The Search for the Red Dragon - James A. Owen [83]
“It’s an old trick of Peter’s,” Daedalus said, “that goes back to the origins of Haven itself. It’s to prevent…”
He paused and put his hand to his chin, thinking. “It’s to prevent one from being swayed by the persuasion of the panpipes,” Daedalus said finally. “But why would Peter have put beeswax in his own granddaughter’s ears? She wasn’t at risk from him.”
“What do you mean by ‘persuasion’?” asked John.
Daedalus folded his hands behind his back and bowed his head. “It is something inexorably intertwined with the history of the Argo, the Lost Boys, and finally, with Peter himself,” he said. “The pipes of Pan have always had the ability to influence, to persuade, and to enchant. But of all who have heard its charms, the only ones who cannot resist…
“…are the children.”
“It began with the old gods,” Daedalus continued. “The Romantics civilized the stories and retroactively remodeled our images of what they were meant to symbolize. They were not toga-draped Caesars and Cleopatras; they were raw. Primal. And the one who most embodied that, who arose from Mother Earth herself, wrapped in root and loam, and who never truly scraped off the soil of his birth, was Pan.
“His exploits and mischief are literally the stuff of legends, but the most famous story of Pan involves the origin of his trademark panpipes,” said Daedalus. “There was a beautiful nymph named Syrinx who was beloved by all the other dwellers in the wood, but she scorned them all. She believed they were lesser creatures than she, and as such were beneath her notice.
“One day, as she was returning from the hunt, Pan saw her through the trees of his wildwood, and he became enamored of her. She rejected his advances and ran away. He shouted words praising her grace and beauty, but she didn’t stop to hear his compliments, and quickened her pace. He followed, continuing to pursue her until she came to the bank of a river. There he overtook her, and she had only enough time to call out to her kin, the water nymphs, for help.
“Just as the Pan laid his hands upon her, the nymphs turned her into river reeds, which infuriated the god. He stormed to and fro across the banks of the river, shouting his fury, when a slight, plaintive melody caught his attention.
“It was the reeds that had once been Syrinx. When the air blew through them, it produced music, and the sound was very pleasing to him. So the god took some of the reeds to make an instrument that he called a syrinx—the panpipes—in honor of the nymph he had pursued and lost.
“But Pan was not yet finished with the nymphs. One of those who had protected Syrinx was a graceful dancer who had a sweet, trilling voice. Her name was Echo.”
“Like the Well,” said Charles.
“Not like the Well,” corrected Daedalus. “Echo is the Well—or at least, she is the water within.
“Like her cousin, Echo scorned the love of any man. This angered Pan even more, to have been turned away twice by those who were not respectful of his birthright as a god. In revenge, he instructed his followers to kill her.
“Echo was torn to pieces and spread all over the Earth, and all that was left was her voice. As punishment for what he had done, the gods, led by the goddess of the earth, Gaia, remade the nymph as an elemental and allowed her to exist as a pool of living waters. They also granted Echo the ability to reflect back the words spoken to her, and to give the speaker his heart’s desire.
“The gods then took from Pan the one object he treasured most—the pipes he had made from the nymph Syrinx. And they gave them to a mortal who had been called on a great quest by the hero Jason.
“They gave the pipes to Orpheus.”
“How did the pipes make their way from Orpheus to Peter?” Bert asked. “That implies that there are more connections to the time of Jason’s Crusade than just the name of the islands.”
“Correct,” said Daedalus. “Under Orpheus, ‘the Pan’ became a title in and of itself. A designation of office, of a sort. Orpheus was the first ‘Pan’ to use the panpipes, and