Thessalonica

A rock hissed through the air, almost as fast as if flung by a catapult. It caught the rabbit in midbound. George heard bones shatter. The rabbit let out a shrill, startled cry. It tried to leap again after it thudded to the ground, but its hind legs didn’t want to work. Bleeding, it dragged itself along with its forepaws.

Clattering hooves in the brush at the edge of the clearing made George tighten his grip on his sword and bring up his shield--had the Avars pursued him even here, as the satyr said they might?

But it was not Avars who burst from the screen of bushes. George was glad he had his hand clenched on the swordhilt; that made it harder for him to cross himself, which would have frightened the centaurs away. He watched, fascinated, awed, as they came out into the clearing. The one that had thrown the rock was a roan male; its human torso had thick red hair on the chest, while a red beard grew from its cheeks and chin. George had never imagined a bald centaur, but this one was.

Its companion was smaller, slighter, darker, and so fervently female from the navel up as to make George wish he were part stallion himself. The noise the satyr made reminded him that it was part stallion, even if to a lesser degree than the two centaurs. George wondered whether they had laws against such out-of-kind couplings. If they did, the satyr, by its reaction, cared not a fig for them.

George kept staring as the centaurs cantered across the field to pick up the rabbit, which had stopped moving. Not all the staring had to do with the way the female centaur’s breasts bobbed as it moved, either. Satyrs were rare around Thessalonica, yes. Centaurs were more than rare. He’d thought the swelling power of the Lord had long since driven them from the world of men.

“ ‘Twill be fine, cony in a stew of leeks and turnips,” the male centaur remarked, his voice a bass deeper than any man’s, his Greek so archaic George had to think before he could be sure he understood it.

“Aye, thou hast reason, in good sooth,” the female replied in the same old, old dialect. That dialect was not the only reason her voice startled the shoemaker, for it fell in the same baritone registers as his own. All the same, he couldn’t help wondering whether the Biblical prohibitions against bestiality applied to creatures such as these.

Then he had another curious thought, not too far distant from the first. Along with those splendid, humanlike breasts, the female centaur also had a set of teats at the bottom of its horsy belly. When it had a baby or a foal or whatever the right word was, where did it nurse? George knew what his choice would have been, but he reminded himself he wasn’t a newborn centaur.

“Hunting is so poor these days,” the female said with a sigh.

“Aye, for the newcomers do most savagely chase and slay all the small deer they chance to run across, leaving but their leavings for us who have since time out of mind made these woods our home,” the male said. George supposed it meant the Slavic wolves and other such powers. Had George been a wolf, he wouldn’t have cared to run up against the male centaur, but a partly supernatural wolf might think different.

When he’d seen the Avars so confidently planted on their horses, they’d put him in mind of centaurs. Now, seeing the real thing, he wondered what the Avars would make of them. Would they be jealous? Or would they assume the centaurs were meant to be their slaves, simply because they hadn’t been lucky enough to be born Avars? That fit in with what he’d seen of the fierce nomads from off the distant plains.

The centaurs had their own measure of that lordly arrogance. Only after they’d finished with their own business did they deign to notice the satyr and his human companion. “Who is it that cometh with thee, Ampelus?” the male asked. That thee, unlike the one the female had used with the male, was patronizing, even insulting, not intimate. “A man from the city below, not so?”

“Yes, from the city, the city where they fight the new people, the new things,” the satyr--Ampelus--answered. “The city with saints inside.”

That made both centaurs scowl, reminding them of the marginal life they--and the centaur--led in an ever more Christianized world. The male dipped its shiny head to George. “We welcome you to this fastness to which our. . . acquaintance hath brought you. Know that I am Crotus, and with me you see my wife Nephele.”

George gave his own name, then said, “I didn’t know centaurs still roamed these hills.”

“They are ours,” the female said, drawing itself up with formidable pride. “Not enough saints hath . . . your city” --Nephele could not speak the names of God or Christ any more than the satyr could, and had to talk around them-- “to drive us hence altogether. Nor shall the savage strangers force us to flee, however fierce they be.”