Thessalonica

VIII

A barmaid sidled up to George, smiling a bright, professional smile. “More salted olives?” she asked. Partly, that was to help make him thirsty. Partly, it was pride that Paul’s tavern still had salted olives to sell. Whatever it was, George had already gone through one bowl of them, and a fresh mug of wine sat in front of him. He shook his head.

A kithara gently wept, accompanying the singer’s plaintive song of lost love. Across the table from George,

John made a face. “If I had to listen to this fellow all day long, I’d have left him, too,” the comic said.

“Practice for your act?” George asked: his friend wore the intent look he donned whenever he was about to perform.

But John shook his head. “Paul told me he’d throw me out on my ear if I ever badmouthed any of the other people he brought up onstage to make the customers forget how lousy his wine is.” His flexible features displayed great gobs of scorn. “As if anybody needs me to tell him what a bad mouth this singer has.” He wasn’t on the platform yet, but his quips drew blood even so.

Before long, the kithara player mercifully finished his last song. He got a tepid round of applause, half praise, half relief that he was done. Paul shouted, “And now-- here’s John!” The comic bounded up onto the little stage. The kithara player gave him a fanfare he looked as if he could have done without.

“I thought I was going to have good news for everybody tonight,” John said. “I thought the siege would be over by now. When I was out on the wall a couple of weeks ago, one of the Avars told me their women were getting pretty tired of how long this whole business is taking, and they said they wouldn’t sleep with their men unless they gave up and made peace with us Romans.”

“You’re stealing that from Aristophanes!” yelled a heckler with an education in the classics.

“The frogs are loud tonight,” observed John, who also had one. “Koax! Koaxl But that’s from the wrong play, and besides, anybody see the siege ending? Nope, the Avars are still here, all right, and what’s more, half their sheep are pregnant.”

Somebody threw an olive at him. He caught it out of the air and ate it. “It’s not a tough crowd if they don’t throw things from the swordsmith’s shop,” he remarked. Maybe that was supposed to be a joke. Maybe it was just how a tavern comic went about gauging his audience.

John said, “One thing this siege has done is make me glad I’m a Christian. I have enough trouble keeping one God happy. Try and keep all the gods the Slavs and Avars have happy and you end up as worn out as an old man trying to keep a young harem happy.” He pantomimed limp exhaustion--limp in every sense of the word.

After exactly the right pause, he recovered as if by magic and started counting on his fingers. “How many gods have we seen? Water god, thunder gods, fire god--I expect any minute now they’re going to sic the god of shrunken tunics on us.” Again, he let his body get his laughs for him, twisting and jerking as he tried to handle an imaginary bow in a tunic that was squeezing his arms like a serpent.

“And somebody,” he said, sitting down on his stool once more, “told the chief tax collector the Slavs have so many gods, they even have one who inflicts high interest on delinquent returns. From what I hear, the tax man jumped over the wall and converted day before yesterday.”

That got a loud laugh. Every tax collector George had ever known would have worshiped a god like that. He watched the men in the taverns looking around at one another. Half of them would have worshiped a god like that, too. Enough people owed George money that he might have been tempted into a brief bit of fiscal paganism himself.

“That same god went down into the Jews’ quarter,” John added. “They told him to come back once he had some experience.” No one was safe from John. That was a lot of what made him funny. It was also what made the people whose vanity he flicked hate him.

A barmaid carrying a wooden tray filled with empty mugs stumbled over somebody’s outstretched foot. She squealed and managed to stay upright, but several of the mugs flew off the tray. Being the cheapest of cheap crockery, they shattered.

“Pick up the pieces, Verina,” Paul said wearily when the noise stopped. “That’ll come out of your pay, you know.”

“What a kind and generous host we have,” John exclaimed--not sarcasm, as George first thought, but the lead-in to a joke, for the comic continued, “Puts me in mind of the two fellows who owned a slave in common. One day one of them came into their shop and found the other one whacking the slave with a stick. “What are you doing? he asked his partner. And the other fellow told him, ‘I’m beating my half.’ “

As Verina swept up the shards of the broken mugs, John said, “Like I told you, Paul’s a good fellow. Instead of taking it out of Verina s pay, he could have taken it out some other way.” He leered at the barmaid. The largely male crowd whooped. Verina looked ready to throw the pieces of crockery at him. Again, though, he’d only used the situation to help set up a story: “I remember the poor fool who was talking with a good-looking woman, and he said to her, ‘I wonder whether you or my wife tastes better.’” He leered again, and ran his tongue lewdly over his lips. “And the woman said, “Why don’t you ask my husband? He’s tasted us both.’”

He got his laugh, but George, listening to it, thought it had a certain nervous undertone. Not everyone had as much confidence in his wife as he did with Irene, and everyone there, no doubt, had been devastated by an unexpected answer at one time or another, even if not by that particular unexpected answer. When John’s jokes worked well, they touched a central core of humanity all his listeners shared.

“Then,” said the comic, “there was the fellow who went to Maurice and wanted to be named Augustal prefect of Egypt. ‘I already have one,’ Maurice told him. ‘Well, all right, you’re the Emperor--make me governor of Thrace,’ the man said. And Maurice answered, ‘I can’t do that, either--I like the job the man there now is doing.’ And the fellow said, ‘In that case, give me twenty solidi!’ So Maurice did. As the fellow was walking out of the palace with his gold pieces, his friend asked, ‘Aren’t you disappointed you got so little?’ And the fellow said, ‘Are you crazy? I never would have got this much if I hadn’t asked for all the other stuff.’ “

That got a laugh, too, both for the sake of the joke and, again, for the obvious truth it contained: Maurice, among the most parsimonious Roman Emperors of all time, never parted with a copper if he could help it.

John got down from the platform, went over to the bar, and spoke to Paul in a loud, wheedling voice: “How about giving me half an interest in this tavern, my good and wise friend?”

“What?” Paul jerked as if a wasp had stung him. “Are you out of your mind, John? Go away.”

“Well, if you won’t do that, how about letting me have all the roast pork I can eat for the next year?” John asked.

“Are you crazy?” said the taverner, who obviously hadn’t been paying attention to the routine. “Go back there and be funny.”

“Give me a mug of wine, then.”

Paul dipped it out for him. “There. Go on, now.”

John turned to the crowd. “You see?” he said with an enormous grin. People laughed and cheered as he finally went back to the platform, and Paul never did figure out where the joke lay. John knocked back the wine in one long draught, then ruefully shook his head. “ ‘Go back there and be funny,’ the man says. I’ll tell you people what’s funny. That’s funny. Our beloved host thinks he can tell somebody to be funny and have it happen, just like that.”

“You’d better be funny,” said Paul, who was listening now.

