Thessalonica

IX

From up on top of the wall, people shouted down to the men by the postern gate that somebody hadn’t managed to get in. Those shouts did George no good whatever. The gate didn’t open again right away, and what looked like all the Slavs in the world were bearing down on him.

George turned his face from the wall and ran for his life. Not quite so many Slavs were coming from the southwest, and the woods in that direction were fairly close. He slashed at a Slavic archer as he sprinted. The barbarian fell back with a howl of pain.

George was in among the Slavs now. No more arrows hissed past him. The archers most likely feared hitting their own comrades. If they closed with him, he was dead, and he knew it. But he was still swinging that sword, and they were armed with nothing better than bows and belt knives. That left them unenthusiastic about closing.

Breath sobbing in his throat, heart thudding as if it would burst at any moment, he got closer and closer to the woods. Now most of the Slavs were behind him, which meant they started sending arrows after him once more. He remembered they were in the habit of poisoning those arrows, and wished he could have kept on forgetting it.

Here was the brush. His boots scrunched on dry, fallen leaves. He groaned--how could he hope to go anywhere without giving himself away with every step he took? He wondered if the barbarians had let him get into the woods just to give themselves the pleasure of hunting him down. He’d watched cats playing with mice. Let the little creature think it can break free? Why not, especially when it’s blocked off from its hole?

“Sometimes the mouse does get away,” he panted, dodging between tree trunks. “Sometimes the cat ends up with a stupid look on its face.” Most of the time, the mouse got eaten. He knew it. Again, he did his best not to think about it.

From right beside him, a voice spoke in Greek: “Sometimes mouse gets help.” He had all he could do not to scream. He hadn’t thought anyone was right beside him. Some Slavs were coming through the woods after him--much more quietly than he could--but . . .

He turned his head. A satyr looked back at him, its amber eyes wide and amused, its phallus jutting out almost as far as his sword. Was it the one he’d met when he was out hunting, that day not long before the Slavs and Avars came? He thought so, but couldn’t be sure.

“Come,” the satyr said. “Not stay here long.” He didn’t know whether that meant the creature couldn’t stay so close to Christian Thessalonica for long, or whether it deemed staying so close to so many Slavs unsafe. Either way, George couldn’t argue with it.

The satyr hurried away. Leaves flew up from under its hooves, but it made no noise as it moved. None--as far as George’s ears could tell, it might as well not have been there. He blundered along as he always had, sounding like a herd of cattle being driven to market over a field of kettledrums, or so his racket sounded to himself.

But however appalling the racket he made, the Slavs didn’t seem able to use it to track him. He heard them shouting back behind him. Some of them peeled off to the left of his true track, others to the right. Both groups, by the excitement in their voices, thought they’d seize him at any moment. Meanwhile, he got farther and farther away from them.

Realization blossomed. “You’re doing this!” he said to the satyr.

“Yes. Hush. Not safe yet.” On it went, silent itself and using the noise George made as a ventriloquist uses his voice: throwing it in every direction but that from which it truly came.

Something small and winged peered out at them from the branch of a sapling. It made a piping sound that had words buried in it. They were not Greek words. All at once, both groups of Slavs behind George started moving in the right direction.

Snorting with fear, the satyr grabbed for the fairy. It flitted into the air, those dragonfly wings buzzing. The satyr grabbed again and missed again. “Kill this thing!” it called to George.

“Who, me?” the shoemaker said in surprise. Without much conscious thought, he swung his sword at the fairy. He started to pray to God to help him, but swallowed the words at the last instant: the holy name would surely make the satyr flee. And maybe God was helping him through the satyr, or would be if George let Him.

He felt no resistance when his blade, as much by luck as by design, passed through the fairy’s translucent body. But a tingle ran up his arm, as if lightning had struck close by. Light flared from the swordblade. Where the fairy had been was--nothing.

“Good!” The satyr groped for words. “That thing look, tell …” It ran a hand up and down its erection, as if it kept its brains there. George wouldn’t have been surprised; he knew some men who did.

He gave the satyr the word it wanted: “It was a spy.”

“A spy, yes!” The satyr’s smile stretched across its snub-nosed face. “Not speak much, not need many names for longish time. Now need again. You give.” Before George could answer that, the mercurial creature changed the subject: “You have wine? You give wine, like before?” It was the same satyr, then.

“No, I’m sorry. I have none.” George hadn’t bothered bringing a skin of wine up onto the wall with him. What point, when he’d be going back down again before long and could step into whatever tavern he liked? He hadn’t expected to go beyond the wall, to be trapped outside of Thessalonica, or to need wine to make a thirsty satyr happy.

Its pointed ears drooped. “No wine,” it said, as if summer had gone to winter in the space of two words. It trudged along with slumped shoulders. Now, for the first time, George could faintly hear its hooves moving through the leaves, as if the very aura of magic surrounding it was fading.

He knew how absurd it was to feel guilt at not having done something he couldn’t possibly have known he would need to do. He felt it anyhow. “I am sorry,” he said. “Here, how’s this? When we find a village, I’ll get some for you there.” He didn’t have more than a few folleis in his beltpouch, but they ought to serve. If they didn’t, he would trade work--shoe repairs, for instance--for wine. The thought made him feel better.

It didn’t seem to make the satyr happier. “Not find villages,” the creature said, stroking itself again. “Not for a while, not find.”

“What do you mean?” George said. “The hills around Thessalonica are full of villages. Why--” He paused, trying to work out the direction in which they’d gone. “There should be one over, over--” He started to point, then stopped. He tried again to get his bearings.

Eyes glowing, the satyr looked back at him. It looked amused. “You see now? Not for a while, not find.”

“Yes,” George said slowly. “Where are we, anyway?” He didn’t know if that was the precise question he wanted to ask, but couldn’t find a better one. As he ran through the woods, the ground on which he set his feet and the trees and bushes all around him seemed familiar enough: he would have seen their like had he gone out from Thessalonica to hunt in quieter, more peaceful times.

Their like, yes. But whether he would have seen precisely these stones, those oaks, that set of brambles … with every step he took, he grew more doubtful of that. For the life of him, he could not tell where he was in relation to the city. He couldn’t hear the Slavs coming after him, either. At first, he’d thought that was because he and the satyr had outdistanced them. Now… he didn’t think that was all.

