The Dog Said Bow-Wow (31 page)

To Darger’s lasting regret, his childhood had not been one of privilege and gentility, but spent in the rough-and-tumble slums of Mayfair. There, perforce, he had learned to defend himself with his fists. Now, for a silver lining, he found those deplorable skills useful.

Quickly, he brought up his forearms, crossed at the wrists, between Surplus’s arms. Then, all in one motion, he thrust his arms outward, to force his friend’s paws from his throat. Simultaneously, he brought up one knee between Surplus’s legs as hard as he could.

Surplus gasped, and reflexively clutched his wounded part.

A shove sent Surplus to the floor. Darger pinned him.

Now, however, a new problem arose. Where to put the patch. Surplus was covered with fur, head to foot. Darger thought back to their first receiving the patches, twisted around one arm, and found a small bald spot just beneath the paw, on his wrist.

A motion, and it was done.

“They’re worse than football hooligans,” Surplus commented. Somebody had dumped a wagonload of hay in the town square and set it ablaze. By its unsteady light could be seen small knots of townsfolk wandering the streets, looking for trouble and, often enough, finding it. Darger and Surplus had doused their own room’s lights, so they could observe without drawing attention to themselves.

“Not so, dear friend, for such ruffians go to the matches
intending
trouble, while these poor souls…” His words were cut off by the rattle of a wagon on the street below.

It was Theodosia and Anya, returned from their chore. But before Darger could cry out to them, several men rushed toward them with threatening shouts and upraised fists. Alarmed, Theodosia gestured menacingly with her whip for them to keep back. But one of their number rushed forward, grabbed the whip, and yanked her off the wagon.

“Theodosia!” Darger cried in horror.

Surplus leaped to the windowsill and gallantly launched himself into space, toward the wagonload of mattresses. Darger, who had a touch of acrophobia and had once broken a leg performing a similar stunt, pounded down the stairs.

There were only five thugs in the attacking group, which explained why they were so perturbed when Darger burst from the inn, shouting and wielding his walking stick as if it were a cudgel and Surplus suddenly popped up from within the wagon, teeth bared and fur all a-hackle. Then Anya regained the whip and laid about her, left and right, with a good will.

The rioters scattered like pigeons.

When they were gone, Anya turned on Darger. “You
knew
something like this was going to happen!” she cried. “Why didn’t you warn anybody?”

“I did! Repeatedly! You laughed in my face!”

“There is a time for lovers’ spats,” Surplus said firmly, “and this is not it. This young lady is unconscious; help me lift her into the wagon. We must get her out of town immediately.”

The nearest place of haven, Anya decided, was her father’s croft, just outside town. Not ten minutes later, they were unloading Theodosia from the wagon, using one of the feather mattresses as a stretcher. A plump nymph, Anya’s mother, met them at the door.

“She will be fine,” the mother said. “I know these things, I used to be a nurse.” She frowned. “Provided she doesn’t have a concussion.” She looked at Darger shrewdly. “Has this anything to do with the fire?”

But when Darger started to explain, Surplus tugged at his sleeve. “Look outside,” he said. “The locals have formed a fire brigade.”

Indeed, there were figures coming down the road, hurrying toward town. Darger ran out and placed himself in front of the first, a pimplyfaced young satyr lugging a leather bucketful of water. “Stop!” he cried. “Go no further!”

The satyr paused, confused. “But the fires…”

“Worse than fires await you in town,” Darger said. “Anyway, it’s only a hay-rick.”

A second bucket-carrying satyr pulled to a stop. It was Papatragos. “Darger!” he cried. “What are you doing here at my croft? Is Anya with you?”

For an instant, Darger was nonplused. “Anya is your daughter?”

“Aye.” Papatragos grinned. “I gather that makes me practically your father-in-law.”

By now all the satyrs who had been near enough to see the flames and had come with buckets to fight them — some twenty in all — were clustered about the two men. Hurriedly, Surplus told all that they knew of Pan, Eris and the troubles in town.

“Nor is this matter finished,” Darger said. “The Chief Researcher said something about using Dionysus to stop riots. Since he has not appeared to do so tonight, that means they will have to create another set of riots to test that ability as well. More trouble is imminent.”

