Nephele roughly flung the dipper back to Crotus. The male centaur refilled it and drank. George watched in astonishment: the change in Crotus was even greater than that in Nephele had been. The male centaur seemed large and more . . . predatory than had been true only a moment before. If it turned that fearsome gaze on George, he told himself he would make the sign of the cross at the creature--better to drive it off than be torn limb from limb.
And then George wondered if the sign of the cross would do any good against a centaur maddened by wine. He could see Father Luke wondering the same thing. All at once, he understood in his belly what Philotechnus’ maxim meant.
More and more centaurs drank. More and more centaurs underwent that transformation, awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time. Hoarse shouts rose into the sky. The more drunken centaurs there were, the more the horse shouts gained in volume and ferocity.
Even Demetrius, still the only centaur colt George had seen, took a dipper of wine and was remade in the savage image of its elders. Demetrius put the shoemaker in mind of a fox cub worrying at a bone too big for it, but that didn’t mean, or didn’t have to mean, the small centaur wasn’t dangerous in its own right.
“How do we go down toward Thessalonica?” Luke asked.
“I think we’d better have the males who aren’t drunk tell the rest to get going,” George said. He wasn’t anxious to draw to him the notice of the centaurs who had been drinking.
“That isn’t what I meant,” the priest said. “How do we go down to Thessalonica? I may be needed there, to bring the power of. . .” --he didn’t speak God’s name, not wanting to find out whether or not the centaurs could bear it in their present condition-- “to bear against the Slavs and Avars and their powers.”
“Oh,” George said, and then, “Well, how do you feel about being cavalry, Your Reverence?”
“Riding a centaur, do you mean?” Father Luke said. George nodded. The priest went on, “Riding a drunken centaur? Riding a maddened drunken centaur? Of all the things in the world, the only one I’d less rather do, I think, is stay up here in Lete.”
George nodded again. He started to go up to Nephele, to ask if the female centaur would bear him down the long and winding road that led back to Thessalonica. Then, remembering what Ampelus had tried to do to Nephele, he sheered off. He could think of only one way to hold on as he rode, and feared the female centaur would take it as an undue liberty.
He went up to Crotus instead. “Will you carry me to Thessalonica?” he asked. “Will one of your friends carry Father Luke?”
Crotus’ eyes were tracked with red. Slowly, slowly, they focused on George. “Thessalonica,” the centaur said, one thick syllable at a time, as if it had never heard the word before. Then its head went up and down. “Oh, aye, the new town.” George did not think of it as a new town, but George did not personally remember its founding, as Crotus no doubt did. The male went on, “And you, mortal, you are … ah, who you are returneth to me: the follower of the new.” The centaur looked ready to tear him to pieces for being a follower of the new. But then more memory seemed to make its way through the haze of wine. “And we are … we are in alliance. Alliance with bad against worse. A hard path, but the only one left to us.”
Without another word, Crotus squatted down on all fours (or rather, on four out of six). George scrambled onto the centaur’s back. Crotus shouted for Elatus; the other male stood nearby. Elatus squatted, too. Father Luke hurried over and mounted his unorthodox--in both the literal and theological senses of the word-- steed.
“Thessalonica!” Crotus shouted in a huge voice. “Thessalonica! The foe awaiteth. Thessalonica!”
In a moment, the whole great band of centaurs had taken up the cry, baying like so many wolves: “Thessalonica!” Down the hillside they poured, a drunken mob of supernatural creatures. Beneath Georges fundament, Crotus’ musdes heaved and rippled. The shoemaker clung to the centaur’s human torso with one hand and to Perseus’ cap with the other. If he needed to draw his sword and fight he wouldn’t be able to hold on then. He hoped--how he hoped!--it wouldn’t matter.
He looked around to see where in the band Father Luke was. Riding behind Elatus’ torso as George rode behind Crotus’, the priest made his centaur look as if it boasted two upthrust human parts rather than the standard one. George and Crotus no doubt made the same absurd picture.
“Thessalonica!” the centaurs shouted, urging one another on and, George suspected, reminding themselves where they were going.
“Hurry!” Father Luke called to them. “In the name of whatever you hold dear, hurry! The foe ariseth in his might.” He imitated the old-fashioned Greek they spoke, which made them heed him almost as if he were one of their own. George, who could not have done the same, wished he had hands free with which to applaud.
Now, despite being in among the band of centaurs, he too could feel the gathering of power to the south. He’d known that sort of feeling in the churches of Thessalonica, but the power rising here had nothing to do with the God he worshiped. Whether it was--or could be, if fully manifested--more powerful than his God, he did not know. That frightened him worse than anything. “On the way home,” he murmured, trying to reassure himself. But the way home was, as it had been, blocked by the Slavs and Avars and by the powers that had already accompanied them into this part of the world.
A shout from the front-runners among the centaurs said they’d spotted one of those powers. Peering forward over Crotus’ shoulder, George spied a Slavic wolf-demon. The creature’s howl, this once, brought no terror with it; had it burst from a human throat, it would have been an exclamation of surprise and dismay.
The wolf turned and tried to flee, as if to take news of what it had just seen back to those with more power than it possessed. Since it was heading down toward Thessalonica, the drunken centaurs ran after it. In short order, they ran over it: the whole band, or at least as many of them as its battered body happened to pass beneath. George felt it go under Crotus’ trampling, pounding hooves. With four legs on which to stand, the centaur had no trouble keeping its balance and delivering a good stomping at the same time-Once the band had passed over the wolf, George turned and looked back over his shoulder at it. It didn’t look as if it had ever been alive; far from seeming immortal, it didn’t look as if it would ever be alive again, either. He might have been wrong: things from beyond the hills he knew were often next to impossible to slay. Not many of them, though, endured what the wolf-demon had just suffered.
Before long, the centaurs came upon more wolves. A few peeled off from the main band to chase them. The wolf-demons, more used to chasing centaurs, ran away from their numbers and their ferocity, baying as they went. But a lot of the centaurs went on yelling “Thessalonica!” at the top of their lungs. For whatever reason they did it, it helped keep most of them together.
George kept looking for Vucji Pastir. The shepherd of the wolves would be a more dangerous foe than the creatures he herded. But of Vucji Pastir there was no sign. George remembered the swordwork he had done while invisible. He still did not think he had slain the demigod; to think that, on the basis of what little he knew, would have made him both more stupid and more heroic than he actually was.
Disturbed by the centaurs’ thundering hooves and by their cries, bats rose in chittering swarms. Remembering that bats had spied on Thessalonica, George shouted a warning. The centaurs were already flinging volleys of stones and branches at the creatures. They brought down a good many, and trampled them as they had trampled that first wolf. Again, George wondered if any creature, supernatural or not, could survive such treatment.