Songs_of_the_Satyrs (17 page)

He scented the father and the six daughters before he heard them. Every new moon they danced, skipping through the heather, leaping and spinning. Their hair waved in the breeze, golden at the scalp before darkening to green along its length.

The monstrosity crouched lower into the blackberry brambles. Gray hair grew in wavy strands around his loins and legs, which ended in cloven hooves. His torso and arms suggested a man but wiry, yellow hair veiled his white skin in a jaundiced halo. A black mane ringed his face. Deep-seated yellow eyes peered over a broad, flat nose, and from the tip of his nostrils through his upper lip sliced a cleft from which his tongue shot to taste the air. Retractable claws adorned his fingers.

Ignoring the tantalizing berries, the half lion, half satyr risked inching forward to admire Feena, his lust and love. If they saw him, the dryads would vanish into the forest, driven off by his ugliness.

He watched for hours, yearning to hold her, to touch her tender skin. Twice she danced within reach. A single bound and she would have known the strength of his grasp, suffered his lips and tongue, but Salton checked his desire: he wanted her love.

When the dryads left the clearing, Salton rolled onto his back, waiting for limberness to return to his aching knees. He must have her. The old father dryad would suffer, but surely he wouldn’t sacrifice them all to keep one.

Their magical hearts beat deep in the forest in a grove all but inaccessible to the woodsman’s ax. Salton journeyed daily from his cave to caress Feena’s tree, to lick and sniff her sap, and to offer his devotion. Each hemlock grew perfectly straight with delicate branches fanning out from its bole. The new growth emerged dark yellow as if the branches were tipped with gold.

The father’s tree stood in the center beside a blackened, limbless trunk, which marked the mother’s grave where lightning had done its worst. She must have screamed as she burned alive. Salton thanked the gods he had not heard it.

The father recoiled as Salton approached, creaking and bending as if the satyr-lion brought forth a mighty wind. Salton touched the father’s bole and pressed his fingers into the furrowed bark. “Is my ugliness a threat, Lerhem? I had no part in how nature made me. Let me love your daughter.”

Lerhem did not speak. The dryads, the squirrels, and even the birds fell dumb with anticipation.

“Your silence insults me.” His cleft parted as he snarled through jagged teeth and red gums. “You condemn me for nature’s abuse, but I
am
master of what I do.”

Claws shot from his fingers and he dragged the points through the furrows, cutting to the tree’s flesh. Lerhem screeched and his branches shook.

Salton withdrew his hand. His claws folded into his fingertips. “I can hurt you in ways unimaginable.”

Delicate whisperings flitted among the trees like butterflies. Then the chatter ceased and a deep voice resounded in his head.

“Such a union would be unnatural. It is forbidden.”

Salton roared at the sky, baring his cat fangs from point to root. The hemlocks quivered, as with the first gusts from a storm.

He raised his claws and looked about the circle at so much beauty and perfection. How could an honest plea for love be forbidden? His hand snapped downward, leaving a five-fingered gash across Lerhem’s trunk.

***

“Did you hear that?” asked the elder of the two woodsmen. The handle of his ax rested on his shoulder and graying hair poked below the edge of his red, wool cap.

“It’s too far. We shouldn’t be going this way.” Like his father, the son carried an ax and wore a red cap, but his black hair curled up below the neck, and a thick coil of rope hung from his shoulder.

The older man stopped. They were following a deer trail and something else through a stretch of unexplored forest. The noonday sun stabbed at the broad-leaf canopy overhead, pressing the forest to yield from the black of night to the cloudy gray of twilight. Squirrels scurried among the oaks. A woodpecker’s knock reverberated. A grunt told them of feral pigs feasting on nuts. All these sounds were familiar and unnoticed except when they chose to listen.

“These woods are strange, Father. I can feel something here.”

“Aye. Perhaps we should go back. But look at these oaks. No one has ever cut here.”

They craned their necks to see the treetops well over a hundred feet above them.

“Too big for us,” said the son. He pointed at the base of a massive bole. “Would take five men, maybe even six or seven, just to circle that.”

Three delicate notes from a flute fluttered past.

“That,” said the father.

