Songs_of_the_Satyrs (11 page)

I looked north where the sunset’s soft apricot did nothing to belie a bysening sense of mine that a storm was coming, one way or another.

A satyr once did run away . . .

—Sir Philip Sydney

Whores
. . . he smiled. Lord Smart had called them “bareback riders.” This one, he thought, had been worth the money to bring from London. The room where they lay was absolutely black. In the ancient days, he could see in the dark. Back then, his eyes picked up every bit of starlight, moonlight, false fire from swamp gas, the luminescence of insects. Give him a few glowworms in those old days, and he could find his way out of a dense wood on a cloudy night.

But in the absolute darkness of his bedchamber, he saw only the black. He felt the warm body beside him, softly ran his hands over the smooth melons of her breasts, down her stomach to her soft thighs and the tangle of hair about her warm little nest. She knew her trade well. She had given him a wild thrash and now he wanted wine.

He got up so he would not wake her. She must not see—though he wondered if a woman who’d been in the bedrooms of hundreds of strange men might not simply accept it if she did see. He crept from the bed to the closet that no one knew about.

In his secret room, he grasped for a bottle of brandy. When he sat at dinner parties, he sipped from crystal glasses with the delicate refinement a wealthy man was expected to exhibit. Alone, in privacy, he pulled the glass stopper from the decanter, put his lips to the spout, and let the hot, rich liquor pour down his throat. It was the best and most expensive of his stock, but what did money matter to him? His estate had been solvent for two hundred years. And he had hardly touched the treasure buried near the Roman ruins.

He rejoiced as the fiery brandy warmed him. He breathed a prayer of thankfulness to Dionysus. No one worshipped the old gods anymore, but habit lodged stubbornly in the heart.

He set the empty bottle on a table. The liquor made him want Lucy once more and immediately.

He walked over to the single window in his private room—his lair, he called it. Dawn was coming up over the forest and the hedgerows that bounded his estate.

The woods no longer teemed with fauns, satyrs, nymphs, and hamadryads. In ancient times, each grove, stream, and lake had sheltered a genius. Each river had been home to a god or goddess. The Christian religion, with its habit of consecration, had driven most of them away. Here and there, though—and especially in the rural areas where allegiance to the old gods continued to exist within the peoples’ hearts—a few of the minor deities remained.

He remembered when it had all started, two hundred and forty years ago.

***

One day, all those years ago, when roaming free, he came across a bright, shiny object. He knew it to be a horn from his association with Roman soldiers. However, this one was curved, not straight like the Roman ones. It sparkled in the sunlight, bright, burnished, the color of gold. He lifted it in fascination.

Its weight and the beauty of the smooth shiny metal fascinated him. Almost involuntarily, he brought the horn to his lips and blew into it.

A loud, mellow note sounded. Startled, he dropped the horn. The note resonated and echoed after he had puffed into the device. As the clear, beautiful tone died away, he heard sounds that filled him with terror.

Human voices. Horse hooves. The baying of hounds.

He glanced back and saw them coming across the meadow beyond the grove of trees where he had found the horn.

As he broke free of the tree line and sped across an open space, he saw four riders and more dogs. They were on both sides of him. The human men had seen him and recognized him for what he was. They shouted, pointed, and spurred their steeds. Loud explosions of thunder (he recognized them as gunshots now—he did not know what a firearm was back then) sounded on all sides of him. Frantic, he ran. He could hear the pounding of the horses’ hooves as they gained on him.

Varinius understood the local language imperfectly, but at the time he caught enough of it to know that one of them shouted, “A satyr!” Translating in retrospect, he remembered their leader had bellowed, “A thousand pound to the man who takes him!”

Varinius ran for a thick grove where their horses could not follow. An explosion sounded close to him. A bolt of pain tore through his body. He fell and rolled into the trees.

He lay on the ground, crying out. He heard the horses slow and stop. The hunters were dismounting. Smelling water, he managed to raise himself. He got unsteadily to his feet and tottered forward.

