Hellenic Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  “And at least seven scribes, based on the hand.”

  “You’ve seen them?”

  “I have. They are largely unimportant. Were it not for the one correct prediction that saved the cult itself, the scrolls would have been abandoned long ago. It was in those scrolls that the return of Philopaigmos was prophesized.”

  “Just . . . a return?”

  “No. There was some matter of saving us all. It was interpreted for much of history to mean restoring the Telesterion, but who knows.”

  I nodded and drank up some of my own beer, a strong, dark brew that I liked quite a lot, which was why it was the third one I’d had. “I think I was in Carthage around then.”

  Kargus made a grunting noise I’d come to associate with disbelief.

  “I was,” I insisted. “By then Greece was a minor satellite of the Roman Empire, and the Romans were . . . well, I didn’t care for them. I’m surprised the cults even lasted to the third century.”

  Kargus scoffed. “You are terrible at this.”

  “I’m not pretending. Look, to be honest, after I left Athens I figured everyone eventually just gave up and went home. Not that the rituals weren’t fun. Do you know what’s in the kiste?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “With your lineage, you must be an initiate. Do you?”

  Kargus spoke cautiously, and with a considerable increase in gravity. “I know what we place within the kiste, and why, and what is done when it is removed.”

  “Ah, but that isn’t what I asked, is it?”

  At the start of Boedromion—which is the name of a month, not a ceremony—the kiste is supposed to be filled with a variety of foodstuff that each hold ceremonial significance. The food doesn’t get withdrawn until the rituals of Eleusis, fourteen days later. But there was something that never left the box, and Kargus didn’t know what that was. If he did, it would have made proving my identity to him that much easier.

  He lifted an eyebrow ever so slightly. “You are an odd one, Greg.”

  “Perhaps I am. Now tell me; how many Philopaigmoses have there been?”

  He smiled. It’s one of the few expressions they have that looks human, because they had taught themselves to do that. It’s hard to pick up human women if you don’t know how to smile on a detectable level. “Dozens. None lasted much longer than it took for those paying attention to recognize the claimant was aging. They ranged from the amusingly misguided to the incredibly dangerous.”

  “But why?” I asked. “Or rather how? I didn’t even realize the Mysteries had survived until recently, so your secret has been . . . well kept.” Not to say I had been looking. “If it was the satyros that kept the Mysteries alive, how would a human male know enough to make such a declaration?”

  “That was the mistake many of our kind made in the past. Who would claim to be who was not? How would they know? But politics are what they are. In the early days, a claimant was generally coached by one of us.”

  “A puppet.” I thought of Pisistratus’s temporary Athena.

  “Exactly. But now we have many humans in the cult, so there is really no telling. And these things have consequences.”

  Kargus looked away, and I wondered exactly how much he wasn’t telling me. But the pieces were all there, and when I put them together, I got the picture. A man who claimed to be Philopaigmos the sojourner was somehow responsible for the kiste’s absence.

  “How will the ceremony proceed this season without the kiste?” I asked, after a time.

  “We are in the month of Boedromion right now,” he admitted. “There will be no ceremony for those of us still in Athens.”

  “They are taking place elsewhere?”

  Kargus grumbled something unintelligible into his beer before looking up again. “There are some that feel the Mysteries should serve a more public purpose. And another kind of god.”

  That was a statement that deserved much more clarification, but I could tell I wouldn’t be getting one, so I tried to find my way around it. “I never saw the gods as being the most important thing about the Mysteries. It’s a celebration of harvest, and life. It’s not all that versatile.”

  “Versatile?”

  “It used to be a harvest celebration, and now it’s being honored by people far from farmlands.”

  “And nature,” he suggested. “And the gods.”

  “The gods were incidental,” I insisted.

  Kargus laughed. “My friend, I take back what I said earlier. You make a fine Philopaigmos. I am sure you will do well.”

  This was sarcasm, which I could live with. It was the rest of it that gave me pause. “Do well? In what sense?”

  “There is a process for when one such as yourself turns up making declarations. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  I looked around the room—I’d stupidly sat with my back to the door—and realized we were in the midst of at least three satyrs aside from Kargus, all younger and less likely to be nursing a bad back.

  “They will take you to the new Telesterion for the test,” Kargus added. “Nothing the true Philopaigmos would have issue with.”

  Another satyr walked into the tavern. He was older than the rest, but looked supremely fit. I didn’t like my chances with any of them. The elder locked eyes on the one nearest to me and nodded. All three of the satyrs stood.

  “Tell me, Kargus. What happens to the ones who fail the test?”

  “I don’t know, actually,” he said, standing as well. “I imagine they just send them on their way.”

  A hand fell hard on my shoulder, and I stood up to avoid the discomfort of being yanked to my feet. He had a gun tucked into his belt, and he made sure I saw it.

  “Send them on their way, you say?”

  Kargus smiled. “What else would they do?”

  * * *

  If you ever wondered what the vehicle of choice is for a party of satyrs, it’s a Ford Explorer. And the back seat isn’t nearly as roomy as you might think it is when you’re the only human in the car and you’re crammed between two of them.

