Songs_of_the_Satyrs (10 page)

And that was how I met Yevariel.

***

Explaining to Rakharion how Adyl and I have lived and worked in many different nations on account of my career as an actor, it began to dawn on me that it was possible that being well-traveled was the reason we’d been held up. The thought made me relax somewhat: such journeyings as ours are easily explained. It’s only reasonable to understand that an actor and a poet have a basic need to spend time in other cultures if they are to explore to the uttermost their arts.

I was even here in Swerna at the behest of one of their own! It hadn’t quite occurred to me then that the satyrs could only know about where Adyl and I had been in the past via some clandestine method, as such travels certainly weren’t mentioned on any of our papers for this trip.

I’d never much gone in for believing all the half-baked theories out there about some sort of Satyric Secret Service. It was in that cell that such thoughts began to be yeasted in my mind. I recognize that now. I’m not suggesting I’d go so far as to say that, now that they have the Ziggurat, they are using the power of the place to spy on the world—even though the talk I have heard about that since our trip to Swerna is couched in pretty convincing terms—but only that I think it’s sensible for any reasoning person to wonder about the stolid and pre-emptive nature of Swerna’s political machinations since that occupation.

I voiced my logic to Rakharion after a little while, knowing, from what he’d told me of his own journey to these cells, that he’d been taken from his lodgings that morning on the grounds that he had come out of the north to trade moon oil here in Swerna. The flimsiest of excuses—that the explosion at the temple might have required moon oil to fuel it—was all he’d been offered so far as reason for his current detention. When he’d questioned the captain of the guard about this ridiculous justification, he’d received a whack on his hind for his impertinence. He nodded now as I explained what I believed was the reason we’d been stopped.

“It’s possible,” he said, “for they can be quite paranoid. When my brethren spoke of this to me before I came here I scoffed. Now I have proof of it.” He twisted a little, showing me the gash of suffused red on his hide.

“That looks incredibly painful,” Adyl said. “You should complain. No—we should get someone down here to look at it, Sen!”

Rakharion smiled sadly at her. “Centaurs have endured worse,” he said, “but I thank you for the thought. Do not trouble yourselves for me . . . although . . .” He looked at our bucket and licked his lips. “Perhaps I could ask you for some water? I have none over here, you see.”

“Oh!” I felt a fool. I hadn’t noticed. I dragged the bucket over to the bars and lifted the dipper to him. He took it. As he put it to his lips I saw a great resignation in his eyes. I had seen that look before. Yevariel had worn it.

***

I heard my mother and Hebaneph talking about Yevariel long before he arrived: they speculated he was a young prince of the realm and certainly, when he arrived, there was a particular regality of aspect in the way he held himself. But that might be true of any centaur, I guess.

There are factions over there as bad as anything the Two Hoofs can concoct
, my father had said warningly to me once, and my mother had chastised him for using the term.
You never know
, he’d muttered to me.

The first time I saw Yevariel I was mid-performance. My mother kept her word and brought him and Hebaneph to the College Auditorium to see the play: I was halfway through the monologue in the second act (the one about heroes) when I inadvertently looked at the audience—something I’m loathe to do these days: I hadn’t really mastered the art of light-housing then—and saw a dark face, gleaming eyes. He was looking up from where he had wholly reclined on the cushions and carpets my mother had brought along for him to rest on and was pressing his lips to the mouthpiece of a complimentary hookah. He parted those lips and smoke blossomed from his mouth. Still the gaze he had on me penetrated the smoke. I did not falter in performance, but there was a pause I hadn’t intended.

Backstage Yevariel was full of effusive praise for the company and me. My mother was still buzzing around my playmates, and Yevariel took me aside and asked if I would meet him later that week: he wondered if I might show him around the city. So far, he murmured with a smile and a meaningful glance at Hebaneph, he had been taken only to the places middle-aged women would go to for pleasure. I was happy to agree.

We met in a small restaurant not far from Karamir Hill on a late, summer afternoon. His lodgings were to be found at the rear of the place, and the restaurant became his regular haunt during his time in Lymander.

