Thessalonica

III

More people began encountering Slavs in the woods. A couple of men who went out hunting didn’t come back. George was on a search party that went out after one of them. He found no trace of the missing hunter. He found no trace that the man had fallen foul of the Slavs, but nothing to prove the fellow hadn’t, either. Whatever had happened to him, he never showed his face in Thessalonica again. George, along with most other people, suspected the worst.

The roads from the north grew crowded with farmers fleeing the ever-growing presence of the Slavs--and, presumably, their Avar overlords, though the Slavs were the folk on everyone’s lips. Some of the peasants took refuge in the city. Others kept going, hoping to find lands he barbarians would not penetrate.

With the peasants came priests and monks, driven from churches and monasteries by the inroads of the barbarians. The monks, many of them, took refuge in the monasteries surrounding Thessalonica; the priests came into the city itself, to help serve its churches while theirs lay under the control of the Slavs and Avars. Suddenly the divine services had far more officiants than were needed, so that the holy men had to take turns performing them. When the refugee priests were not celebrating the liturgy, they gathered in the market square and told their harrowing tales to whoever would listen and perhaps toss a follis or two into the begging bowls they put out in front of them.

George wondered whether the copper coins they collected would go to the ravaged churches from which they had fled, to the churches of Thessalonica in which they sheltered, or into their own pouches. He did not know whether others had that same doubt. People who were clever enough to have the question occur to them were also clever enough not to voice it.

The priests drew considerable crowds. George listened along with everyone else, but kept his money to himself as long as the priests talked about the merely human destruction they had experienced or seen. The world was a harsh place, and war unceasing: unfortunate, certainly, but also unsurprising.

But then one of the refugees, a man who, by his theatrical gestures and carefully balanced sentences, had had more than the usual share of rhetorical training, said, “Nor is the energy from this vicious and brutal plunder and rapine derived from this world alone. For the Slavs and Avars bring with them a new host of barbarous powers against whom the true God and His Son Jesus Christ shall have to contend and whom They shall have to overcome by virtue of their superior prowess.”

Someone--not George--called out, “Doesn’t the Lord cast out all demons?” After a moment, the shoemaker recognized John’s voice. Not content with scoring points off people in the taverns he frequented and off his fellow militiamen, now he was trying to get a priest angry at him. If John lived to be old, George would be astonished.

The priest, however, took the question seriously, answering, “In the end, the triumph of the Lord is inevitable: so it has been written; so it shall be. But the path to that end is not known, and much misery surely lies along it until it be traveled to the fullest.” George waited to hear what John would make of that. The tavern comic made nothing whatever of it, falling silent instead. As silently, George wished his friend would show such good sense more often.

“For now, the spirits attending the Slavs and Avars, being puffed up with arrogance on account of the victories those folk have won over us Christians, vaunt themselves and exult in their strength, and are difficult even for pious folk to withstand successfully,” the priest said, which was not only true but explained to his audience why he and his fellows had had to retreat from the Slavic powers instead of easily beating them, as the old pagan Greek spirits were beaten these days. “We must do not what we want to do, but what God wants us to do.”

His audience murmured in approval. But then, unfortunately, John started up again, asking the priest, “What does that mean, what God wants us to do? Should we be more fierce, so we can beat the barbarians and make their powers weaken, or should we be more pious, so God will take better care of us?”

The priest gaped at him. If he’d just answered both, he would have done well and probably made John shut up, an act of virtue in itself. But John had asked whether it meant one or the other, and the priest (whose wits were, excusably, perhaps not at their swiftest then) took it that way and that way only. Any reply he gave, then, was but half a truth and, worse, contradicted the other half.

After tossing the priest a couple of coppers, George elbowed his way through the crowd and caught John by the arm. The tavern comic whirled. He started to grab for the knife on his belt before he saw who had hold of him. Just in case he didn’t feel like stopping--his temper could turn nasty--George squeezed a little harder. He had large, strong hands. “Come along with me,” he said in a pleasant tone of voice. “Suppose I don’t feel like it?” John said. He wasn’t going for his knife, but he wasn’t coming along, either.

George started walking. He did not let go of John. Since he was bigger and stronger than his fellow militiaman and sometimes friend, John got moving, too. He yelped. Then he cursed. If he did try to take out that knife, George figured he’d kick him where it would do the most good. If that didn’t distract John, he didn’t know what would.

“Turn me loose,” John said.

It was not an angry shout, and did not seem like a threat. George considered. “Will you come along if I do?” he asked. John did not say yes. But John did not say no, either. George chose to take that as assent, and let go of his arm. John did keep walking. Once they reached one of the little side streets that opened onto the market square, George stopped, turned to him, and said, “Do you want to know a secret? Getting a priest going in circles is cheap sport.”

“I liked it well enough,” John answered. “Priests always pretend they know everything. That makes them more fun to bait--same with drunks in taverns.”

“Baiting a drunk is one thing,” George said. “Nobody but him made him drunk. But it’s not that priest’s fault he’s here. All he did was keep from getting murdered by barbarians or eaten by wolf-demons. You can’t blame him for not knowing which end of the awl to hold right now.”

“Who says I can’t?” John demanded. “And if he’s not to blame for the way he acts, who is?” If John couldn’t play logic-chopping games with the priest, he’d play them with George.

The shoemaker, however, didn’t feel like playing. “Why don’t you ask the khagan of the Avars? I’ll bet he’d give you a better answer than that priest could.”

John glared at him. George looked back steadily. That look didn’t abash Theodore anymore, but John hadn’t been exposed to it so often. He shuffled his feet like a boy caught stealing grapes. “Sometimes you’re too serious for your own good,” he grumbled.

“Yes, that’s probably true,” George said, which only made John eye him with even more annoyance than he had before. George could make no sense of that. When he realized he could make no sense of it, he started laughing. He didn’t explain what he found funny. John got angrier still.

The next time George went out hunting, he saw neither satyrs nor Slavs. That suited him fine. He also saw one rabbit, and missed it, which pleased him and his wife not at all. “Look on the bright side,” he told her. “I don’t have to go tell anything to Bishop Eusebius.”

“Thank God for that,” Irene said. “You got by with saying too much to him once. Doing it twice would be tempting fate.” This was the first time she’d admitted George had got by with telling the bishop about the satyr. He decided to accept that, and gladly, and not worry too much about the rest of what she’d said. Concentrating on the good and not letting the rest get under his skin was one of the reasons his marriage went along as well as it did.

Dactylius came in just then. Sure as sure, he was carrying bow and arrows and had a sword on his belt. Sure as sure, he said, “You’ve forgotten again.”

