MUST tell you, before I begin, the tale I am going to tell you must not be discovered by anyone else, at least while I am alive. My name is not Anestos. But it is a name which I have chosen for myself, both because I wish to remain hidden from those who will not understand and because I choose to mark the transformation of myself with a new name. I was called out of myself and what of the old self remains is the subject of my story.

The trials I have endured have made me an outcast, among men and my own kind. Only now, in the later part of my life, when Death is likely to find me sooner than my detractors will, have I worked up courage to put it onto paper. Wretched faun that I am! My nature prevents me from celebrating the changes wrought within it! My double-body quivers at my newfound singleness of soul.

I remember it well, even down to the month and the day, because it was just after the Mid-summer feast. We Fauns have always kept our feasts with utmost regularity and devotion, though our enthusiasm has lately been tempered by a certain circumspection, a fear of being discovered. This time, however, I blundered. There was, in those happier days, a great Village of Fauns in the —— Woods (I will not give myself away by revealing its name), and had been for centuries. We were there first. I feel that must be said strongly.

The coming of the monks and their monastery was met by we Fauns with a mixture of derision, apprehension and curiosity. While humans were not unheard of in those days, they were far less common than they are now. One might see a human once in a lifetime and consider himself lucky to have done so. By chance or luck or fate, this particular cloister of monks had chosen for their Abbey a small valley that nearly bifurcated our wooded home, and thus situated themselves almost in the perfect middle of our community. They first made their presence felt by the commotion of the abbey’s construction: sawing and hammering and hoisting newly-felled trees until slowly, slowly, a nave and a narthex began to form in the clearing. Not that we knew what those were at first, of course. Only in the course of my studies did we gradually discover this, and a great many other things. I was not the first to meet them. I think a few of the younglings were, by accident. But it was I, and I alone, who lived among them. And the way in which this came about is so odd and extraordinary I cannot refrain from giving an account of it.

I have mentioned I first met the monks shortly after the annual Feast of Mid-summer. Those days were as close as any of us Fauns came to days of “obligation,” as the monks call it.

The celebration of the Mid-summer feast was marked chiefly by cracking casks of ale put to cellar at the end of fall. Late autumn brew was, I thought, quite the best of all faun-brewed vintages, and I indulged with enthusiasm. Oh, the games were splendid! You have never seen a game like a Faun’s drinking game. There is a perfect pandemonium of dance and question-and-answer and drink and speeches all rolled into one, and the longer the game goes, the funnier it becomes because the tipsier one gets. You may imagine I was not as circumspect as I would have been otherwise. Wandering off by myself, I sat beneath a great white oak tree which demarcated the monks’ new property, and careless of detection, began singing an old Faunish drinking song:

A drop, a dram, a draught, all three

A flagon fine for drinking!

A pint of porter, just for me

And all my worries’ sinking.

There are a great many other verses to the song and I was in just the humor to sing them all when I was interrupted by a small, bald headed man in a tunic coughing politely in the way humans do when they wish to interrupt. I was as startled by our meeting as he, though I took his appearance in stride. I had seen humans before, though never so closely; he appeared to have never conceived such a thing as a faun possible.

“Saints defend us!” he blurted, staring down at me, looking especially at my legs and hooves. “What on earth! Are you a… a…?”

As he seemed incapable of forming a sensible sentence at the moment, I interrupted him. Ale had made me gregarious, and I was interested in this odd-looking man. “Yes, I am indeed a faun. I’m glad to meet you, sir! Delighted.”

Recovering himself, the monk made a curious gesture, tapping his forehead, his chest and then his left and right shoulder, and bowed. “Forgive my being rude, but I have never met one of you… of your type…” he stammered and trailed off.

“Of course, my dear fellow, of course. There are fewer of us these days than there used to be, and many more of you.” I said this rather pointedly. He ignored, or pretended to ignore, the barb.

“Indeed there are! We have only just come to this part of the woods; the parish is building a monastery in the woods just over there. We are standing in what is to become the outer courtyards”.

“Rather rough on the countryside citizens, don’t you think?” I said.

“Not at all, not at all! Let your reasonableness be known to all men and live at peace with all, said Saint Paul.”

“And what about we Fauns?”

“Well… well, I don’t think he ever met one.” And here he bowed again and said “Brother Marsyas. The Lord be with you.”

“He hasn’t been," I replied. “No lord or lady has ever set foot in this Wood as far as I know”— and I restrained myself from adding “and so much the better”.