John ignored him. Now the comic’s face bore a wistful expression: maybe a true one, maybe only a trick of the light. “I wish it were that easy. I wish you could walk into a shop and say, ‘I’d like a pound of funny, please,’ and put it in a sack and take it home with you. Wouldn’t that be fine, if you could buy funny the way you buy a loaf of bread from Justin the baker or a pair of shoes from George here?”

Now George jumped. John hadn’t been in the habit of including him in his routines, and he would have been as well pleased had his friend left him out of this one, too.

And, sure enough, John sent a sardonic stare his way as he went on, “Come to think of it, you can buy some pretty funny shoes from George, all right.”

“I’ll remember you in my nightmares,” George called.

“Your nightmares are ugly enough without me,” John retorted; he wasn’t shy about mocking himself, either. He went on, “Besides, it’s hard to be funny in Thessalonica these days. God is punishing us for our sins. The Slavs and Avars are outside the wall, there’s not enough food inside the wall, and He gave Menas back his legs so he could go around shouting at everybody.”

Some people laughed. Others looked alarmed, either because God might have been insulted or because Menas had been. George put his elbows down on the tabletop and buried his face in his hands. Sure as sure, that crack would get back to Menas. And, sure as sure, Menas would think George had said it, not anyone else. Fourteen people might tell him it had come from John’s lips; he would hear George every time.

The shoemaker didn’t really listen to the rest of John’s routine. People laughed every so often, so he suspected his friend was doing well. And, when John finally came back to the table, the bowl he brought with him was nicely full of coins. He sorted them with his usual quick dexterity.

George said, “I do wish you wouldn’t tell jokes on Menas so often.”

“Why, in God’s name?” John didn’t look up from what he was doing. “He’s funny, is what he is. I can’t think of anybody funnier in the whole world, him swaggering around like he’s got God’s hand in his drawers.”

“The trouble is, he does--or he did, anyhow--have God’s hand in his drawers,” George said uncomfortably,

“Yes, but God didn’t put it there to play Menas’ trumpet for him,” John answered, setting a silver miliaresion off by itself with a pleased grunt. “Menas still hasn’t figured that out, even though it’s been months. He’s pretty stupid, too; he may never get the idea.”

“Regardless of how stupid he is” --a sentiment with which George heartily concurred-- “he’s rich, too, and he’ll get you in trouble if you keep making jokes about him.” He’ll get me in trouble if you keep making jokes about him. But George remained too stubborn to tell John about that.

“What’s he going to do?” the comic asked. “Make me leave town? I can’t go by land, and if he puts me on a ship he does me a favor.”

“He can make your life miserable while you’re here,” George said. “Believe me, I know.” That was as close as he would come to revealing the trouble to which his friend had contributed.

“My life is already miserable while I’m here,” John said. “A little less miserable,” he amended, “because the night’s take is pretty good. And if Verina’s in the right kind of mood--” He raised his voice and called to the barmaid: “Hello, sweetheart! What do you say you and I--”

“I say no, whatever it is,” Verina answered. “All those broken cups I was cleaning up, I wish I’d broken them over your head.” George didn’t know what John had done to her, or what she thought he’d done to her, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with him now, stalking off nose in air.

If he was embarrassed, he didn’t show it. Going up in front of an audience to tell jokes for a living had no doubt hardened him against embarrassment. “It doesn’t matter,” he said lightly. “She’s no good in bed, anyhow.”

That, for once, hadn’t been pitched to carry to Verina’s ears, but she heard it and came storming back. “For one thing, you’re a liar,” she snapped. “For another, you’ve never had the chance to find out whether you’re a liar. And for one more, you’re never going to have the chance.” Off she went again.

John got more laughs than he had through his whole routine, all of them aimed at him. Had George been publicly humiliated like that, he wouldn’t have dared show his face on the street for weeks afterwards. John took it all in stride. By the calculating look on his face, he was figuring out the jokes he’d tell about it the next time he got up in front of a crowd.

Having gone to Paul’s tavern, George was glad he had an afternoon shift on the wall the next day. He was less glad about staring into the westering sun; the day was cold but brilliantly clear. The glare in his face made it hard for him to keep an eye on whatever the Slavs and Avars might be doing.

John didn’t worry about that, and had some reason not to worry: the barbarians’ encampment seemed as quiet as it ever had since the siege began. The comic said, “They’re probably all out with their sheep.”

“You told that one last night, John,” George said patiently.

“Go on, complain about every little thing,” John said. “I think--”

George didn’t find out what John thought. Up farther north along the wall, someone started shouting in a very loud, unpleasant voice: “Call yourself a fighting man, do you? A fighting man is supposed to be alert in the presence of danger. He is supposed to--”

Had Rufus been giving that dressing-down, neither George nor John would have thought anything of it. As it was, John’s face gave the impression that he’d smelled some meat several days later than it should have been smelled. George’s lip also curled. “Menas,” he said.

Menas it was, and he was, to George s dismay, heading in the direction of the Litaean Gate, spreading joy and good cheer in front of him. John glanced his way and said, “What’s that thing he’s carrying? Besides his big, ugly belly, I mean.”

“His war hammer--is that what you’re talking about?” George said. “I’ve seen him lugging that around before. It’s a rich man’s toy, if you ask me--something that makes him feel like a soldier even if he’s not.”

He wasn’t a soldier himself, as any member of Thessalonica’s regular garrison would have told him in as much detail as he could stand. But he’d done real fighting since the Slavs and Avars infested the city, which was more than Menas could have said. George checked himself. No: it was more than Menas could truthfully have said.

And here came the noble, twirling the hammer around by the leather strap attached to the end of the handle. He glared at George as if at a moldy spot on a chunk of bread. “Haven’t I told you to stop insulting me?” he growled. “Haven’t I warned you I’ll get my own back if it’s the last thing I do?”

“You’ve done all those things, sir,” George answered. “What I haven’t done is insult you.”

“Liar!” Menas shouted, loud enough to make militiamen within a bowshot of him turn their heads his way. “The latest is, you say God cured me so I could go around shouting at people.”

Whoever had reported John’s joke to him had got the words right, but Menas had got the source wrong, as George had known would happen. The shoemaker wondered if John would own up to having said it, and if Menas would believe him if he did. Since John kept quiet, the latter didn’t become an issue. George said, “I did not say that about you, sir.”

“Liar!” Menas shouted again.

“I did not say that,” George repeated. “If you keep doing the things that someone said about you, though, I will start saying them myself. I’ll have to start saying them myself, because you’ll have made them true.”

Menas stared at him. Being a rich and prominent man, being a man to whom God had granted a miracle (for what reason, George could not imagine, and he’d tried-- how he’d tried!), the noble was not accustomed to having anyone speak so pointedly to him. He raised the hammer, as if to strike George down.

