “You’re staying until my birthday?”

  “Of course. But what’s this?” He leant across the sofa, plucked Robert’s badly wrapped present from under the tree.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “It’s going to be embarrassingly rubbish.”

  “Fantastic! I can’t wait.”

  As she reluctantly opened the parcel, Kantzaros nibbled on a strip of wrapping paper.

  Nell pulled back the leaves of the box to reveal a selection of steel kitchenware: spatula, whisk, potato peeler, and cheese grater all sat in the bowl of a colander.

  “I always moaned about not having enough utensils,” she said.

  Kantzaros nodded. “That’s . . . um . . . hmmm. Who is this gift from?”

  “Robert.”

  “And who’s Robert?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t,” she said, smiling. She jiggled her glass at him and he obligingly topped it off with nectar. As she drank, she luxuriated in the physical warmth it transferred to her.

  “Drink of the gods, eh?”

  “You betcha,” said Kantzaros. “Tantalus was condemned to eternal torment for daring to steal it.”

  “And you?”

  “Huh?” He looked at her and his roguish grin wrinkled oddly. “Damned and blessed in equal measure. I am the night on the town and the morning after.”

  She reached forward and ruffled his hair. Her fingers lingered on his stubby horns. “You are the very devil, Kantzaros.”

  “There is a certain superficial similarity.”

  He put his hand to the crown of her head, felt the smooth, hornless curve of her skull, and then brought his hand down to cup her cheek.

  “So where’s my Christmas present?” he said.

  She stood up and bent to put a kiss on his forehead. He smelt of darkness.

  “That,” she said. “And a sofa to sleep on and a blanket to keep you warm.”

  “A fine exchange,” he replied.

  ***

  On Christmas morning, while Nell prepared dinner, Kantzaros crouched by the fire and stared at the colander that Robert had bought her.

  He was so intent on the thing that he failed to notice her set the table or even bring the dinner in.

  “Kantzaros,” she said.

  He looked up. “Oh. Sorry. They used to leave them out for us in the old country.”

  “Colanders?”

  “Sieves, I suppose. In hope that we would be fascinated by them and be distracted from our mischief-making until dawn.”

  “It’s just a colander.”

  “But all the little holes!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you feel the need to count them all? Huh?”

  “Right,” she said. “And given that you can’t count above two means . . .”

  “Well, quite,” he added.

  “Fauns are OCD,” she mused.

  There was wine with the food and when there was no more food there was still more wine.

  Kantzaros made extravagant toasts, many of which Nell did not understand. He told tales of the “old country” and of the schemes and ploys of the beautiful centaurs, of his battles of wits with the hare and the wolf. He spoke of kings and heroes and, in his growing drunkenness, it was uncertain whether he was speaking of them or to them. And Nell, in her own drunkenness, imagined that she caught glimpses of those he spoke of, shades that hovered in the corners of the darkening room.

  She drifted into sleep with stories wrapped around her, her head lay on a cushion of soft green leaves and moss, and in her dreams, she was lifted up by the cavalcade of characters in her uncle’s stories and taken with them on their endless journey.

  ***

  On Boxing Day, Kantzaros lay on the sofa with his scarf over his eyes and groaned in pain and repentance for his night of drinking.

  “You drank more the other night,” said Nell. “Why the hangover today?”

  “Because,” he said through gritted teeth, “today is a day for hangovers. The world has gorged itself and now is the day to sweep away the leavings and put the boxes out for the tradesmen, to pay the piper and acknowledge the fragility of everything.”

  “If you say so. Can I get you anything?”

  “The crushed bark of the willow tree.”

  “You mean aspirin.”

  “It sounds better the way I say it,” he muttered.

  ***

  On Saturday, along with the food and alcohol, Kantzaros produced from nowhere a set of bagpipes, a peculiar furry octopus with dusty clay legs. The music he played was simple at first, a mere nursery rhyme, but then, as his fingers leapt from pipe to pipe to pipe with spidery dexterity, the tune branched out into numerous distinct melodies that wove around one another, sometimes fighting for dominance, sometimes spiralling up to some heartrending height as one.

  When—and Nell couldn’t say whether Kantzaros had played for a minute or a day—when he stopped playing, he gave her an expectant look.

  “A better piper than a caroller?” he asked.

  “That was astounding.”

  “Ha!” he barked. “You would call the finest wines of Arcadia merely nice but are astounded by a man with an inflated goatskin.”

  “A relative of yours?” said Nell wryly.

  “Yes,” said Kantzaros. “But I didn’t like him very much.” And then he grinned with a mouth full of peg-like teeth and she didn’t know what to believe.

  ***

  Snow blew in from the east and the world became a colder and grayer place. And by contrast the fairy-lit glow of her little flat was made warmer and more colorful until she was spending her days in a whirlwind haze of Arcadian wine and the songs and stories of her uncle.