“That is no concern of mine,” said one stodgy-looking crofter.

“It
will be
ours,” Darger declared, with his usual highhanded employment of the first person plural pronoun. “As soon as the agent of the riots has left town, she will surely show up here next. Did not Dionysus dance in the fields after he danced in the streets? Then Eris is on her way here to set brother against brother, and father against son.”

Angry mutters passed among the satyrs. Papatragos held up his hands for silence. “Tragopropos!” he said to the pimplyfaced satyr. “Run and gather together every adult satyr you can. Tell them to seize whatever weapons they can and advance upon the monastery.”

“What of the townsfolk?”

“Somebody else will be sent for them. Why are you still standing here?”

“I’m gone!”

“The fire in town has gone out,” Papatragos continued. “Which means that Eris is done her work and has left. She will be coming up this very road in not too long.”

“Fortunately,” Darger said, “I have a plan.”

Darger and Surplus stood exposed in the moonlight at the very center of the road, while the satyrs hid in the bushes at its verge. They did not have long to wait.

A shadow moved toward them, grew, solidified, and became a goddess.

Eris stalked up the road, eyes wild and hair in disarray. Her clothes had been ripped to shreds; only a few rags hung from waist and ankles, and they hid nothing of her body at all. She made odd chirping and shrieking noises as she came, with sudden small hops to the side and leaps into the air. Darger had known all manner of madmen in his time. This went far beyond anything he had ever seen for sheer chaotic irrationality.

Spying them, Eris threw back her head and trilled like a bird. Then she came running and dancing toward the two friends, spinning about and beating her arms against her sides. Had she lacked the strength of the frenzied, she would still have been terrifying, for it was clear that she was capable of absolutely anything. As it was, she was enough to make a brave man cringe.

“
Now!
”

At Darger’s command, every satyr stepped forward onto the road and threw his bucket of water at the goddess. Briefly, she was inundated. All her sweat — and, hopefully, her pheromones as well — was washed clear of her body.

As one, the satyrs dropped their buckets. Ten of them rushed forward with drug patches and slapped them onto her body. Put off her balance by the sudden onslaught, Eris fell to the ground.

“Now stand clear!” Darger cried.

The satyrs danced back. One who had hesitated just a bit in finding a space for his patch stayed just a little too long and was caught by her lingering pheromones. He drew back his foot to kick the prone goddess. But Papatragos darted forward to drag him out of her aura before he could do so.

“Behave yourself,” he said.

Eris convulsed in the dirt, flipped over on her stomach, and vomited. Slowly, then, she stood. She looked around her dimly, wonderingly. Her eyes cleared, and an expression of horror and remorse came over her face.

“Oh, sweet science, what have I done?” she said. Then she wailed, “What has happened to my
clothes?
”

She tried to cover herself with her hands.

One of the young satyrs snickered, but Papatragos quelled him with a look. Surplus, meanwhile, handed the goddess his jacket. “Pray, madam, don this,” he said courteously and, to the others, “Didn’t one of you bring a blanket for the victims of the fire? Toss that to the lady — it’ll make a fine skirt.”

Somebody started forward with a blanket, then hesitated. “Is it safe?”

“The patches we gave you will protect against her influence,” Darger assured him.

“Unfortunately, those were the last,” Surplus said sadly. He turned the box upside down and shook it.

“The lady Eris will be enormously tired for at least a day. Have you a guest room?” Darger asked Papatragos. “Can she use it?”

“I suppose so. The place already looks like an infirmary.”

At which reminder, Darger hurried inside to see how Theodosia was doing.

But when he got there, Theodosia was gone, and Anya and her mother as well. At first, Darger suspected foul play. But a quick search of the premises showed no signs of disorder. Indeed, the mattress had been removed (presumably to the wagon, which was also gone) and all the dislocations attendant upon it having been brought into the farmhouse had been tidied away. Clearly, the women had gone off somewhere, for purposes of their own. Which thought made Darger very uneasy indeed.

Meanwhile, the voices of gathering men and satyrs could be heard outside. Surplus stuck his head through the door and cleared his throat. “Your mob awaits.”