As if picking the thought from his mind, the satyr nodded. “You not in hills you know,” it said. “You beyond hills you know.” It went on quickly, reassuringly: “Can go back. Go back now, be hunted to death. But can go back. Mortals go back, forth many times.” It hesitated then. “Not go back, forth so much now, on account of--” It could not say the name.

Despite its forced muteness, George understood. He was in the fairyland that had been receding from this country ever since men began following Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christian men would reckon they could not cross into that world, that plane, whatever the proper term was, without imperiling their souls. He supposed he was imperiling his soul.

“Who does go back and forth these days?” he asked.

“Men, women follow old ways. Some yet, yes,” the satyr answered. “Up in hills, deep in hills, where … not come yet.” Again, the silence implied the new dispensation. After a moment, the satyr added, “Those others, the ones with wolves and such” --George presumed he meant the powers of the Slavs-- “they live in this kind of hills, too. They share with us a kind of being.”

God--the God George had worshiped all his life-- presumably either shared a kind of being (essence, the shoemaker thought, the word is essence--but what would a satyr know of theological terms, save perhaps for those dealing with fornication and lewdness?) with the powers of the Slavs and Avars or else altogether transcended those powers. George had always believed the latter; now he was less sure.

The farther he went, the stranger things felt. The strangeness did not lie in what he could see or hear or in the way the ground pressed his feet through the soles of his shoes. With every breath he took, though, he felt himself farther from Thessalonica, and that had nothing to do with getting away from the city stink. It suddenly occurred to him that Mt. Olympus lay only thirty or forty miles south and west of the Christian city in which he’d always dwelt.

Did the gods of whom Homer sang still live there? A few weeks before, he would have said no, and laughed at the idea. Now . . . now he wondered. He’d thought before that the epic poems might give those old gods a sort of half-life even in a Christian world.

But when he asked the satyr, it shook its head. “If up there, not come down. Pretty women no get Zeus--get me instead.” It rubbed itself once more, smiled lasciviously, and rocked its hips forward and back. “How they laugh and squeal, pretty women!”

The great god was gone, conquered by God, Who was greater. The homely, earthy satyr remained, still a part, even if a hunted part, of the world George knew. He wondered how the Slavic powers would look after a couple of centuries of struggle against Christianity. Unfortunately, he did not have the luxury of waiting around to find out.

Another little wingety thing peeped out at him from behind a bush, then let out a high-pitched squeak. The satyr waved; its horselike tail came up in greeting. The fairy waved back, then flew off deeper into the woods. “Ours,” the satyr said.

“Yes, I’d worked that out, thanks,” George answered, as surprised by how much he was taking all this for granted as by anything else on a day he would cheerfully have traded for any other three bad days in his life. “Where are we going, exactly?”

“To a place,” the satyr answered, which made George wish to boot it in its hairy hind end. “Near a village,” it amended, perhaps sensing his discontent. “To friends.”

“When we get to this place near a village, what will we do?” George asked, being of the cast of mind to seek answers as far out ahead of possibly needing them as he could.

“Eat,” the satyr said. “Maybe drink wine. Village has wine.” He stared reproachfully at George.

Angry, the shoemaker almost cursed the satyr in the name of God. That would surely have made the creature flee, and as surely would have dropped George back into the mundane woods and lulls around Thessalonica. He had no chance of getting back into the city on his own, not with the Slavs and Avars stall besieging it. Finding a village would be a matter of luck; finding one the invaders hadn’t wrecked would be a matter of much more luck. With autumn sliding rapidly toward winter, finding food and shelter enough in the woods to make it on his own would be more than a matter of luck. It would be a matter of divine intervention.

He kept on following the satyr, then. Surely coming across it in the woods had been a matter of divine intervention. He would have felt easier about that, though, had he had a better notion of which divinity was intervening.

“What’s the name of this village?” he asked after a while.

The satyr shrugged. “The village. One of the villages.” It took a few more steps, then added, “Pretty women.” As far as it was concerned, that counted for more than such merely human things as names.

They came out into a small clearing. A rabbit bounded across it, flup, flup, flup, little black eyes wide with fear. George wished for his bow. If you could get close enough to kill a rabbit with a sword, you could get close enough to kill it with your bare hands. George knew he wasn’t that kind of woodsman.

A rock hissed through the air, almost as fast as if flung by a catapult. It caught the rabbit in midbound. George heard bones shatter. The rabbit let out a shrill, startled cry. It tried to leap again after it thudded to the ground, but its hind legs didn’t want to work. Bleeding, it dragged itself along with its forepaws.

Clattering hooves in the brush at the edge of the clearing made George tighten his grip on his sword and bring up his shield--had the Avars pursued him even here, as the satyr said they might?

But it was not Avars who burst from the screen of bushes. George was glad he had his hand clenched on the swordhilt; that made it harder for him to cross himself, which would have frightened the centaurs away. He watched, fascinated, awed, as they came out into the clearing. The one that had thrown the rock was a roan male; its human torso had thick red hair on the chest, while a red beard grew from its cheeks and chin. George had never imagined a bald centaur, but this one was.

Its companion was smaller, slighter, darker, and so fervently female from the navel up as to make George wish he were part stallion himself. The noise the satyr made reminded him that it was part stallion, even if to a lesser degree than the two centaurs. George wondered whether they had laws against such out-of-kind couplings. If they did, the satyr, by its reaction, cared not a fig for them.

George kept staring as the centaurs cantered across the field to pick up the rabbit, which had stopped moving. Not all the staring had to do with the way the female centaur’s breasts bobbed as it moved, either. Satyrs were rare around Thessalonica, yes. Centaurs were more than rare. He’d thought the swelling power of the Lord had long since driven them from the world of men.

“ ‘Twill be fine, cony in a stew of leeks and turnips,” the male centaur remarked, his voice a bass deeper than any man’s, his Greek so archaic George had to think before he could be sure he understood it.

“Aye, thou hast reason, in good sooth,” the female replied in the same old, old dialect. That dialect was not the only reason her voice startled the shoemaker, for it fell in the same baritone registers as his own. All the same, he couldn’t help wondering whether the Biblical prohibitions against bestiality applied to creatures such as these.

Then he had another curious thought, not too far distant from the first. Along with those splendid, humanlike breasts, the female centaur also had a set of teats at the bottom of its horsy belly. When it had a baby or a foal or whatever the right word was, where did it nurse? George knew what his choice would have been, but he reminded himself he wasn’t a newborn centaur.