Though the day outside was bright I found him in a dim alcove set off from the main part of the restaurant. He looked like he’d been there a while. The low table was covered with soiled plates and ewers still tacky with blackish wine, and his eyes were somewhat red rimmed from the hookah.

He greeted me with a wave of his hand through the smoke, the hobgoblin waiter bringing another carafe to the table as soon as I had nestled down comfortably on the soft cushions opposite Yevariel. A moment later skewers of chicken and lamb and little leaf-wrapped dumplings were run over from the kitchen.

As I ate we spoke of the city and of his impressions of it so far. He would be with us for a year and, over the course of that year, I would observe how he enraptured so many with his charm, his easy manners. I found him admirable, I will admit, but for me it was the sense that he was a thing displaced that I was mildly enamored of, I think: it is a familiar condition for actors to find themselves in. Yevariel seemed boundlessly rich, which is always an attractive thing when one is making new friends; willing to laugh and make mild mischief (for which his apologies would be disarmingly gracious); and he had an unerring, penetrating insight into people.

It was he who recognized I had a teacher’s instincts. I think he saw that when—feeling that, at the very least, he was almost as much a guest of my family as he was of Hebaneph’s—I told him about the parts of Lymander that only a native (and, especially, only a native
male
) would know: he was of a similar maturity.

Eventually, as the sun wore down the wall in a square of light, we came to the subject of the play he had seen me in. He asked me to iterate the monologue for the second act again:

“When heroes are named it takes all day,” I began. “The beach is covered with flowers and reeds, flags and trees, and the gods on the mountaintop clap and weep. By moonlight the nymphs come with milk sweet as spring, and the heroes are led away, one by one. At midnight the ships come. Time winds their sails . . .”

Yevariel gestured for me to stop, tears in his eyes. “This business of heroes,” he said, “it is very important in Egepy right now. These words touch me very deeply. I see from how you speak them that they touch you, too. In my beautiful Egepy we say ‘
mi breja, mi freyn
’ when we meet one we believe has the same soul as us. It means ‘my brother, my friend,’ see?”

He stretched one of his strong arms across the table toward me and I took his proffered hand as though we were about to arm wrestle. “Mi breja, mi freyn,” he said, soulfully, and I politely repeated it. Just then four more centaurs arrived outside the restaurant.

“Stewards of my father’s house,” Yevariel said. “I must speak with them briefly. They are here to arrange more suitable accommodations, but I have become fond of my little hidey-hole here.”

He gave a lopsided smile which I returned. I watched through the window as he spoke to them out on the street, his arms going up and down, making cutting gestures through the air, pointing hither and thither. The other centaurs nodded and trotted away, and he returned to the table, easing himself down into the alcove and onto the cushions.

“Are you quite sure you are happy here?” I asked, eyeing the dingy restaurant: I was sure there were better places for him to lodge.

“My people are used to making sacrifices,” he said.

***

Just as Rakharion returned the dipper to me a group of satyr guards came down the steps, opened his cell, and beckoned him out. Rakharion offered no resistance. Indeed, he went without a murmur.

“He’s hurt,” Adyl called out to them. “I hope you’re taking him to have that wound seen to.”

“These are only preliminary questions,” one satyr said. “And the water was for you only.”

Before we could make any response to that they ushered Rakharion up the broad steps. Did it occur to me then that to have placed the water in the cell for us meant that we were headed here all along? I don’t know. I do know that I have since dreamt of a satyr placing that bucket of fresh, cold water there as we stepped aboard the boat that brought us to Swerna days before.

I took a dipper of it over to Adyl when they were gone. Her eyes had hardened and she looked up the dark steps with a palpable fury: but she drank and let me wet her forehead again with a dabbing handkerchief. A sole guard returned.

“Your appellant is here,” he said.

“My appellant?” I had no idea what he meant.

“Satyr. One who speaks in your defense.”

“Defense? Of what?”

He didn’t answer.

“Are we to come with you?” Adyl asked.