George sprang backwards. He had an arrow on the string and the bow down almost as soon as his feet hit the walkway again. The point of the arrow--a bronze point, perhaps made by Benjamin--was aimed at a spot a palm’s breadth above Menas’ navel.

As nothing George said had ever managed to do, that made Menas thoughtful. He lowered the silver-chased hammer. George lowered the bow so the arrow pointed toward the walkway rather than Menas’ brisket. He held it at full draw, though, ready to bring it up in a hurry if the noble was only pretending to back away from a fight.

“How you’ll pay!” Menas snarled. “You’ll wish the Slavs and Avars had got hold of you by the time I’m done.” He stamped south along the walkway. George resisted the temptation to put the arrow in his bow straight through Menas’ left kidney. It wasn’t easy. He had to make himself replace the arrow in the quiver one motion at a time.

“Getting credit for my lines, are you?” John said when Menas started bellowing at some other luckless militiaman farther down the wall. “That’s a trouble you could probably do without.”

“Now that you mention it, yes,” George answered. John was bolder with his insults when the target wasn’t standing right there in front of him. George tried to get angry at that, but found he couldn’t. Most men were made the same way.

“That’s why you’ve been after me not to tell jokes about him anymore,” John said, with the air of a man for whom a dark corner of the world has suddenly become bright.

“In a manner of speaking,” George said.

“Well, I won’t,” John promised. And then, an instant later, he backtracked: “I don’t think I will, anyhow. But if something comes to me while I’m up there in front of a bunch of people, who knows what I’ll do?”

“No one,” George said sadly. “Not a single, solitary soul. Not even you. You’d be better off if you did.”

“Maybe,” John said. “But if I knew ahead of time everything I’d do when I got up on a platform, and if I did just what I’d thought beforehand I was going to do … I wouldn’t be me. Like you say, I might be better off. But I might not be able to perform at all.”

George thought about that. He’d made shoes all his life, learning the trade from his father. But if, for some reason, he couldn’t make shoes anymore, he was sure he’d be happy enough as a potter or a miller instead, once he’d learned one of those businesses. If, however, a man had in his makeup something that had to come out if he was to be happy, he couldn’t very well go through life denying it was there.

“I will try,” John said, which, as a pledge, left something to be desired.

“Do the best you can.” George sounded weary, even to himself. “The damage is probably done by now, any which way.”

A man whom George needed a moment to recognize was in the shop when he came back from the wall: a burly fellow of about his own age, with rather heavy features pitted by scars from either a light case of smallpox or a bad set of pimples as a youth. The latter, George thought, and that let him figure out who the visitor was a moment before Irene said, “Dear, of course you know Leo the potter.”

“Yes, of course,” George said, and clasped Leo’s hand. The potter had a firm grip, and very smooth skin on his palm from using it to shape clay: a great contrast to the scars and punctures that marked a shoemaker’s hands. “A pleasure to see you. Will you drink some wine with me?”

“Your lady already gave me a cup,” Leo answered, holding it up. “I got here myself not two minutes ago, matter of fact.” Irene poured a cup for her husband, who took it with a word of thanks. He looked around for Sophia and Theodore, both of whom seemed to have vanished. But no: shadows at the top of the stairway said they were lingering as discreetly as they could, no doubt with hands cupped to their ears to hear the better.

As much to annoy them as for any other reason, George stretched small talk longer than he might have done. But small talk was also a way of getting acquainted with Leo, whom he did not know well. After a while, casually, George said, “You’re Constantine’s father, aren’t you?” Had Leo still had his youthful pimples, he and Constantine might have been two brothers, not father and son. George stretched a point: “Fine-looking boy.”

Irene frowned at him. He nodded, very slightly, to let her know he’d seen. Had he been buying a donkey, he wouldn’t have praised anything about the animal till it was his. A marriage dicker, though, was a different sort of business--or so he thought.

“He’s a good lad, if I do say so my own self,” Leo answered, “and, since he’s not here, there’s nobody but me to say it for him. Helen--my wife, you know--she didn’t come through the plague a couple of years ago.” Absentmindedly, he scratched himself. “I hate fleas.”

“They are a nuisance,” George agreed. “Yes, the plague was a hard time for all of us. This siege is another hard time. I hadn’t intended speaking to you till it was over and done, and things were back to normal again.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Leo said. “But I drew a different lesson from the plague, and that is, don’t wait. Things may never be--what was that word you used?--normal, that’s it, normal again. No telling what’ll happen tomorrow, I say, so we’d better arrange today the best we can. And on account of that, I didn’t figure I ought to wait before I came to see you.”

George hesitated before replying. As far as he was concerned, Leo’s lesson was absolutely the wrong one. Festina lente ran through his mind: make haste slowly. But the fact that Leo did draw lessons, even mistaken lessons, from what went on around him bumped the potter up a notch in George’s estimation. Most people, he was convinced, went through life without a clue it might hold patterns they could use.

Irene said, “Your brother is a potter, too, isn’t he?”

“Zeno? That’s right, though his shop is over by the other side of St. Demetrius’ church.” Leo smiled at Irene. “Either you have a right fine memory, or you’ve been asking questions about me.”

“Everyone in this family has a very good memory,” Irene said primly. That was on the whole true, even if Theodore sometimes showed a maddening inability to remember what George had told him to do five minutes earlier.

“That’s nice,” Leo said, willing to pretend to believe Irene hadn’t been investigating his family. He’d also been doing some investigating, for he went on, “I’m sorry God didn’t give either of you sibs who lived.”

“I had an older brother,” George said. “I don’t even remember him; he died when I was a baby.”

“I had an older sister and a younger brother.” Irene’s eyes were sad as she looked into the past. “God’s will.” She grew brisk once more. “But you didn’t come here to talk about old sorrows, but the chance for new joys.”

“The chance, yes.” Leo scratched his nose. “You do keep a clean shop, George, I’ll say that for you. Hardly any stink of leather in the air.”

Though George bristled, he made a point of not letting Leo notice. Making and repairing shoes was a perfectly respectable trade, but not one of high class. By implying as much, Leo was making a bid for a bigger dowry to accompany Sophia if she married Constantine: it was astonishing how a fatter bride portion could balance social stigma in the scales.

But George in turn remarked, “You and your son are lucky fellows, not to be melted to tallow standing in front of your kilns day after day.” He had no intention of conceding that potters stood any higher on the social scale than did shoemakers.

Leo grunted. “Well, when we talk about Sophia’s dowry, what are we talking about? Twenty solidi, something like that?”

George stared at him, admiring the effrontery of such a forthright thief. “You’re going to lose this girl if you go on that way” he said. “We aren’t nobility, and neither are you.”

Sulkily, Leo said, “How much, then? It would have to be a pretty price, I’ll tell you. Constantine has his admirers, yes he does.”