ESPITE what I hoped was the proper amount of aloofness on my part, Brother Marsyas was a genial sort of person, and he wasted no time in inviting me to supper at the monastery; the other monks seemed more circumspect. I gathered that custom demanded their hospitality, and Brother Marsyas seemed to hold some seniority.

Mixed with their hospitality was I think pity. The dinner they served me was not the bread and fish and ale the other brothers supped on. I was given a hearty soup and fresh goat’s milk (the latter, of course, I refused) and afterwards a tonic which made me cough and sputter. It was plain, dull food, made for work and energy, not merriment and mischief. And so, of course, not at all to my liking.

Nor was the manner of the brethren in sleeping and waking. After they had dined, Brother Marsyas and a host of monks repaired to a small chapel and sang a few songs— weird, mournful-sounding things with an over-emphasis on the harmony. I half expected them to sing late into the night, in the Faunish manner, but they concluded without so much as a dance.

Afterward, being worse the wear for my indulgence, I was led to a room whose walls were decorated with pictures of stern-looking men and women who were covered in rays of golden light. Their faces and their deep, sad eyes stared down at me in my cot, and I dreamed strange and uncomfortable dreams.

The next morning I was wakened by Brother Marsyas, who seemed to have been appointed my guide. The abbot had desired a meeting with me, and, being in debt to the monks’ hospitality, I felt compelled to accept. The abbot’s office, a little ways down a corridor from my room, was as sparse and simple as the rest of the monastery.

The abbot himself was an impressive figure, though he said little. The issue seemed to have been decided already, needing only my consent. The monks were concerned (unduly, I thought) about my drinking habits, and thought it wise I spend a week as their guest in the monastery.

Why did I accept? I am uncertain even now. Partly, I felt obliged to them for their care, and also, hospitality is not a thing to be taken lightly among we Fauns. Even more, among my general curiosity, I felt a creeping sense of desire. I hardly knew why, but feeling within myself a longing to know and understand these stern and joyous and spartan people, I began my stay at the monastery.

“Spartan” was the word. Actually, their word was “mortification”— a term which I had until now used to mean “embarrassment”. The monks took spartanness to a different level. Not for me, of course; I was a guest, and my quarters were comfortable, though plain and unadorned, save for the pictures. The environment was likewise chiefly brown and earthen-colored, the monastery being built from the sandy stones that made up the countryside. Broadly cruciform, my cell lay at the extreme end of the right arm of the cross, and held no more than a bed, a plain bedside table, and a lamp.

Brother Marsyas’ cell was the same, a drafty little cubby that held no more than a cot and a bedside table. The same kind of pictures hung on his walls, but that was the only decoration. Even in the early stages of construction, the overarching sense of the place was austerity.

I couldn’t understand it. A faunish house could best be described as an elaborate bower. There are no masons and  smithies among our kind; our homes are little more than thatched huts or canopies in whatever suitable nook the woods afford us. But we do like our decorations: bouquets and wreaths, garlands and sprigs and sprays are a great part of any well-appointed faun’s home. We build our homes to be a part of our environs, becoming a part of the natural world in which we lived. 

This building of an edifice seemed to me, as I walked among the unpaved paths, dodging this monk chiseling cobblestone, that monk filling the cracks with pitch, an usurping imposition on the natural order. This was the first inkling I had of how vastly different our approach to life was from these humans.

HOSE were strange days. The monks began the day early, and though I was not expected to join them, I found myself padding my way down cold silent halls to the morning masses. How different their songs were from our Faunish songs! Sonorous and sad, and always about one thing. I quickly inferred this Person who was the Chief, Sole and Singular Subject of their songs and sayings was the same one depicted in the peculiar paintings in my room. We fauns had a thousand songs on a thousand subjects (you will remember the drinking song from the beginning of my story), and we would never have dreamt of so limiting ourselves.

I was soon to discover this limiting was woven into the very nature of these monks. Indeed, they had only one deity. Of all the strange habits these people had, monotheism, of course, was especially vexing. As long as I could remember, since I was a little Faun sitting at the cloven feet of my schoolmasters,  I had come to know the gods intimately. There were gods for everything, of course. Gods of feasting and gods of fasting (one often fasted to appease the god you offended by feasting, and doubled one’s pleasure at feasts by fasting), gods of war and gods of peace and gods of love and of vengeance. We knew their names and their attributes, their likes and their dislikes as well as any family member’s. And we were comfortable in their house. None of us would have ever imagined there might have been only one God.