“Hunting is so poor these days,” the female said with a sigh.

“Aye, for the newcomers do most savagely chase and slay all the small deer they chance to run across, leaving but their leavings for us who have since time out of mind made these woods our home,” the male said. George supposed it meant the Slavic wolves and other such powers. Had George been a wolf, he wouldn’t have cared to run up against the male centaur, but a partly supernatural wolf might think different.

When he’d seen the Avars so confidently planted on their horses, they’d put him in mind of centaurs. Now, seeing the real thing, he wondered what the Avars would make of them. Would they be jealous? Or would they assume the centaurs were meant to be their slaves, simply because they hadn’t been lucky enough to be born Avars? That fit in with what he’d seen of the fierce nomads from off the distant plains.

The centaurs had their own measure of that lordly arrogance. Only after they’d finished with their own business did they deign to notice the satyr and his human companion. “Who is it that cometh with thee, Ampelus?” the male asked. That thee, unlike the one the female had used with the male, was patronizing, even insulting, not intimate. “A man from the city below, not so?”

“Yes, from the city, the city where they fight the new people, the new things,” the satyr--Ampelus--answered. “The city with saints inside.”

That made both centaurs scowl, reminding them of the marginal life they--and the centaur--led in an ever more Christianized world. The male dipped its shiny head to George. “We welcome you to this fastness to which our. . . acquaintance hath brought you. Know that I am Crotus, and with me you see my wife Nephele.”

George gave his own name, then said, “I didn’t know centaurs still roamed these hills.”

“They are ours,” the female said, drawing itself up with formidable pride. “Not enough saints hath . . . your city” --Nephele could not speak the names of God or Christ any more than the satyr could, and had to talk around them-- “to drive us hence altogether. Nor shall the savage strangers force us to flee, however fierce they be.”

“They very fierce. They very many,” Ampelus said. “How we stop them?” The satyr had fewer words and a far less elegant way of speaking than the centaurs, but seemed to George to have a better grasp on the way the world outside this backwoods retreat worked.

Crotus said, “Thou, satyr, art less afflicted than we by the powers we do not name, and so hast wider compass of vision”--the very thought that had just gone through George’s mind. “But if one deem a difficulty impossible of solution, unsolved it shall surely be forevermore. Nor dost thou reckon our case hopeless, I warrant, else thou hadst not brought here this mortal, this George.”

Ampelus shrugged. The satyr’s erection jounced up and down. Nephele’s reaction might have been amusement or disgust; George had no practice reading the sounds centaurs made. After a moment, Ampelus said, “He give me wine once. I save him, hoping he maybe give me wine again. But he has no wine this time.” As nothing else had done, that made its phallus droop for a moment.

“As well that he have none!” Nephele exclaimed. “Wine for you satyrs is as it is for men: a little foolishness, a little sleep, a little headache, and then all in readiness to be done over again. Not so for us, whom the slightest taste of the blood of the grape inflameth to madness.”

“Wine is sweet,” Ampelus protested. “Wine is good.”

“Aye--for thee,” Crotus said. “When the scent of the fermenting vintage wafteth from the villages wherein the men trample the grapes …” A look of terrible longing filled the centaurs face. “I needs must hie me off deep into the woods then, lest instead I rush forward to guzzle and . . .” It fell silent again. The day was chilly. Sudden sweat sprang out on its forehead even so.

“Will someone please take me to one of these villages?” George asked. “Maybe I can find a way to get back into Thessalonica. If I can get down to the seaside, if I can find a boat. . .” He didn’t think any of that was likely to happen, but it was the best his imagination had been able to do.

Satyr and centaurs ignored the request. In that disconcerting baritone, Nephele asked, “How is it, George of Thessalonica, you have no fear of our kind, and neither seek you to compel us to flee your presence with signs against which we may not stand?”

“Why would I do that?” George asked in return. If the female centaur thought he wasn’t afraid, that only proved the pagan powers were a long way from omniscient. Hoping Nephele wouldn’t notice he was responding to only half the question, he went on, “Ampelus saved my life. He didn’t have to do that. I owe him a debt.”

“Wine!” the centaur cried. “Jars and jars and jars of wine!”

“We stand in need of a better bargain than that,” Crotus said stiffly.

“Is no such thing,” Ampelus said, but then corrected itself: “Is maybe one, but cannot bring jars and jars and jars of pretty women.”

Nephele set hands on . . . no, not on its hips, but the place where the narrowness of that human waist swelled out to meet the equine body that carried it. “Enough of japes and jests and fribbles,” the female centaur declared, giving the satyr a severe look that altogether failed to dismay it. When Nephele went on, it was to George: “So many of your fellows would raise against us that which we cannot face or deny our existence altogether.”

“Aye.” Bitterness edged Crotus’ voice. “And should the denial become universal, it becometh also sober truth: another reason for our clinging to the peaks and other lands wherein our being is more certain.”

George had never wondered what the growth of Christianity looked like from the viewpoint of creatures pushed to the wall by the new faith. Along with other such abstract questions, though, that one would have to wait. He found a question anything but abstract: “If you have these weaknesses, how do you propose to come down and fight the powers of the Slavs and Avars?”

“We need help.” Nephele spoke unhappily, but without hesitation. “Thus your coming is welcome, even if Ampelus aided it for reasons of his own rather than to promote the general welfare.”

“I do what I do,” Ampelus said. “I like to do what I do.” The satyr rocked his hips forward and back again, aiming that enormous phallus at Nephele. The female centaur ignored it. George wondered whether that sprang from remarkable aplomb or standards of comparison different from those he was used to using.

“What is your craft, mortal?” Crotus asked. “Are you by any chance a priest of. . . ?” Again, the male used a pause to do what it could not.

That almost made George laugh. “No,” he answered. “I’m only a shoemaker.” That sounded as ordinary as any trade possibly could, till he realized none of the beings with whom he was talking had any need for what he did. He shook his head like a man caught between dream and reality; the difference of his new companion’s feet brought home to him that dream was reality here.

“ ‘Tis too much to be hoped for that any priest should find our kind fit for aught but exorcisms,” Nephele said. “So many woods and streams and paths barred to us on account of words from that book.” It glared at George as if that were his fault.

In a way, he supposed it was. He was a Christian man. His belief gave the priests some part of their power, just as lack of belief threatened to doom centaurs and satyrs and other failing creatures of pagan days. But-- He brightened. “I think I know a priest who would come here,” he said.

