Thessalonica

At last, everything was to Crotus’ satisfaction. “Let us taste the wine!” the male cried, a sentence that had not changed much over time. The rest of the centaurs did not cheer, as George had expected them to do at that welcome exhortation. Instead, a deep sigh ran through them, as when a lover spied his beloved after the two of them had spent a long time apart.

Crotus was the first to fill a dipper. Instead of also being the first to drink, the male centaur, oddly ceremonious, passed the dipper to Nephele. The female savored the bouquet of the wine for a moment, then poured the dipper down. A shudder ran through both the human and the equine halves of the centaur’s body. Its eyes slid almost shut. A low, soft sigh escaped its lips. If that wasn’t ecstasy, George had never seen ecstasy.

And, when Nephele’s eyes opened again, they had fire in them. The transformation was abrupt, and a little terrifying. All the planes and angles of the centaur’s face were different. Every one of them screamed danger! Something wild and terrible, something not seen in these hills for many long ages, had slipped its bonds and was running free.

Father Luke saw that, too. He did his brave best not to seem alarmed. In a conversational tone of voice, he asked, “Do you know the writer on magic named Philotechnus, George?” When George shook his head, the priest went on, “One of the bits of advice he gives is, Do not call up that which you cannot put down. I think that may have been good advice indeed.”

Nephele roughly flung the dipper back to Crotus. The male centaur refilled it and drank. George watched in astonishment: the change in Crotus was even greater than that in Nephele had been. The male centaur seemed large and more . . . predatory than had been true only a moment before. If it turned that fearsome gaze on George, he told himself he would make the sign of the cross at the creature--better to drive it off than be torn limb from limb.

And then George wondered if the sign of the cross would do any good against a centaur maddened by wine. He could see Father Luke wondering the same thing. All at once, he understood in his belly what Philotechnus’ maxim meant.

More and more centaurs drank. More and more centaurs underwent that transformation, awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time. Hoarse shouts rose into the sky. The more drunken centaurs there were, the more the horse shouts gained in volume and ferocity.

Even Demetrius, still the only centaur colt George had seen, took a dipper of wine and was remade in the savage image of its elders. Demetrius put the shoemaker in mind of a fox cub worrying at a bone too big for it, but that didn’t mean, or didn’t have to mean, the small centaur wasn’t dangerous in its own right.

“How do we go down toward Thessalonica?” Luke asked.

“I think we’d better have the males who aren’t drunk tell the rest to get going,” George said. He wasn’t anxious to draw to him the notice of the centaurs who had been drinking.

“That isn’t what I meant,” the priest said. “How do we go down to Thessalonica? I may be needed there, to bring the power of. . .” --he didn’t speak God’s name, not wanting to find out whether or not the centaurs could bear it in their present condition-- “to bear against the Slavs and Avars and their powers.”

“Oh,” George said, and then, “Well, how do you feel about being cavalry, Your Reverence?”

“Riding a centaur, do you mean?” Father Luke said. George nodded. The priest went on, “Riding a drunken centaur? Riding a maddened drunken centaur? Of all the things in the world, the only one I’d less rather do, I think, is stay up here in Lete.”

George nodded again. He started to go up to Nephele, to ask if the female centaur would bear him down the long and winding road that led back to Thessalonica. Then, remembering what Ampelus had tried to do to Nephele, he sheered off. He could think of only one way to hold on as he rode, and feared the female centaur would take it as an undue liberty.

He went up to Crotus instead. “Will you carry me to Thessalonica?” he asked. “Will one of your friends carry Father Luke?”

Crotus’ eyes were tracked with red. Slowly, slowly, they focused on George. “Thessalonica,” the centaur said, one thick syllable at a time, as if it had never heard the word before. Then its head went up and down. “Oh, aye, the new town.” George did not think of it as a new town, but George did not personally remember its founding, as Crotus no doubt did. The male went on, “And you, mortal, you are … ah, who you are returneth to me: the follower of the new.” The centaur looked ready to tear him to pieces for being a follower of the new. But then more memory seemed to make its way through the haze of wine. “And we are … we are in alliance. Alliance with bad against worse. A hard path, but the only one left to us.”