The Dog Said Bow-Wow (32 page)

Beside him, a satyr slid to the ground and wept.

Alas, he simply did not care.

Surplus, meanwhile, was in his element. Running headlong through the night, with the moon bouncing in the sky above, he felt his every sense to be fully engaged, fully alive. Through spinneys and over fields he ran, savoring every smell, alert to the slightest sound.

By roundabout ways he came at last to the monastery. The ground at its rear was untended and covered with scrub forest. All to the good. Nobody would see him here. He could find a back entrance or a window that might be forced and…

At that very instant, he felt a warm puff of breath on the back of his neck. His hackles rose. Only one creature could have come up behind him so silently as to avoid detection.

“Nobody’s here,” Bast said.

Surplus spun about, prepared to defend himself to the death. But the great cat merely sat down and began tending to the claws of one enormous paw, biting and tugging at them with fastidious care.

“Excuse me?”

“Our work now being effectively over, we shall soon return to Greater Zimbabwe. So, in the spirit of tying up all loose ends, the monks have been sent to seize the Evangelos bronzes as a gift for the Scientifically Chosen Council of Rational Governance back home. The Chief Researcher, meanwhile, is out front, preparing to deal with insurgent local rabble.”

Surplus rubbed his chin thoughtfully with the knob of his cane. “Hum. Well…in any case, that is not why I am here. I have come for Dionysus.”

“The crypt is empty,” Bast said. “Shortly after the monks and the Chief Researcher left, an army of nymphs came and wrested the god from his tomb. If you look, you can see where they broke a door in.”

“Do you know where they have taken him?” Surplus asked.

“Yes.”

“Then, will you lead me there?”

“Why should I?”

Surplus started to reply, then bit his words short. Argument would not suffice with this creature—he was a cat, and cats did not respond to reason. Best, then, to appeal to his innate nature. “Because it would be a pointless and spiteful act of mischief.”

Bast grinned. “They have taken him to their temple. It isn’t far — a mile, perhaps less.”

He turned away. Darger followed.

The temple was little more than a glen surrounded by evenly spaced, slim white trees, like so many marble pillars. A small and simple altar stood to one end. But the entrance was flanked by two enormous pairs of metal lions, and off to one side stood the heroic bronze of a lordly man, three times the height of a mere mortal.

They arrived at the tail end of a small war.

The monks had arrived first and begun to set up blocks and tackle, in order to lower the bronze man to the ground. Barely had they begun their enterprise, however, when an army of nymphs arrived, with Dionysus cradled in a wagonload of feather mattresses. Their initial outrage at what they saw could only be imagined by its aftermath: Orange-robed monks fled wildly through the woods, pursued by packs of raging nymphs. Here and there, one had fallen, and the women performed abominable deeds upon their bodies.

Surplus looked resolutely away. He could feel the violent emotion possessing the women right through the soothing chemical voice of the patches he still wore, a passion that went far beyond sex into realms of fear and terror. He could not help remembering that the word “panic” was originally derived from the name Pan.

He strolled up to the wagon, and said, “Good evening, sir. I came to make sure you are well.”

Dionysus looked up and smiled wanly. “I am, and I thank you for your concern.” A monk’s scream split the night. “However, if my ladies catch sight of you, I fear you will suffer even as many of my former associates do now. I’ll do my best to calm them, but meanwhile, I suggest that you —” He looked suddenly alarmed. “Run!”

Lethargy filled Darger. His arms were leaden and his feet were unable to move. It seemed too much effort even to breathe. A listless glance around him showed that all his brave mob were incapacitated, some crouched and others weeping, in various attitudes of despair. Even the chimeric squid had collapsed into moist and listless blobs on the grass. He saw one taken up by Thanatos’s tentacles, held high above the monastery, and then dropped into an unsuspected maw therein.

It did not matter. Nothing did.

Luckily, however, such sensations were nothing new to Darger. He was a depressive by humor, well familiar with the black weight of futility, like a hound sitting upon his heart. How many nights had he lain sleepless and waiting for a dawn he knew would never arrive? How many mornings had he forced himself out of bed, though he could see no point to the effort? More than he could count.