“I don’t know what difference it makes,” George answered sourly. “I can’t hit anything today anyhow.” But he got his own weapons and headed down to the practice field with the jeweler.

They went past St. Demetrius’ basilica along the way. The broad doors were open. The hexagonal silver roof of the ciborium not far inside the entrance glittered, catching a little of the slanting late-October sun.

The reflections drew George’s eyes to the church. His glance was wary, as if he expected Bishop Eusebius to burst out and rush toward him with either more questions or, just possibly, with red-hot pincers. Nothing of the sort happened; the only person who did come out of the church was a gray-haired woman wearing black, who had probably gone in to pray for the soul of some recently deceased relative.

George did hit the mark a few times. No one harassed him for not shooting better, because Paul the taverner seemed unable to frighten the targets, let alone hit them. “Next time, you don’t want to drink up all the wine in the place before you take your shots,” Rufus told him.

“I did no such thing,” Paul said indignantly. “It’s only that other people have had more practice than I have.”

“Well, in that case, go gather up your arrows--if you can find them all; God only knows where some of them have got to--and shoot off another quiverful. This time, at least try to shoot ‘em toward the targets.” Rufus pointed at the bales of hay.

“You don’t want to give him too hard a time, or he’ll cut you off at his tavern,” John said, stirring up trouble.

He got it Rufus expressed in great detail what he would do if Paul presumed to take so rash a course. Cutting it off was one of the milder things he came up with. His bloodthirsty bellowing formed the background to Paul’s search for his missing arrows. The taverner took a long time to find them, despite or maybe because of Rufus’ running commentary.

“No wonder Jesus had nasty things to say about publicans,” John remarked. That got him back in Rufus’ good graces, but made Paul send him such a dirty look, George wondered if he’d ever be welcome to perform at the taverner’s place of business again. Sometimes paying attention to something more than the moment’s joke was a good idea.

By the time Paul did stick the last arrow into his quiver--and by the time Rufus counted them all (counted them twice, in fact, when he lost track on his fingers the first time)--daylight was fast draining out of the sky. “I think you did it on purpose,” the militia commander said. “Now all you lugs get off with less work than you might.”

“Maybe we could get enough torches to keep on practicing even after sunset,” Dactylius said.

“Maybe we could light you up instead,” Sabbatius muttered. “For once, we get off easy, and you want to spoil it?”

Rufus, fortunately, did not hear that. “It’d be too expensive,” he told Dactylius. “Bishop Eusebius, if it’s for the church, he’ll pay whatever it takes. But if it’s for anything else, you got to cut the coppers out of him with a knife. You’d think so, anyhow, way he bellyaches.” He stretched and grunted and pointed northwest, back toward the part of the city where most of the militiamen lived. “To hell with it. Tonight, we go home.”

Not even Dactylius argued with him after that. George, for instance, knew Irene would be glad to see him home. Carrying his gear with him, he trudged off the practice field.

“Who’s for some wine?” Paul asked when they neared his tavern. After a moment, he added, “Everyone can come on in.” Rufus kept walking. Paul sighed. He was more worried about profit than about the insults he’d taken from the veteran. Sabbatius did go in. Knowing him, he would be there well into the night and wake up with a thick head in the morning.

“What about you, George?” Dactylius asked.

The shoemaker shrugged. “Not tonight, I don’t think,” he answered. “I have some work that could use finishing.” He shook his head. “I always seem to have some work that could use finishing. Ah, well--if you intend to keep eating, better to be too busy than the other way round.”

“That’s true.” Dactylius nodded several times, rapidly. “A man who isn’t doing anything can’t sell anything, and a man who can’t sell anything isn’t going to eat.”

As they drew near the basilica of St. Demetrius, George sniffed. The air in Thessalonica always smelled smoky, what with so many fires going to cook food and heat homes. Still. . . The militiaman came round a corner. George pointed. Sure enough, a black cloud was pouring out of the open doors of the church.

For a moment, everyone simply stared in dismay. As in any city, fire was the great fear in Thessalonica. Once every generation or two, a great blaze would level whole districts. Again, the shoemaker thought of all the fires burning all the time: lamps, cookfires, hearths, smiths’ fires, potters’ ovens…. No wonder the flames got loose every so often.

“It’s the saint’s ciborium burning!” Dactylius said.

Priests were dashing out of the basilica, past the six-columned dome erected over St. Demetrius’ tomb. Layfolk from nearby buildings came running. Those who had buckets of water splashed them onto the blaze. George could see at a glance that that was like trying to hold back the ocean with a spoon--the fire was far past putting out. If God was kind, it would not spread to the rest of the church, or to any other budding in Thessalonica.

“Not much wind,” Rufus said. “Sparks won’t go flying all over the place.” He’d been thinking along with George, then. “Something, anyhow,” he grunted.

Dactylius, who spent his days working with precious metal, eyed the silver dome of the ciborium. It wasn’t solid silver, but silver laid over wood--wood now burning. “That’s going to melt,” he said. “It will run just like water, and splash down onto the floor above the tomb.”

“It’ll be where anyone can grab it, you mean,” Rufus said, and Dactylius nodded. Rufus transformed himself from a tired old man walking home with his companions back into a militia officer. “We’ll have to form a perimeter around it, then, and keep people who don’t have any business inside the church from getting too close till the priests can gather up the metal.”

He drew his sword and advanced on the ciborium. George, Dactylius, and the rest of the militiamen in the group followed him. Dactylius had known what he was talking about: already melted silver was dripping down from the dome of the ciborium; smoke rose from the marble on which it landed. How much silver had been in the dome? It had to be hundreds of pounds.

“God bless you!” the priests called as the militiamen took up their stations around the monument to St. Demetrius.

“I want to tell you, He’d better,” Rufus said grimly.

George would gladly have echoed the officer. The church was filling rapidly, and not all the people were those the shoemaker was delighted to see. The smoke and the outcry the fire had created combined to bring out gawkers of every sort, from the merely curious to those who appeared at disasters to see what profit they could make from them.

When this latter sort saw the silver melting and dripping down to where they might get their hands on the lumps and globules, their expression reminded George of the look dogs wore in front of a butcher’s shop. He’d never seen so many hungry, avid, hopeful faces all together.

“Why don’t you go home?” he suggested to some of them. “Nothing here belongs to any of you.”

“Not yet,” a skinny man said. His friends laughed.

Priests and militiamen together lacked the numbers to keep the swelling crowd from doing as it would. The priests were not even armed--no, some of them had makeshift bludgeons, not that those would amount to much. George did not want to draw his sword, for fear of turning crowd into mob. Many of the Thessalonicans staring at the silver had weapons no worse than his.

