“It won’t come to that,” she insisted. “I still have some sway over him.”
“He’s insane, Ariadne,” I countered. “The only thing holding sway over him at this point is his own delusions.”
“He will listen to me. I promise.”
I stared at her for a long second, wondering if she really believed what she was saying, or if she just knew how little choice she’d left herself and was hoping for the best. “I’m going to help build the camp. And then I’m going to see if we’ve brought any beer, because I’d like to spend my last night on earth drinking, if that’s at all possible.”
* * *
An hour later, the only tent in the party had been pitched, and we’d started a small fire to keep warm by. There were no sleeping bags and we had only one day’s supply of food: dried meats and fruit. And no beer whatsoever.
Ariadne and I sat up next to the fire and made an effort to regain some mild sensation in our extremities while Dyanos and Staphus searched for more wood to burn and Hippos stepped away to contact Gordon on his own satellite phone.
“This is turning into a disaster,” I said to her quietly, in the off-chance Hippos was in earshot.
“We’re just stopping for the night.”
“Bet that’s what the campers said. ‘Let’s just stop here and wait out the storm.’ ”
Her face turned grave. “I’m trying not to think about them.”
“I can’t help it.”
Hippos returned. “He will postpone the ceremony for a day.”
“Can you do that?” I asked. The Greater Mysteries at Eleusis always took place at the same time, every year. If you missed it, you were out of luck.
“You understand little,” Hippos grunted, settling to the forest floor beside the fire.
“Then enlighten me,” I said. “And try to sound like you’re on our side instead of his. I’ll sleep better.”
Hippos and Ariadne shared a meaningful look.
“The reason I’m here is my loyalty to the line of Papodopoulos,” he explained. “That doesn’t mean I disagree with what Gordon Alecto intends to do. And if you are who she says you are, you might agree as well.”
“I know only that he plans to revive an old god. Why don’t you help me better understand that decision?”
Ariadne shot Hippo a look and sighed. “Go ahead.”
“He is reinventing the Mysteries,” he explained.
“Reinventing how?”
“Into something more meaningful for the satyros. It was our line that kept the Mysteries alive all these centuries. Gordon would take us back to our roots. You saw for yourself how far we have strayed from our origins.”
“So you would do what? Divest your worldly possessions, shed your clothes and live off the land? I don’t think that’s possible anymore.” And we’re all better off for it. I complain from time to time about the lack of a genuine forest to visit, and I do feel the loss, but at the same time, living off the land kind of sucks.
“This is true,” Hippos agreed. “Which is why he is seeking the help from the old gods. The forests of the world are dying. Only they can help.”
I glanced at Ariadne. “He’s kidding.”
“No, that’s about right,” she said, a slight smile on her face.
“The Greeks called them nymphs,” Hippos added helpfully. “They were our gods before we came out of the woods.”
“Duh-ryadyh,” I said.
Hippos looked surprised. “In the archaic tongue, yes. Dryads. Wood nymphs.”
Before I had an opportunity to react appropriately to this, a high-pitched scream echoed through the valley.
Ariadne jumped. “What was that?”
“Staphus,” Hippos said, leaping to his feet. “That sounded like Staphus.”
“Put out the fire!” I started throwing snow on the fire as quickly as I could, not bothering to put my gloves back on first.
“What are you doing?” Ariadne asked. “Stop that!”
I ignored her and kept digging for more snow. The fire was smoking, but didn’t appear to be going anywhere.
“What could have happened to him?” Hippos asked.
“Staphus is dead, ambassador,” I said. “Now help me put out the fire.”
“Hippos!” Ariadne called. He finally noticed what I was doing.
“We need the fire, you fool!” he said, stepping in front of me. “Have you gone mad?”
“Actually, no, I’m the only sane one here.” I got to my feet to meet him face to chin. “Your ancestors didn’t worship the gods of the wood, you ignorant Athenian.”
To call a satyr an Athenian was a greater insult than referring to one as ignorant. In the old days, the satyros who left the forest and established a life in the city were looked down upon. Hence, it didn’t happen all that often.
“What do you know of it!” he roared, and for a second I thought he was about to hit me.
“Do you know what the gods were to the satyros?” I asked. “They were terrible things. Things that were so terrible the old tribes—your ancestors—feared them like they feared no other thing on this earth.”
Hippos looked a bit less certain. “I don’t believe you,” he insisted.
“It doesn’t matter if you do or not. But what you do need to believe, right now, is that there is something out there that is not afraid of us. The fire is a beacon.”
He looked off in the middle distance, expecting, I suppose, for Staphus to walk into the camp and explain that he’d been frightened by a bunny, and was sorry for the gut-wrenching scream.
“Yes . . . yes, I do believe you are right.” He stepped into the middle of the fire and kicked the wood away across the snow, while I shoveled as much powder as I could onto the embers.
“Now what do you recommend?” he asked.
I pulled the still-addled Ariadne to her feet. “We move into the woods. Quickly.”
I led the two of them away from the campsite and into a thicket, huddling atop one another in brambles that effectively hid our existence from a casual prying eye.