Irene said, “When you married Helen, Leo, her bride portion was what? Two solidi and a little silver, wasn’t it?”

“How did you know that?” Leo turned red as the fire under one of his kilns. George wondered the same thing, although his wife’s skill at ferreting out such tidbits roused respect in him, not the horror Leo obviously felt. By that horror, George judged Irene had the straight goods.

“Never mind how I know,” she said crisply. “That hasn’t got anything to do with anything. What matters is, it’s true. Are you so much richer than your father that you think people want to beggar themselves to join your family? And I hear Zeno s wife brought a smaller dowry than yours.”

“Did she?” Leo exclaimed. “She puts on airs she doesn’t deserve, then.” Now he sounded indignant. He also sounded as if he hadn’t known what his sister-in-law’s bride portion had been. George wondered from whom Irene had pried that little nugget.

“If you’re going to be unreasonable about these things, there’s no point in us even talking,” George said. “In fact, I probably wouldn’t even be talking with you now if I didn’t know how sweet Constantine was on Sophia.” He didn’t know that, but had a feeling it was so from the way the youth had glanced back at him when they passed on the street.

And, for a wonder, his shot proved as effective as Irene’s had been. Leo turned red again, this time from annoyance rather than embarrassment. He said, “I told him not to show that on the sleeve of his tunic.”

“I have nothing against love matches,” George said. “A lot of times, they work out as well as the other sort. But I don’t see any reason a bride should pay a fancy price so she and the groom can end up doing what they’ve wanted to do anyhow.”

“If she brings a small portion, that makes your family and mine both look bad,” Leo said. “People will find out about it and gossip.” He sent Irene a glance filled with anything but delight unalloyed.

“I don’t gossip,” she said sweetly. “But I will say you have a point, since I know people who do.”

Leo got to his feet. “I thank you for the wine. Maybe you were right after all, and we shouldn’t talk this all the way through till we know Thessalonica is safe. After this, I don’t know as I want to talk with anybody else, either.

Good day to you both.” He edged out of the shop and fled.

No sooner had he gone than Sophia and Theodore hurried downstairs. Angrily, Sophia said, “Now look what you did! You scared him away. He won’t come back anymore, and my life is ruined. Ruined!” She burst into tears.

George and Irene, by contrast, burst into laughter. That made Sophia cry harder than ever. She glared at them from red, wet eyes. George said, “He will be back, little one--I promise. The only thing your mother and I did was show him the two of us weren’t fools.”

Sophia stared at him doubtfully. “Do you really think so?” She wanted to believe him, that was plain.

“No doubt about it,” Irene said. “He thought we’d dower you with everything we own, just for the sake of joining his snooty family. Now that he knows better, we should get on well enough.”

“He wants this match, too,” George added. “Otherwise, he would have waited till the siege was over before he started talking about it, the way we were going to do.”

“Oh,” Sophia said in a small voice. Her smile was like the sun coming out from behind rain clouds. “I hope you’re right.” It was evident she wanted the match at least as much as Constantine did. George resolved not to let Leo know that; it would make the dickering harder.

Theodore asked, “Mother, how did you know what bride portions Constantine’s mother and aunt brought with them?”

“From Claudia, of all people,” Irene answered. Before George could say anything worried, she went on, “It didn’t have anything to do with this match, either. I forget whether it was last year or the year before--last year, I guess, because it was after the plague--and Claudia was complaining about people who pretended they were finer than they really were, and she mentioned Helen and her dowry, and her sister-in-law, too. I thought it was in poor taste myself, poor Helen being dead and all, but I didn’t forget it, either. And when I turned out to need it, there it was.”

“Your mother,” George told Theodore, not joking at all, “never forgets anything.”

“Me?” Irene said. “Me? Who was it, about the time we got married, who could tell which team had won the chariot races at every running for the past fifty years before then, and which rider had the most wins for each team, and how this one bald driver hadn’t missed a running for fifteen years--”

George maintained a dignified silence. That was how he thought of it, at any rate. Its chief effect was making his wife and both his children laugh at him. Seeing that, he tried the opposite course: “That bald fellow had a brother who was a driver, too, and their father trained their horses, same as he’d been doing for twenty-three years before that, and …”

Such arcana proved every bit as risible as dignified silence. George gave up and started repairing a sandal. Sophia, having swung from sad to furious to eager and hopeful in the course of a couple of minutes, came over and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you, Papa,” she said.

“For what?” George asked, confused now.

“For a bald charioteer,” his daughter answered, which confused him worse than ever. But he’d just started talking about marrying her off, and she didn’t hate him for it. Confused or not, he didn’t suppose he was doing too badly there.

“Magic,” Rufus said decisively, peering out toward the encampment of the Slavs and Avars.

“I think you’re right.” George nodded. “That’s what they’ll hit us with next.” He sniffed. The wind was out of the west, and swept the savory odors of roasting mutton and beef from the enemy’s camp into the city. Sighing, he said, “They’re still eating well. I wish we were.”

“We’ve got enough to get us through,” Rufus answered, which lifted George’s spirits: if anyone knew how Thessalonica stood for food, the veteran was the man.

He went on, “What surprises me is that the barbarians are keeping their army so well fed. They must have dragged in all the livestock for miles around, the bastards. Even after they go, the countryside’ll be bare as a sheared sheep for years.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” George said, an admission that bothered him: he was the sort of man who tried to think as far ahead as he could. “Meat will be expensive for a long time to come.”

“We can always eat old Avars,” Rufus said, “except I think they’d be tougher than your shoeleather.”

“Shoeleather!” George exclaimed. “If they’re slaughtering all the cattle and sheep, what will I use for shoeleather?”

“Don’t know that one, either,” Rufus said, if not cheerfully than with a good deal less concern than George had for the question. “What we’ve got to do is, we’ve got to get the siege over with so we can worry about things like shoeleather again.”

Things like deciding whether I want to see Sophia marry Constantine, George thought. But the veteran was right. “What sort of magic do you think they’ll throw at us?” he asked.

“The bishop and I have been talking about that,” Rufus answered. George had a hard time gauging his tone: was he proud of having become part of the city’s inner circle or scornful of the man with whom he was conferring? A bit of both, the shoemaker judged. Rufus continued, “Eusebius thinks we’re going to come up against it before too long, that they’re going to throw all the magic they have at us to try and break in. If they don’t make it, they’ll likely give up and go away.”

“That sounds sensible,” George said.

“It may be true anyway.” Rufus’ smile was crooked. “The bishop kept giving me all sorts of reasons out of the Holy Scriptures why he thought it was so. After a while, I started to doze off.”

“You don’t think he’s right?” the shoemaker asked.

