Its companion was smaller, slighter, darker, and so fervently female from the navel up as to make George wish he were part stallion himself. The noise the satyr made reminded him that it was part stallion, even if to a lesser degree than the two centaurs. George wondered whether they had laws against such out-of-kind couplings. If they did, the satyr, by its reaction, cared not a fig for them.
George kept staring as the centaurs cantered across the field to pick up the rabbit, which had stopped moving. Not all the staring had to do with the way the female centaur’s breasts bobbed as it moved, either. Satyrs were rare around Thessalonica, yes. Centaurs were more than rare. He’d thought the swelling power of the Lord had long since driven them from the world of men.
“ ‘Twill be fine, cony in a stew of leeks and turnips,” the male centaur remarked, his voice a bass deeper than any man’s, his Greek so archaic George had to think before he could be sure he understood it.
“Aye, thou hast reason, in good sooth,” the female replied in the same old, old dialect. That dialect was not the only reason her voice startled the shoemaker, for it fell in the same baritone registers as his own. All the same, he couldn’t help wondering whether the Biblical prohibitions against bestiality applied to creatures such as these.
Then he had another curious thought, not too far distant from the first. Along with those splendid, humanlike breasts, the female centaur also had a set of teats at the bottom of its horsy belly. When it had a baby or a foal or whatever the right word was, where did it nurse? George knew what his choice would have been, but he reminded himself he wasn’t a newborn centaur.
“Hunting is so poor these days,” the female said with a sigh.
“Aye, for the newcomers do most savagely chase and slay all the small deer they chance to run across, leaving but their leavings for us who have since time out of mind made these woods our home,” the male said. George supposed it meant the Slavic wolves and other such powers. Had George been a wolf, he wouldn’t have cared to run up against the male centaur, but a partly supernatural wolf might think different.
When he’d seen the Avars so confidently planted on their horses, they’d put him in mind of centaurs. Now, seeing the real thing, he wondered what the Avars would make of them. Would they be jealous? Or would they assume the centaurs were meant to be their slaves, simply because they hadn’t been lucky enough to be born Avars? That fit in with what he’d seen of the fierce nomads from off the distant plains.
The centaurs had their own measure of that lordly arrogance. Only after they’d finished with their own business did they deign to notice the satyr and his human companion. “Who is it that cometh with thee, Ampelus?” the male asked. That thee, unlike the one the female had used with the male, was patronizing, even insulting, not intimate. “A man from the city below, not so?”
“Yes, from the city, the city where they fight the new people, the new things,” the satyr--Ampelus--answered. “The city with saints inside.”
That made both centaurs scowl, reminding them of the marginal life they--and the centaur--led in an ever more Christianized world. The male dipped its shiny head to George. “We welcome you to this fastness to which our. . . acquaintance hath brought you. Know that I am Crotus, and with me you see my wife Nephele.”
George gave his own name, then said, “I didn’t know centaurs still roamed these hills.”
“They are ours,” the female said, drawing itself up with formidable pride. “Not enough saints hath . . . your city” --Nephele could not speak the names of God or Christ any more than the satyr could, and had to talk around them-- “to drive us hence altogether. Nor shall the savage strangers force us to flee, however fierce they be.”
“They very fierce. They very many,” Ampelus said. “How we stop them?” The satyr had fewer words and a far less elegant way of speaking than the centaurs, but seemed to George to have a better grasp on the way the world outside this backwoods retreat worked.
Crotus said, “Thou, satyr, art less afflicted than we by the powers we do not name, and so hast wider compass of vision”--the very thought that had just gone through George’s mind. “But if one deem a difficulty impossible of solution, unsolved it shall surely be forevermore. Nor dost thou reckon our case hopeless, I warrant, else thou hadst not brought here this mortal, this George.”
Ampelus shrugged. The satyr’s erection jounced up and down. Nephele’s reaction might have been amusement or disgust; George had no practice reading the sounds centaurs made. After a moment, Ampelus said, “He give me wine once. I save him, hoping he maybe give me wine again. But he has no wine this time.” As nothing else had done, that made its phallus droop for a moment.
“As well that he have none!” Nephele exclaimed. “Wine for you satyrs is as it is for men: a little foolishness, a little sleep, a little headache, and then all in readiness to be done over again. Not so for us, whom the slightest taste of the blood of the grape inflameth to madness.”
“Wine is sweet,” Ampelus protested. “Wine is good.”
“Aye--for thee,” Crotus said. “When the scent of the fermenting vintage wafteth from the villages wherein the men trample the grapes …” A look of terrible longing filled the centaurs face. “I needs must hie me off deep into the woods then, lest instead I rush forward to guzzle and . . .” It fell silent again. The day was chilly. Sudden sweat sprang out on its forehead even so.
“Will someone please take me to one of these villages?” George asked. “Maybe I can find a way to get back into Thessalonica. If I can get down to the seaside, if I can find a boat. . .” He didn’t think any of that was likely to happen, but it was the best his imagination had been able to do.
Satyr and centaurs ignored the request. In that disconcerting baritone, Nephele asked, “How is it, George of Thessalonica, you have no fear of our kind, and neither seek you to compel us to flee your presence with signs against which we may not stand?”
“Why would I do that?” George asked in return. If the female centaur thought he wasn’t afraid, that only proved the pagan powers were a long way from omniscient. Hoping Nephele wouldn’t notice he was responding to only half the question, he went on, “Ampelus saved my life. He didn’t have to do that. I owe him a debt.”
“Wine!” the centaur cried. “Jars and jars and jars of wine!”
“We stand in need of a better bargain than that,” Crotus said stiffly.
“Is no such thing,” Ampelus said, but then corrected itself: “Is maybe one, but cannot bring jars and jars and jars of pretty women.”
Nephele set hands on . . . no, not on its hips, but the place where the narrowness of that human waist swelled out to meet the equine body that carried it. “Enough of japes and jests and fribbles,” the female centaur declared, giving the satyr a severe look that altogether failed to dismay it. When Nephele went on, it was to George: “So many of your fellows would raise against us that which we cannot face or deny our existence altogether.”
“Aye.” Bitterness edged Crotus’ voice. “And should the denial become universal, it becometh also sober truth: another reason for our clinging to the peaks and other lands wherein our being is more certain.”
George had never wondered what the growth of Christianity looked like from the viewpoint of creatures pushed to the wall by the new faith. Along with other such abstract questions, though, that one would have to wait. He found a question anything but abstract: “If you have these weaknesses, how do you propose to come down and fight the powers of the Slavs and Avars?”