“When it gets a little darker, they’ll likely rush us,” Rufus said. “That way, nobody will be able to tell for certain who does what.”

“I think you’re right,” George said, “and it gets dark a lot faster this time of year than it did a couple of months ago, say.” When I get home, Irene will yell at me for being seven different kinds of fool for letting myself get caught in what’s likely to be a riot. That was his first thought. Only after it had gone through his mind did he think to wonder how and if he would get home once the riot got rolling.

Through smoke still thick enough to make him cough and force tears down cheeks no doubt sooty, the stretch of sky he could see got darker and darker. Color seemed to leach from the bricks of the basilica of St. Demetrius and the other nearby buildings.

In the gathering gloom, someone hissed, “Come on. Let’s get it. They can’t hardly spy us now.” The serpent’s voice must have sounded like that when it was tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Only a few feet away from George, Rufus suddenly jerked, as if he’d been hit by an arrow. For a moment, the shoemaker thought that was what had happened. Then he felt the power in the air, strong enough to make the hair stand straight up on his head. He looked around wildly, wondering if lightning was about to strike.

But it was not lightning, or not mere lightning. Rufus’ eyes were wide and staring. Whatever he saw had nothing to do with the burning ciborium or the thieves gathering around it. His mouth started to move. At first, no words came from it, as if the power about to speak through him had trouble matching its needs to those of his flesh and blood.

Then it did speak, in a voice that would have made George’s hair stand on end if it hadn’t been doing that already: “Men, citizens--barbarians around the wall!” After a moment, Rufus, or Whoever was using him as a channel, cried out again: “They’ve appeared unexpectedly, but all of you, all of us, we’ll hasten with arms for our homeland!”

Rufus repeated himself twice more, using, so far as George could tell, the identical words each time. By the time he fell silent, staggered, and almost fell as he came back to himself, the basilica was nearly empty. Almost everyone who had heard him had rushed to obey.

He turned toward George, who was having all he could do to keep from rushing to the walls at that very instant himself. “The saint…” Rufus began, and then tried again: “The martyr . . .” He shook his head. “Something happened,” he muttered, “but what?” He might have been the only person in the basilica of St. Demetrius who did not know what he’d said.

George started to explain, but a cry of wonder from behind him made him stop before he’d got out more than a couple of words. A priest was pointing at the wreckage of the ciborium. Wreckage it remained, but it was no longer burning. “We did not put out this fire,” he exclaimed, his eyes almost as round as Rufus’ had been. “God put out this fire.”

“Christ and God helped us, with the intercession of the glorious martyr,” Rufus said, again in a voice not quite his own. “The fire is quenched, and nothing here destroyed by it.” Where before he had given orders to the crowd, now he commanded the priests: “Shut the doors to the church and gather up the silver in peace and quiet. And remember that this place remains in good order because of what the martyred saint established.”

The veteran shivered like a man coming out of a warm house into an icy wind. Gently, cautiously, George touched him on the arm. “Come on,” the shoemaker said. “The Slavs are attacking the walls.”

“They are?” Rufus exclaimed. “What are we wasting time here in the church for, then?” Now he was himself again, and no one else. “Let’s get moving. We’ll teach the whoresons a lesson they’ll remember one cursed long time.”

He trotted out of the church at a ground-eating lope. George followed, along with the handful of other militiamen who had resisted the call that came through Rufus and stayed by the man himself. Behind them, the doors to the basilica slammed shut, with their bars thudding down to hold them so. Inside, the priests would be collecting the spilled silver … in peace and quiet.

People were running through the streets of Thessalonica, brandishing the spears and bows and swords and knives and occasional axes they had snatched up from their homes. “This is marvelous,” Rufus said. “I wouldn’t have thought even the barbarians at the gates would get everybody moving this way. I wonder what did it.”

“It was you,” George said, but Rufus, now, paid little attention to him when he tried to tell what had happened. Power had not only filled him, but filled him to overflowing, so that he had neither memory nor even great interest in what he had set in motion. So, at any rate, it appeared to George, who was viewing it from the outside. He wondered what being filled with the power of the saint felt like. He doubted he would ever know.

Many of the townsfolk, not being part of the militia, had no assigned place on the walls. They went up anyway, and shouted curses and abuse at whoever was on the far side. George supposed that would do Thessalonica no harm; if any of those curses stuck to the Slavs, it might even do some good.

His own place on the wall was on the western stretch where he and his comrades in the militia had taken their turns as watchmen, near the Litaean Gate. That meant traversing most of the city, as St. Demetrius’ church stood over in the northeastern part of town.

“Here we are,” Rufus said when they reached their proper section of the wall. The old veteran sounded winded. George did not blame him, and contented himself with a nod by way of reply. When you made shoes, you sat or stood in the same place all day, which did not do wonders for your endurance. George’s heart thudded like a drum.

Climbing the stairs up to the wall made it beat even harder and faster; he wondered if anyone had fallen over dead rushing to the defense of Thessalonica. They gained the walkway and looked out into the gathering dusk. His heart pounded harder still, now not from exertion but from astonishment and alarm.

Beside him, Rufus murmured, “Sweet Mother of God, it’s a whole swarm of them.”

The word was better than any George had found to apply to the Slavs. Thousands of men milled around outside the city, all of them carrying weapons of one kind or another. Some looked to be mounting attacks against the monastery of St. Matrona, leaning ladders against its walls and trying to climb up them. The monks overturned some of those ladders as George watched, and threw stones down onto the heads of the Slavs down below.

“Do you know,” he said, discovering he had breath enough to speak again, “I think they think they’re attacking the city wall.”

“They couldn’t be that stupid,” Rufus said, but then, after he’d watched them for a couple of minutes, he shook his head in wonder. “I take it back. Maybe they could be that stupid.”

“It’s getting dark,” George said. “There’s a little mist in the air. They must have taken the long way round to get at Thessalonica from the west, because everything we’ve heard about the fighting is that it’s been off to the east and north. So here they’ve come, they’ve never been anywhere near the city before, and what do they do? They see strong walls, so they think they’re doing the right thing by storming them.”

“You make sense,” Rufus said, a compliment that delighted the shoemaker. His superior went on, “Now how long will they take to figure out that a city’s bigger than a monastery?”

The Slavs did not take long. Some of them kept on assailing the monastery. More, though, drawn by the more distant walls and the people on them, came on and discovered Thessalonica. No sooner had they discovered it than they began to try to take it. They flung javelins and shot arrows at the militiamen and simple citizens on the wall.