He wondered what sort of penance Bishop Eusebius would set Father Luke for associating with these beings. He did not wonder whether Father Luke would associate with them if it meant saving Thessalonica. He was sure the priest would come. Which left the next question: how to get him to come?

“Of necessity, ‘twill be you delivering word he is wanted,” Crotus said. “Saints hem Nephele and me and the rest of our land so close, it were the end for any of us to venture forth from these hills, as hath been previously intimated to you. Being of ruder substance, Ampelus and his fellows may fare farther abroad more readily, but cannot think to enter into the city where so many are of your opinion.”

“Mm.” George rubbed his chin. “Since it’s surrounded by the Slavs and Avars, I can’t think about entering it, either. Can you help me come close enough--maybe through the hills my land don’t usually travel anymore-- to give me some chance of getting in?”

“It may be so,” the male centaur answered. “I cannot speak with certainty, not here, not yet. But the thing must be essayed, lest all fail.”

“New things in woods, things in those hills,” Ampelus added fearfully. “Things with wings, to spy and see. Things with teeth and claws, to bite and kill.”

“You can speak of them, can’t you?” George asked. The satyr and the two centaurs nodded. Watching Nephele nod was worth the candle, even if the female’s voice was as deep as his. Refusing to let himself be distracted, he went on, “I’m surprised you don’t want to see those powers win at Thessalonica. They’re more your kind than . . .” Now he used silence to indicate God, Whom he would not name here.

“Not so,” Crotus said, “for their people lack all knowledge of and belief in our kind. Did they win, did they defeat even that which hath reduced us to our present estate, they would on the instant then proceed to hunt us to extinction: not a slow fading but a quick and bitter end.”

“He hath courage, to speak on what reboundeth not to his advantage,” Nephele said, tempering the compliment a moment later by adding, “Courage, or a signal want of good sense.”

“How soon can you try to get me back into the city?” George asked. “My family--” He broke off, thinking of his family for the first time since Menas slammed the postern gate in his face. As far as they knew, he was probably dead. He hoped someone had seen him escape into the woods, but even if someone had, so what? The most reasonable guess was that the Slavs would have hunted him down regardless. Had he been up on the wall watching someone else run, that was what he would have believed.

Crotus and Nephele looked toward Ampelus, who could approach Thessalonica more closely than they. The satyr nervously masturbated itself. “Not be easy,” it said, its rusty voice worried. “People round the city, things in the woods--”

George looked at the sky. The sun would soon be down, hurrying toward the southwestern horizon on this cold near-winter day. “Would it be easier” --by which he meant safer-- “to travel at night?”

“No!” Ampelus spoke with great certainly, and kneaded its own tumescent flesh to emphasize the point. “Things worser at night. Eyes glow, they see like owls, they . . . No.”

Realizing the hour made George also realize how worn and hungry he was. “Will you take me to that village, then?” he asked. “That should be safe.”

“I doubt we should reach it ere the sun’s chariot leaveth the sky,” Crotus said. “Are you fain to pass the night with us, George who feareth not that which dwelt in this land long ago and abideth here yet?” Unlike Ampelus, the male centaur plainly did not want to go anywhere near where men dwelt. Fear of wine, George thought, and then, or is it lust for wine?

“Yes, of course. Thank you.” The shoemaker bowed to the centaur. He did his best to tell himself getting back among men, even backwoods pagans who probably didn’t know the Emperor’s name, was better than passing his time with creatures whom Bishop Eusebius and almost all his fellow Christians back in Thessalonica reckoned fit only for exorcism. That was the right thing, the proper thing, to think. He couldn’t make himself believe it. His curiosity was itching too fiercely. How many modern men got a chance like this? For that matter, how many men in ancient days had got a chance like this?

Crotus and Nephele went ahead at a pace he could not match. Ampelus led him through the woods to what might easily have been a hunters’ encampment. It was almost disappointingly prosaic: several neat lean-tos (some of them outsized, to accommodate centaurs), with a fire in the middle, a large pot bubbling over it.

Little by little, strangenesses surfaced. The knife Nephele used to cut up the rabbit and add it to the stew was bronze, with a bone handle. The pot into which the female threw the pieces of meat had a delicate perfection of shape potters these days didn’t even attempt, and was ornamented with capering satyrs in black on a red background. George didn’t know how old that made it-- Leo might have--but knew it was very old indeed.

Ampelus walked over to the pot. Nephele gave the satyr a look that warned it not to steal any stew. But that wasn’t what it had had in mind. It pointed to one of the satyrs the potter had painted, then to its own chest. “Me,” he said proudly.

For a moment, George thought that only an idle boast.

Then he took a closer, more careful look. The potter had labeled each dancing satyr. Beside the one at which Georges guide had pointed were Greek letters: AMTIE?O?. The shoemaker stared at the ancient portrait. It was a good likeness.

Another satyr came into the encampment, carrying a couple of squirrels by the tail. “Ha, Stusippus!” Ampelus said. “Here is George, this man I tell you I meet yesterday.”

It hadn’t been yesterday. It had been months before. George started to say as much, then abruptly closed his mouth. Here was a creature with a picture from at least as many centuries before the Incarnation as had passed since. No wonder the recent past blurred together for it.

“Friendly man--I remember,” Stusippus said. The new satyr’s features were less manlike than Ampelus’, its erection even larger. “Man with wine.”

“I have no wine today,” George said, and Stusippus’ phallus drooped for a moment, as Ampelus’ had done at the same sad news.

“Give thou me thy meat there,” Nephele said. Stusippus handed the female the squirrels without making the bawdy comment George had expected. Nephele still had that knife in hand.

More centaurs drifted into the camp. A couple of females--Lampra and Xanthippe, their names were-- brought in baskets of roots, while Lampra’s mate (husband? George didn’t know), Elatus, had a dead pig tied onto its back with vines. More fires were started. More delicious smells rose into the evening air.

With Xanthippe frolicked something George had never imagined, a baby centaur. Again, he wondered whether to think of it as a foal or a child. He watched, fascinated. “What’s it called?” he asked the young one’s mother, whose light roan coat and golden human hair and horse’s tail might have given it the name Xanthippe.

“Demetrius,” the female centaur answered. Its voice was deep as Nephele’s.