  It took us a while to clear the city, which was persistently devoured by traffic no matter what the hour was. We were heading north.

  The lead satyr’s name was Hippos, and that was the extent of what I knew. I had tried striking up a number of conversations, but nobody was interested in speaking, or even making eye contact. It was kind of unnerving, and mildly reminiscent of those scenes in mob movies where some unfortunate is driven off to the woods to be shot.

  That seemed to be the general idea here. Once we got on the highway, I realized we were heading roughly in the direction of Mount Parnitha. From what I recalled from the various hotel maps I’d had the chance to review, it was one of the few places left in the region that looked vaguely like it did when I last lived here. Woods, in other words.

  The young one to my left kept fiddling with the gun in his waistband. It seemed the seatbelt pressing up against it was causing him discomfort.

  “I hope for your sake the safety is on,” I said, watching him adjust himself.

  He glared at me and went back to staring out the window.

  “I’m just saying that’s not the best place to carry a gun. You should slip it into a pocket or something.”

  “Be quiet,” Hippos hissed from the passenger seat.

  “You know your ancestors would be outraged to see your kind with guns,” I said to him.

  He looked at me with disgust. “Our ancestors were here before there were guns. And what would you know of it, pretender?”

  Well. At least he’d gotten around to calling me a pretender. Not that his feelings toward me weren’t already sort of obvious. “I know they didn’t care at all for metal. I don’t suppose these are wooden guns.”

  “They’re very real guns,” he countered. “And you should take care not to speak as if you know anything about us. You’ll only make yourself look foolish.”

  I leaned forward, which was more or less the only emphatic motion I
had at my disposal. “When the soldiers first came to the great woods with metal swords and armor, the satyros fought them back with sharpened wooden staffs and guile. After the battle, one of the satyr warriors picked up a discarded sword and brought it to the elder of his clan. The elder wondered what type of wood the sword was as he took it in his hands. He noted it was cold to the touch, like water, but hard like rock and sharp like a thorn, and heavier than the hard wood of his walking stick. ‘This is a tool of the Duh-ryadyh,’ the elder had said fearfully. And then he ordered the young warrior to bring it to the edge of the woods and bury it. Only then would the tribe be protected from the wrath of their angry destroyer-god. And for centuries after, each time the satyros found metal in the woods they did exactly that.”

  Hippos said nothing, but turned to glare at me.

  “Don’t speak as if you know anything about me,” I urged him. “You’ll only make yourself look foolish.”

  * * *

  The rest of the drive—it seemed to be over an hour once we hit the highway but was probably less—went by mostly in silence. The main road diverged onto a smaller one, and a smaller one still, and soon we were on a dirt path with trees dangerously close to scraping the side of the vehicle. I couldn’t think of a much better place for a body dump, other than perhaps the ocean, which would have been a much longer drive. In my favor, I was nearly positive they weren’t going to shoot me in the car.

  We attained a flattened clearing, a spot that could hold twenty or thirty cars, but at the time was empty. It was the cult’s new Eleusis. In the old days, the mystai would spend an entire day just walking there; today’s version hiked in air-conditioned SUV’s.

  The satyros had gotten soft, and that was a possible advantage.

  The driver—I’m nearly positive they called him Frank, which is not a very popular name for a satyr or a Greek—parked near the opening of a small footpath and shut off the car.

  Hippos turned. “Out,” he commanded us.

  A few minutes later, we were walking up the path. The moon was bright, if no longer full, but it didn’t help visibility all that much, as the forest was still impressively thick. Not as overgrown as it had been back in ancient times, but close.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked.

  Hippos didn’t respond, and the younger ones with him were either not at liberty to speak, or were mute or something. I decided I was tired of expecting a bullet in the back of the head.

  Body language in satyrs, as I’ve pointed out, is a little harder to read than it is in people, but men carrying guns read the same in every species. Specifically, I could tell the one behind me and on my left had never actually fired a gun before and was nervous about having one in his hands. This would be the same one who couldn’t decide how to deal with both the gun and the seatbelt in the car. I had no chance at all of overpowering him and getting it, but I didn’t have to; I just needed him to keep thinking about that gun rather than me.

  So when we reached a slight bend in the path, rather than stride forward, I planted one foot and drove my weight backward, then swung my elbow down and made contact with his gun hand. The impact wasn’t nearly sufficient to knock the gun to the ground, but it didn’t need to be, because for that half second all he was thinking about was not dropping it.

  And that was all I needed to disappear.

  * * *

  If you had asked me a week earlier if it made sense to hide from a party of satyrs in a wooded area, I would have suggested you had a better chance of hiding from a shark in a shark tank. But if the modern satyr lives in a city and drives a car, he probably wouldn’t be able to hunt for his food or move silently through the forest floor, or vanish into the underbrush like his ancestors.

  Whereas I could still do all of those things.

  * * *

  I left a loud, clean trail for my first thirty seconds in the woods, something anybody with functioning eyes and ears would be able to follow easily. This may seem counterintuitive, but assuming they were smart enough to follow the path, I knew where they were up until they reached the point where the trail stopped.