An arrow slammed into the stonework not far from George’s head. He heard the shaft snap, much as he did when he broke one of his own arrows hunting rabbits. But the Slav who’d shot this arrow had not been out for game. He’d had killing George in mind, or if not George then Rufus or someone else nearby. He wanted to kill me. Once lodged in George’s mind, the thought would not leave. He did his best to kill me. This was not practice, shooting at a target. This was not chill. The Slav had meant it. This was war.

More arrows flew. One zipped past Georges head, hissing like a snake. The first realization he was a target had shocked him. The second .. . He pulled an arrow of his own from the quiver, nocked it, and shot it at one of the barbarians down below. He didn’t know whether he scored a hit or not--the Slav was running around among several others, and they were hard to tell apart: growing harder by the moment, too, as the light failed.

He also had other troubles. “We should have practiced shooting from the top of the wall,” he said to Rufus. “It’s a different business from shooting on the level.”

“Aye, you’re right--it is,” the veteran answered. “Have to talk to the city prefect about that, or maybe to the bishop.”

“You should talk to the bishop,” George said. “If he won’t listen to the man the saint spoke through, whom will he hear?”

“Nobody, maybe,” Rufus said. Having dealt with Eusebius not long before, George thought that had a chance of being true. Eusebius, he suspected, listened to himself first and everyone else afterwards. But with Thessalonica being in his hands more than anyone else’s this side of St. Demetrius, he might well pay attention to anything that would help him defend the city.

Sabbatius and Paul came up onto the wall then. Paul was somber and self-contained; Sabbatius reeked of wine. The contrast did not particularly surprise George. A taverner who got too fond of the goods he sold would not stay a taverner long: his business would fail, and he’d end up drinking at someone else’s.

Sabbatius stared down at the Slavs. “Mother of God!” he muttered. “How many of ‘em are out there? Must be ten or twenty myriads, easy.”

“Even if you’re seeing double, there aren’t that many-- not anywhere close,” Rufus said. He scratched his chin. “I don’t know if there’re ten myriads of people inside

Thessalonica, let alone twenty. Three, four thousand Slavs out there, five at the most.”

“There have to be more than that,” Sabbatius said. Rufus gave a single scornful shake of his head. If George had to choose between a guess by a drunken militiaman and another by a soldier who’d been gauging the size of armies most of his life, he knew which one he preferred.

“Anyway,” Rufus said, “the point isn’t how many of ‘em there are, the point is how to make there be fewer of ‘em. Why don’t you stop jawing and start using that cursed bow--or don’t you remember you have it along?”

Sabbatius did start shooting at the Slavs. George could not tell what effect his arrows had; a lot of missiles were flying out from the wall. Somebody said, “If the jawbone of an ass was good enough for Solomon to fight with, why not for Sabbatius, too?”

“Hullo, John,” George said without turning around. He loosed another arrow himself, then went on, “I thought I’d see you up here.”

“It’s the place to be right now,” John said in affected, upper-class Greek.

George snorted. “Pity the Slavs don’t speak any civilized language--you could slay them with laughter.”

“Me? John said. “Considering the way you shoot, making them laugh themselves to death would be your best chance.” He let fly, then grunted in satisfaction. “There, you see? I got one. I’m funnier than you are, and I’m a better man with the bow, too.”

“To say nothing of more modest,” George murmured.

“That’s ri--” John began, and then stopped, sending a chilly glance toward the shoemaker. George felt a moment’s pride; not everyone could trade words with John and come off the winner. He knew he couldn’t do it himself very often.

But then his small satisfaction was swept away, for out of the woods rode four or five men who sat their horses as if they were the centaurs that might still linger in the remotest valleys of the most rugged upcountry. But centaurs wore no armor, neither the man half nor the beast, and these men and their horses were both clad in scalemail that would ward them against anything but a direct and lucky hit.

They rode up to and through the Slavs, who parted before them as the citizens of Thessalonica might have parted before the Roman Emperor, had he come to worship at the church of St. Demetrius. They halted within bowshot of the walls. Under their iron helmets, their faces, as well as George could make them out in the fading light, were flat, strong, impassive.

“Avars,” Rufus muttered under his breath. As soon as he spoke the name, George knew he had to be right. No wonder the Slavs treated them like lords: they were the Slavs’ lords.

Calm as if they had come to visit rather than to attack, the Avars studied Thessalonica’s works for a minute or two, then turned their horses away from the walls and rode back into the gathering darkness. Once more, the Slavs stood aside to let them pass. Shadows reached out for them, and they were gone.

Neither side started up the fighting again for some little while after that. “Those men had a power in them, and not a small one,” George said quietly. “I wish Bishop Eusebius would have been here on the wall with us, to show them we have a power that can stand against theirs.”

Rufus surprised him by shaking his head. “The less the enemy knows about you, the better off you’re going to be,” the veteran said. “That’s true every which way, not just with plain weapons.”

After a little thought, George nodded. “You’re probably right,” he said. Then he pointed to the Slavs, who were beginning to resume the racket they had abated when the Avars appeared among them. “We’ve found out about them, that’s for certain.”

But Rufus shook his head again. “Not yet. Not hardly. Not so it matters.” He too looked out toward the barbarians. They were starting to light fires out there on the cleared ground between the city and the woods. “Me, I’ve got the feeling we’re going to have plenty of time to find out more.”

The strangest thing about the early days of the siege of Thessalonica was how close to normal everything felt. The only difference in his life George noticed was that going out to hunt had become impossible--which was, he realized, just as well, for it would have been decidedly unwise. He did not think the Slavs would share bread and honey with Romans they chanced upon in the woods, not anymore.

Not even his times up on the wall changed much. He still served his usual four-hour shifts, sometimes during the night. There was always the chance the Slavs would mount an assault against Thessalonica’s formidable curtain of stone, but, after St. Demetrius had warned the townsfolk of their presence and kept them from coming up over the wall by surprise, they contented themselves with shooting occasional arrows at the garrison.

Indeed, as time went by, many of them left the immediate neighborhood of Thessalonica, so that the city hardly seemed under siege at all. Sometimes, looking out from the walkway atop the wall, George could not set eye on a single enemy warrior.

“They’re out there,” Rufus said one afternoon when he remarked on that. “Oh, they’re out there, never fear. If they weren’t out there, we’d have traffic on the Via Egnatia getting into the city from east or west. Seen any?”

“No,” George said. “I wish I had.” He lowered his voice, as if passing on a secret, and, in fact, he wanted no one but Rufus to hear his next words: “If we don’t get some traffic, we’ll be hungry by and by.”

“That’s so,” Rufus answered, also discreetly. “Constantinople, now, Constantinople gets grain from Egypt. An enemy can besiege Constantinople till everything turns blue, and it won’t do him any good at all. We aren’t so lucky. We’ve had a few ships in from southern Greece, but not many, and not much in ‘em.”