The stream of satyrs and men, armed with flails, pruning-hooks, pitchforks and torches, flowed up the mountain roads toward the Monastery of St. Vasilios. Where roads met, more crofters and townsfolk poured out of the darkness, streams merging and the whole surging onward with renewed force.

Darger began to worry about what would happen when the vigilantes reached their destination. Tugging at Surplus’s sleeve, he drew his friend aside. “The scientists can escape easily enough,” he said. “All they need do is flee into the woods. But I worry about Dionysus, locked in his crypt. This expedition is quite capable of torching the building.”

“If I cut across the fields, I could arrive at the monastery before the vigilantes do, though not long before. It would be no great feat to slip over a back wall, force a door, and free the man.”

Darger felt himself moved. “That is inutterably good of you, my friend.”

“Poof!” Surplus said haughtily. “It is a nothing.”

And he was gone.

By Darger’s estimate, the vigilantes were a hundred strong by the time they reached the Monastery of St. Vasilios. The moon rode high among scattered shreds of cloud, and shone so bright that they did not need torches to see by, but only for their psychological effect. They raised a cry when they saw the ruins, and began running toward them.

Then they stopped.

The field before the monastery was alive with squids.

The creatures had been loathsome enough in the context of the laboratory. Here, under a cloud-torn sky, arrayed in regular ranks like an army, they were grotesque and terrifying. Tentacles lashing, the cephalopods advanced, and as they did so it could be seen that they held swords and pikes and other weapons, hastily forged but obviously suitable for murderous work.

Remembering, however, how they feared fire, Darger snatched up a torch and thrust it at the nearest rank of attackers. Chittering and clacking, they drew away from him. “Torches to the fore!” he cried. “All others follow in their wake!”

So they advanced, the squid-army retreating, until they were almost to St. Vasilios itself.

But an imp-like creature waited for them atop the monastery wall. It was a small black lump of a being, yet its brisk movements and rapid walk conveyed an enormous sense of vitality. There was
a presence
to this thing. It could not be ignored.

It was, Darger saw, the Chief Researcher.

One by one, the satyrs and men stumbled to a halt. They milled about, uneasy and uncertain, under the force of her scornful glare.

“You’ve come at least, have you?” The Chief Researcher strutted back and forth on the wall, as active and intimidating as a basilisk. A dark miasma seemed to radiate from her, settling upon the crowd and sapping its will. Filling them all with doubts and dark imaginings. “Doubtless you think you came of your own free will, driven by anger and self-righteousness. But you’re here by my invitation. I sent you first Dionysus and then Eris to lure you to my doorstep, so that I might test the third deity of my great trilogy.”

Standing at the front of the mob, Darger cried, “You cannot bluff us!”

“You think I’m bluffing?” The Chief Researcher flung out an arm toward the looming ruins behind her. “Behold my masterpiece — a god who is neither anthropomorphic nor limited to a single species, a god for humans and squids alike, a chimera stitched together from the genes of a hundred sires…” Her laughter was not in the least bit sane. “
I give you Thanatos — the god of death!
”

The dome of the monastery rippled and stirred. Enormous flaps of translucent flesh, like great wings, unfolded to either side, and the forward edge heaved up to reveal a lightless space from which slowly unreeled long, barb-covered tentacles.

Worse than any merely visual horror, however, was the overwhelming sense of futility and despair that now filled the world. All felt its immensely dispiriting effect. Darger, whose inclination was naturally toward the melancholic, found himself thinking of annihilation. Nor was this entirely unattractive. His thoughts turned to the Isle of the Dead, outside Venice, where the graves were twined with nightshade and wolfs bane, and yew-trees dropped their berries on the silent earth. He yearned to drink of Lethe’s ruby cup, while beetles crawled about his feet, and death-moths fluttered about his head. To slip into the voluptuously accommodating bed of the soil, and there consort with the myriad who had gone before.

All around him, people were putting down their makeshift agricultural weapons. One let fall a torch. Even the squids dropped their swords and huddled in despair.

Something deep within Darger struggled to awaken. This was not, he knew, natural. The Chief Researcher’s god was imposing despair upon them all against their better judgments. But, like rain from a weeping cloud, sorrow poured down over him, and he was helpless before it. All beauty must someday die, after all, and should he who was a lover of beauty survive? Perish the thought!