Songs_of_the_Satyrs (35 page)

Kantzaros, who had been sleeping on the sofa with the colander over his face, sat up, put down the colander and the wine glass he’d been holding, and looked at her violent handiwork.

“Taking down the decorations already?” he said blearily.

Nell wiped away the snot and tears with the back of her hand. “Why me, eh?” she said.

“Hmmm?”

She gestured at her bare legs and gave an involuntary stamp of one of her hooves.

“I didn’t ask for these.”

“You have there some mighty fine goat legs, Nell. Stirs something in a man, I tell you.”

She gave a suppressed yell of rage. “Who the fuck would want mighty fine goat legs?”

“Goats?” suggested Kantzaros.

She picked up the nearest thing to hand, which turned out to be Kantzaros’s bagpipes, and lobbed them inexpertly at his head. They bounced off his face with a sharp, discordant squeak.

“I want you out of here,” she growled and then stormed into her bedroom, threw herself on her bed, and buried her face in her pillows.

A short time later, she heard the bedroom door open.

“You were conceived and born in the Chinese year of the goat.”

She rolled over. Kantzaros stood in the doorway, very still.

“And you’re a Capricorn,” he added.

“So was Jesus,” she said. “He didn’t have to put up with hooves and fur, did He?”

“Any child born during the twelve days of Christmas can become one of us.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “And with me for a father, the odds were against you.”

She sat up suddenly. “Father?”

He spluttered. “Father. Uncle. Brother. It’s all good.”

She shook her head.

“There are antidotes,” he said.

“Really?”

“I could bind you in ropes woven from straw or garlic stalks.”

“Not sure if I’ve got any in the flat.”

“There’s the singeing of the toenails thing, too.” He looked at her hooves. “Mmmm, maybe a bit late for that.”

“I just want to be normal,” said Nell.

“No you don’t,” said Kantzaros vehemently. “You want something and you just need to be strong enough to recognize it.”

“What do I want?”

From nowhere he produced two glasses of wine.

“I don’t think alcohol is the answer,” said Nell.

“No. Alcohol is the axle grease of thought and conversation and decision and deed. Wine is part of the journey, not the destination. Drink up and we’ll be on our way.”

She shook her head but took the glass nonetheless. He sat down on the bed beside her and stroked her leg. Nell watched his fingers burying themselves in her fur.

“Why goat legs?” she said.

“Why not?”

“But why goat? Why not sheep or cow or horse or dog?”

“Or chicken.”

“Or chicken.”

“Goats are intelligent creatures. Inquisitive. And even when you think you have them tamed, there’s still that bit of wild left in them. We’re not docile like sheep or cows. You can never trust a goat.”

“Can’t I trust you?” said Nell.

He squeezed her thigh, tenderly but powerfully. “Absolutely not,” he said. “The desert tribes knew our power. The Arabs called us
azabb al-akaba,
the ‘shaggy demons.’ The Israelites called us
se’irim
or ‘hairy men’ and tried to placate us with gifts and sacrificial offerings.”

“Get away.”

“S’true, till that bloody Moses character anyway, with his ‘you shall no more offer your sacrifices to the
se’irim
after whom you have gone a-whoring.’ Makes it sound like they were a-whoring after me all the bloody time. Fat chance. Anyway, it was a short step from there to blaming the sins of the tribe on a goat and sending it out into the desert to die.”

“A scapegoat?”

“Right. But it takes a lot more than a desert to kill a goat. And, the way I see it, if you keep heaping sins on a goat for long enough, that goat’ll get to thinking . . .” He drained his glass and looked through it. “Belief’s a powerful thing.”

He stood up and took her by the hand into the lounge, where he sat her down on the sofa and refilled their glasses. “And speaking of gifts and offerings,” he said and pulled down the red parcel with green ribbon from the mantelpiece and placed it in her lap.

“It’s not my birthday until tomorrow,” said Nell.

Kantzaros looked at the clock on top of the television. “It’s true. We could wait for five hours.”

They sat in silence for nearly a full minute before Nell growled and opened the parcel.