“Oh, I think he’s right, but not for any of the reasons he was going on about,” Rufus said. “You look at what’s left for the Slavs and Avars to eat out there, you look at the really bad weather that’s bound to come, and you can’t see them besieging us forever. The only thing about the cold I don’t like is that it makes pestilences spread slower--but their magic for that sort of thing is pretty good anyhow. We’ve found out about that.”

“We’ve found out their magic for a lot of different things is pretty good,” George said. “I tried telling that to Eusebius, but--”

Rufus held up his hand. “I’ve heard that story, you know, George. And do you know what Bishop Eusebius said to me? He said, “Rufus, if I’d only listened to that shoemaker, what’s-his-name, we’d all be better off now, because he sure knew how strong the Slavs’ magic was.’ “

“Really?” George’s eyes widened. He didn’t even mind being called what’s-his-name. “Did he really say that?”

Rufus leered evilly. “No.”

The gesture George used invited Rufus to perform an act so vile, and so anatomically unlikely, that God, when He was writing the Holy Scriptures, hadn’t thought to condemn it. The veteran laughed till he held his sides. “If you could have seen the look on your face . . .” He dissolved again.

“Funny,” George said. “I laugh.”

“Sorry,” Rufus said, sounded about a quarter sincere. “I couldn’t resist.”

“You didn’t try,” George said. Rufus did not deny it. By the nature of things, Rufus hardly could have denied it. George thought for a bit. He could either stay angry at the veteran or he could forget about it. He forgot about it, suffusing himself in a warmly Christian glow of virtue. Besides, forgetting about it let him keep on questioning Rufus instead of cursing him. His relentless curiosity insisted that was the better choice. He asked, “What kind of magic does Bishop Eusebius think will be in the next big push from the Slavs and Avars? You never quite answered.”

“Earth, most likely,” Rufus said. “They’ve tried air and fire and water more. I don’t know whether they can make the wall come down that way, but that’s what the bishop thinks they’ll try.”

“It does make sense, I suppose.” George kicked at the walkway. “I don’t want the wall to crumble under my feet.”

“Neither do I,” Rufus said. “They’ve come too cursed close to managing that without using any magic at all. If they have some gods whose special province is earthquakes, say. . .”

“That could be very bad,” George agreed. “Are there any special prayers we can use to keep earthquakes from happening?”

“Eusebius is looking for some,” Rufus answered. “Me, I have my doubts. If there really were prayers like that, everybody would know them and use them, and we wouldn’t have earthquakes anymore.”

“Something to that, I shouldn’t wonder.” It was, in fact, the sort of logical look at a problem George might have used himself. He said, “If we can’t pray to stop a quake, what can we do?”

“Pray that the gods of the Slavs and Avars can’t start one that wouldn’t have happened without them, I suppose,” Rufus said. “That’s better than nothing, and it lets us fight them on our own ground.” George grimaced. Rufus grinned. “Relax, pal. I’m not smart enough to do that on purpose.”

“If you say so,” George answered, which won him a dirty look from the veteran. He held up a placating hand. “If you were stupid, Rufus, you would have done something that got you killed years ago.”

Rufus laughed. “Ah, there’s a deal of truth in that, I tell you. A soldier starting out, he’s all balls and no brains.” He laughed again, on a different note this time. “Maybe it’s a good thing I came to the trade with Narses for my first general. He didn’t have any balls at all--first eunuch I ever heard of who wanted to be a fighting man, and oh! wasn’t he a fine one--but brains? That man had more brains than any five I’ve met since.” After looking around, he lowered his voice. “And that includes Eusebius, too.”

Also quietly, George said, “I’ve always thought the bishop’s pretty smart.”

“Oh, he is, he is,” Rufus said. “That’s what he is, sure enough: pretty smart. Lf we had Narses here in Thessalonica, now, if we had Narses, the Slavs and Avars would have gone away weeks ago, and they would have thought it was their idea, and they would have been proud of it.”

“He sounds like quite a leader,” George said, thinking he sounded like Rufus’ beloved first commander, seen across most of a lifetime through a warm haze of memory.

“He was,” Rufus said. “Remember, he’s the fellow who finished the job of conquering Italy from the Goths after Belisarius marched up and down and up and down till his feet got flat but couldn’t make those shaggy bastards he down and quit. And Narses only had dribs and drabs of money and men to work with, too, on account of most everything got sent to the frontier with the Persians when the war started up there.”

“That’s so,” George said slowly. Maybe Rufus knew what he was talking about after all. He had a way of knowing what he was talking about. But-- “Isn’t Italy full of Lombards nowadays?”

“It sure is,” Rufus said. “And do you know what? That’s Narses’ doing, too. After Justinian finally upped and dropped dead, Sophia--his nephew Justin’s wife, you know: the new Empress--heard how Narses had booted all the Goths and Franks out of Italy, and you know what she did?”

“What?” George asked, willing to oblige the veteran.

He needn’t have bothered; Rufus talked right through him: “She sent him a distaff so he could spin thread. He was a eunuch, after all, so she figured she could insult him no matter what he’d done for the Roman Empire. But he had his revenge. He’d had Lombard mercenaries on his side fighting in Italy, and he invited the whole cursed tribe down. They were plenty glad to come, too, I’ll bet. The country next door to theirs was filling up with Avars about then.”

George thought about that. His shiver had nothing to do with the weather. “Any country next door to the Avars is a good one to get out of, you ask me.”

“You mean, like this one?” Rufus asked, which was such a good question, George didn’t answer it.

At first, George thought the service at St. Demetrius’ basilica convened for prayer against earthquakes a coincidence. Then he reminded himself that Rufus and Eusebius had been putting their heads together. If they thought the Slavs and Avars liable to try working earth magic, the bishop would naturally do his best to forestall it.

“Why does the earth quake, Father?” Sophia asked as they walked toward the basilica.

“Because God is angry with us,” Irene said before George could answer.

“I know that,” Sophia said impatiently. “What I mean is, how does He make the earth shake? Or how do the gods of the Slavs and Avars do that, so He can stop them?”

“They jump up and down inside the earth, and when their feet hit, everything in there shakes, and so do we,” Theodore said.

“Let’s say that’s true,” George said. “What is there for their feet to land on that’s any harder than anything else? And if there isn’t any one part inside the earth that’s harder than another, how can they jump up and down at all?”

“They’re gods,” Theodore said, “or demons, anyhow. Who knows what they can or can’t do? Besides that Avar wizard, I mean.”

George chewed on that. “Of course God--and demons, I suppose--can break natural laws now and then. That’s what miracles are. But if natural laws got broken all the time, we wouldn’t have any natural laws.”

“Earthquakes only happen every now and then,” Sophia said.

“Thank God,” Irene added, and made the sign of the cross.

Theodore, being of the age where he constantly had to challenge his father, did so: “If demons jumping up and down inside the earth don’t make earthquakes, what does?”