“Maybe we should sally, try to drive them away,” George said. “Then traffic could start moving again.”

“Probably nothing to move right now, anyhow,” Rufus said gloomily. “If the Slavs are here, they’re in the farm country and backwoods villages, stealing their wheat and barley and wine. No, best thing to do is wait ‘em out. Maybe God will send them a plague. That happens in a lot of sieges.”

“Happens in towns, too.” George remembered the outbreak of bubonic plague in Thessalonica not so long before. Hundreds, maybe thousands, had died.

After a while, Dactylius and John came up onto the wall. George hurried back to his shop; he was convinced his being away from it so regularly would make it founder. Irene was convinced he was out of his mind; Theodore, on the other hand, was convinced a soldier’s life was far more exciting than that of a shoemaker. One day, George intended to sit him down with Rufus, to see if anything resembling sense would penetrate his head.

George had just finished nailing a new heel onto a boot (not a boot he’d made, he was pleased to note) when Claudia came into the shop carrying a pair of sandals. “Hello,” George said, setting aside the newly repaired boot. “What can I do for you today?”

“Have you seen my husband?” Claudia’s voice throbbed with melodrama. She was one of those people who found day-to-day life too dull to be readily tolerable, and spiced it up with imaginary worries when no real ones were handy. And when real ones were handy-- “I live in dread of the day when the messenger will tell me my beloved Dactylius has died a hero’s death for his city.”

She clasped both hands to her bosom. It was a fine, well-rounded bosom; the gesture might have belonged in a pantomime show but for the inconvenient sandals. Sophia excused herself and hurried upstairs. Theodore coughed and coughed. Irene kept her face utterly expressionless. She worried about George, and made no secret of it, but made no production of it, either.

And George did not tell Claudia that the likeliest way for Dactylius’ untimely demise to occur at the moment was death by boredom. Instead, showing restraint he felt sure St. Demetrius would have praised, he said, “I think he’ll be all right. The wall is very strong.”

“So they say,” Claudia answered, as if they were notorious liars. “For myself, I wish Dactylius would just stay in the shop with me.”

Given a choice between closing himself up in a shop with Claudia all day and going out to fight the fierce barbarians, George would have taken on the Slavs even without a sword to hold them at bay. That was something else he couldn’t tell her; he was wider through the shoulders, but she overtopped him by two or three digits.

“What’s wrong with the sandals?” George asked, hoping to turn her away from morbid worries about her husband and toward something simple.

“I broke a strap on this one--see?” She showed him the problem.

“Yes, I can take care of that,” he told her, and then, to make conversation, added, “How did it happen?”

He realized that was a mistake the moment the words were out of his mouth. Claudia drew herself up to her full, formidable height. Her gray eyes flashed. It wasn’t quite so impressive a manifestation as when St. Demetrius had spoken through Rufus, but it wasn’t supernatural, either: it was only her temper coming out.

“That stupid slut next door kept throwing her garbage in front of my place, and so I hit her with the shoe,” she explained. “I don’t think you sewed the strap on very well.”

George examined it again. It hadn’t broken at a sewn seam. She’d hit so hard, she’d torn the leather. From under his eyebrows, he glanced up at her. No, getting on her bad side was not a good idea. She might well have been more dangerous to the Slavs than a good many militiamen on the wall, her husband included.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said again. With almost anyone else, he would have pointed out in no-uncertain terms that the problem was not of his making. But Claudia was his good friend’s wife … and, even if she hadn’t been, he suspected he’d have kept his mouth shut.

Instead of sewing the broken strap back together, he took it off the sandal and replaced it with a new one. That took a little longer, but meant the sandal wouldn’t rub Claudia’s ankle when she wore it again.

She tried it on after he gave it back to her. After a judicious pause, she nodded. “Yes, that will do. I hope it holds together, though.”

“It should,” George answered. “Of course, the next time you hit your neighbor, you might want to think about using something like a brick instead.”

Claudia considered the joke with such drilling seriousness that George once more wished he had the words back; he’d wanted to make her smile, not to make her murder the woman next door. But at last she said, “No, a brick would have hurt her more than I intended then. I would have to be truly angry to use a brick.” She took a couple more steps in the repaired sandal and nodded. “It does feel good, George. I’ll tell Dactylius I’ve been here. You know you can drop by the shop.” She wrapped her mantle around her and swept away.

“What will you get me at Dactylius’, Father?” Sophia asked, as eagerly as if she were a little girl rather than a young woman. The shoemaker and jeweler did not charge each other money for their services, but traded them back and forth.

“I don’t know,” George answered. “Some bit of polished brass--a ring, maybe, or a thin bracelet. Fixing a sandal strap isn’t enough for me to bring home gold inset with rubies and pearls, you know.” Nothing he was likely to do was enough for him to bring home gold inset with precious gems. He’d long since resigned himself to that.

“That woman.” Irene shook her head. “She reminds me of a jar with the stopper in too tight left in the fire too long. One day it will burst and hurt half a dozen people with flying potsherds. And yet Dactylius dotes on her.”

“Of course he does,” George said. “Do you think he’d dare not to?”

Theodore chuckled, Sophia giggled, and Irene wagged a severe finger at her husband. “You are a wicked man. All the time you’ve been spending in the company of the militia is making you sound like John.”

“I got the better of him the other day, up on the wall,” George boasted, and recounted the exchange he’d won.

“That’s funny, Papa,” Theodore said, clapping his hands together. “Now will you tell us all the ones where he bested you?”

“If you want to hear those, you can go ask John,” the shoemaker replied with dignity. Then he gave his son a cuff on the side of the head, not hard enough to hurt, not soft enough to be ignored, to remind the youth to preserve at least some vestige of respect for his parents.

“It’s all right, George,” Irene said.

“I know it is,” he answered. “I want to make sure it stays that way.”

As long as only Slavs were besieging Thessalonica, George didn’t worry much about the ultimate safety of the city: they hadn’t impressed him as being particularly dangerous fighters. That was as well; he and his fellow militiamen weren’t particularly dangerous fighters, either.

“The ones who bother me are those Avars,” he said to Dactylius as they waited for relief so they could return to their shops and homes after a morning stint on the wall. “We haven’t seen much of them since that handful the first night of the siege, but if they weren’t real soldiers, there’re no such animals.”

“They were fierce-looking, all right,” Dactylius said, “but I don’t think you worry enough about the Slavs. There are so many of them. Look at the way their powers are coming in and doing things the ones that have been here forever wouldn’t even try in the face of Christian men.”