There was still a torch in his hand. Slowly, Darger made his shuffling way through the unresisting forms of his supporters. He lacked the energy to climb the wall, so he walked around it until he came to the gate, reached in to unlatch it, and then walked through.

He trudged up to the monastery.

So far, he had gone unnoticed because the men and satyrs wandered aimlessly about in their despair, and his movement had been cloaked by theirs. Within the monastery grounds, however, he was alone. The bright line traced by his torch attracted the Chief Researcher’s eye.

“You!” she cried. “British government man! Put that torch down.” She jumped down from the wall and trotted toward him. “It’s hopeless, you know. You’ve already lost. You’re as good as dead.”

She was at his side now, and reaching for the torch. He raised it up, out of her reach.

“You don’t think this is going to work, do you?” She punched and kicked him, but they were the blows of a child, and easy to ignore. “You don’t honestly think there’s any hope for you?”

He sighed. “No.”

Then he threw the torch.

Whomp!
The dome went up in flames. Light and heat filled the courtyard. Shielding his eyes, Darger looked away, to see satyrs and men staggering to their feet, and squids fluidly slipping downslope toward the river. Into the water they went and downstream, swimming with the current toward the distant Aegean.

Thanatos screamed. It was a horrid, indescribable sound, like fingernails on slate impossibly magnified, like agony made physical. Enormous tentacles slammed at the ground in agony, snatching up whatever they encountered and flinging it into the night sky.

A little aghast at what he had unleashed, Darger saw one of the tentacles seize the Chief Researcher and haul her high into the air, before catching fire itself and raining down black soot, both chimeric and human, on the upturned faces below.

Afterwards, staring at the burning monastery from a distance, Darger murmured, “I have the most horrid sensation of
déjà vu
. Must all our adventures end the same way?”

“For the sake of those cities we have yet to visit, I sincerely hope not,” Surplus replied.

There was a sudden surge of flesh and the great cat Bast took a seat alongside them. “She was the last of her kind,” he remarked.

“Eh?” Darger said.

“No living creature remembers her name, but the Chief Researcher was born — or perhaps created — in the waning days of Utopia. I always suspected that her ultimate end was to recreate that lost and bygone world.” Bast yawned vastly, his pink tongue curling into a question mark which then disappeared as his great black jaws snapped shut. “Well, no matter. With her gone, it’s back to Greater Zimbabwe for the rest of us. I’ll be glad to see the old place again. The food here is good, but the hunting is wretched.”

With a leap, he disappeared into the night.

But now Papatragos strode up and clapped them both on the shoulders. “That was well done, lads. Very well done, indeed.”

“You lied to me, Papatragos,” Darger said sternly. “The Evangelos bronzes were yours all along.”

Papatragos pulled an innocent face. “Why, whatever do you mean?”

“I’ve seen the lions
and
the bronze man,” Surplus said. “It is unquestionably the statue of Lord Nelson himself, stolen from Trafalgar Square in ancient times by the rapacious Grecian Empire. How can you possibly justify keeping it?”

Now Papatragos looked properly abashed. “Well, we’re sort of attached to the old thing. We walk past it every time we go to worship. It’s not really a part of our religion, but it’s been here so long, it almost feels as if it should be, you see.”

“Exactly what
is
your religion?” Surplus asked curiously.

“We’re Jewish,” Papatragos said. “All satyrs are.”

“Jewish?!”

“Well, not exactly
Orthodox Jews.
” He shuffled his feet. “We couldn’t be, not with these cloven hooves. But we have our rabbis and our shuls. We manage.”

It was then that Dionysus began to play his panpipes and the crowd of nymphs and women from the temple flowed onto the former battleground. Surplus’s ears pricked up. “Well, it seems the night will not be a total waste of time, after all,” Papatragos said brightly. “Will you be staying?”

“No,” Darger said, “I believe I will return to our inn to contemplate mortality and the fate of gods.”

Yet Darger was no more than halfway back to town when he came upon a wagon piled high with feather mattresses, pulled over to the side of the road. The horses had been unharnessed so they could graze, and sweet sighs and giggles came from the top of the mattresses.