After a few minutes of silence, Hippos said, “Somebody is coming.”
“I don’t hear anything,” I said.
“You are human,” he muttered.
“Fine. Then what does your satyr nose tell you?”
“It is still full of smoke from the fire.”
There was indeed something in the camp. We held our collective breath as it felt its way around the remnants of the fire. And then it spoke. “Hello?”
It was Dyanos. We called him over.
“What are you doing in there?” he asked. “And where is Staphus? I thought I heard something.”
* * *
The four of us remained huddled in the brush for the entire evening, using body heat for warmth. It was a poor substitute for a fire, but it kept us breathing and all of our body parts remained attached, which was a decent trade-off. On the plus side, the storm ended and the wind died down during the night and it even started to warm up a little. I managed to sleep with Ariadne on top of me, which would have been considerably more fun if there were fewer clothes involved, not to mention the threat of impending death awaiting us if we made too much noise.
I stepped out into the open in bright sunlight and stretched the kinks from my muscles. I was one big kink, and I imagined so was everyone else.
“It’s beautiful,” Ariadne commented. And she was right; it was. I pulled open the parka and took off the hood and the goggles. It felt about forty degrees, and the sunlight through the ice-covered tree branches around us reflected kaleidoscopic rainbows.
“Look here,” Hippos called. He was standing near the tent. I walked over. “Something did come for us in the night.”
The tent was slashed apart. It looked as if four parallel knives had been used. Or more obviously, four very sharp and very long claws.
“That’s what we’d look like if we had been in there.”
“Yes,” he agreed grumpily. It must hav
e been killing him to concede any point to me at all.
“I heard no sounds during the night,” he said. “Did you?”
“No. We must have slept through it.”
“I didn’t sleep,” he insisted.
On the ground near the tent were more of those peculiar bare spots I’d seen at the earlier campsite. Hippos took note of them as well.
I toed the bare patch with my boot. “You ever see that before?”
“No. It must be heavy for its footfalls to reveal the bare grass . . . whatever it is,” Hippos said.
Dyanos, who had been the first of us to leave the brambles at daybreak, returned. “I’ve found him,” he said simply. That Staphus was not standing beside him as he said it spoke volumes.
“Where?” Hippos asked.
“Over the rise. I can lead you.”
“You stay with her,” Hippos ordered. “We will go and see for ourselves.” He was referring to he and I.
“No,” I said. “Pack up; we should all go together.”
“She does not need to see this,” Hippos argued, switching to English.
I shook my head. “Actually, I think she does.”
He twitched an eyebrow, but didn’t argue further.
Ten minutes later, we’d packed all the goods that hadn’t been destroyed during the night and Dyanos led us to the final resting place of Staphus.
He’d been caught from behind just as the dead campers had, killed by a single swing at his back that had nearly cleaved him in two. Several other cuts were inflicted after he’d fallen face-first into the snow, possibly after he was already dead. There was viscera everywhere, and it hadn’t snowed hard enough during the night to cover much of it.
I caught the look of sorrow on Dyanos’s face. “He didn’t suffer much. It was the first blow that killed him. That was when we heard him cry out.”
He nodded, but I don’t think my consolation helped much.
Ariadne refused to come close enough to see what had happened to her satyr friend.
“Hippos,” I said, “get her over here.”
He walked to her, put his arm around her shoulders, and led her to the scene. Nobody seemed all that bothered by the fact that I’d just issued an order to my erstwhile captor.
“I can’t look,” Ariadne cried. “It’s so . . .” She pushed away from Hippos, but I caught her by the wrist and spun her around.
“Look at him,” I insisted.
“Why?”
“Because you knew this was going to happen.”
“What? How could I . . .”
“Peter Arnheit, Ariadne. Don’t pretend you’ve never heard the name.”
It was probably the phone call I’d placed to Mike’s cell phone that got me thinking about Peter again, but it didn’t really come into focus until I was huddled in a bush, in the dark and terrified for my life, while trying to get some sleep.
She jerked her wrist from my grasp and ran for the trees. We followed her, catching up when she stopped for a session of dry heaving. “I don’t know who you’re talking about. I swear.”
“You’re lying,” I said.
Hippos asked, “Who is this Peter?”
“He’s a fugitive,” I explained. “Part of the California Mystery Cult. A year ago, he and a friend visited the Amazon rainforest, but only Peter survived the trip. Isn’t that right, Ariadne?”
She was sitting in the snow and wiping away tears, declining to play a meaningful role in this discussion.
“What I haven’t figured out yet is how much of this has been an act.”
Ariadne reacted as if I’d slapped her. “How can you say that?”
“You put Gordon in charge. And when he became impossible to control, you found me. Maybe Peter’s trip was your idea, too.”
“It wasn’t . . .”
“You’re the only one who benefits at the end of the day. Maybe we’re as much puppets in this as Gordon is.”
“It wasn’t like that!” she shouted.
Hippos put a hand on her shoulder and spoke. “Yet there is much you have kept from us, Papodopoulos. Now would be the time to share it.”
She shook her head. “No, Hippos, you don’t . . .”