The V-shaped object was dark and had the greasy shine of something that had been held by a thousand different hands. She couldn’t tell if it was made of stone or wood or some strange metal, as she lifted it out.

“Pipes,” she said.

There was one mouthpiece leading to two pipes, set at an angle to one another. Carved trails of ivy—or maybe it was actual ivy—twined around the pipes and bound them together.

“More pipes,” she said.

“Ah, but these are different from the bagpipes,” said Kantzaros.

“Well, I can see that. The absence of a bag for one thing.”

“Not what I meant,” said Kantzaros. “The bagpipes are mine. These
auloi
are yours.”

She smiled. “I can’t play.”

“Belief,” said Kantzaros and got up in search of a fresh bottle of wine.

While her uncle made investigative noises in the kitchen, Nell put the pipe reed to her lips and blew. The pipes produced a harmonious two-tone note.

“And you said you couldn’t play,” called Kantzaros.

She experimentally covered a hole with her fingertip. The notes changed although perhaps not for the better. She tried other fingerings until she managed to produce a harmony equal to the first.

“Here,” said Kantzaros, thrusting a glass at her. “Piping is thirsty work.”

“I’ve only just started,” she said, but drank regardless.

“Wine improves music,” said Kantzaros. “And more.”

“It only makes it appear to sound better.”

“We live in a world of appearances, don’t we?” He picked up his bagpipes. “With me now.”

He began a simple tune. She watched him and his hands on the pipes. She found a configuration of notes that, to her ear, harmonized with his pipes, and when his fingers galloped on into other variations and counter-harmonies, she kept the simple tune going. Cheeks puffing, he nodded in approval and played on.

His pipes were louder but the sound she produced was clearer, purer, more akin to a brass instrument than the woodwind she held in her hands. While his music skittered and bounded, melodies running like animals through the shady and twisted woods, her music was the sunlight, sometimes concealed by his music, frequently revealed in unusual ways, but always there, a constant.

And she realized, in a way that she could not articulate properly, that there were other constants at her disposal. There was the air, high, cold, and capricious. There was the water, filling the emptiness with its gentle relentlessness. And the earth too, a limitless realm of rich chord-filled depths. The possibilities of the instrument opened up in front of her like a yawning pit, and she balked with a momentary vertigo but, with her uncle’s wordless encouragement, she launched herself into it, taking control of the music from him and guiding the melody into new territory.

“The auloi were invented by Marsyus, the wisest of the satyrs,” said Kantzaros.

He had stopped playing but Nell carried on. She wasn’t sure she would have been able to stop if she had wanted to. She had given the music free rein and it rode her with a certain inevitability.

“Some say that the auloi were invented by Athena who tossed them aside when the puffing of her cheeks ruined her pretty little face,” said Kantzaros. “Whatever, Marsyus was the master of the pipes and there was no greater musician in all the world. He knew this too and challenged Apollo to a contest: Marsyus versus Apollo, the auloi versus the lyre, freedom versus reason. Apollo was the god of light and truth. Marsyus was the emissary of the great Dionysus; Dionysus the giver of unmixed wine; Dionysus the hidden ruler, the false man; Dionysus the wild, the liberator, he of the loud shout; Dionysus the big-balled, the black goat, the goat killer, the winnower; Dionysus who brings release from care and worry.”

As Kantzaros recited the litany of names, Nell felt, as she had in previous evenings, the shadows gather in the corner of the rooms and the corners of her eyes, and through Kantzaros’s invocation, something more beautiful and more terrible than she could bear to look at took form in the room with them.

“In such a contest, only Dionysus could win,” said Kantzaros, “but Apollo can never admit defeat and Marsyus was forced to pay for his hubris for daring to challenge a god. Apollo took him to a dark and windowless cavern and flayed the skin from his back and left him there for dead. I still carry the scars,” he said, wincing.

She played on but her eyes twitched questioningly.

“But Marsyus and the auloi survived, down among the roots of the world tree. And he rises still to lead the Bacchanalia, the cult of drunken frenzy.”

And she saw without seeing, could not see but knew, that there was not one figure in the room with them but several, a host of them emerging from the moonlit copse behind her, moving in time to her music.