  And then it was suddenly New Year’s Eve and she surprised herself by dancing along to Kantzaros’s pipes, and at midnight he raised his glass, yelled, “Janus, you’ll never see me coming, you two-faced bastard!” and bounded across the furniture, leaping from chair to table to chair before pulling down a shelf and falling to the earth with a bump, surrounded by books Nell could not remember owning.

  ***

  On New Year’s Day, they walked in the park and threw bread to the ducks on the ice-covered pond. Every crumb of bread Kantzaros threw seemed to transform midflight into a stone, and he hooted with glee each time one of his stones struck an unwary and sometimes terminally surprised duck.

  Nell put her arm through his and gently steered him away from the pond and toward the Victorian glasshouse at the centre of the park.

  She tugged at the edge of his scarf. “Is it deliberate?”

  “What?” said Kantzaros.

  “The scarf. The brolly. You look like wotsisname out of those children’s books by thingy.”

  “Ever loquacious, dear niece.”

  “You know, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

  He spat on the ground. “That foul piece of Christianization. Yes. You refer to Mr Tumescent the Faun. Cast into the role of petty Judas, you’d note.”

  “I don’t think that was his name.”

  “Who’s the expert here?”

  She frowned at him.

  “So what’s it like underground?” she said.

  “Dark,” he replied.

  “I mean, do you really live underground, sawing through the world tree and that?”

  “It is what I said.”

  “I mean . . . I didn’t know if it was a metaphor or something.”

  “Have you ever tried living in a metaphor?”

  “Where will you go when you leave me? Where will you actually go?”

  “Mmmm. Do you think I am a dream? A fantasy? A mental delusion?”

  She nodded
and then said, “I mean, if this is a mental breakdown I’m having then I would heartily recommend it to others.”

  “Thank you.” He squeezed her arm affectionately. “There are dark places in this world. Gray, windowless caverns. And the world tree has many roots to be sawn through. What separates me and mine from the great galumphing human race is we know what we’re doing and we’re wise enough to give it a rest from time to time.”

  ***

  The following day, she left for work before he woke.

  After the last few days, the Blame ‘n’ Claim call center seemed ethereal and otherworldly. Despite the holiday season there were plenty of calls to field, but she couldn’t keep her mind on the job. She stumbled over her script and lost the thread of things more than once.

  She went to the coffee machine for a caffeine boost and a chance to collect herself. Nell found a group of office underlings around the coffee machine, sharing a joke. Robert was among them.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi there,” said Robert. “How was your Christmas?”

  “Oh. I had a mad uncle drop by for a couple of days.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t have an uncle.”

  “I didn’t know you paid attention to things I said.”

  He paused lengthily and Nell realized that she knew less about Robert than she thought.

  “Thank you for the present,” she said. “Very . . .”

  “Practical.”

  She smiled. “Nice,” she said. “It was very nice.”

  “I think ‘nice’ is even worse than ‘practical.’ ”

  “My uncle liked the colander.”

  “Good for him. Frankly, I might as well have sent you a big sign saying ‘cook for me.’ Next time, I’ll cook.”

  “You don’t cook.”

  “I will, next time,” he said.

  “Next time?”

  He coughed awkwardly. “And New Year?”

  She shrugged. “Took the mad uncle to the park so he could throw stones at the ducks. You?”

  “The best,” he said and that caused a wave of laughter from the underlings around them.

  “What?” said Nell.

  “Oh, nothing.” He grinned. “We had a very good New Year.”

  There was further laughter from the others. It was dirty and secretive and hurt her, not because it was directed at her, but because it suggested that Robert, who she had never thought as special enough to belong anywhere, did not belong exclusively to her. She was surprised to find herself feeling and thinking such things.

  Something must have shown on her face because he touched her arm tentatively.

  “You could have been there,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she replied hollowly.

  “But you could have,” he said. “All you had to do was turn up.”

  She nodded silently as she backed away.

  ***

  Before her front door had even closed behind her, she angrily ripped the skirt from her waist and flung it across the room where it swept the tacky little Christmas tree from its stand and fell down behind the television.

  Kantzaros, who had been sleeping on the sofa with the colander over his face, sat up, put down the colander and the wine glass he’d been holding, and looked at her violent handiwork.

  “Taking down the decorations already?” he said blearily.

  Nell wiped away the snot and tears with the back of her hand. “Why me, eh?” she said.

  “Hmmm?”

  She gestured at her bare legs and gave an involuntary stamp of one of her hooves.

  “I didn’t ask for these.”

  “You have there some mighty fine goat legs, Nell. Stirs something in a man, I tell you.”

  She gave a suppressed yell of rage. “Who the fuck would want mighty fine goat legs?”

  “Goats?” suggested Kantzaros.

  She picked up the nearest thing to hand, which turned out to be Kantzaros’s bagpipes, and lobbed them inexpertly at his head. They bounced off his face with a sharp, discordant squeak.

  “I want you out of here,” she growled and then stormed into her bedroom, threw herself on her bed, and buried her face in her pillows.

  A short time later, she heard the bedroom door open.

  “You were conceived and born in the Chinese year of the goat.”