  Had these satyrs known what the hell they were doing, I would have been caught before those thirty seconds were up. All it would have taken was for one or two of them to take to the trees and follow me from the top of the canopy. But the modern versions thought like humans and humans stay on the ground, hold their guns out in front of them, and run toward the sounds. If I weren’t counting on them to be inept, I would have cried.

  Predictably they followed the path, making enough noise to be mistaken for a stampede. Two of them walked right past me, close enough that were I so inclined, I could have grabbed one by the arm. I was not so inclined; they may have gone soft, but I still didn’t like my odds in hand-to-hand combat.

  “I found his shoes,” one declared, which meant he had reached the end of my trail. I had to kick off the shoes because it’s extremely difficult to move about silently with them on; I needed the feel of the ground under my toes.

  My decision to discard footwear was met with great confusion. “Why would he do that?” I heard, followed by, “I have no idea.”

  I stifled a laugh. Laughter is generally frowned upon when trying to hide.

  “Pretender!” a loud, deep voice boomed. It was Hippos, and it sounded like he was still on the footpath. That left one satyr unaccounted for. “You are several kilometers from shelter and the night is cold.”

  “And he has no shoes!” shouted one of the young ones helpfully.

  I made my way closer to the path. One of the tricks to hiding in the woods is to actually keep moving, especially if someone’s actively looking for you. The satyrs of yore could stay motionless for hours and be completely unseen by man or animal, but neither man nor animal was expecting them so it was permissible. In my situation, staying put only meant giving my pursuers an opportunity to find me by process of elimination.

  “We have no plans to harm you,” Hippos declared. “And you’re going to freeze to death out here.”

  “Do you think I’m an idiot?” I asked him.

  He and the two in the woods all darted towards my voice, which was fine because I wasn’t standing where the voice came from. (There are a few different ways to do this and it’s complicated, but you know how a sand dune will completely mask the sound of the ocean until you reach the top of it? It’s like that. Kind of.)

  I continued, turning in another direction and offering a new place for them to hone in on. “I survived for over two centuries alone in these woods, satyr. I can last a few nights. Can you?”

  It would have seemed as if my voice was coming from four or five different directions. I could see Hippos at the edge of the path, looking up in case I was hiding in the trees. I was actually about ten meters from him, at eye level.

  “I can have twenty more here in under an hour, “ he countered. “You’ll eventually run out of places to hide.”

  Well that was true enough, especially if one or two of them knew what they were doing. I was sort of hoping someone came to their senses and realized I was who I said I was, so I didn’t have to spend the next two weeks playing commando. But Hippos was not going to be the one to make that leap.

  I could hear someone coming down the path. At first I thought Hippos’s reinforcements had already begun to arrive until I remembered I had been missing a satyr in my head count. He must have been sent ahead. And he’d brought someone back with him—someone shorter, and probably human. I couldn’t see who, but I had a guess.

  A quiet conversation on the pathway ensued, and I could tell by the rising tenor on Hippos’s end of it that he wasn’t happy. I waited, and listened to the two in the forest as they made enough noise to warn everything with ears in a two-mile radius that they were there. I seriously considered finding a sharpened stick and killing them one at a time just to prove a point.

  The conversation ended. I could see long, black hair, and when I moved slightly closer to the path, the
rest of her came into view. She was wearing a loose raincoat over a white chiton, and sandals, which was a disconcerting blend of styles.

  My favorite memories of chitons on women—and I have quite a few—involved warm weather, a great amount of wine, and a lot of debauching. Ariadne looked like she had stepped right out of one of those memories.

  Except for the coat. London Fog, I think. But, it was cool out.

  “Sojourner,” she called, in English. It sounded strange, as I’d been speaking Greek for the better part of a month. “Adam. You know who I am.”

  “Hello, Ariadne,” I greeted. She lifted her chin at the sound of my voice and smiled.

  “That is a clever trick.” Ariadne turned to Hippos. “Your ancestors taught him this, Hippos. These are ways even you have forgotten.”

  Hippos muttered something I couldn’t entirely make out, but which included a word that sounded like ninja. He didn’t look as impressed as he probably should have been.

  “Are you their hierophant?” I asked.

  Ariadne turned to face the woods again. “I am.”

  I took two steps closer to the road. “You’re sure about that?”

  She glared at Hippos. “You were in no danger,” she insisted. “It’s very complicated. Let’s say that false claimants to your name have proven unusually damaging of late.”

  “The kiste is missing,” I elaborated.

  “It’s not missing. We know exactly where it is.”

  Well, that was a mite confusing. “Explain.”

  Ariadne sighed. “I’d rather not air our political problems by shouting at a forest all evening, in any language. Why don’t you come out and we can sit down and have a proper conversation? Our retreat is just beyond the ridge.”

  That did sound sort of nice, and much better than spending the night in the woods. “Tell me first why your adherents believe the kiste has been taken,” I asked.

  “Because it has.”

  “But not by the hierophant of the order.”

  “As I said, it’s complicated.”

  I stepped out of the tree line about three meters in front of her. “You have a schism,” I guessed.