“And the dance will go wherever it will,” said Kantzaros, smiling at the forms in the shadows. “The ladies of the dance offer their gifts, their wine, their bodies to whomever they meet, and kill those who refuse them.”

There were other instruments accompanying hers now, cymbals and drums and things she could not imagine, and Nell felt the power she held ripple through her, a caress and a shiver. Kantzaros raised his hands high in welcome, a wine bottle held in one of them.

“We shall share our Bacchanalian mysteries with those willing to learn, the mysteries of fig and ivy and pine, mysteries of bull and goat. The bull whose horns we drink from. The goat whose hide makes our wine sacks.”

He grinned at those assembled. “For what is an old goat for, if not for storing wine?”

He drank deeply and his smile broadened and his voice grew larger and more resonant than humanly possible.

“We lead the dance,” he said, “and everyone must follow us or perish.”

She stopped blowing. The shades who accompanied her did not vanish instantly but faded back into the gloom, their music disappearing like a balloon slipping from a child’s hand.

Kantzaros looked at her, waiting for a response.

“I like that,” she said.

“Of course you do,” he replied and pointed at the clock on top of the television. “It’s midnight.”

“My birthday.”

“My last day in the world above.”

“Let’s make it one to remember.”

***

People might find it hard to imagine how the minions at the Blame ‘n’ Claim call center could possibly fail to see the radical change that was worked upon them that day, but those people, just like the rest of us, perfectly aware of the invisible progress of the hour hand, are still capable of looking up at the clock and declaring, “Is that the time?”

Each person in that office found a way into that other world. Some entered the building humming tunes they imagined they heard on the radio. Some had heard the echoes of birdsong in the trees in the sculpted lawns by the car park. Some, driving in, had been fortunate enough to glimpse the cavorting figures emerge from the Harvester pub, their faces raised in exultation to the sky. Those witnesses carried their experiences with them into work, like seeds in their pockets.

During the morning, several callers made mention of the unusual voices they heard whilst on hold, strange and sibilant, enticing them with offers, though of what they couldn’t be certain. Then there was the old woman who sat in one of the toilet cubicles (a toilet cubicle that was now a dark and mossy bower and yet quite clearly still a toilet cubicle). The crone uttered prophecies to every woman who would stop and listen and read the fortunes of those few who dared ask. Then there was the music that began to bleed in through the office PA system, a constant rolling tune that was sometimes pipes and sometimes drums and sometimes voices. The music was utterly natural. They all knew the tune. They had always known the tune.

And when the call handlers and paper shufflers heard and saw that the music wasn’t coming from the overhead speakers but from the instruments and mouths of the party makers who were now among them, this too seemed obvious. New Year’s may have been nearly a week gone, but it was still the season for parties.

The parade of drunkards wound its way through the aisles of tiny cubicles, encouraging folk from their chairs with offers of wine and food (a banquet of food was set out by one wall, trestle tables laden with platters brought in by a catering company that no one had booked). Few of the minions questioned any of what was going on about them. Even fewer questioned it once they had a cup of wine in their hand or, better still, in their belly. Kantzaros’s wine was heady stuff, and many of Nell’s coworkers were soon stumbling about drunkenly.

Nell watched Kantzaros hopping from hoof to hoof in the midst of a circle of women, making loud, lewd, and ecstatically received boasts about his “horn of plenty.” Turning with a smile, she saw Robert refilling his cup at the drink machine (which had spontaneously decided to produce golden frothy wine), and as she saw him, he lifted his head and saw her too. He gave her a little wave. Another Nell would have returned the wave but it was a tiny gesture that indicated too little to signify anything. Now, for today at least, she was not a woman of tiny gestures. She glared at him, not unkindly, and blew on her pipes, raising the volume and tempo of the music that she controlled.

A ragged cheer and drunken laughter rippled around the room, spinning the party onward into dance. Drummers and singers, bare-breasted call handlers and wine-addled desk jockeys, locked arms and seized waists and kicked their legs to the music.

“You want to dance?”

She stopped playing, leaving the music to its own whims.

Kantzaros stood beside her, leaning on the banquet table and nibbling on something red and papery.