It seemed to us quite logical that subjects as wildly different as sex and birds and death and the moon and the harvest have different deities to oversee them. To throw the lot upon one single entity seemed dangerous. This God, who rather selfishly demanded dominance over everything, seemed to take an especial interest in every human event: birth, coming of age, marriage, death. Everything the monks did was prefaced or concluded with a prayer to him, every trivial endeavor was entrusted to his care and oversight. Likewise, he did not have cults of anything. There were no special acolytes who devoted themselves to this ritual or that rite, this deity or that demigod. It seemed as though while he intended to be the God of everything, he did not intend his followers to be devoted to any one thing in particular— except himself. It was odd. Whereas one naturally devotes oneself to the deity of a tree and thus communes and becomes familiar with her treeness, this God would show you the beauty of a tree in order to discover the beauty, like a tree’s, but greater, that was already in Himself. That in itself was strange.

Their philosophy was likewise horribly provincial. We Fauns only celebrated the seasonal wine-harvest, and we celebrated it with fruits of the vine— symbolic of itself. Monkish celebrations unfailingly meant something. When you celebrated their God’s birthday (Brother Marsyas told me they called it “Christmas”), you gave gifts in imitation of his own generosity and gift-giving, and so the gift itself was nearly only of symbolic importance. You gave because He liked to give.

I respected the devotion, though it was a monomania. I said as much to Brother Marsyas, but we never came to an understanding — the object of his devotion seemed too small a thing to command such passion. I would only begin to understand their ways after the most peculiar chain of events in my own life came to pass.

HE monastery was home to a brewery, famous in the region for a wonderful ale, strong and lovely and dark. The monks brewed it in a barn-like structure adjacent to the monastery. I remember it now, the dark interior, cool and damp as a cave, the very walls exhaling a heady vapor of loam and liquor. An enchanting place, and of much more interest to me than a library or kitchen or the loomery. The monks who worked there were solemn and silent individuals, scrupulously clean, and absolute wet blankets. The first time I had taken the tour of the brewery, I had wondered why it was so early in the morning. I quickly discovered that, apart from the monks’ being habitual early risers, they saw this as a job— they taught me the curious word “vocation”.

The faunish way was for everyone to have their own garden, from which we grew the apples and grapes and grain upon which we lived. As for the wine, every faun brewed his own vintage, in his own home, and everyone brought a cask or so of it to the feasts. That was the custom, and why it was so easy, common, and acceptable to leave a feast quite inebriated. Any faun of good taste and breeding graciously sampled everyone’s particular libation, without partiality or favoritism. That, in combination with the drinking games, the generous partaking of one’s own personal brew, and the general imbibing of everything one was passed, are explanations enough for why a faun, absolutely blotto, sleeping it off under a tree after a feast, was a common and accepted sight.

These monks went about it in completely different fashion. The brewing of the ale was a communal effort, and the result was a singular brew— not yours or mine, but ours. This monk grew grain, while his fellow mashed wort, and yet a third felled oak trees which a fourth carved into barrels to ferment. Whatever the process, the result was an absolute success. Ah, such a brew. I have given up drinking these many years, but I still remember that ale: the garnet-amber bottles winking in the shaft of light poking through the cellar window. The sample Brother Marsyas poured me was far too small, but I gulped it with more pleasure than I had felt in all my years of feasting. Such an ale! Our Faunish wines were warm, stale water compared with this. Redder than rubies, with a beautiful head of cream-colored foam that wafted a sweeter scent than I have smelled before or since. Cool with the coolness of the earth where it lay, redolent with a beautiful perfume of liquor and fruit. The draught went to my throat like a traveler coming home from a long journey. The taste was many things: fresh bread and cold water, and spices and the smoke of a friendly fire in the chill of winter, herbs and flowers and stone-cooled rain. The taste of the sample lives in my memory still, and still I yearn for it.

Recovering myself, I held out my glass for another dram. Brother Marsyas took the glass from me and replaced it on the shelf. I began to protest but to no use. Brother Marsyas led me by the elbow out the door. I listened, and he did not lock it.

That night was a strange one. The faces in the pictures around my bedroom seemed to have changed in the meantime. Sterner than before their faces grew, and their rays seemed more cold, shining in the light of the bedside candle. I had a sudden wild fancy the light was shining on me. Was it their voices I heard, low and stern and gentle? I snuffed the candle and smashed my pillow onto my head. I felt beastly, thirsty and hungry and hollow. I thought to get up for some water, yet, I hardly know how, found myself tiptoeing down the stairs to the cellar.