“That’s so,” George admitted unhappily. “I wish it weren’t, but it is. I hope that satyr I saw up there in the hills is all right. He’s not a Christian power, true enough, but he’d been here a long time, like you say.”

Dactylius made small disapproving noises. “As a good Christian man myself, I say we should have nothing to do with the old powers.” His voice was prim. “The sooner we forget all about them, the sooner they’ll vanish from the earth.”

In principle, George agreed with him. In practice, he found the supernatural powers still lingering in the land that had once been theirs interesting in the same way he found old inscriptions and old coins interesting--relics of what had once been of great import to people.

He said, “I wish the Slavic powers would vanish from the earth if I forgot about them. Trouble is, they’re too much in the minds of the Slavs for that to happen.”

“What we need to do is convert the Slavs and Avars to Christianity,” Dactylius said. “Then their powers will vanish away, as they deserve to do.”

“That would be wonderful.” George pointed out to a couple of Slavs sitting on the yellowing grass out beyond archery range. They were passing a wineskin back and forth. After a while, one of them rolled over and went to sleep. “They don’t look ready to convert right now, worse luck.”

“That’s so,” Dactylius said. “Maybe in the time of my children--if God blesses Claudia and me with children who live.”

George thought about making love to Claudia. She was a well-built woman, and far from homely. All the same, had she been his wife, divine intervention would almost surely have been necessary for them to start a family. On the other hand, she might simply seize little Dactylius and have her way with him when the mood took her. George turned a snort into a cough; he didn’t want his friend to know what kind of thoughts were running through his mind.

The Slavs did not try to break into Thessalonica during the rest of their watch. When the sun had swung through a third of its arc across the heavens, Paul and John ascended to the wall to take their places. John peered out at the Slavs, most of whom seemed utterly uninterested in the siege. “Another day of martial combat!” he cried. “And now to rush at the foe with a fearsome--” After a look of intense concentration, he broke wind.

“There you go,” George said. “If the breeze were blowing in the right direction, you’d save the city single-handed.”

“That wasn’t my hand, you blockhead,” John said. After a little more chaffing, he and the taverner began patrolling their stretch of wall while Dactylius and George went down into the city.

As usual, a crowd of women had gathered around the cistern in the neighborhood. Thessalonica’s water came from nearby streams and rivers through underground pipes the Slavs and Avars had not yet discovered or tried to destroy. It still filled all the cisterns and flowed unhindered from fountains not only on street comers but also in several churches.

Among the chattering women stood Irene. Spotting George, she lowered the water jug she carried from her shoulder and waved at him. He waved back, looking around to see if she had Sophia with her. Sometimes it was hard to tell them apart from a distance--and sometimes not from a distance, too. But no; Sophia wasn’t there this time.

Just then, the roof of the cistern flew off. Concrete chunks, some of them as big as a man, spun through the air. One of them smashed a house. More, by luck or providence, came down on empty ground. But some landed with horrible wet squashing noises.

The women near the cistern screamed and scattered. “Irene!” George cried, and ran toward them. He had almost reached his wife when the power that had hurled the roof off the cistern stood up inside and looked around.

It was roughly man-shaped, but five or six times as tall as a man. It looked old, old. Its hair, what there was of it, was moss-green, and its long, straggling beard was also made of moss. Its skin hardly seemed skin at all, but rather wet bark.

Maybe George’s shout, deep among shrill, had drawn its attention to him. Whatever the reason, it turned his way. Its eyes were red, like burning coals. When he looked into them, he felt his will dripping away like olive oil out of a cracked jar.

It reached out a hand--no, more a misshapen paw-- toward him. As a drowning man will reach for anything his fingers touch, so the shoemaker made the sign of the cross. A satyr would have fled in terror. This horrifying apparition kept right on groping for him.

But the holy sign had not been altogether without effect. He had his wits back, and his will. He snatched an arrow from his quiver, set it in his bow, and took aim at the gigantic . . . Slavic water-demon or -demigod, he supposed the thing was.

Irene, whose presence of mind he often admired, had not dropped the water jar she’d filled at the cistern. A smaller version of the green-bearded thing popped out of it and grabbed George’s arm, spoiling his aim. The touch of the power was clammy and piercingly cold.

Dactylius smote the smaller water-demon with his sword. What might have been mist or might have been ichor sprayed out from the wound. Irene did drop the jar then. Water splashed up and out from it. The small apparition of the demigod went from a single one to a multitude of tiny ones spread out in the bigger puddles among the cobblestones.

George started stamping the tiny ones, as if they were so many cockroaches. They crunched under his sandals like cockroaches. The great demigod in the cistern roared and bellowed as he crashed its smaller simulacra--or perhaps they were all part of the same entity, so that the big one felt the pain he inflicted on the others as if on itself.

More water-demons began springing out of the jars of other women who hadn’t dropped them. George and Dactylius shouted for the women to do just that. Crockery crashed on cobbles. And George and Dactylius and Irene fled away from the cistern as fast as they could run.

“Do you suppose,” Dactylius panted, “these horrible things--are in every--cistern in the city?”

“I hope not,” George answered, just as short of wind. “I hadn’t--thought of that. I wish--you hadn’t--either.”

Their flight carried them past the church of St. Elias, the church nearest their homes and shops. It was close enough to the cistern for a couple of priests to have come out to try to learn what the commotion was about. Irene stopped and gasped out an explanation. The priests exclaimed in dismay. “Heathen powers loose in our God-guarded city?” one of them, Father Luke, said. “We’ll exorcise them forthwith.”

“Have a care,” George told them, still trying to catch his breath. “These things are strong, Your Reverence. You didn’t see the roof go flying.”

“A roof is a material thing, a thing of this world,” the priest replied. “In matters of the spirit, the power of God shall overcome all others. Did not He, through the intercession of St. Demetrius our patron, vouchsafe a warning that our city was about to be attacked?”

“Yes, He did, no doubt about it. I was there, and I saw it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears,” George said. “But the Slavs are such raw pagans, their powers are strong in the world of the spirit, too.” As he had so many times by now, he warned them of the wolf-demon that had slain a priest.

One of the men who had come out of St. Elias’ church turned pale and made as if to go back inside. Father Luke remained unperturbed. “This means only that our own faith shall have to be stronger. Come, Father Gregory. If we fear the pagan spirits, we give them power over us.”

Father Gregory looked anything but delighted at the prospect of facing a water-demon of the might of this one. But facing a water-demon was liable to be as nothing when set against facing Father Luke--to say nothing of facing Bishop Eusebius. Muttering something that might have been a prayer or a curse, Gregory followed his colleague up the street toward the cistern.