The son shook his head. “What is it?”

The father broke through the undergrowth toward the source, drawn like a wolf to blood. The son followed, his senses clouded and dim. He felt drunk, not the way of the mead he drank to excess with his friends, but on enchantment. A witch might live out here or faeries, coaxing them to a cauldron or an Eden of no return.

For hours they traveled in fits and starts, leaving the oak and walnut forest for hemlock and pine, resolving to turn back only to plunge ahead again when the flute whispered. They emerged from the forest into a grove of golden hemlocks, which grew in a ring around another hemlock and a denuded bole, gray and cracked from the weather.

They gaped at the perfectly proportioned trees, at the green boughs tipped with gold, a species living only in myth.

“It can’t be,” said the son. “It’s an illusion. We’re bewitched.”

“A gift,” answered the father. “We were meant to find these.” He stepped toward the fairest tree, grasped the lowest branch and broke off the tip with its mixture of green and golden needles. “Is this an illusion?”

The satyr-lion hiding in the shadows winced as his beloved shrieked. Already the unanticipated had soiled Salton’s scheme. Though these woodsmen could not hear it, the trees screeched and screamed like horses in a burning stable.

With one hand Salton pressed the halves of his cleft lip together and with the other brought the hollow reeds bound with grass to his mouth. The notes diverted the woodsmen.

“And this is the grandest of them all,” said the father, approaching Lerhem. “Go on, see if you can reach around it.”

The son embraced the trunk but his fingers did not touch.

“At least six more hands,” said the father. “We must keep this place secret.”

“Who would believe? It will take us a week to drag these home through the woods.” Startled, he pointed to five parallel gouges in the bark.

“A lion, possibly. Marking his territory,” said the father.

“It’s too dangerous here.”

“The woods are always dangerous and so is a prize worthy of song and story. We should cut one now.”

The son pointed at Feena. “The fairest and the lightest.”

Salton sucked in a breath. His lips quivered and his fingers shook as the two men approached Feena. The dryads squealed like dying rabbits, piercing his eardrums and shattering his concentration, which he needed most for the spell.

He squeezed his eyes shut, focusing on the words, on the two men who must forget. He repeated the words, catching their rhythm, for if that rhythm was imperfect, the spell would fail. Notes shot from the flute toward the men, who stopped before landing their blow.

They looked at one another, searching for a glimmer of comprehension, a landmark in a fog bank, but found nothing. Where? Why? What? The questions rolled about in their minds, sloshing to and fro, and in unison they shouldered their axes and strode from the grove, following the obscure path that had led them there.

***

The boy crouched lower behind a fallen log and fountain of ferns as his father and older brother marched past, staring ahead, not speaking or singing, not smiling or frowning. Their sharp eyes did not scan the forest at all: most unusual and dangerous.

He looked back to the golden hemlocks, then slunk along the trail until he was out of sight and hearing. A giant boar crossed their path, grunted, and shook his tusks. But the men marched toward it, and if the boar had not charged away, they would have fallen over the beast’s bristled back. They suffered an enchantment. About this, the boy harbored no doubts.

As the father’s grip loosened, the branch that he had broken from one of the hemlocks fell out of his hand. The boy picked it up, not fully believing what he had seen until he felt the prick of the green and golden needles in his palm. He dropped the branch in a satchel, where it joined the berries he had been gathering.

The spell wore off as the pair reached familiar woods and the men began wondering at the passage of the day without cutting any trees.

The boy caught up to them. “No luck today, Father?”

The men exchanged a troubled glance. “We didn’t find a tree worthy to cut today, Doran.” He slapped his youngest son’s shoulder. “I hope your berry picking was more profitable.”

“Not so much,” said Doran. “But I did find a worthy tree. I found a golden hemlock.”

His older brother laughed. “And I saw a centaur mounting a river nymph.”

“You saw a dying pine,” said the father. “You’re as likely to see a golden hemlock as a satyr.”

The two men laughed as they turned toward the cottage.

Doran pulled the branch from his satchel. “Is this a dying pine?”