The guard shook his head. “Appellant coming now,” he said and then he went to linger in the pool of blue gloom by the stairs. After a moment or two, Utag, the Director of the House of Pantomime, appeared at the top of the steps. He came down gingerly, looking fearful that either his hoofs or his toga would betray him on those slick stones. His face was tired, troubled. He and I had not met since he’d visited my workshop in Lymander.

“Master Sennufer!” he called out. As he came to the cell he stretched out his hand to shake mine, but the guard put up his billy club and halted him before we touched.

“I am sorry for all of this, my dears,” he said to us, with a sour glance at the guard. “Bureaucratic nonsense is ever an obstacle when one tries to break boundaries.”

I shrugged. “I suppose . . . ,” I began to say, but Utag went on quite briskly:

“I will need to verify to them that your time in the hobgoblin diaspora, and your year in the aelf collectives, are merely instances of you pursuing your work?”

“Of course!” I spat. “I was
performing
in both places! And it was ten years ago! You know this, Utag!”

He nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes, yes. Indeed,
I
do. I must confirm these things for
them
. That is all.”

Before either Adyl or I could voice our contempt for the ludicrous situation we were in, the Pantomime director asked, “And you never met with any political subversives in those places? Never had any conversations about Swerna or Egepy?”

Adyl made a disgusted sound.

“Utag,” I said, trying to communicate to him as gently as possible, “This is not appropriate. What business is it of Swerna’s whom I speak with?” I shook my head. “No. This won’t do.”

Utag’s face fell. He looked more troubled than ever as he peered over at the guard—who just stared back impassively.

“I will see what I can do, my friends,” Utag said. He leant in close and stage-whispered: “You must understand, Swerna’s eyes are
everywhere
!” With a waft of his toga in the direction of the guard, he left.

***

They came and told us we were being ejected about twenty minutes later. I protested that I had a contract of work, but to no avail. Utag was nowhere to be seen when we were ushered back up the stairs and our papers were returned to us. We were told a boat was leaving soon and we would be on it. Our luggage reappeared and we were escorted back to the dock.

When we got to the wooden quay, we were led past Rakharion’s head. It adorned a pole, facing east. Adyl looked away but I could not. I felt like everything that had happened had been pre-ordained, foretold somehow. I don’t know why.

We were given a small cabin in steerage. Once we set off I felt the irresistible need to eject something from myself. I made my way to the shared toilets and there, standing in the stink beside the rusty, snaking pipes, hot piss tumbled out of me, making me shake like I was having some sort of seizure.

When I got back to the cabin Adyl had managed to cram herself on the small cot. She had thrown an arm over her face and would not speak to me. The boat juddered away from the dock and I went back up to the low deck, thinking that even the heavy air over the wide river would be better than the stuffy atmosphere in the cabin.

Up there, I watched Swerna slowly slip out of visibility. Smoke still lingered in the air over the red citadel. I stayed up there until the evening grew gloamy and the mosquitoes thrived in and out of the few lights along the deck.

I thought about the last time I had seen Yevariel.

I had only caught a glimpse of him as the skiff he was on slid through the water, away from Swerna. He’d been crouched between three or four horses. When he looked up, his face was black, darkened with ash, but his gleaming eyes were the same as ever. The skiff’s captain had hollered some greeting at our passing boat and the faerie-lords and the aelfes and the hobgobs had waved. Yevariel had looked at me and I had looked at him. Then he had crouched lower and became obscure to me.

Would I still call him brother? Would I still call him friend?

I went back to the cabin and took off my linen coat. Adyl was asleep, her face reposed and calm, taking up the entirety of the cot. Our bags were piled up in the tight corner by our small sink and faucet. I pulled mine out and set it on the single metal chair, intending to put on a heavier coat if I was to spend the night on deck, as it now seemed I must. Instead I found, at the top of my luggage, my long-lost corduroy jacket, neatly folded and placed above all the things I had packed for our journey to Swerna. Its wine-dark color had faded and it looked dusty, as though kept long in storage. Every badge that had ever adorned it was still affixed upon its lapels. I dusted it off and looked at it for a long time before I put it on and returned to the deck and the cool night.