He stared in a way that caught her up short. I decided he must make for one hell of an ambassador with that stare.
“Okay, okay,” she said quietly. After a few calming breaths, she continued. “Peter was investigating the jaguar myths of the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon. That was why he and Lonnie went there. Gordon was going to go, too, but . . . he was busy traveling with me to Athens. But this was something Peter and Gordon had been doing for years. Gordon said they were looking for the Great Protector.”
“The what?” I asked.
“Syncretistic versions of the nymph myths. The Great Protector is a god-thing that defends the forests from the non-natural world.”
“From humans?”
“Or human designs, yes. I never thought much of it. Not until Lonnie was killed.”
Hippos asked, “So this man, this Lonnie, he was killed by one?”
“When Peter emerged from the rainforest, he knew two things,” Ariadne said. “One, he’d learned from the Yanomamo how to awaken the jaguar god. Two, when it’s awake, it’s angry. But I didn’t ever think . . .”
“. . . that there were two of them,” I finished her thought.
“Gordon was overjoyed,” she said. “He was sure all he needed was to get to another forest and Peter could do whatever it was he did in the Amazon to awaken the god of that forest. Gordon wants to do this in every heavily forested region on earth.”
“The ecologist’s ultimate revenge,” I said.
“I thought he was crazy to believe any of Peter’s story, but Gordon’s not listening to me anymore. Please understand that I never thought this would come about. You should have heard how insane the whole thing sounded when they explained it to me.”
Hippos’s expression had gotten stony. Even for a satyr.
“I take it you didn’t know about all of this,” I said to Hippos.
“We were told the dryad could be awakened,” he said, “and that it would bring about a great change. That such a thing was an indiscriminate killer was omitted. How did the hierophant hope to survive this experience?”
“He thinks he can control it. Remember the prophecy?” Ariadne prodded.
“Hold on, what prophecy are we talking about this time?” I asked.
“ ‘The sojourner ascendant will tame the wild, the flock to be restored’,” she recited, in nearly perfect archaic Greek. “Gordon took it to mean that only he, as Philopaigmos, can command the dryad.”
“So if I have this right, Peter woke up the dryad of the North Cascades, and now he and Gordon are calling it to Azure Lake, where Gordon plans to . . . tame it?”
“Yes.”
“How many people are there with them?”
“At least fifty,” Ariadne said. “Possibly more. Some families.”
“It’ll be a slaughter. And we’re heading right into this.”
“It’s not too late,” she assured me. “If we can just get there before it does . . .”
“Then what?” I asked. “Tell it to go away? Give it a sleeping pill? What?”
“Then you will stop it yourself, Philopaigmos,” Hippos said.
I looked at him. “What did you call me?”
He knelt down. “Forgive me for doubting you,” he said. “It is Gordon Alecto who is the impostor.” He noticed a confused Dyanos out of the corner of his eye. “Kneel, you fool. It is he.”
Poor Dyanos, having no idea what any of this was about, knelt nonetheless. For my part, this sort of thing always made me more than a little uncomfortable. “Get up, both of you,” I said.
They pulled themselves up. “What do you want us to do?” Hippos asked. “Should we leave this place?”
I turned to Ariadne. “Families?”
“Probably, yes,” she said.
“Children?”
“Yes.”
I don’t like playing hero. I never have. Some of the worst experiences of my life have come about largely because I fooled myself into thinking I had to act in some sort of heroic manner, but the truth is, the life expectancy of a hero is considerably worse than that of the pragmatic non-hero. But a valley full of people who thought they were worshipping in my name, were about to be slaughtered in my name. (That they were worshipping in my name at all was another issue. Given my significance to the early formation of the Eleusinian Mysteries I could understand it, but still; if I’m at the center of your religion, something has gone horribly wrong with your religion.)
I’d spent most of the past two days trying to figure out how to escape my apparent fate, and now that I was in a position to do just that, I realized Ariadne had been right all along. I couldn’t let this continue. Gordon Alecto had to be stopped, and I was the only person qualified to do it.
“I guess we had better get there before the dryad does,” I said.
DION. WE CAN TAKE SHELTER IN THE WOOD.
SIL. IT IS A GREAT ARMY; NO WOODS WILL BE ENOUGH.
DION. THE TREES CANNOT DEFEND US, BUT NOTHING MAN HAS EVER WIELDED IS A MATCH FOR THE SATYRS OF THE FOREST.
From the dialogues of Silenus the Younger. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne
After debating the merits of attempting to bury or ceremonially cremate Staphus, we decided to leave him where we’d found him and return later for more appropriate respects. There was just too much risk involved in sticking around. So after a few quick, but solemn words, we covered his body with snow, noted the GPS coordinates, and moved on.
“Tell me more about the prophecies,” I asked Ariadne a couple of hours later, as we trudged along after Hippos. We were following a path that ran along Stetattle Creek and straight to Azure Lake, but it was slow going, even without the storm conditions to worry with. The snow that the storm had dropped everywhere was still something to contend with, and the sun wasn’t doing a lot of damage to it.
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
“I’m thinking specifically about what else might have been included in that passage you quoted.”
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