Darger stopped, appalled. He knew those sounds well, and recognized too the pink knee that stuck out here, the tawny shoulders draped with long black hair that arched up there. It was Theodosia and Anya. Together. Alone.

In an instant’s blinding insight, he understood all. It was an old and familiar situation: Two women who loved each other but were too young to embrace the fact in all its implications, and so brought a third, male, partner into their dalliances. It hardly mattered who. Unless, of course, you were the unimportant male himself. In which case, it was a damnable insult.

“Who’s there?” The two women pulled apart and struggled up out of the mattresses. Their heads appeared over the top of the wagon. Hair black and blond, eyes brown and green, one mouth sweet and the other sassily sticking out a little pink triangle of tongue. Both were, implicitly, laughing at him.

“Never mind about me,” Darger said stiffly. “I see the way the wind blows. Continue, I pray you. I retain the fondest memories of you both, and I wish you nothing but well.”

The women stared at him with frank astonishment. Then Theodosia whispered in Anya’s ear, and Anya smiled and nodded. “Well?” Theodosia said to Darger. “Are you joining us or not?”

Darger wanted to spurn their offer, if for no other reason than his dignity’s sake. But, being merely human — and male to boot — he complied.

So for a space of time Darger and Surplus stayed in Arcadia and were content. Being the sort of men they were, however, mere contentment could never satisfy them for long, and so one day they loaded their bags into a rented pony-cart and departed. For once, though, they left behind people who genuinely regretted seeing them leave.

Some distance down the road, as they passed by the ruins of the Monastery of St. Vasilios, the pony grew restive and they heard the music of pipes.

There, sitting atop the wall, waiting for them, was Dionysus. He was wearing a peasant’s blouse and trousers, but even so, he looked every inch a god. He casually set down his panpipes. “Bach,” he said. “The old tunes are best, don’t you agree?”

“I prefer Vivaldi,” Darger said. “But for a German, Bach wasn’t bad.”

“So. You’re leaving, are you?”

“Perhaps we’ll be back, someday,” Surplus said.

“I hope you’re not thinking of returning for the bronzes?”

It was as if a cloud had passed before the sun. A dark shiver ran through the air. Dionysus was, Darger realized, preparing to assume his aspects of godhead should that prove necessary.

“If we were,” he said, “would this be a problem?”

“Aye. I have no objection to your bronze man and his lions going home. Though the morality of their staying or returning is more properly a matter for the local rabbis to establish. Unfortunately, there would be curiosity as to their provenance and from whence they had come. This land would be the talk of the world. But I would keep our friends as obscure as possible for as long as may be. And you?”

Surplus sighed. “It is hard to put this into words. It would be a violation of our professional ethics
not
to return for the bronzes. And yet…”

“And yet,” Darger said, “I find myself reluctant to reintroduce this timeless land to the modern world. These are gentle folk, their destruction of St. Vasilios notwithstanding, and I fear for them all. History has never been kind to gentle folk.”

“I agree with you entirely. Which is why I have decided to stay and to protect them.”

“Thank you. I have grown strangely fond of them all.”

“I as well,” Surplus said.

Dionysus leaned forward. “That is good to hear. It softens the hurt of what I must say to you. Which is:
Do not return
. I know what sort of men you are. A week from now, or a month, or a year, you will think again of the value of the bronzes. They are in and of themselves worth a fortune. Returned to England, the prestige they would confer upon their finders is beyond price. Perhaps you have been guilty of criminal activities; for this discovery, much would be forgiven. Such thoughts will occur to you. Think, also this: That these folk are protected not by me alone, but by the madness I can bring upon them. I want you to leave this land and never come back.”

“What — never return to Arcadia?” Surplus said.

“You do not know what you ask, sir!” Darger cried.

“Let this be an Arcadia of the heart to you. All places abandoned and returned to must necessarily disappoint. Distance will keep its memory evergreen in your hearts.” Now Dionysus reached out and embraced them both, drawing them to his bosom. In a murmurous voice, he said, “You need a new desire. Let me tell you of a place I glimpsed en route to Greece, back when I was merely human. It has many names, Istanbul and Constantinople not the least among them, but currently it is called Byzantium.”