Songs_of_the_Satyrs (12 page)

He looked at her. The wind blew and fluttered her garment.

“Easier for you than for me,” he replied.

“It will be more complicated for you than it was for me, yes. Still, I do not jest.” She looked at the pile of freshly turned earth where he had buried Lorena. “They caused her death. They will eventually cause your death. I have taken steps to make sure they don’t destroy me. In a short while, I will own this land. That way I can make certain this tree is never cut down. Your form is a challenge, certainly. But you have found the hoard the Roman Britons hid in the ground during the days of Boudicca. Money will enable you. You can make a place for yourself in their world as I have made a place for myself.”

“You know about the treasure?”

“I know this land. Some of my roots go into the cave. I don’t need any of the gold there.”

He did not know what to say. She smiled.

“Come to the house four
stadia
down this road.” She pointed. “I dwell there. Establish your presence. It will be your entry to the human world.”

“How?”

“Disguise yourself. Use your resources. At one time satyrs had the reputation of being wily.”

And with that she vanished.

***

Varinius came down to breakfast. Biggs, his valet, brought him tea and the London paper. He sat in a chair, taking in the sunlight, feeling the cool breeze blow through the open windows, satisfied to his marrow by a night of love with Lucy.

He ran his eyes over the paper. The population of the United States had reached fifty million. The Bolivian army had been routed by the Chileans in the Pacific War, and the Chileans had captured Lima. The Empire, still reeling from the heavy losses and Maiwand, felt better now that an expeditionary force had relieved the garrison at Kandahar and were in pursuit of the Afghan rebels—who, it seemed, had suffered serious, crippling losses in the battle, making it a pyrrhic victory.

He sighed. In the past, he had had no interest in human affairs. He had lived his life in nature, in the immediate experience, not qualified by the passing of time.

Biggs brought in his breakfast of bacon, eggs, rolls, and butter. He topped the meal off with a frothing mug of ale. He felt refreshed. He also thought of Annabella and Cynthia. Since they would be the main attractions after the banquet, perhaps it would be good if he broke them in a bit. He laughed out loud. Like they needed breaking in.

As he ate, he remembered the visit to Ionia and his first time inside a human dwelling.

***

He stole clothes drying on a line. Putting them on, he shuddered. The confinement seemed unbearable—yet he knew the humans hardly ever went unclothed.

The shirt and waistcoat fit well. The trousers were a problem. His crooked goat legs did not fit easily into them. He found a pair of boots cast off in a trash heap—though they looked new and sound to him. But his hooves slid about on the soles, so he stuffed them with moss and leaves and practiced walking in them before he set out for the house Ionia said he should visit.

It loomed up before him when he turned a corner. Its towers and gables pierced the sky. A brick fence topped with iron spikes bounded it. He came to the iron gate. A servant in a powdered wig met him there.

“And whom shall I say is calling?”

He realized he had to invent a name.

“Tell her Mr. Morlington is here at the invitation of Miss Ionia.”

When he heard this, he instantly became obsequious, bowing and opening the gate. Still wobbling a little in his boots, Varinius followed the man down the long lane leading to the house.

Another servant appeared at the door. The two men whispered and the gatekeeper left. The house servant showed Varinius inside.

He found himself in a large room filled with furniture made of white and light brown wood with gold trim. Thick red cloth covered the floor. Dazzling glass ornaments hung from the ceiling. He heard footfalls. Ionia appeared on the other side of the chamber.

She had on garments that the humans wore—though in the course of his interactions with humans he had encountered mostly men, hardly any women. She was wearing a gown with a full, billowing skirt. The garment gathered at her waist, making her middle appear unnaturally thin. The top of it, cut low, revealed a wide swath of her beautiful white breasts. His blood stirred at the sight of them.

“Lady Mannering will be along shortly,” she whispered. “She has left all of her property and wealth to me. In a short while you will understand why.”

At that very moment, he heard a voice lilt: “O pussy! Pussy cat, are you here?”

