“You looked to be a chap who needed a large favor,” Gorgonius answered. “Not even the oldest old wife in town remembers hearing from her granny about the last time centaurs came into Lete. Centaurs! If they think you’re important, do you suppose I’m going to argue very hard?”
“I do thank you,” George said, “and here’s your cap back.” He set it down on Gorgonius’ workbench.
“You’re sure you’ve done everything with it you wanted?” the carpenter asked.
“Everything I needed,” George answered. Again, a vision of the visit he hadn’t paid on Menas flashed through his mind.
Gorgonius was no fool. He caught the difference between his question and George’s answer. Walking over to the bench, he picked up the cap and thrust it at the shoemaker. “If you’re not done with it, friend, take it back. You’ve come up here once to return it to me. I expect you’ll come again.”
“Are you sure?” George said. “That thing is a temptation, and no mistake.”
“If you came once, you’ll come again,” Gorgonius repeated. “As long as you have come all this way, would you like some wine and olives before you go back? And you, too, Ithys, of course,” he added politely for the satyr’s benefit.
George nodded. Ithys said, “Yes, I take some ‘some wine and olives’. Just you leave out the olives.” Laughter set the satyr’s phallus bobbing up and down. The two men laughed, too. Gorgonius went off to get the food and drink. Ithys pointed to the cap. “He let you keep that longer, eh?”
“It seems so, yes,” George answered.
“Then we come all this way for nothing? No need to give back hat. No pretty women for me to take.” But Ithys could not quite manage a full-blown scowl, especially not after Gorgonius came back with a bowl of olives and three cups. “Wine,” the satyr said, as if reminding itself. “Wine. No, this walk not for nothing after all.”
On the way back to the encampment where the centaurs and satyrs dwelt, George stumbled several times. His feet did not want to go where he meant to put them. Ithys, normally as graceful as any of the supernatural kind, also had trouble. “Wine,” the satyr said, and giggled, a surprisingly high-pitched, squeaky sound to come from such a large, shaggy creature.
“Maybe.” But George, though he didn’t argue, wasn’t so sure. He’d had only a couple of cups in Lete, not nearly enough to make him too tiddly to walk straight. On the other hand, if the problem wasn’t wine, what was it?
When he reached the encampment, he found Father Luke looking worried. “I wish the centaurs would make up their minds,” the priest said. He pointed down toward Thessalonica. “Can’t you feel the trouble in the air-- and the power?”
Maybe there was a reason George had been so clumsy. “Is that what I’m feeling?” he said. “You deal with powers all the time, Your Reverence, so you’d know better than I do. Something’s wrong, I think, but I don’t know what.”
“Something enormous is building, down by the city,” Father Luke said. “I can’t tell what it is, only that it is-- and that I don’t like it.”
“I don’t think the Slavs and Avars ever really turned their strongest gods loose against Thessalonica,” George said. “They’ve tried to get into the city without doing that, unless I’m wrong. I don’t quite understand why, but that’s the way it’s looked to me.”
“You may have made a very good guess there,” Father Luke said. “I think the Slavs and Avars have been using their demigods and lesser deities for the same reason we often ask saints or the Virgin to intercede for us with God. Facing too much raw power, trying to turn that power to your own ends, can bum out a mere man.”
“That makes sense,” George agreed thoughtfully. “But if the Slavs and Avars are changing what they’re doing now…”
“I can think of only one reason why they would change,”
Father Luke said. “And that is that everything they’ve tried up till now has failed. If they’re going to take Thessalonica, they’ll need everything they can possibly bring to bear against it.” The priest nodded. “That fits well with what I’m feeling. Do you know what their great gods are like?”
George shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest notion, Your Reverence. We’re going to find out, though, aren’t we?”
“I wish I were back at St. Elias’,” Father Luke said, but then, immediately, he shook his head. “No, I’m wrong. Inside Thessalonica, with faith so strong all around me, I might not have noticed this till too late.”
“What can you do here that you wouldn’t be able to do there?” George asked.
“Pray, of course.” Father Luke looked surprised that he should need to put the question. Then the priest looked surprised again, in a different way. “And I can also pray that the centaurs will decide to do whatever they decide to do soon enough for them and us to draw some benefit from it, whatever it turns out to be.”
“That would be good.” George peered in the direction of Thessalonica. He was no holy man, to feel subtle disturbances in the relationship of powers and the material world in which those powers--and he--dwelt. But what was coming up from out of the south wasn’t subtle. His shiver had nothing to do with the chilly day. “How long do you think we have?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Father Luke said. “It’s like a cloudburst hanging over us. The rain will come, but when? And when it does, will it wash us away? The one thing I will say is, I don’t think we have very long.”
“What do we do, then?” George turned to Ithys. The satyr had been ignoring him and Father Luke. “How do you go about making the centaurs move faster?” the shoemaker asked.
“Is no way,” Ithys answered.
Ampelus, who was sitting close by the fire, shook its shaggy head. “Is maybe a way.” The satyr got to its feet and silently vanished into the woods.
“What’s he going to do?” Father Luke asked.
Ithys shrugged, as if to say it couldn’t possibly make any difference, whatever it was. George answered, “If I knew, I’d try it myself.”
Not much later and not very far away, a loud baritone shout rose from the woods. George needed a little while to remember male centaurs all had bass voices. That wasn’t a shout, then. It was a scream.
Ampelus came back into the encampment laughing and staggering a little and rubbing at what George first took to be a bruise on the hairy flesh of the satyr’s chest. Then the shoemaker saw that it was a bruise, all right, a bruise in the shape of a hoofprint. Ampelus said, “Centaurs here soon. Minds made up. Not know which way, but made up.”
“How did you manage that?” George exclaimed.
Ampelus laughed some more, though the laughter looked as if it hurt. “Went up in back of filly Nephele, tried to screw. If I do it, I think I have good time. If I don’t do it, I make Nephele, all the centaurs so mad, they give over talk talk talk.”
“You get it in?” Ithys demanded.
By way of reply, Ampelus sadly rubbed at that hoof-shaped bruise. Though the satyr healed with the speed characteristic of immortals, George suspected it would wear that mark for a good long while.
Sure enough, though, Nephele burst out of the woods a few minutes later. The glance the female centaur aimed at Ampelus should have annihilated the satyr more thoroughly than any kick, no matter how ferocious. Ampelus, however, only leered back, which made Nephele more furious than ever.
Father Luke spoke quickly: “Have you decided, then, whether you will drink the wine to try to save Thessalonica?”
Distracted, Nephele turned away from Ampelus. “Oh,” the female centaur said. “That.” Anger cooled somewhat, it spoke now with more than a little hesitation. “Aye,” it said at last. “We are decided. Let it be as you say, priest of the new. We shall do this thing, and run wild upon the earth, and madness shall overtake us, and, if it be fated, we shall overfall the folk and powers that have come down into this land.”