Thessalonica

“Not like to come so close,” the satyr answered. A moment later, it added, “Hard to come so close. Saints almost everywhere to keep me away.”

George nodded, half matter-of-factly, half sympathetically. As Christianity’s hold on the land tightened, the old creatures found it harder and harder to approach holy men or holy places. The satyr hadn’t had any trouble approaching him. He shrugged. He was just a man, just a sinner. He knew it.

“Where have you been living?” he asked.

“Up in rough country.” The satyr pointed off to the north and east: rough country sure enough, well away from the Via Egnatia that still--tenuously--linked Thessalonica with the Adriatic and Italy on the one hand and with Constantinople on the other. The satyr went on, “Villages not so bad. Not so much--” Being what he was, he couldn’t make the sign of the cross, but George got the idea.

He nodded to show the satyr he followed. Bishop Eusebius was always talking about doing a better job of evangelizing the little upcountry villages. It wasn’t only satyrs that hung around them. Bacchus still came around in the fall, when the grapes were being crushed for wine. Up in the hills, Pan had a festival, too, though even there some said he was dead.

“Why didn’t you stay up in the rough country, if it was easier there?” George asked.

The satyr’s eyes got wide. It stroked itself again, as if for reassurance. Breathing wine fumes into George’s face, it answered, “Not easier there. Not so good, no. People all right, even if some--” Again, he would have crossed himself if he could. “But new things in woods.”

“What kind of things?” George tried to put the same kind of dread into the word as the satyr had, but knew he didn’t come close.

“Lots new things in the woods.” The satyr looked back toward the northeast, as if expecting those things, whatever they were, to burst from the woods and tear it to pieces. Up and down, up and down went that hand. After a moment, it added, “Wolves worst. Yes, wolves.” It nodded to itself; it might have been comparing the wolves to something else almost as dreadful.

George scratched his head. For one thing, you heard wolves howling outside the walls of Thessalonica every winter. For another-- “I wouldn’t think ordinary wolves would be the sort of things to worry you,” he remarked. Satyrs weren’t what they had been, back in the days before Christianity came to this land. They were a long way from diminishing to mere flesh and blood, though.

“Not ordinary wolves,” the satyr said. “Not ordinary, no.” It seemed grateful to George for having given it the word to describe the wolves, even if only in the negative.

“Ah,” George said. “New sorts of powers trying to come down here: is that what you mean?” The satyr nodded, head moving in rhythm with its hand. George shrugged. “I expect the priests will drive them away.”

The satyr made a noise like none he’d ever heard before. After a moment, he realized it was half moan, half giggle. “I watch priest go out to wolves,” the satyr said. “He not see me, or he” --once more, it indicated the sign of the cross without actually making it-- “and I have to run away. But he not see. He find wolf. He go up to it. He do that thing, thing make me run.”

“Yes?” George said when the satyr didn’t go on. “What happened then?”

Again, that strange mixture of mirth and terror burst from the satyr’s throat. It was an appalling sound, one that made the little hairs on George’s arms and at the back of his neck stand up as if he were a wolf himself. “Priest do that thing,” the satyr repeated. “He do it not at me, so I see safe. And wolf--eat him up.”

“Really?” George said. It was, he realized, a foolish response. He consoled himself with the thought that it was better than making the sign of the cross, which would have routed the satyr. It had been a long time--a lot longer than he’d been alive--since powers that could stand up against Christianity’s most potent symbol had come into this part of the world. He nodded slowly to himself, fitting puzzle pieces together like mosaic tesserae in the church of St. Demetrius. “They must belong to the Slavs.”

“Slavs.” The satyr spoke the word as if it had never heard of the people so named. “Who--what--are Slavs?”

George’s nose was long and beaky, admirably made for exasperated exhalations. “They and the Avars have only been raiding the Roman provinces south of the Danube for the past generation,” he said, his tone perfectly matching the irritated sniff.

“Ah, only one generation,” the satyr said in some relief. “No wonder I not know.”