“My father said that his father said he once heard a philosopher traveling to Athens say--” George began.

Irene’s loud and pointed sniff interrupted him. “Philosophers followed the pagan gods,” she reminded him, “and God proved the stronger. So why should anyone care what the philosophers said?”

“Why should anyone care if I get a word in edgewise?” George said. “I don’t think anyone does care if I get a word in edgewise.” Having won a small space of silence with that outburst, he proceeded to fill it: “What this fellow said, if I have it right, didn’t have anything to do with God or demons at all. He said the earth is full of caves and caverns that go deep, deep, deep underground, and when air rumbles through them in underground storms, that’s what makes earthquakes.”

Theodore delightedly clapped his hands together. “Earthfarts!” he cried, hopping in the air with glee. “Let’s all pray that God can keep the Slavic demons from farting underground. Amen!”

“I get asked a serious question, I give a serious answer, and what thanks do I get for it?” George asked the air. “This. Straighten up, you foolish loon,” he growled at Theodore, who had doubled over in laughter. He was having a hard time not laughing himself, but he would have given himself over to the city torturer before admitting it.

He was not the only one who knew their son well, either. In tones suggesting the Last Judgment, Irene said, “Theodore, before you think of breaking wind in the middle of Bishop Eusebius’ prayer, imagine what your father will do to you after you come out of the church.”

Theodore did imagine it. George could see him weighing whether the disaster to follow would be worth the entertainment during. What he could not see, and what worried him, was which way his son would decide.

When they got to the basilica, Irene and Sophia went upstairs to the women’s gallery. George and Theodore made their way toward the altar. Along with keeping his elbows up to move other men out of the way, George kept looking around to see where Menas was. When he spotted the rich nobleman, he made a point of staying away from him. It wasn’t fear: more on the order of not borrowing trouble, since every time the two of them came anywhere near each other, things only got worse.

People muttered back and forth while they waited for Bishop Eusebius. Not everyone knew why the bishop had summoned the folk of Thessalonica. Theodore made himself look wise and well connected by explaining to anyone who would listen. George kept his own counsel. Being thought close to the powerful was nothing he deemed important. Besides, Eusebius would do his own explaining soon enough.

Here came the bishop, behind a couple of muscular deacons swinging thuribles from which came the incense George often thought of as the odor of piety. Eusebius, his clever face more deeply lined than it had been when the siege began, took his place behind the altar. He raised his hands in a gesture of benediction that was at the same time a request for silence. When that silence proved slow in coming, the deacons stared out at the congregation so sternly, they soon obtained it.

“Kyrie eleison--Lord, have mercy,” Eusebius said. “Christe eleison--Christ, have mercy.” George echoed those prayers. So did everyone else in the basilica, the women in their gallery along with the men below. Eusebius said, “Servants of Christ, brethren, my friends: I have not bid you come to any ordinary divine liturgy. We are indeed here to beg God to have mercy on us in our struggle against the barbarians’ vicious onslaughts.”

In spite of the fiercely scowling deacons, a low murmur ran through the basilica from people who hadn’t heard why Eusebius wanted them there or had got a garbled account that needed correcting.

Eusebius went on, “We have reason to believe the Slavs and Avars are wickedly consorting with the demons who, in their pride, reckon themselves gods, and seek to inspire those demons, whose province is the infernal regions, to overthrow the fortifications of this great and God-guarded city--fortifications the aforementioned barbarians have proved unable to overcome--by causing the ground to tremble and shake in the horrors of an earthquake, thereby transforming Thessalonica in the wink of an eye from town to tomb.”

He brought out the sentence all in one breath, without the slightest hesitation. George admired that as much as he resigned himself to yet another dose of Eusebius’ mortuary rhetoric.

The bishop went on, “We pray Thee, God, all of us here, individually and collectively, to spare Thy city and thwart and bind the powers of the demons, in accordance with the greatness of Thine own power. Let us live as we have lived, secure in Thy bosom and that of the Roman Empire Thou lovest. Preserve the calm Thou hast ordained in the bowels of the earth.”

Theodore’s face assumed a look of intense concentration. Acting with the reflexive speed he’d acquired in combat on the walls of Thessalonica, George stepped on his son’s foot, hard enough to make Theodore grimace in pain. Whatever might have happened, didn’t.

After that, assuming a properly reverential attitude, one that might persuade God to pay some small attention to his prayer, wasn’t easy for George. He did his best, and had to hope it was good enough. He suspected the only prayer Theodore had offered up to the Lord was one for timely flatulence, and George had managed to keep that one from being granted.

Fortunately, Theodore hadn’t howled when George stepped on him. That meant the reverence of the rest of the congregation remained undisturbed all the way up to Eusebius’ final “Amen.” People filed out of the basilica of St. Demetrius chattering approvingly about what a moving prayer service it had been.

“And when they say ‘moving,’ “ George told his son, “they aren’t talking about their bowels.”

“Bishop Eusebius was,” Theodore retorted, whereupon George trod upon his toes again. This time, it didn’t help. Theodore dissolved into giggles, from which occasional mumbles of “bowels” and “earthfarts” emerged.

He and his father met Irene and Sophia across the street from the church. “I see you didn’t have to kill him-- quite,” Irene said to George, again proving she knew their son as well as he did.

“I didn’t do anything,” Theodore protested, a cry that would have resounded with greater sincerity had he not still been snickering from time to time.

“Yes, and it wasn’t for lack of effort that you didn’t, either,” George said, which singularly faded to abash his son.

Sophia gasped. George whirled, expecting some Slavic or Avar demigod to be menacing his daughter or someone else close by. Pointing, Sophia said, “Look--there’s Constantine. Isn’t he splendid?”

As far as George could see, the splendid one was still hulking, rather surly-looking, and pimple-besplotched. He knew Sophia was looking at the youth as much with her heart as with her eyes. Instead of examining Constantine (to his way of thinking, an unprofitable exercise), George nodded politely to Leo the potter. The father of Sophia’s object of affection nodded back. He studied Sophia and then, warily, Irene. The smile she gave Leo showed good teeth; George was sure he’d imagined fangs in her mouth. Almost sure.

“God will provide,” Irene said. Her husband wondered whether she was talking about Constantine or freedom from earthquakes. Probably both, he decided.

Several Avars on horseback stared in at Thessalonica. “They don’t look very happy, do they?” Dactylius said, sounding happy himself at the Avars’ appearance of unhappiness.

“No,” George said, and then, more sharply, “Uh-oh. Here comes that priest or wizard of theirs. I’d almost sooner pray never to see him again than for no more earthquakes for a while.”

“Amen to that,” Rufus said. “He’s caused us as much trouble as all their soldiers rolled together--throw in the Slavic wizards with him, I mean.”