George’s jaw dropped. “After the saint?” he said. Could the pagan creatures have been trying to gain the protection of God, Whose name they could not say?

But they knew deities of their own. “After the great mother goddess,” Xanthippe said severely.

“Oh.” George was relieved and disappointed at the same time. “How old is it?” he asked, wondering if centaurs grew according to the pattern of horses or men.

Xanthippe shrugged. Time meant no more to centaurs than it did to satyrs. “I don’t know.” Its voice was--not indifferent, but uninterested. “A few hundred years.”

“Oh,” George said again, and said no more. Would Demetrius be ranging these hills a thousand years from now? If the Slavs and Avars weren’t driven away, the youngster wouldn’t be. Otherwise . . George tried not to think of the thirty or forty years that were the most he could expect to remain on this earth. But his soul would exist forever. Did Demetrius have a soul? One more thing George did not know and never would.

He missed bread with his supper, and he was used to drinking wine, not the clear, cold water bubbling up from a spring near the fire. Other than that, the meal was as good as any he’d ever eaten, with hunger a relish sharper than garlic.

After everyone had eaten, Xanthippe chanted Pindar’s Second Pythian Ode, to Hiero of Syracuse. George did not understand why it had chosen that particular piece till he realized it spoke of the creation of its race. Crotus and Nephele, little Demetrius, and Elatus all got up and danced to the song that had been written ages before George’s great-great-grandmother was born. But anyone of them, save perhaps Demetrius, might have seen Pindar. The shoemaker’s shiver had nothing to do with the cold.

The centaurs and satyrs had drifted fallen leaves in their shelters to serve as beds. Ampelus and Stusippus invited George in with them. The three of them crowded their lean-to, and the satyrs’ phalluses kept prodding at him as he burrowed into the leaves. The pagan Greeks, he remembered uneasily, had found unnatural vice neither unnatural nor a vice, and so their powers would not, either. But the satyrs did not seek to molest him. He was glad he’d had no wine for them.

Shortly thereafter, he was glad to be in bed with the satyrs, a gladness that had nothing to do with carnality. Without them, he would have shivered the whole night through. With them, despite their phalluses and other minor annoyances such as their hooves kicking him in the shins, he was warm enough. He burrowed into the leaves and slept.

“What a strange dream,” George said the next morning. He rolled over to tell it to Irene. Leaves rustling under him made him open his eyes. He was looking into Ampelus’ face.

“Morning,” the satyr said: more an announcement than a greeting.

“Good day,” George said, wondering if it would be. He got to his feet and started brushing leaves off his tunic and out of his hair. If the satyrs and centaurs slept like this, he wondered why they weren’t perpetually covered with bits of their mattresses.

He discovered the answer to that moments later. Ampelus and Stusippus had a bone comb. The first thing they did after getting out of their bed was to take turns combing each other free of dried leaves. George knew a couple of brushmakers down in Thessalonica. If they brought their wares up into the hills, they might do a good business.

Since he had less hair to fret over than any of his companions, and since he also had no one to groom him, he decided to make himself useful by stirring up the fire. His breath smoked as he built the blaze up again; the heat from the new flames was welcome.

“For this we thank you,” Crotus said, coming up behind him. Where George had been warming his hands in front of the fire, the male centaur bent forward so it could beat the bare crown of its head. Brushmaker. . . Hatmaker. George added to his mental list of artisans who might be useful here among these creatures of an outworn creed.

What did creatures of an outworn creed do about breakfast? At home, George was ready to face the day after bread with olive oil and a cup of wine. His chances of getting any of those things here in this sylvan encampment didn’t look good.

What he got were sun-dried apples and apricots, washed down with more water from that stream. It was cold enough to make his teeth ache, but almost as sweet as the fruit the centaurs gave him.

Once he’d eaten and drunk, he asked, “Shall we go on to one of those villages now?”

“If you be so eager to return to your own kind, we can do’t for you,” Crotus said, “however wary of villages we may be on account of the temptations of the vintage brewed therein. But if you would liefer bring us this holy man of whom you spoke not long ago, were it not wiser to seek to return to the town whence you came?”

“If you think you can get me back inside Thessalonica in spite of the Slavs and Avars all around, I’m game, but I don’t see how you’ll do it, especially since you can’t come close to the city yourselves.”

Crotus frowned. In a way, George knew a certain amount of intellectual pride at having perplexed the supernatural being. In another way, he wished the centaur had had an easy answer waiting. Crotus said, “We shall do all in our power to aid you, the more so as the holy man seemeth to be of the sort the situation requireth. That there may be risk in this course, both from the new-come powers and from the one against which we cannot stand--this we understand. We weigh here dangers one against another. In no direction standeth none.”

“I think you’re right about that,” George said slowly. He thought for a little while himself, then said, “All right, if you think you can get me down to Thessalonica and into the city, we’d better try it. And the sooner, the better.”

“There I deem you have bitten through the meat straight to the bone,” the male centaur said. “My land is but rarely inclined to take quick action, the passage of time being of small import to us. Thus it was that. . what you follow established itself in our land, we feeling no urgency toward expelling … it till too late. And now we are all but banished ourselves. May we prove wise enough to learn from one error and not commit a second of like sort.”

“People don’t often learn from their mistakes,” George said. If these immortal creatures did, they deserved to be reckoned demigods.

“Nor satyrs, either, they being prisoners to their lusts,” Crotus answered. “We dare hope ourselves the wiser. We are no longer wine-bibbers, having learnt from sore experience how such enrageth us.”

They could have stood around for the next several days, talking about the ramifications of moving and not moving. George realized Crotus would talk about ramifications for the next several days, and not notice the flowing time. Harshly, the shoemaker said, “Let’s get moving, then, if we’re ever going to.”

“I cry huzzah for mortal celerity,” Crotus said. “On to Thessalonica!” It went back to the lean-to it shared with Nephele and talked with its mate for a while, then with the rest of the centaurs, and at last with the satyrs, who seemed to require less in the way of instruction and debate than its own kind. However much it tried to hurry, more than an hour went by before George, all the centaurs (even little Demetrius), and the satyrs started down from the hills toward the city.

In purely physical terms, going down was easier than coming up had been. But purely physical terms were far from the only ones that mattered. For one thing, George was not entirely certain he remained in the hills he knew. For another, after a while he began to feel as if every step he took required a distinct effort of will. When he remarked on that, Nephele tossed its head and replied in that disconcerting baritone:” “ ‘Tis but a cantrip of the barbarians circling round the city, and hardly one of potency overwhelming.” Its sniff declared the Slavs and Avars should have done better.

