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.”