I am not going to relate the total events of that night. Both shame and dissolution have obscured the memory of those hours. I do remember it was pleasurable at first. Oh, those monks knew their business. I could never define the line between pleasure and profligacy, never pinpoint the moment my body, a vehicle of intense desire, changed to an instrument of aching pain. Being drunk with a fellow drinker was alright. One knew the point of the affair was to drink with him and grow friendlier by means of and on the mutual approval of the drink. Drinking by oneself, one had only the company of the drink and one’s own increasingly-addled thoughts. Drinking alone was selfishness and so a kind of loneliness.

Of course, I had been drunk any number of times before, even to physical illness, without feeling the sense of shame which now wracked me. This was different. Both my body and my mind were unwell.

ROTHER Marsyas was the first to find me next morning, lying on the bottom-most step of the cellar stairs, the same glass he had offered me broken in pieces about my smelly, disheveled body. His eyes were filled with hurt and disappointment that pained me almost as much as my throbbing head did. He picked me up, never mind being only somewhat larger than me, and hardly knowing why, I clutched my arms around his neck.

I had hoped to be deposited in my own bed, with perhaps a bowl of warm soup to settle my turning stomach. I was dismayed to find myself plunked down in front of the Abbot in his office.

Shame was a relatively new sensation to me, especially concerning matters of drinking. All the same I couldn’t help hanging my head. Oh, he was not unkindly, though not happy with what I had done. I’m afraid I found it difficult to concentrate on his words; my head was pounding and I kept my arms tightly folded across my stomach to quell my rising gorge. The end of the affair was that I was to be sent away from the monastery. The words “pernicious influence” were used more than once. I felt deep regret at having overstepped the bounds of my hosts’ hospitality, but that rudeness seemed entirely secondary to the real offense I had given. I couldn’t understand it: they were far less offended by my presumption than my dissolution— the exact opposite of what I would have expected. Nevertheless, whatever my offense, it was enough to warrant expulsion from the monastery.

On the whole, I got off rather easily, considering I had been thricely a thief, a rebel and a drunkard. Mere and simple banishment was my due, and it was with a strange mixture of regret and relief that I left them the next morning, setting out even before they woke. The abbot had asked, very nearly insisted, that I take breakfast with the brothers before l left. It was kindly meant, and I never forgot it.  But I could not face them; the Faunish law was graven still deep within my heart. One simply did not dishonor the house of his host and then sit at his table. 

I wandered back along the path to my village, taking my time. As odd as it may seem, I was not looking forward to being home. I can’t explain it, but there was the sense of having failed; at what, I would be hard-pressed to say, but all the same, there it was. And so I tarried long among the trees of the wood, listening for their old familiar voices. I heard the murmur of the wind in the outstretched branches, but all beside was silent.

I walked into my village. There had been a feast the night before, the remains lay piled unattractively on the communal lawn. Nobody was about, of course, as everyone was sleeping off the previous night’s feasting. I was very hungry, but the food on the tables had no appeal.

In my own home I lay down in my bed until the sun came up, harsh and white in the cold air.

The first faun I met that morning was one of our elders, one of those who spent his time grumbling about wayward young fauns and their disregard for tradition. I was outside my hut, sweeping the lawn and tending the garden.

“Good morning,” he growled at me, his forehead wrinkled with disdain. 

“Good morning,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“Been having some adventures, eh?” 

“I suppose. How did you know?”

“Everyone knows, my boy. Been fraternizing with those humans, have you?”

“Yes, I have. Not a bad sort. You should see the way they make an ale!”

“Bah! I wouldn’t dream of it. If your father were here he’d let you have it!”

He snorted and stumped off, tail wagging in indignation.

Suddenly I was tired.

In the village there were games under the trees and picnics and dancing, and I wandered from party to party looking for any sign of welcome, any flicker of that feeling of belonging that I used to know. 

I felt nothing.

Well, not nothing. I wouldn’t say I missed the monastery,  but I felt, as clear as the ringing of a bell, the ache of aimlessness I could hardly explain.  

I had come to realize that the order of life I knew was a maze with no center. I had feasted and filled myself with all the things I had been told were necessary for a good life. I had tasted and seen and come away weary and empty. I had hit upon the impasse. There was only one with Whom I had to reckon. And He was waiting for me at the monastery.