The spell’s potency might not have been overwhelming to the female centaur, but it was of different substance from George, who found the going ever harder. And then, suddenly, he had no trouble at all setting one foot in front of the other, and went along as ready as he might have done on the street outside his shop in the city. “That’s better,” he said.

Only when the words were out of his mouth did he notice that his companions had stopped, as if they’d walked into Thessalonica’s wall. After a moment, Ampelus and Stusippus gathered themselves and came toward him. The centaurs needed longer than the satyrs, and advanced as if pushing their way through glue, not air.

“What’s wrong?” George asked. “Did that cursed Avar priest make the spell stronger? He’s not to be taken lightly, that one.”

“The barbarian?” Crotus had to fight to get the words out one by one. “Nay, that was naught of his doing. Meseems you are prayed for inside the city toward which we fare.”

George thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand Of course he was prayed for back in Thessalonica. His wife and children would be in St. Elias’ now--if they weren’t in St. Demetrius’. His friends would be in one church or another, too, if they weren’t up on the wall.

And their prayers had succeeded in weakening the spells the Slavs and Avars had been using to keep him from approaching Thessalonica. The only trouble with that was, the prayers also seemed to have weakened the supernatural beings aiding him. That wasn’t good. He had doubts about being able to get down from the lulls with the centaurs and satyrs helping him. Without them, he had no doubts: he wouldn’t make it.

He saw how vulnerable they were to the power of God. As a Christian, that made him proud. As someone trying to save his own neck, it worried him. If he was going to keep on being proud, he hoped he’d soon be able to start worrying less.

“The weakness passeth,” Xanthippe said after a bit, tossing its head in an impatient gesture a horse without human excrescences might have made. “The petition, methinks, was not aimed straight against us, else the hurt had been greater.”

Gaining strength with her, the other centaurs also came on. Down the game tracks they went with the satyrs and George. He was thoughtful and quiet. The prayer had surely been aimed at the Slavs and Avars. It had weakened their spell, to be sure, but he doubted it had done them the harm it had his companions. That meant those companions were weaker than the powers of the Slavs and Avars. He’d known as much, but didn’t care to be reminded of it.

Little by little, the shock of God’s power wore away. The satyrs took to playing with themselves again. That amused Demetrius, the immature centaur, who, having seen such things for only a few centuries, still found them funny. George didn’t laugh. He took the masturbation as a sign the satyrs remained alarmed, even if at the Slavs and Avars, not at the Lord.

Smiling like a good dog, the first wolf stepped out from between two trees half a bowshot in front of George. It was, obviously, no ordinary wolf. It was bigger than a wolf had any business being, its teeth were longer and sharper, its very stance fiercer and more alert than an ordinary wolfs could have been.

Ampelus, who had been walking alongside of George, sprang nimbly back with a gasp of fright. The shoemaker gasped, too, and made the sign of the cross. He’d already done it before he remembered the company he was keeping. But the satyr had said he’d watched a Christian priest make the holy sign when confronted by a Slavic wolf-demon. It hadn’t been aimed at Ampelus, and so had had no effect on him.

Nor did the satyrs and centaurs flee George now. But the sign of the cross, though it made the wolf draw back a pace and turned that doglike smile into a snarl, did not rout it. George remembered that the wolf the priest had met had killed him in short order. He yanked out his sword. This wolf would not have such an easy time. He had more defenses than the spiritual alone.

The wolf snarled again, as if angry at itself for yielding even slightly to the strength of the Christian sign. Then it sprang for him. He raised his shield. If the wolf knocks me down, he thought, I have to keep the shield between those teeth and my throat. Maybe I’ll be able to stab it before it bites too many chunks out of me.

From behind him, a rock flew through the air and caught the wolf-demon on the tip of its nose. Its agonized yelp was sweet music in George s ears. It skidded to a stop and stared past him to the centaurs, as if it had never imagined they would do such a thing to it.

Another stone hit it, this one in the chest. It staggered, threw back its head, and loosed one of those horrifying howls George had heard corning out of the forest from the walls of Thessalonica.

The shoemaker crossed himself again. Growling deep in its throat, the wolf retreated a few paces. Perhaps because it was hurt, the sign of the cross had more power over it than had been true a moment before. It howled again, this time more in pain than to cause fear among its foes. George took a step toward it, and it drew back once more.

“Move aside, that we may pelt the creature according to its deserts,” Crotus called.

“I don’t care about its pelt,” George heard himself answer: his mouth ran wild and free, disconnected from such wits as he had. “Besides, this is my fight, too.” He advanced on the wolf, which backed away from him.

But now other howls rose in answer to those the creature had loosed. Other wolves came out of the woods to stand with the first, and still others made leaves rustle in the forest to either side of the path. Such creatures could surely have traveled silent as a thought, had they so chosen. But they must have wanted George and his companions to know they were there, so as to put them in fear. George stared now this way, now that. He and the satyrs and centaurs were outflanked.

“We have to go back!” George shouted.

Ampelus and Stusippus scampered away toward the encampment from which they’d set out that morning. All the centaurs, though, stared at George with blank incomprehension. That look told him more clearly than anything else could have why even the pagans of ancient Greece, without the power of God behind them, had been able to drive the powerful creatures deep into the hill country: the very notion of retreat seemed alien to them, however necessary it might be.

Only when wolves burst out at them from left and right at the same time did the centaurs suddenly seem to catch on to what George had meant. He hoped that wasn’t so late, it would get them all lolled--and him with them.

A wolf sprang at Xanthippe’s flank. The female centaur whirled, startlingly quick, and kicked out with its hind legs. The hooves slammed into the wolf s snout. It rolled away, yowling in pain. Blood spurting from its wounds. Any natural creature, any creature of flesh and blood, would have had its head caved in.

Demetrius let out a sound half-scream, half-whinny, as a wolf raked the young--but not so young--centaur’s side with its teeth. The wolf rammed the centaur, overbore it, and came darting back to tear out its throat.

Shouting, George ran to the--colt’s?--aid. The first swipe of his sword lopped off a couple of digits’ worth of the wolf s tail. That got its attention. It whirled away from Demetrius and toward George. The end with the teeth looked much more dangerous than the end with the tail.