  She rolled over. Kantzaros stood in the doorway, very still.

  “And you’re a Capricorn,” he added.

  “So was Jesus,” she said. “He didn’t have to put up with hooves and fur, did He?”

  “Any child born during the twelve days of Christmas can become one of us.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “And with me for a father, the odds were against you.”

  She sat up suddenly. “Father?”

  He spluttered. “Father. Uncle. Brother. It’s all good.”

  She shook her head.

  “There are antidotes,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “I could bind you in ropes woven from straw or garlic stalks.”

  “Not sure if I’ve got any in the flat.”

  “There’s the singeing of the toenails thing, too.” He looked at her hooves. “Mmmm, maybe a bit late for that.”

  “I just want to be normal,” said Nell.

  “No you don’t,” said Kantzaros vehemently. “You want something and you just need to be strong enough to recognize it.”

  “What do I want?”

  From nowhere he produced two glasses of wine.

  “I don’t think alcohol is the answer,” said Nell.

  “No. Alcohol is the axle grease of thought and conversation and decision and deed. Wine is part of the journey, not the destination. Drink up and we’ll be on our way.”

  She shook her head but took the glass nonetheless. He sat down on the bed beside her and stroked her leg. Nell watched his fingers burying themselves in her fur.

  “Why goat legs?” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “But why goat? Why not sheep or cow or horse or dog?”

  “Or chicken.”

  “Or chicken.”

  “Goats are intelligent creatures. Inquisitive. And even when you think you have them tamed, there’s still that bit of wild left in them. We’re not docile like sheep or cows. You can never trust a goat.”

  “Can’t I trust you?” said Nell.

  He squeezed her thigh, tenderly but powerfully. “Absolutely not,” he said. “The desert tribes knew our power. The Arabs called us azabb al-akaba, the ‘shaggy demons.’ The Israelites called us se’irim or ‘hairy men’ and tried to placate us with gifts and sacrificial offerings.”

  “Get away.”

  “S’true, till that bloody Moses character anyway, with his ‘you shall no more offer your sacrifices to the se’irim after whom you have gone a-whoring.’ Makes it sound like they were a-whoring after me all the bloody time. Fat chance. Anyway, it was a short step from there to blaming the sins of the tribe on a goat and sending it out into the desert to die.”

  “A scapegoat?”

  “Right. But it takes a lot more than a desert to kill a goat. And, the way I see it, if you keep heaping sins on a goat for long enough, that goat’ll get to thinking . . .” He drained his glass and looked through it. “Belief’s a powerful thing.”

  He stood up and took her by the hand into the lounge, where he sat her down on the sofa and refilled their glasses. “And speaking of gifts and offerings,” he said and pulled down the red parcel with green ribbon from the mantelpiece and placed it in her lap.

  “It’s not my birthday until tomorrow,” said Nell.

  Kantzaros looked at the clock on top of the television. “It’s true. We could wait for five hours.”

  They sat in silence for nearly a full minute before Nell growled and opened the parcel.

  The V-shaped object was dark and had the greasy shine of something that had been held by a thousand different hands. She couldn’t tell if it was mad
e of stone or wood or some strange metal, as she lifted it out.

  “Pipes,” she said.

  There was one mouthpiece leading to two pipes, set at an angle to one another. Carved trails of ivy—or maybe it was actual ivy—twined around the pipes and bound them together.

  “More pipes,” she said.

  “Ah, but these are different from the bagpipes,” said Kantzaros.

  “Well, I can see that. The absence of a bag for one thing.”

  “Not what I meant,” said Kantzaros. “The bagpipes are mine. These auloi are yours.”

  She smiled. “I can’t play.”

  “Belief,” said Kantzaros and got up in search of a fresh bottle of wine.

  While her uncle made investigative noises in the kitchen, Nell put the pipe reed to her lips and blew. The pipes produced a harmonious two-tone note.

  “And you said you couldn’t play,” called Kantzaros.

  She experimentally covered a hole with her fingertip. The notes changed although perhaps not for the better. She tried other fingerings until she managed to produce a harmony equal to the first.

  “Here,” said Kantzaros, thrusting a glass at her. “Piping is thirsty work.”

  “I’ve only just started,” she said, but drank regardless.

  “Wine improves music,” said Kantzaros. “And more.”

  “It only makes it appear to sound better.”

  “We live in a world of appearances, don’t we?” He picked up his bagpipes. “With me now.”

  He began a simple tune. She watched him and his hands on the pipes. She found a configuration of notes that, to her ear, harmonized with his pipes, and when his fingers galloped on into other variations and counter-harmonies, she kept the simple tune going. Cheeks puffing, he nodded in approval and played on.

  His pipes were louder but the sound she produced was clearer, purer, more akin to a brass instrument than the woodwind she held in her hands. While his music skittered and bounded, melodies running like animals through the shady and twisted woods, her music was the sunlight, sometimes concealed by his music, frequently revealed in unusual ways, but always there, a constant.