“That’s so,” George agreed. “But it looks like the other Avars aren’t any happier to see him than they are to look at us, doesn’t it?”

“Good,” Rufus said with considerable relish.

One of the mounted men pointed toward Thessalonica. The priest shook his head and spread his hands in regret. Whatever the horseman wanted him to do, he couldn’t do it.

“No earthquake today?” Rufus’ voice oozed false regret. “Can’t make the walls fall down? Oh, poor ducks. What a shame they had to go up against the power of God. When you do that, you come off second best.” Realism replaced sarcasm for a moment. “Well, most of the time you do. The powers out there, they’re pretty tough.”

The Avar cuffed at the priest. George stared. Knowing how much power the man who wore furs and fringes controlled, he waited for the wizard to turn the horseman into a grub, or possibly even into a Roman scribe. But nothing happened, save that the Avar priest brought up a hand to keep the captain from hitting him more than once.

“Dissension in their ranks!” someone with a big, deep voice shouted from not far away: Menas. There he stood, atop the Litaean Gate. He’d been quiet till that moment, something so unusual it had kept George from noticing him. Now he went on, loudly obvious, “If they quarrel among themselves, our victory is assured.”

“Why doesn’t he keep still?” Dactylius asked.

“I don’t think he knows how,” George answered. “If he stops talking for long, he forgets he exists.”

“That’s no way to talk about a noble,” Rufus said in stern tones, then added, “But I won’t tell you you’re wrong, either.”

Menas waved his big, expensive, ostentatious war hammer. “We shall slaughter them, hip and thigh, root and branch.”

“Is he a wrestler, a gardener, or a soldier?” George asked.

“He’s a blowhard, that’s what he is,” Rufus said. “Haven’t seen him up on the wall for a bit. He must have heard that the truth gets told here, and the truth about him is that--”

“Hush,” Dactylius said. “He’s liable to hear you, and then you’ll have the same troubles with him that George does.”

“Not me.” Rufus’ hand dropped to the hilt of his sword. “He tries getting wise with me, he’ll regret it to the end of his days--and that’ll be soon.”

Out beyond the wall, the Avar captain was finally getting it through his head that the wizard couldn’t give him what he wanted. He shouted to his companions. One of them produced a horn of polished brass that shone like gold even on a cloudy day. The fellow raised it to his lips and blew a long, unmelodious blast.

“Uh-oh,” George said, as he had a little while before on spying the wizard.

“Oh, dear,” Dactylius added. Rufus said something that expressed the same opinion a good deal more pungently. Slavs started tumbling out of the tents and little wooden shacks in which they sheltered from the elements. And, all along the wall, more horn blasts were presumably calling more Slavs out of more encampments.

“Something’s going on,” Rufus said, as good a statement of the obvious as George had heard in a long time. A moment later, the veteran added, “Here come the Slavs, all right.”

Almost indignantly, George said, “I thought we decided the Slavs and Avars would try magic against us next.”

“Maybe they did try it and it didn’t work, thanks to the prayers we sent up to God the other day,” Rufus answered. “Or maybe we were just flat-out wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to me, and I expect not to you, either, eh?”

George didn’t answer. He was watching the Slavs, who were indeed issuing from their encampments in large numbers. Most of the barbarians were clutching bows. They trotted toward the wall of Thessalonica and started loosing great flights of arrows.

Crouching behind a battlement, Dactylius said, “This must be what they mean when they talk about shooting so many arrows, they darken the sun as they come.”

“If one of ‘em hits you square, it’ll darken the sun for you, all right, and you can take that to church,” Rufus said.

As if to underscore his words, men up and down the length of the wall shouted and screamed as they were wounded. George heard Menas say, “Here, my good fellow, lean on me. I’ll get you down to safety and the help of a physician.” The shoemaker’s lip curled. Menas had found a way to get out of the dangerous part of the fighting, and to look good while he did it.

George popped up long enough to shoot at the Slavs, then ducked back down again. Up, shoot, duck . . . up, shoot, duck .. . “They haven’t tried anything like this for a while,” he said, nocking another arrow.

“Sure haven’t,” agreed Rufus, who was also grabbing for a new shaft. “Whatever they’re doing, they’re bloody serious about it.”

“Of course they’re serious,” a newcomer said. “Have you ever seen anybody tell jokes while he was shooting a bow?”

“Hullo, John,” George said without looking up. Till you did it just now, no, I hadn’t seen anybody do that.”

“He did, didn’t he?” Dactylius said. “Is it time to change shifts already? I mean, would it be time? If I’m not there when I’m supposed to be, it will make Claudia very unhappy.”

“She’d be even more unhappy if the Slavs take the city,” Paul pointed out; the taverner had come up onto the wall with the comic. He shot at the Slavs. “Got one there, I think.”

“There are enough of them, I’ll say that,” Rufus said. “They haven’t brought the whole army forward like this since . . .” His brow, already wrinkled, furrowed still more as he thought. “Since that time they used those tortoises to try and undermine the walls.”

After George let fly with another arrow, he stayed upright longer than he had been doing. “I see more of them, getting ready to use those big shields they had then.”

“Let me have a look.” Rufus stood up beside him, ignoring the arrows humming by as if they were so many gnats. George pointed. The veteran let out a grunt. “Aye, that’s what they’re doing. Didn’t know whether they’d try the same stunt twice, but I always figured they might. And don’t the Scriptures talk about a dog coming back to its vomit?”

“That means coming back to a bad idea,” George said, loosing another shaft at the advancing Slavs. “For them, this is liable to be coming back to a good idea.” He shot again. The arrow ricocheted from one of the large, heavy shields. He cursed.

So did Rufus. “Aye, it’s liable to be,” he agreed. After he looked around at the piles of stones on the walkway, his curses put George’s to shame. “I’ve been screaming at everybody who might listen, but we still haven’t put back as many rocks as we dropped on the Slavs the last time they tried tortoises against us.” He raised his voice to a great bellow: “Water and fuel for the cauldrons!” In more conversational tones, he said to George, “We’ll never get stones up here quick enough to do much good. Dropping boiling water on the whoresons will still help, though.”

“It had better,” George said. The tortoise crews moved steadily forward. The shoemaker pointed to them. “They’ve learned from what went wrong the first time. Now they’ve got the shields up to make their shells right from the start.”

“Only way to do it,” Rufus said absently, and then, “I wish they were as stupid as those Goths and Franks and Lombards over in Italy. The German tribes didn’t know how to do anything except bash and slash, and they didn’t want to learn, either.”

Under George’s feet, the wall shivered. The first tortoise had reached it and, under cover of the iron-faced shields, the Slavs were using pry bars and hammers and chisels to try to pull stones out of the base and send the whole thing tumbling down. George set down his bow, picked up a stone, and dropped it down toward the attackers. It landed with a dull thud, not a clatter, telling him he’d missed.