That night Ionia met him beneath the moonlight by her oak. She slipped out of her chiton, he threw his arms around her, and they mingled in love under the sight of the chaste moon. After the rolling, grunting, and gasping was over, they sat on a mossy rock and watched the white light Phoebe shed play across the clear water of a rocky stream that ran near the oak tree where Ionia’s spirit rested.

“I felt so bad for Lorena,” she said. “I want to make sure the same thing does not happen to me. No one will ever cut down this oak because I will soon own it.”

“How long have you been Lady Mannering’s lover?”

“Four years. She is dying. I can tell, but she can’t. Cancer is growing in her. She will soon sicken and perish. She thinks the weariness she feels is the infirmity of age. When she is gone, I will become sole owner of her estate.”

He glanced at her beautiful, gentle body, white like ivory in the bath of moonlight. When a breeze arose and blew her hair, his blood jumped.

“You need to make provision for yourself,” she said. “The men of the district talk of seeing a satyr and scour the land you once counted as your realm, hunting you. You will not be safe as long as you’re living in the wild.”

She paused.

“I don’t want you to die, Varinius. I want you to live. I want you to be near me, to be a lover and friend. I am ripe to have a child. This only happens every two hundred years or so. I want you to father my child. But with us, it takes a lot of effort. I need you around for a long while. If you stay out in the wilderness, even in the sacred land, they will eventually find you and kill you.”

He saw the truth of her words. They listened to the plashing of the stream for a long time.

“I endure that woman’s embrace,” she said, “only to preserve myself. You too must make your place in the human world.”

“I would not even know where to begin.”

“I have an idea,” she said.

***

Varinius finished his breakfast. He decided he would ride over and see Ionia. Their child, Nerina, had found land of her own and married one of the local deities who had also managed to survive disguised as a human. They lived in Ely (her husband was a genius of the marshes there). He could visit Ionia, roll with her, and then return and prepare Annabella and Cynthia for the considerable business they would do tonight.

His servants got his horse ready. He still found riding awkward. Ionia insisted he learn, and he was glad he did. Still, sitting astride a fellow beast felt unnatural. His settlement in the human world, he recalled, began with riding a horse to Paige House, the manor he would eventually acquire.

***

He had learned about Lord Paige from Lady Mannering.

Two months before her abrupt death from cancer, he had sat with her and Ionia at tea. He noticed how her hand shook as she raised her teacup to her lips. It clattered when she set it down.

“Pussy tells me you are looking for property.”

“I am,” he said. “I own houses in London and in Hull, but my love is for the country.”

“Lord Paige is selling his estate. He’s flat broke, I’m told—drinking, gambling, profligacy. You could probably get it for a song.” She smiled. “He even owns the satyr’s grove. No one has caught the creature yet, but we are told he still lurks in the precincts.”

He rode over to the Paige House. The structure, ancient, slightly medieval in its look, sat on a hill. Huge oaks surrounded it. The grounds, he noticed, had sunk to deplorable condition. Weeds choked the lawns. Grass grew through the flagstones leading to the front door. Scraggly vines crawled over the fences. He saw a pack of skinny dogs—probably hunting hounds gone feral—nosing for food in the weedy garden. No servants greeted him. He went up to the door and rang the bell.

After a long time, the door opened.

A white-haired man with bright blue eyes and a ruddy face regarded him. He wore a black frock coat and a wine-stained shirt.

“Lord Paige, I assume. My name is Morlington. Someone has informed me that you are thinking of selling your estate. I have come here to make inquiries.”

“You speak English like an American,” he said, his voice a gruff guffaw.

“I divide my time between Hull and London,” Varinius said, improvising a story. “Thus the confusion of dialect.”

“Come in,” he said, turning abruptly and gesturing.

Varinius followed him inside. Paige glanced back.

“Crooked legs,” he observed, a stifled laugh bursting from his lips.

“I have an infirmity—from birth.”

Lord Paige only laughed again.

