“Some of the elders remember the times before there were marshes here,” he began, “but I spent my earliest days gathering herb and root in these very mires. Many’s the time I remember gathering figwort and purple medic with my Aunt Megaera, she who always told me, ‘Agion, purple medic follows the dove, figwort the pigeon’ . . .”
“This is all very fascinating, Agion,” I interrupted, looking desperately back at Bayard, whose attention was on the trail in front of him solely.
“Yes, but there’s more, Master Galen,” the centaur continued. “Aunt Megaera and I once had to fight a nest of bees away from the purple medic when we were making winter poultices and the compresses the older centaurs use for the arthritis. Dozens of bees there were, with the nagging bite of the horsefly and what is always worse with bees, the swelling afterwards. And Aunt Megaera says . . .”
Agion began to chuckle.
“She says . . . Oh! but she was a caution!”
His loud laughter shook the environs. A pack of small marsupials leaped shrieking from a nearby dwarf vallenwood and scurried off into the recessed green darkness. Bayard looked at me uncomfortably, his hand on his sword.
“Agion,” he interrupted, softly and urgently. “Remember we’re traveling toward hostile ground.”
“Right thou art, Sir Bayard,” said Agion, not much more softly. “But listen to what Aunt Megaera said, when we came out of the medic patch, our flanks swollen and knotted with bee stings.”
Bayard raised his eyebrows, politely attentive. His hand was still on his sword.
“She says . . . Oh! such an oddity she was!” And he began to laugh again. “She says, ‘It is a blessing tonight we sleep standing up!’”
By an unspoken agreement, Bayard and I steered him away from further stories about his life before he met us, which we had soon discovered to be not only boring but noisy. Instead, we asked more and more about the satyrs, and found out, to our dismay and irritation, that the centaurs—or at least this particular centaur, who didn’t strike me as all that knowledgeable—in fact, knew little more than we did.
“You don’t even know where they come from?” Bayard asked, for the first time showing a little impatience like a dent in that righteous spiritual armor. It was about the fifth question in a row to which Agion had no answer.
“It is simply as I told thee, Sir Bayard,” the centaur insisted, brushing something small, buzzing, and irritating from the bridge of his nose. “The satyrs have been here awhile—a month or two, I suppose, though even that is difficult to tell for certain.
“When they first arrived, we thought they were legendary creatures. Those from stories of the way things were before the Cataclysm. Thou rememberest the little goat-footed pipers in the story of Paquille?”
Bayard and I looked at one another. Neither of us had any idea.
“Of course, we tried to befriend them,” Agion went on. “We thought they were something from the old time, when it is said that the races of Krynn were bound more closely to the land and the animals who dwelt upon it. It made us yearn for things past.”
Bayard and Agion traveled awhile in silence, until I grew tired of the suspense.
“Go on, Agion. What happened when you tried to befriend these creatures?”
“As thou canst see, little friend, it was ill-fated,” Agion continued sadly. “At first, the satyrs kept a distance. They snarled. They brandished weapons.”
“I would have taken those as not very favorable signs, Agion,” I interrupted dryly. Bayard hissed my name, then shot me a scolding look. I sneered at Bayard, then softly, almost sincerely, urged the centaur to continue. Which he did, after a moment’s pouting.
“But we thought they were only being cautious in a new country,” he said apologetically. His big tail slapped his rump, swatting at some buzzing thing. Something screamed in the distance to our right, and I nearly jumped from Agion’s back, but neither the centaur nor Bayard seemed alarmed. Instead, they seemed almost relieved that something had broken the increasingly heavy silence of the marsh.
For they, too, had noticed the silence.
“As I said, we thought them only cautious,” Agion repeated. “At least until they killed two of our folk.”
“This is the part of the story I have awaited eagerly,” I said. “For I dearly love stories of murder set in the very surroundings I am passing through when those stories are told.”
“Dost thou want me to cease the telling? It is passing sorrowful, I grant thee, but also passing strange, and worthy the regard of those who will hear it.”
“Then tell the story, Agion,” Bayard urged, as we approached a menacing pool of murky water lying in the middle of the road. The water bubbled as Agion and I stepped over it, then calmed to a few narrowing ripples, then bubbled and boiled again as Bayard reined Valorous around it. Then the pool calmed once more as the pack mare, bringing up the rear of our little group, stepped by sure-footedly.
“I was not there when the killings took place,” the centaur said, reaching out cautiously with the end of his scythe to touch a vine dangling into the path ahead of us. Assured at last that it was a vine, he sliced it neatly from the branch where it hung, then ducked as he passed beneath the branch. “But I heard the story from Archala himself, who is always truthful of sight, truthful of telling. Here is what he told me.
“Six of us there were: Archala and Brachis and Elemon and Stagro the Younger and Pendraidos and Kallites. Six captains set off at high summer, to the middle of the marshes to deal for peace and friendship with the newcomers, the goat-men.”
Though I can stand the occasional tale of murder or war or other arbitrary bloodletting, I hate stories of mysterious death, especially when told to me in a mysterious and desolate place. Agion, on the other hand, told the grisly yarn with delight and with relish. It turns out that a good number of the stories the centaurs choose to remember and tell again end in the mysterious death of most, if not all of the characters. I didn’t know at the time, but casualties were light in this one.
“Six of us there were,” Agion chanted, “and four stories only that returned to high ground out of the fenlands.
“The first was that of Archala, leader of soldiers, the eldest, who saw them fall, Kallites and Elemon, who saw nought else but the falling, heard nought but the cries. Then saw the Solamnic Knight riding away.
“The second was that of Pendraidos the surgeon, who saw them fall, Kallites and Elemon, who saw no wounds on their bodies, until we were like to believe there had been no wounding, that nought had come to pass but their great hearts giving. He, too, saw the Solamnic Knight riding away.
“The third was that of Stagro the Younger, the archer, who saw them fall, Kallites and Elemon, and yet who saw no enemy, hearing his friends cry out, hearing the cries of the satyrs answer mockingly, hearing one cry above all of them, that one cry raised in a rich and musical and honeyed laughter, while Kallites and Elemon thrashed in pain amid the leveled reeds of the swamp. Then heard he, Stagro the archer, his friends cry out a last time in pain and in mortal wounding. And saw the Solamnic Knight riding away.”
Bayard frowned. He inclined his head forward to hear the details. Something about honeyed laughter gave me pause. I thought of the Scorpion.
“The fourth was that of Brachis the huntsman, who kept the dogs of Archala, who saw no falling, but . . .”