George thought he was a dead man. By the way Ampelus moaned, the satyr expected the wolves to tear them to pieces in the next instant, too. But they didn’t. Some small part of Vucji Pastir’s glamour still clung to George. The wolves, however, did whine and growl when he tried to go forward. When he turned around and started uphill, the way he had come, they were silent.
“I think,” he said carefully, “we’d better head back.”
“See?” Ampelus said. “I told you so.”
“You’ll make someone a fine wife one day,” George snapped. The satyr laughed at him. He looked over his shoulder. The wolves were not tagging along at his heels, as they had before. That made him more glad than otherwise: sooner or later, they were going to figure out that he’d duped them. He didn’t want them anywhere near his heels then.
As things happened, he’d put most of a mile between himself and the wolves before a furious howling broke out at his back. They didn’t catch up with him and Ampelus before the two of them had returned to the encampment from which they’d set out. Nor did they prove willing to attack the centaurs there. After more hideous howls, they went away.
“I can’t go to Thessalonica in the daytime,” George muttered, “and I can’t go at night, either. What does that leave?” He didn’t think it left anything, but there had to be a way into the city. No--he wanted a way into the city. There was, unfortunately, all too often a difference between what he wanted and what there was.
X
A satyr named Ithys, whom George hadn’t met before, came into the camp the next morning. Where the satyrs and centaurs there moped, Ithys bounced and sparkled. “Tell me why,” Ampelus said, scowling, “or I throw something at you.”
“I tell you why.” Ithys leaped in the air from sheer high spirits. “Find woman in village--Lete. Give her all my loving. All my loving, I give to her.” He leaped again, like a happy billy goat.
That instantly raised the satyrs’ spirits, and their phalluses, though the centaurs stayed glum. “Tell me, tell me,” Stusippus exclaimed.
“I want to tell you,” Ithys said. “Yesterday, I see--”
“Tell me what you see,” Stusippus broke in.
“I try. I try. I tell the word” --logos, in Greek, could mean almost anything connected with speech and thought-- “if you not interrupting. You wait. Otherwise, I looking through you.” Ithys stood on its dignity, which was even more absurd than a dog standing on its hind legs. “First, I just see a face--”
“Then what?” This time Stusippus and Ampelus interrupted together.
“I get you, I think. I wave to her.” What Ithys waved was not a hand. “She want me.” The satyr preened. “I see her standing there. She set down her washering. She leaving home, her home. She not want to do it in road, but come out into trees. ‘Love me,’ I say. ‘Do. Please please me.’ She no ask me why. She hold me tight. We do and do and do.” Ithys panted at the memory. Ampelus and Stusippus panted, too. “Not a second time, not a third, not a fourth, not a fifth,” Ithys boasted. “She never say, ‘You can’t do that,’ like women sometimes do. When she finally have to go, ‘Any time at all,’ she say. She say, ‘I need you.’ I’ll be back, yes, yes, yes.”
Ampelus and Stusippus both sighed, jealousy and admiration perfectly mixed. “Nice someone happy,” Ampelus said. Stusippus nodded.
“Why all so gloomish here?” Ithys asked. “All you need is love.” The word the satyr used was related to love, anyhow.
“Need something different,” Ampelus answered, and went on to explain what George was doing in the camp and how the shoemaker and the satyrs and centaurs had tried and failed to reach Thessalonica.
Ithys stayed cheerful. “You not know lovely Lete well, no. You come in, I show you this, too. Maybe even show you maid.” The second part of the offer raised the satyrs’. . . interest. The first part made the centaurs pay attention at last.
“What meanest thou?” Nephele demanded.
The satyr talked for some time. If not explicit, it was interesting. Finally, it said, “You come with me. I show.” It started off, presumably toward the village. George, Crotus and Nephele, and the two other satyrs followed.
Lete, as far as George was concerned, might as well have been called Lethe, or Forgetfulness. Till he walked down its narrow, muddy, twisting main street, he would not have believed any such hamlet still existed in the Roman Empire in these modern, enlightened times.
He had known paganism still survived in the hills above Thessalonica. He had always taken that to mean, though, that in some of those isolated villages pagans still lived side by side with their Christian neighbors.
But he might well have been the first Christian ever to set foot in Lete. That he walked into the village with Ithys and Ampelus and Stusippus, with Crotus and Nephele, argued that he was. Had Christians dwelt in Lete, their crosses and relics and icons would have forced the satyrs and centaurs to stay away.