“Go back to the shop,” George told Irene. “Let the children know you’re all right.”

“What are you going to do?” his wife demanded.

He pointed to the priests. “You never can tell what sort of help they might need, or who might be able to give it to them.” He still didn’t know what an arrow might do to the demigod or whatever it was. On the off chance he might have to find out, he started after Father Luke and Father Gregory.

Dactylius followed him. So did Irene. He wondered for a moment why she chose such inconvenient times not to listen to him. He had no time to argue, and the only way to force her to go back would be to drag her, which would mean he couldn’t help Father Luke. Resolving to take it up with her later (a wasted resolution if ever there was one, as he knew even at the time), he hurried to catch up with the priests.

Then Father Luke, confusing things further, spun around on his heel and ran back into the church. He emerged a moment later, leaving George mystified. “Let’s go!” he said, and go they did.

The open square by the cistern was almost bare of people: of living people, at any rate. A couple of women were down and not moving under shards of what had been the roof. Others writhed and wailed. The liquid puddled around them was red and sticky and of no interest to demons concerning themselves only with water.

“By She Who bore God!” Father Gregory gasped when he got his first glimpse of the water-demon looming out of the cistern. A few smaller copies--or parts--of the demigod still stood in puddles left by shattered water jars. They were hideous, too, but hardly worth noticing with the great one about.

Those red eyes swung toward the newcomers. The demigod made a strange, wet, bubbling noise, something that sounded as if it might be a question about what people were doing coming toward the cistern rather than running away from it. A good question, George thought. He wondered what he was doing, too. But he kept doing it. Each foot kept going in front of the other.

Father Gregory shouted, “In the holy name of God, go back to whatever accursed place spawned you!” He made the sign of the cross.

He must not have been listening when George warned of what the Slavic powers could do. Or, possibly, he hadn’t believed George, who was, after all, only a shoemaker.

A power from the days of the pagan Greeks would have been routed. A power from the days of the pagan Greeks, though, could never have made its way into Thessalonica in the first place, not when the city was warded by God through St. Demetrius.

Far from being routed, the water-demon roared angrily and reached out for Father Gregory. As it was several times longer than a man, it had a correspondingly longer reach. George shot an arrow into its arm. A slight mist sprinkled down onto him. Other than that, the shaft had no effect.

Dactylius aimed for the thing’s torso. In what might have been the shot of his life, he sank an arrow that should have pierced the demigod’s heart. It seemed, however, not to have a heart: at any rate, his arrow did no more good than George’s had.

“Run!” George shouted. He didn’t know whether he meant it more for Father Gregory, on whom the water-demons hand was closing, or for Irene. No, that wasn’t true: he did know. He wanted his wife away from the power. The first denial must have sprung from embarrassment at putting her safety above that of the holy man.

It didn’t matter. Neither his wife nor the priest listened to him. The huge hand closed on Father Gregory. He screamed like a lost soul. Considering his circumstances, that seemed fitting enough. He called on God and the Virgin and on Christ, using the holy names as if they were curses. They did no good against the Slavic demigod. George, in the midst of his own terror, was saddened but not surprised. Revenge and reverence were not the same.

Father Luke ran toward the cistern. The water-demon reached out its other hand toward him. George and Dactylius both sent arrows into that arm. The shoemaker never knew for certain whether that did any good. What he did know was that, when the demigod snatched at the priest, it missed.

Instead of grabbing again at once, it chose to pay attention to Father Gregory, whom it had already seized. It raised him high, then threw him down onto the cobbles of the square. Blood splashed out from his body when it struck, as if he too were a shattered jar. He screamed no more.

That brief hesitation, though, had let Father Luke reach the side of the big concrete basin with the wrecked roof. He pulled a small jar out from inside his robe, yanked off the stopper, made the sign of the cross over the jar, and tossed it up into the cistern. The demigod reached down to treat him as it had his colleague. Father Luke waited, unafraid. A moment before those great hands grabbed him, George heard a small splash: the jar had gone into the water.

The demon disappeared.

Silence slammed down in the square, silence punctuated by distant screams. George realized he’d been hearing those with the back of his mind for some time, which was a good argument in favor of the notion that the water demigod had appeared in every cistern in Thessalonica. As he stood there still half-stunned by his escape, those screams changed in tone from terror to amazement, which was a good argument in favor of the notion that, whatever Father Luke had done, whatever force he had called upon, had rid every cistern in Thessalonica of the demigod in the same instant.

On legs still wobbly with fright, George walked up to him, taking a few steps around the smashed horror that had been Father Gregory. “Bless you, Your Reverence,” he said, most sincerely.

“Bless you for your courage,” the priest answered, sounding as shaken as the shoemaker felt. “Without courage and faith, I fear, we shall be lost in the dark days that He ahead.”

George nodded. He looked back toward what was left of Father Gregory. The other priest had proved not to have quite enough of either, there when the ultimate test came. George suspected Father Luke would have found a way to prevail even without… whatever he’d thrown into the cistern. George’s bump of curiosity, always easy to excite, began itching furiously now. “What was in that jar, Your Reverence?” he asked.

“Water from the baptismal font,” Father Luke answered. “Fighting fire with fire is as ancient a proverb as I know. Here I thought it better to--”

“--Fight water with water,” George interrupted, an enormous smile stretching itself across his face. The priest showed himself a man of enormous charity as well as piety: he did not get angry with George for stepping on his line.

Dactylius and Irene came up then. George put an arm around his wife. She shivered against him for a moment, but then said, “I’ll have to buy a new jug to replace the one I broke here.”

More than jugs had been broken in the square. Along with Father Gregory, several women lay there. Some might be helped. One was groaning and shrieking and clutching her leg, which streamed blood out onto the cobbles. A big chunk of concrete from the roof the demigod had destroyed lay by her.

George used his sword to cut a strip from the bottom of her tunic to bandage the leg. She screamed abuse at him all the while, as if the tunic were more important than anything else. He took no notice of that; the lower part of the leg was out of true with the rest. “A bandage isn’t all she needs,” he said, pointing. “That leg is broken.”

“I’ll fetch a physician,” Dactylius said. “This could have been Claudia, as easily as not.” George might not have bet on the water-demon against Claudia, but he knew the little man was right. Dactylius hurried away.

Father Luke came up to the woman and prayed over her. His entreaties might have eased her pain a little, but no more than that. Routing the Slavic demigod was a matter of power against power. Something as mundane as a broken leg wasn’t, barring a miracle. Barring--

“Pity we can’t take her to the healing spring outside the city,” George said. “But the Slavs have to be prowling there nowadays.”

“It is the will of God,” Father Luke said. “We are in His hands.”