Dactylius threw a stone down on the Slavs, too. He cheered when he heard a crash, but the barbarians kept chipping away at the wall, which meant the shields above them had turned the stone.

John said, “If this goes on much longer, it could get very boring.” After a moment, he added, “Running out of rocks up here could be boring, too.” Boring, as he used it, seemed to mean getting everyone on the wall killed.

Rufus lifted a stone. It was not one of the enormous boulders he’d picked up the first time the Slavs tried tortoises, but of more ordinary size and weight. Even so, it was enough to make him stagger. George decided God really had been helping him then. He also decided God wasn’t helping Rufus now. When the veteran dropped the stone, he missed the tortoise, as George had.

The vibration underfoot got worse as more and more

Slavic crews got to work at the base of the wall. “We aren’t going to have enough rocks to smash all of them,” Paul said. “I don’t know how else we’re going to stop them, either.” George had been thinking the same thing. He’d kept quiet, hoping it wouldn’t be true if he didn’t say it. Now Paul had said it. It was true.

Rufus’ face was haggard, for once showing every one of his years. “We’re in trouble,” he said, each word dragged from him.

“A sally?” George asked, as he had before.

He saw how much Rufus wanted to say no, to keep fighting from the top of Thessalonica’s wall, the wall that had for so long warded the Romans within from the barbarians outside. But the wall trembled beneath their feet, and might crumble beneath those feet at any moment. Looking as if every word tasted bad, Rufus said, “Aye, a sally.” The decision made, he wasted no time wondering whether he should change his mind. Instead, he shouted, “Come on, you lugs! Grab your swords and shields and get down to the gate. If we can’t make the Slavs leave the wall alone any other way, we’ll have to chase ‘em off!”

Having set down all his arms but his bow and arrow when he got up to the walkway, George had to snatch them up in a hurry now. Several of his comrades were doing the same thing. Rufus had already started down the stairway toward the Litaean Gate. John, Paul, George, and Dactylius hurried after him, along with a couple of dozen other militiamen from farther away.

Down on the ground, Rufus was shoving every able-bodied man he could find in the direction of the gate. “Here, what are you doing?” Menas shouted in anger and alarm. “Do you know who I am?”

Rufus kept shoving. “You’re not much more than half my age, and you’ve got that big, fancy hammer in your hand,” he answered. “Past that, pal, I don’t care who you are.”

This time, the soldier at the postern gate gave Rufus no argument when he ordered it open. “Doesn’t this look like fun!” John exclaimed. But the tavern comic was the first one through the gate, out into the hostile world beyond the wall.

George followed a moment later. He let out the loudest shout he could, both to frighten the Slavs and to try to make himself believe he wasn’t frightened. He didn’t know how he did on the first count. On the second, he faded miserably.

He ran toward the tortoise closest to the Litaean Gate. Arrows hissed past, bouncing back from the wall or shattering against it. To his relief, the Slavic archers didn’t come rushing forward to engage his comrades and him in hand-to-hand combat. There were enough of them that they might have overwhelmed the militiamen by force of numbers alone.

Behind their shields, the Slavs in the tortoise saw the Romans running at them and shouted in alarm. John pulled one of the shields aside and slashed at the men it sheltered. Suddenly, the tortoise broke up as the warriors inside realized they had to fight for their lives. Their pry bars and hammers were better weapons against stone than against soldiers. The big, heavy shields were more suited to warding off rocks cast from above than attackers at close quarters, too.

One of the Slavs swung at George with the iron bar he held in lieu of a sword. George got his shield in front of the blow. Pain shot up his arm, all the way to the shoulder. He cut at the Slav, then circled rapidly to his left, away from that part of the barbarian the shield protected. The Slav grunted in alarm and tried to turn with him, but the iron-faced shield weighed so much, it made him slow. And, in his desperate urgency, he tripped over his own feet and sprawled on the ground.

Bang! Bang! Menas’ silvered hammer came down upon his head. Had George dropped a pumpkin from the wall to the ground below, it would have made a sound like that when it hit. Blood sprayed. The Slav writhed, then lay still. Menas hit him again, to make sure that he was dead.

“Er--thank you,” George said, feeling such awkwardness as he’d never known at having to be grateful to the noble.

Menas exploded that gratitude as thoroughly as he’d ruined the Slav’s head. Swinging the hammer, he said, “I wish it had been you.”

George wondered if he could make Menas suffer an unfortunate accident out here beyond the wall. It would make the noble’s wife a widow, true, but, after being married to Menas, widowhood might look good to her.

Though such thoughts ran through the shoemaker’s mind, he had not the slightest chance to do anything about them. Nor did Menas do anything to him that would have given him an excuse to make the noble suffer that unfortunate accident. Both of them, along with the rest of the militiamen who had sallied from several gates, were and stayed busy battling the Slavs who had been assaulting the wall of Thessalonica.

Some of those Slavs fought as fiercely as any men George had ever seen, in spite of their makeshift weapons and clumsy shields. One of them came within a whisker of caving in his skull with a pry bar. Only the pointed tip slid across his forehead, slicing the skin so that blood kept running down into his left eye.

That was the last swing the Slav ever took; George’s sword slammed into the side of his neck a moment later. The barbarian let out a hoarse, gobbling cough; blood poured from the wound and from his mouth. Even as he began to topple, George ran past him. The shoemaker had been one of the first men out of the postern gate on the sally, and he’d come as far from it as any of his comrades. The farther he went, the more Slavs he could drive from the wall.

Not all the barbarians stood up against the unexpected Roman attack. More than a few ran away from the militiamen, some dropping their shields to flee the faster. Bowmen who’d stayed up on the wall shot several of them.

George let out a hoarse cheer every time he saw one fall.

The Slavic archers who’d been shooting at the defenders on the wall and at the sally parties kept their distance-- till mounted Avars showed up behind them and started shouting what had to be threats. More afraid of their overlords than they were of the Romans (a regrettably sensible attitude, as far as George was concerned), the Slavs ran toward the militiamen, whom they badly outnumbered.

“Back!” Rufus shouted. “They aren’t banging away at the wall anymore, and that’s what we wanted. Come back!”

George would have been delighted to do just that, but he and a Slav were busy trying to kill each other. Finally, as if by common consent, they turned and ran away from each other. George was appalled to discover how close other Slavs were, and how far away all his comrades had got.

There went Paul, back through the postern gate. There went Sabbatius. George hadn’t noticed him coming out. There went John, loping along with a bloody sword. There went Rufus. George ran harder. Not many Romans-- hardly any Romans--remained outside the wall.

There went Menas. The noble turned around and looked out at George. He smiled. Tm the last of us!” he shouted. “The very last!” He slammed the postern gate shut. The bar thudded down.