The house, though its interior and furnishings were magnificent, was covered with dust. A musty smell radiated from the carpets. Empty liquor bottles crowded the top of every table, the piano and piano bench, and several stairs on the staircase. Paige ambled on. Then he turned and, as if from nowhere, flourished a sword at Varinius. He tossed another sword to him.

“En garde,
” he said, his eyes alive with mad glee.

Varinius recovered from his astonishment quickly enough to catch the blade and duck a swipe by Paige that might have taken his head off. The old man laughed wildly. Varinius did not know how to fight with a sword. He had watched the Roman legionaries train in the ancient days. Their blades were different, though, and he had never done more than observe them from afar.

The old man, drunk and half mad, wore a look of bloodlust on his face. “Let’s see how well you can fence with those gamey legs,” he spewed, thrusting his thin sword.

Varinius parried, turned, and thrust back, surprising the old man, who gaped at him a moment and then went after him with renewed vigor and more focus. Varinius dodged his jabs and feints. Lord Paige was skilled, no doubt, but his inebriation and the damage he had done to himself through dissolute living blunted his ability.

With the adroitness of a half animal, Varinius quickly saw patterns in his opponent’s attack. He watched him (he was slowing down from fatigue), saw the right moment, rushed at him, parried, and knocked the sword from his grip, sending it high into the air.

He stepped back, caught the airborne sword and backed Lord Paige into a corner, both points sticking an inch from his throat. They faced off in silence.

“You see,” Varinius said into the astonished eyes of the drunk old man, “I have worked very hard to overcome my handicap.”

He paid twice as much as he should have for the estate. But he paid in gold, which Paige could not gainsay. He closed the estate to hunting so the old groves and woodlands that had once been his realm could recover their vitality through natural processes. He refitted and repaired the house, hired servants and gardeners, a cook and a valet. In a few months the place had recaptured its former glory.

Ionia had inherited Miss Mannering’s estate. Neighbors grumbled that a “sapphic,” as they termed her, had gotten all the old woman’s land and money, but Mannering’s lawyers had made the will airtight. She surprised everyone by courting (and, for effect, sleeping with) men and by being seen in London and Paris with Varinius at her side. She spent a year in Paris to have his child (a girl—dryads only bore female children).

She came back with Nerina, whom she introduced as her orphaned cousin. Everyone knew Nerina was more directly related than a cousin, but the practice of a short sojourn overseas and convenient lies afterward was common among landed female gentry who bore unexpected children, and they accepted her.

She helped Varinius adapt to the patterns of human life. She advised him (he had not thought of this) to appear to age, to announce his death, and then appear as a young son. The high-ranking gods could shape-shift easily and assume any form; lower-ranking deities possessed less spacious powers in this regard, but with practice he learned to appear older and then younger.

From his purchase of Paige House in 1710 to his current ownership now in 1880, he had portrayed four different men. Soon it would be time for number five. Ionia kept her supernatural existence hidden by a similar ruse.

They were still lovers. She seemed content with him. He ranged over a wide territory with women, but she understood and accepted as much. He was, after all, a satyr. In another thirty years, she would once again be ripe for childbearing.

***

He made a pleasurable visit to her and then rode back home. His first guests from London would arrive in a few hours. Until that time, he would have the young bareback riders, Annabella and Cynthia, perform their famous “dance” for him (he had never seen it, but it was all the rage among the men of London). Then he would take them to his darkened chamber, where they could not see his goatish legs and tail, and decide if they were worth their price.

Snow-laden pines huddled beneath their white burdens at the margin of the road, and for a moment the Ship of Fools halted as it crested a hill. Its hull was painted a merry yellow. A bitter breeze played in sails of red silk. The wooden figurehead, a fool dressed in motley, wore a comic frown, as if afraid he might run aground. From a distance, the ship would have seemed to be sailing backward through the snow.

“Whoa,” Erstwhyle called to the gray draught horses that pulled the ship. The vessel had been hoisted up on axles and turned into a wagon. Every time it rolled through a town, rustics would gape and point. Inns and homes would empty as spectators gawked. Erstwhyle liked that. The bigger the crowd, the more he got paid.