Then he remembered the lake.

He could not swim, but death was preferable to capture. Varinius stumbled to the brink of a cliff that dropped some forty feet to an expanse of deep, clear water. He felt blood in his mouth. His insides seemed to be on fire. He heard voices and the sound of feet snapping dead branches. He flung himself forward, stumbling over the edge and plunging down to the water below.

***

He reached for another bottle of brandy. Sixteen forty, he thought—the year the Civil War began and the year troopers loyal to Cromwell shot him. Lorena had saved his life. That incident, he reflected bitterly, had won him lasting fame.

He smiled as he drank down a quantity of Hennessy.

The poet Marvell had been in the hunting party. A poem he wrote, “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun,” came out of the incident. It pained him. Whenever Varinius read it, he thought of Lorena.

On that day so long ago, he had fallen, hit the water, thrashed and struggled, and then gone under. As his consciousness failed, he felt hands seize and pull him. He thought his pursuers had dived in to capture him, but when he woke up he found himself in a dry cave. Beside him squatted a woman with light blue skin and long blue tresses.

Varinius tried to get up. The woman reached out and touched him.

“Don’t move. You are still healing. They hit you with one of their bolts. You will heal but you are not yet well enough to stand or walk.”

He groaned, feeling relief but immense weariness.

“The blessing of Almighty Zeus rest on / Your soul and on your body, goddess fair,” he said, lapsing into the poetic meter he used to address female deities. “The Lord of Thunder will repay your grace.”

She smiled, bent down, and kissed his lips.

“Soft,” she replied. “Sleep and heal.”

She gave him drugged wine. He lapsed into blackness.

***

As Varinius finished off the brandy, he reflected on human women. They did come in an assortment of shades and hues. England was a nation with many seaports, so people of many lands came here. He had slept with women who had golden skin and almond eyes, skin the color of ebony, white and freckled women, and women from India with beautiful brown bodies. Their beauties, though, were nothing compared to the blue of a Naiad’s skin or the soft green of dryads when they left their existence as trees and took on flesh.

Lorena had nursed him back to health. He still sighed at the memory of her beauty. Being a water woman, she wore nothing. She had small but perfectly formed breasts, a slender muscular body, beautiful hips, a lovely cunt, and webbed toes and fingers. When he asked her if she had a lover, her eyes grew very sad.

“I consorted with Priscus for many years,” she’d said. “He left when a priest consecrated the ground in his grove to build a church. For a few years, Thalia was my lover. She was the genius of a pond that joined my lake by a small stream. The local farmers dammed the stream and drained her pond to make a grain field. She died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She was a sweet lover. So was Priscus. But Zeus has sent you to me.”

He healed. Lorena became his lover. The main entrance to her cave lay under the water, but a long, cramped tunnel led out to a grove near the lake. There he stumbled on the treasure.

***

The brandy had enflamed Varinius.

Lust. He crept back into his bedroom. He slipped under the covers and put his hand on the voluptuous, snoring woman. She came awake as he greedily kissed her breasts and then her lips and nose.

“You want it again already?” she groaned sleepily.

By now he could only grunt.

“Get some lotion,” she said. “You’ve dried me out. You never stop, Morlington.”

The bedroom, pitch black and shuttered, painted a dark color, concealed his goat legs, tail, and hooves (he kept his horns cut short). He found a bottle of camphor-scented cream, spread it on her mound and slit, and quenched his wine-flamed lust.

Lucy Grandville moaned, bucked, and squealed as the two of them went at it. She had fought (or, he smiled,
fucked)
her way to the status of most sought-after whore in London. He had paid a huge sum to bring her and two of her girls here for a long weekend. Of course money was no obstacle to him. He had money enough to last to the end of time.

***

After healing from the wound, Varinius cautiously explored the grove near Lorena’s lake. Hunters had torn it up, rutting through it with horses and dogs, searching for him. As he learned to speak their language (a thing Lorena insisted he do), he stealthily listened in on conversations around campfires and among farmers and herdsmen. A satyr, they said, had been spotted in the groves not far from Otter Bay Lake. Sportsmen from all over England were coming north to hunt him.