The villagers stared at the centaurs, but only in surprise, not in superstitious dread. They took the satyrs utterly for granted, nodding and waving to them and calling greetings to Ithys, who was evidently a frequent visitor. Oh, a couple of matrons hustled young daughters presumably maidens off the streets when Ampelus and Ithys strolled by fondling themselves, but that was the sort of motherly precaution Irene would have taken with Sophia had they dwelt here rather than down in the city.
George got a much more careful scrutiny than satyrs or centaurs. The people of Lete were familiar with his companions. He was a stranger, and therefore an object of suspicion till proved otherwise.
He wondered what Bishop Eusebius would have made of a place like this. The short answer, he thought, was hash.
He understood why the good and holy bishop of Thessalonica left Lete alone. The good and holy bishop undoubtedly hadn’t the slightest idea the village existed. Ithys, leading the way, had found it without trouble, but George doubted whether he himself could have come back unaided. Folds in the hills hid a good many villages, but none so well as this one.
“What can they have here?” he asked Crotus.
“Means for your ingress into Thessalonica, an we be fortunate and the cockproud satyr speak sooth,” the male centaur answered.
That was more of a response than any George had dragged out of the creature till now. “What sort of means?” he demanded.
“I know not, not with certainty,” Crotus said. “I had not thought such means yet lay under the sun.”
“If you don’t know what and you don’t know whether, what in” --he almost said God’s holy name, which would have forced his companions to flight-- “do you know?”
“I know we have hitherto failed, which doth vex me, as it doth you, in no small measure,” Crotus said.
George walked along fuming. The male made no more sense than if it had suddenly started speaking Slavic. Seeing his anger and confusion, Ampelus said, “All sorts old things here: old things, strong things. Strong things, but not strong enough out there.”
That didn’t make any sense, either. And then, after a moment, it did, or maybe it did. Christianity was too strong for the old paganism of Greece. As the old faith and old powers fell back, naturally they would bring their talismans with them. Could winged slippers fly without a god in them? Or maybe the satyr meant something else altogether. George would find out.
In the midst of strangeness, one thing was familiar: the grapevine painted outside a budding near the center of the village. George said, “Shall we go in and have some wine?”
Ampelus and the other satyrs nodded. As their heads happily bobbed up and down, so did their phalluses. But Crotus and Nephele drew back in something like horror. “This is why we come not into villages,” Nephele said. “Did you not hear, foolish mortal, that wine doth madden and enrage us?”
That deep voice coming from such a lushly female form never failed to disconcert George. At the moment, his own embarrassment disconcerted him more. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I forgot.”
“Fortunate it is that the folk of Lete have memories better trained to retention,” Crotus said. “They know better than to serve us of the drink that inflameth us-- and that, by its sweet savor, tempteth us to inflammation.” The male’s left forehoof took a quarter of a step toward the tavern. When it noticed, it stood very still indeed. “I want wine,” Ampelus said.
“Wait,” George told the satyr. Pouting, it obeyed. George spoke to satyrs and centaurs both: “Who here is best able to tell us how we can use whatever is in this village against the Slavs and Avars?”
“The taverner,” Ampelus exclaimed.
Crotus and Nephele both loomed over the satyr. “Enough of this japery and nonsense,” the male centaur rambled,
“It is Gorgonius the carpenter,” Ithys said. “He has this--thing.”
“I pray he hath a tongue that scoffeth not,” Nephele said. “Lead on.”
Ithys led. George followed, not without a regretful glance at the wineshop as they passed it. He also came with a certain amount of relief that Menas had locked him and not Sabbatius out of Thessalonica. Sabbatius would have headed for the wineshop regardless of what that might do to the centaurs.
Along with the pleasant smells of new-cut wood and sawdust, Gorgonius’ establishment smelled of leather, an odor with which George was intimately familiar-- and which made him wish he were back in his own city. The carpenter was repairing the webbing of a bedframe when George and his companions came in. “Good day, friend,” Ithys said.
“Good day, good day,” Gorgonius answered, with a broad smile that grew broader when he saw the centaurs. “A good day indeed!” he exclaimed. “Welcome, welcome, thrice welcome. Your kind but seldom honors us.”
“Wine,” Crotus said. “We fear it.”
“Aye, aye.” Gorgonius nodded. He was near or past his threescore and ten; his hair and beard were the silvery white that seems to shine even indoors, and his voice sounded a little mushy because he had only a few teeth left in his head. But his eyes were still sharp, and nothing was wrong with his wits. “Satyrs and centaurs together, eh? Centaurs here in Lete at all, eh? Something is curious, sure as sure. And who’s this fellow you have with you?”
“George cometh out of Thessalonica,” Nephele said, sounding portentous in lieu of identifying him as a Christian, which the centaur could not do.