He believed that with every fiber of his being. Not least because of his strong faith, he’d been able to vanquish the water-demon. But had he not had the wit to bring with him water from the baptismal font, all his faith would have done him no good. George, shorter on faith, tried to be sharp of wit. He had trouble understanding how God’s purpose included things like a broken leg inflicted, so far as any man could tell, at random.

Father Luke would have called him presumptuous for wanting God’s purpose to make sense to a mere man. He supposed the priest would have had a point, too. Some of his own purposes didn’t make sense to Theodore and Sophia, who were in essence his equals, not inferiors, as he was an inferior to God. Even so . . .

He waited by the woman till Dactylius brought back the doctor, who took one look at the leg, nodded, and began the business of setting it. “I told him it was broken,” Dactylius said, “so he brought the boards for splints.”

“Good,” George said. He turned to Irene. “Do I remember rightly? Wasn’t I on my way home from a stretch on the wall?” He glanced at the sun to gauge the time. “Not very long ago, either.” He shook himself, like a dog coming out of a pond. “Only seems a year’s gone by since then, I guess.”

“Bless you,” Father Luke said again as he and his wife left the square. Weary and worn as he was, he walked straighter. When a priest like Father Luke blessed you, you felt blessed.

He wondered what the priests of the Slavs and the Avars were doing, now that their effort to make it impossible to draw water inside Thessalonica had failed. Wading and gnashing their teeth, with any luck at all. But they probably wouldn’t go on wailing and gnashing their teeth for long. They’d probably bring more of their gods and demons to bear against the God-guarded city.

He shrugged. The Thessalonicans couldn’t do anything about that till it happened, if and when it did. Not only did they have God guarding them, they also had the militia. George had got almost to his own street before he wondered whether that counted for or against them.

Irene put her hand in his. “You were very brave,” she said.

“I was what?” George said. Father Luke had praised his courage, too. He had trouble following that. “If I hadn’t done what I did, I figured something worse would happen. If that’s courage, then I’m--”

“Someone who talks too much,” Irene said firmly He was about to make an indignant denial; she could truthfully have accused him of a good many things, but not that. After he opened his mouth, though, he shut it without saying anything. If his wife thought he was brave and he went around denying it, didn’t that count for talking too much?

When he and Irene walked into the shop, their children looked up from the shoes they’d been repairing. “Where’s the water jar, Mother?” Sophia asked.

Irene and George looked at each other and started to laugh. Sophia spluttered in annoyance; how dared her parents share what was obviously a joke when she had no idea why it was funny?

Theodore said, “What’s been going on out there, anyway? People have been running back and forth and shouting things that don’t make any sense. And a while ago it sounded like a budding fell down, or something like that. Are the Slavs throwing rocks--?” He paused, stood up, and set hands on hips. “I said, are the Slavs throwing rocks at us?”

His parents were laughing harder than ever, which irritated him and Sophia both. After a while, George stopped laughing. When he did, he felt as if he ought to start shaking instead. Laughing was better.

Little by little, he and Irene explained to their children what had in fact happened. By the time they were through, Theodore had turned very red and looked about ready to burst. “All that was going on not three stadia from here, and we didn’t know anything about it?” he exclaimed in what, to his credit, tried very hard not to be a shout but didn’t quite succeed. “If I’d been there, I’d have--” He made cut-and-thrust motions that merely betrayed how little he knew about handling a sword.

“Thank God you weren’t there,” George said, which only inflamed his son further. “The best adventures are the ones that happen to somebody else, believe you me. This isn’t a story, son. The priest and the women who are dead, they’re dead, and they won’t come back to life till Judgment Day. The woman with the broken leg, she may be crippled for as long as she lives. And any one of them could have been me or your mother as easy as not.” He saw he wasn’t reaching Theodore, who was at the age to believe nothing bad could ever happen to him. George turned to Irene for support, only to discover she wasn’t there to support him: she’d gone upstairs while he was talking, and he hadn’t noticed. He might as well have been Victor, the city prefect, who liked to hear himself talk.

Irene came down a moment later, carrying a cup of wine in each hand. She gave one to George, who gulped it down faster than was his usual habit. Instead of scolding him, she drained her cup, too. George took it from her and went upstairs himself. When he returned with both cups filled, she took one from him and drank it as fast as she had the first. As she had not been behind him on that first cup, he was not behind her on the second.

Her eyes were a trifle glassy as she looked toward Sophia and said, “You can fix supper tonight.” She spoke with unusual emphasis.

“All right, Mother.” Sophia had enough sense to know when not to argue. She went on, “That will be easy, anyhow, because we don’t have much besides bread and beans and oil and some prunes.”

“You can live a long time on bread and beans and oil,” George said. “People only a little poorer than we are live on them their whole lives through.” He spoke more loudly than was his usual wont, too; so much wine drunk so fast made the world seem a very certain place.

“That’s true,” Theodore said, “but the world would be a boring place without some meat every now and then.” He smacked his lips.

George was fond of meat, too. He sighed. “Can’t go out hunting. Can’t hardly keep cows or sheep inside the walls. Pigs, some pigs, and chickens. They eat anything. Ducks, maybe. And fish. The Slavs can’t keep us from fishing in the sea.” He sighed again. “Anything like that would cost plenty, even now. Pretty soon, oil will cost, too. After a while, beans and bread will cost.”

“Bishop Eusebius won’t let that happen. He won’t let the merchants make beggars of us all,” Irene said confidently. She had more faith in the bishop than George did. He didn’t want to do complicated thinking right now, but after a moment decided she might well be right. Eusebius was too good a Christian and too good a politician both to let a handful of men aggrandize themselves at the expense of the rest.

Theodore’s thoughts, meanwhile, had gone off on another tack. “Everything you said about how strong the Slavs’ powers are must be true, Father,” he said, a sentence to warm the cockles of the heart of any father of an adolescent male. “For that water-demon to show up in the middle of this city--”

“It’s a worry,” George agreed. He tried to imagine a satyr strolling into the marketplace of Thessalonica. He couldn’t. Such a thing might have happened when Galerius was Emperor, but three hundred years had gone by since then, and those powers overpowered by a greater power.

“This is the first time they’ve tried anything so horrid,” Irene said. “What will they do next?”

The question hung in the air. George looked out the door. All he could see was the shop across the narrow street. He couldn’t see the wall, let alone what lay beyond it, not with his fleshly eyes. His mind’s eye reached further. Somewhere out there, the chieftains of the Avars would be deciding what to do next. If they and the Slavs they led succeeded with it, whatever it was, the city would fall. That was very simple. For once, George wished things might be more complex.