The presence of the quarry men had frightened away the animals and birds; the droppings of the horses and dogs had fouled the soil and fertilized the weeds; and, of course, the parties of humans who wanted to kill him had ravaged the groves, dells, and meadows where he had lived for hundreds of years.

He found a new woodland in a remote location a few miles from Lorena’s lake. Rumor said it was haunted. An association with ancient druidical worship made locals avoid it. An old law dating back to the time of King Henry III forbade hunting there. It seemed a safe place for him to dwell.

He noticed, as he grew more familiar with the area, an oddly shaped mound. It protruded from the ground in a circle of massive boulders covered with moss and the soil from years of leaves and grass breaking down and returning to humus. Something suggested it was not a natural formation. He dug through a gap between two of the mound’s massive stones. Dirt crumbled. He felt resistance and pushed. Something gave way, and Varinius fell forward. Soil and stone rained down on him as he stumbled and rolled, shielding his head. Silence returned. The dust settled. He twisted his body around. His eyes grew wide at what he saw.

Treasure filled the chamber from top to bottom: piles of gold and silver bars, vessels set with precious stones, and containers of fine jewels. It was a fortune for a king. It would eventually enable him to live convincingly as a human being.

***

He heard Lucy groan and felt her buckle beneath him. He smiled with satisfaction. Who else, he mused, could make the top whore in Britain come? He felt a surge of passion, gripped her, and drove into her with unbridled intensity. A long, loud moan of pain and ecstasy broke from her throat as he finished. When silence came, she lightly struck his back with her fists.

“Off,” she said. “You’re wearing me out. No more for a while. Annabella and Cynthia are here. Ride those young colts if you want it again. I need to rest.”

He kissed her and said he would let her rest. He got up, washed, and dressed. The governor of the shire would be coming by today. He planned on entertaining him royally—with pomp, a banquet, and with Annabella and Cynthia. Lucy, he had decided, would be reserved for himself.

***

What he found in the cave had facilitated his successful sojourn among the human mortals. But Lorena had not fared so well.

One day she seemed troubled. He asked her what was wrong.

“The humans are building some sort of structure on the edge of my lake,” she said.

Varinius did not think this was something she should be so troubled about—two or three cottages where families could live nestled on the shore of her lake. She lived underwater or in her cave. No one would see her.

But her instinct had been right. A local entrepreneur had built a cooperage there. To bend the wood for the barrels they made, they used lye. They dumped the residue from the operation into the lake.

The fish and turtles died. Birds and deer no longer came there to nest and drink. The waters, though a beautiful deep blue, became poisonous and dead. In only a matter of months, the toxins took Lorena as well. He remembered the stages of her demise. She grew thin. Her eyes became dull. Lethargic and nauseous, she moped about her cave.

Varinius said she should find another dwelling place, but by the time he said this Lorena was too ill to travel. She collapsed one day. He carried her thin, feverish body to a grove, hoping sunshine and fresh air might purge the destroying vapors within her. She only grew more miserable and ill. He laid her under an oak. She vomited black fluid, trembled, wept, and died convulsing and screaming in pain.

Varinius buried her by the oak. As he turned, a woman, a hamadryad, materialized by the side of her grave.

She wore a white chiton dress. Her brown hair gathered on one side, she radiated beauty and dignity.

“You are the spirit who dwells in this tree?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I’m sorry I placed a corpse so near to your habitation. I will rebury her.”

“You don’t need to do that. The poor thing has suffered enough without having her grave disturbed.” She paused and then said, “I am Ionia.”

“Varinius. I would not have dug here if I’d known. I did not sense your presence.”

“I don’t exist as a tree enough that my presence resonates here much anymore. I’ve managed to find a place among the humans. You might think about doing the same yourself, Varinius.”