The wolf-demon leaped straight for his face. He got his shield up--Rufus would have been proud of him--and cut at the creature. He felt his blade bite into its side, but it didn’t seem to mind in the least. It hit him like a boulder. Try as he would to keep his feet, he went over backwards.

He did all the things he’d reminded himself to do when the first wolf-demon had been about to attack him. He kept his shield up; the wolf s fangs scraped on the leather facing. He kept slashing with his sword. None of that would have mattered very long. The wolf was immensely stronger than he, and his sword seemed unable to do it much harm.

But then, just as it was scrabbling with paws unnaturally clever to pull down the shield so its teeth could do their deadly work, thud! thud!--two stones struck it blows hard enough to make it roll off him and away. If those stones hadn’t broken ribs, the wolf owned none.

George scrambled to his feet. Elatus grabbed the wolf with human arms and hands, lifted it off the ground in an amazing display of strength, and then threw it down, hard. The male centaur trampled the wolf-demon with both pairs of equine hooves.

The wolf howled and twisted and then clamped its jaws on Elatus’ left hindmost leg. The centaur cried out in anguish as George rushed to its aid. He stabbed the wolf-demon in the belly with his sword. It screamed; supernatural or not, it was sorely hurt. Its blood smelled hot and metallic and almost spicy: an odor much stronger and more distinctive than that of the blood of ordinary living things.

Elatus was bleeding, too. That did not keep the centaur from flailing away with its three good horse’s legs at the wolf-demon, which finally broke away and fled, not just from the male centaur but from the right as a whole.

“We can’t go forward,” George said. “There are still too many of them. We have to go back.”

“A truth may be bitter but a truth naytheless,” Elatus said. The male dipped its shaggy head to George. “And I own myself in your debt, mortal. That was bravely done.” It twisted so it could look at its wounded leg. Scabs were already forming over the bites. In a day or two, George supposed, Elatus would be altogether healed. And, in a day or two, the wolf-demon the shoemaker had stabbed would probably be well again, too. He sighed. Had he been a proper hero out of myth, he would have slain it.

Elatus shouted: a great sound without words George could discern, but one that must have had meaning to the other centaurs. They began to retreat down the path Ampelus and Stusippus had taken. George went with them. The wolves made as if to pursue, but gave up when the centaurs, having opened a little distance from them, bombarded them with showers of stones.

None of the centaurs had escaped without wounds, but all of them were well on the way toward healing by the time they got back to the encampment from which they’d set out. George counted himself lucky to have got away with nothing worse than cuts and scrapes and bruises; no sharp teeth had pierced his tender flesh. He ached and stung as things were. Being in the company of the supernatural beings did not make him so close to immune to hurt as they were.

“Manifest it is,” Crotus said, scratching what had been a bite and was now a rough red scar, “that these folk and their powers desire not your return to the city whenee you were abstracted.”

“I didn’t want to be abstracted from it,” George said. When he thought of Menas, his hands bunched into fists. “I didn’t get what I wanted. I don’t see any reason the Slavs and Avars should get what they want.”

“One reason doth suggest itself,” Nephele observed: “namely and to wit, that they have the power to enforce that which they desire.”

Ampelus came up to George. All the centaurs glared at the satyr, who had been of such little use in the fight against the wolf-demons. Sensitive to that scorn, Ampelus spoke with something like embarrassment: “Not good to go in day. Maybe good to go in night.”

George clapped a hand to his forehead. “When I wanted to do that, everyone said it would be worse than trying it in the daytime.”

“What can be worse than that?” the satyr asked reasonably. “Try in day, not go. Try in night, likely not go, but maybe go.”

George could see one way in which things might be worse. He’d come out of this try alive, even if unsuccessful. If things went wrong again .. .

He wondered what was happening back at Thessalonica. The sally from inside the city had driven back the Slavs undermining the walls beneath the shelter of their tortoises, but had the barbarians attacked again? Had the Avar priest or wizard found yet another set of demigods to hurl against the protective power that came from St. Demetrius and from God?

And on those questions depended the answer to the truly important one: how were Irene and Theodore and Sophia?

“We’d better try and get back, any way we possibly can,” George said. “If it can’t be by day, it will have to be by night.” The children of Israel had traveled by night as well as by day, he reminded himself, with a pillar of fire to light their way as they went.

He did not expect God to give him a pillar of fire. Thinking of the children of Israel made him think of Benjamin the Jew, and thinking of Benjamin made him think of Dactylius and Rufus and John and drunken Sabbatius and Claudia and Paul and the rest of his friends back in Thessalonica. He also thought again of Menas back in Thessalonica. As they had before, his hands formed fists. Without Menas, he wouldn’t have been in this predicament. Rich though Menas was, noble though Menas was, George resolved he would have his revenge. One more reason to go back, he thought.

Daylight hours were short at this season of the year. Time seemed to crawl by anyhow. The satyrs went out hunting, and came back with rabbits and roots and herbs. They presented these to the centaurs as what George took to be a peace-offering. Nephele looked as if she wanted to fling the food in Stusippus’ face. But if the female did that, everyone would go hungry. Into the pot everything went.

George had seen the day before that centaurs had appetites in keeping with their size. He got only a few mouthfuls of stew, and a bit more dried fruit to go with it. After two days straight of fighting for his life, that didn’t feel like enough. His stomach made noises that might have come from the throat of a Slavic wolf-demon.

When darkness finally came, the shoemaker shivered. Part of that, he was not ashamed to admit to himself, was fear. Part, too, was cold. His teeth had chattered up on the wall when he’d drawn night duty. Being out in the woods was worse. He would have welcomed the company of a couple of rampantly erect satyrs in a bed of leaves--they would have helped keep him warm.

Instead, having bolted his meager meal, he slipped out of the encampment with Ampelus. None of the centaurs accompanied them. “For,” Crotus said as they were leaving, “strength having faded, stealth needs must serve. There the lustful ones surpass us, they being every inclined to sneak up on mortal women and so debauch themselves.” The male’s lip curled in scorn. “Mayhap their skulking habits shall this once prove of advantage to us.”

“Huh,” Ampelus said. “He not so smart as he think he is. One of these days, I climb up on rock back of Nephele, show that mare what loving can be.” The satyr’s hips twitched in lewd anticipation. George noted, however, that for all of Ampelus’ bravado, it made sure it was well out of earshot of the encampment before making a boast like that.