***

Salton brushed the rounded nubs of his claws across Feena’s trunk. The wiry hair growing on his hands and fingers caught in the bark, but he took no notice. He hummed a ballad, stroking Feena in time with the music, as if Feena was a violin and Salton the bow. The dryad giggled from the tickling.

“I would never let them hurt you,” he whispered.

“No, you would not. But could you stop them?”

Salton growled deep in his throat. “You underestimate me. I would have torn their limbs and sliced their throats and drenched your roots in their blood had they struck you.”

“And if they had chopped at my father or sisters?”

“They didn’t. They chose the most perfect.”

“If you are to have me then you must speak plainly.”

“Then tell
me
plainly,” said Salton. “Will you have me?”

“Do my father and I have a choice between life and death?”

“It was your father who refused me. To be ugly is to be cursed in his eyes. But do you blame me for seeking a lover’s bliss?”

“I’ve reproached you for what you did. Not why you did it. My father is calling you.”

Salton pressed his cheek against Feena and shot his tongue through his cleft to catch a drop of sap. “It won’t be long, my love.”

“I cannot leave without my father’s permission,” said Feena.

But Salton did not answer. He well knew this and growled as he approached Lerhem.

“You play reckless games,” said Lerhem. “For centuries we stood here undisturbed until an abomination showed death the way.”

Salton shrieked, his cry echoing through the woods and valleys as he slashed Lerhem. Amber rivulets sprang from the gouges. “Give me Feena and I’ll protect you. I’ll stand between all of you and any threat.”

“A harbinger of danger as our savior? Your promises offer no comfort.”

The grove shivered with whisperings, urgent and plaintive. Salton struggled to pick out the individual voices, to determine their tone, whether for or against him.

Lerhem groaned. “You have imperiled us, who are rooted to the earth, the victims and beneficiaries of happenstance. I do not trust your spells, but since you value your desires above our eternal destruction, we must accept your protection. I expect nothing fruitful from this union. Let us never speak of it again.”

***

Salton gathered reeds growing in the shallows of a lake and wove them into a pallet which he laid over dried moss. Across the pallet he sprinkled flower petals from every orchid he could find. His wedding bed complete, he hunted a stag, creeping up on the foraging animal at the edge of a meadow. He sprang onto the beast’s back, sinking his claws into its flank and chest before crushing its windpipe between his jaws. He savored the blood dripping from his mane and hands, blood lust driving him to eat his fill, consume it raw, but for his bride he resisted.

He roasted the deer on a spit at the mouth of his cave until the meat glistened and bubbled with melting fat.

His preparations consumed a day and a night and though Lerhem and his daughters feared the time when the sun crossed the sky, Salton went to collect his bride just as the sun rose behind the eastern peaks.

“Will you hide among the hawthorn to set an ambush or wait in the open to frighten any comers without a fight?” said Lerhem.

“Today, I take my bride home.” Salton stroked Feena’s cheek. “Strategy is tomorrow. You’ve made me wait long enough.”

“You brought them here,” said Lerhem. “You’ve given away our secrets.”

Salton took Feena’s hand and led her from the grove, from Lerhem’s blustering, from the whispering trees.

“Father and my sisters are very frightened by what you did when you brought the woodsmen. We should not leave them during the day.”

“The woodsmen have forgotten everything, and I’ve prepared a feast and a bed of flowers for you.”

Salton talked as they trod the forest, recounting his hunt for orchids and the slaying of the stag. He bade her to sit on a log in the cool shadow of his cave’s entrance. He tore meat from the roasting deer and poured wine in wooden cups. Feena nibbled at the meat, respecting Salton’s kindness. The wine she gulped and after the third cup Salton moved the flask within her reach.

He ate his fill, swallowing chunks of meat whole and snapping bones to suck the marrow. Grease and wine clotted his mane. He recounted the many nights he’d watched her dance. Feena listened and smiled and when his confidence overflowed, he risked a question.

“Do you find me repulsive?”

“You’re a creature with talents, like any other. Your music is certainly not repulsive.”

“Ah, my flute. Many days my only companion.” He wiped his greasy fingers on the goat hair covering his thighs, then raised the hollowed reeds to his lips before turning his back so she would not see him holding his cleft together.