Free Songs_of_the_Satyrs by Aaron J. French Page B

perspective on the world, and this brought his attention back to me as a reality, a thing to be dealt with.
    His eyes were utterly emotionless: “Master Sennufer,” he said, “I’m afraid we are going to be detaining you and your wife a little longer. Please come with me.”
     
    ***
     
    Twelve years ago I took part in my one and only protest against the practices of the Satyric Empire.
    That was the year the satyrs forcibly occupied the Star-Gazer’s Ziggurat on the southern border of the centaur’s kingdom, Egepy. The satyrs still claim to this day that that act was a sacred reclamation, even though their kind have never practiced Celestialism as profoundly as centaurs do; and they continue to deny that wresting the tower from the control of the centaurs was meant as any kind of symbolic gesture at all—even though all of the holy rites of centaurs revolve, in some way, around the Ziggurat and its environs.
    The enmity of the satyrs and the centaurs is ages old. No scholar I’ve ever read has been able to pinpoint exactly how and why this conflict started, nor postulate a formula that might bring it to an end. It’s a tribal thing, I suppose, as ingrained in both races as any view we observers from outside cultures might have in response to it. As with any conflict of this kind the rivalry has certain predictable characteristics: the Empire of the Satyrs and northern Egepy share a border that has always been disputed territory; the two races spring up from the same ancestral stock. In many ways the two cultures have mutual philosophies. It is, in short, the battle of one brother against another—as most longstanding disagreements always are.
    A great many historians from other nations concur that the centaurs are the elder race, however, their philosophical order and their Celestialist faith pre-dating the rise of the satyrs of Swerna, a nation that so often emulates the nature of its longstanding rival. This is also what some commentators believe fuels the competitive temperament of the satyrs, and has been the principal driver of their economic and military expansions. It is, of course, virtually impossible to travel now to any land that doesn’t feature some sign of Swerna’s presence, be it in the trading enclaves they’ve established in the faerie domains, the mines and mills on the lands of the hobgoblins, or even in the human homelands my wife and I have traveled from. There the cafés and stadiums, the oil parlors and the shipping trade, are all now funded by agents of the so-called Crimson Land of the satyrs. This is one of the reasons centaurs have become more and more insular over the last decade or so and are rarely seen outside of Egepy anymore, preferring to avoid their enemy as much as possible. That retraction from the world, though, began when the Ziggurat fell to their enemy.
    That same summer I’d finally finished my training as an actor and my wife Adyl, who was at the protest, too (though not with me), had had her first little pamphlet of poetry published.
    Most of us students barely knew what we were about that day. As we marched down Karamir Hill and out of the campus we joined in with the throngs of more organized marchers that poured out of every street, heading toward Parliament Square and then past that, toward the Satyric Embassy on the canal side. Thinking back, it was one of the last protests of the age, a kind of bacchanal of youth and outrage coming together for one final carefree affair before the inevitable eyes of government turned our way and, by noticing us, finally found reason to outlaw such acts. But, that day, we were united in our cause, and we all lifted our voices on behalf of the centaurs even though they, wisely, were not easily found among our swelling number.
    “When will there finally be,” we’d sung, “fair weather from the Crimson Land?”
    Never , came back the answer to that old centauric lay: the business of our nation with Swerna was too important for