They walked quietly through the woods, down toward Thessalonica. All George heard were their footfalls, scuffing through fallen leaves. Or rather, all he heard were his own footfalls scuffing through fallen leaves.

Ampelus paced along beside him, silent as a shadow. No insects chirped: too late in the year. No nightjars called, no owls hooted.

Bare-branched trees raised their boughs to the sky, as if surrendering to robbers. Those boughs passed black in front of the nearly full moon that poured pale radiance over the hillside. Normally, George would have been delighted to have all the light he could if he was crazy enough to go through the forest at night. Now--. Now he said, “Won’t the moon make it easier for the wolves and whatever else is out there to find us?”

“Easier, yes.” The satyr played with itself for a little while, as it did whenever it was worried. “But they not need much light to see. Maybe they not need to see at all. Maybe they. . . know.”

“What will you do if they know?” George pronounced the word as portentously as Ampelus had done. “Run away again?”

“This” --the satyr gripped its swollen phallus with both hands-- “this is no sword. Can’t kick like donkey, like stupid centaurs do. Can maybe throw rocks. Maybe. What good in fight, I? Made to be lover” --that hip-rocking motion again-- “not fighter.”

“Well, even so--” George began, admitting to himself if not to the satyr that it had a point.

Ampelus cut him off. “Shut up, mortal George, or see how mortal you be. Not get through by fighting anyhow. Get through by sneaking. Sneaking, you be quiet.”

The satyr had another point there, even if it had been doing more talking than George. The shoemaker trudged along. Most of the time, he and Ampelus headed downhill toward their goal, pushing through the spell of resistance the Slavs and Avars had established against such ventures. Every so often, they climbed rises lying athwart their path, Ampelus judging that quicker than walking around. From one of those bits of higher ground, George caught a glimpse of Thessalonica, lamps and torches bravely burning inside the wall. The city hadn’t fallen, then. Relief made him feel as if he’d walked fewer miles on more food than was really so.

That remained true despite his also having seen the campfires of the Slavs and Avars around the besieged city. He hadn’t expected the barbarians to have cleared out since he was locked away from Thessalonica. As long as they were outside the wall, not within it, something might yet be done.

Ampelus suddenly grabbed George’s arm and pulled him to one side, ever so carefully skirting what looked to the shoemaker like a stretch of ground no different from any other. “What’s wrong?” George whispered. “Did you see a wolf?”

“Worse,” the satyr answered with a fearful shudder. “Saint do something holy there, who knows when? Ground hurt to go on.”

“St. Demetrius?” George asked.

Ampelus turned to stare at him. The satyr’s eyes flashed. The light, George thought, was their own, not reflected moonlight. “Who cares St. Who?” the creature burst out. “Is saint. Is holyfied ground. Is hurt. We go different way.”

“If we did go through the hallowed ground,” George said thoughtfully, “we would be doing something the Slavs and Avars and their powers don’t expect. It might gain us an edge.”

“I do not go through holyfied ground,” Ampelus insisted. “Hurt me too much. And like I tell you, I watch wolf eat one of your priests. Wolf not care about ground like I do.”

That was true. It was also depressing. And standing around in the woods arguing did not strike George as a good idea. Standing around in the woods for any reason did not strike George as a good idea. Being in the woods did not strike him as a good idea. But when all the other ideas looked worse … All the other ideas’ looking worse did not make this a good one. Of that the shoemaker was convinced.

He and the satyr pressed on toward Thessalonica. How they were going to get through the encirclement the Slavs and Avars had round the city bulked larger and larger in his mind. He had, at the moment, no idea. He decided to worry about it when the time came. He had plenty of other things to worry about till the time came.

An old man stepped out into the path ahead of George and Ampelus. His long beard and bushy eyebrows were green, and glowed brighter than Ampelus’ eyes had flashed. “Well,” George said, “it’s a good bet he’s not a wandering peasant, isn’t it?” He drew his sword.

“I am Vucji Pastir,” the old man said, his voice sounding in George’s mind rather than his ears: “the shepherd of the wolves.” His eyes, which shone almost as brightly as his beard and eyebrows, seemed ready to pop from his head. Though he stood in the moonlight, he cast no shadow.

“I am a good Christian man,” George said. “Begone, evil spirit!” He made the sign of the cross.

That had pained the wolf-demon at the start of the daylight fight, even if it hadn’t routed the creature. Vucji Pastir smiled. When he did, he showed his teeth, which were as sharp and pointed as any wolf s. The holy sign did him no harm. He raised his right hand. Off in the distance, howling rose. “My sheep, they come for you,” he said.

George was not inclined to wait for them. He rushed at the shepherd of the wolves, slashing as he came. His blade shortened the Slavic demigod’s beard by several inches. The severed hairs glowed as brightly as they had while still attached to their master.

Vucji Pastir bellowed in surprise and anger and--fear? He vanished, leaving behind the results of George’s impromptu barbering. “Bravely did!” Ampelus cried. “Now we can get away.”

“No,” George said. “Now we can go on.” He snatched up the tuft of shining green hairs. “And now we have a holy relic--no, an unholy relic, I suppose--of our own. If that ugly thing is the shepherd of the wolves, they should pay attention to his beard.”

“Yes--when they eat you, they not eat the beard,” the satyr said gloomily. But it went on with George instead of turning back as it plainly would rather have done.

They had not gone far before a wolf-demon snarled at them. Instead of slashing at it with his sword, George thrust the fragment of Vucji Pastir s beard in its face. It let out a startled yip, then a doglike yelp of greeting. Having the bit of beard in his possession made George a shepherd of wolves in his own right.

“See, I told you so,” he said to Ampelus--a privilege he would not have taken with Irene. But--God be praised!--he wasn’t married to the satyr. The wolf-demon rolled onto its belly, then placed itself at George’s left heel, exactly as a well-trained dog would have done if it was going for a walk. In the moonlight, the shoemaker grinned at Ampelus. “Come on--we’ve got our own escort.”

Warily, the satyr moved closer to the wolf. The wolf accepted Ampelus as a friend of George’s. “Strange business,” the satyr said, and stroked itself for reassurance.

They had not gone far before another fierce wolf-demon tried to bar their way. Before George could thrust his fluffy talisman at it, the first wolf, the one he’d tamed with Vucji Pastir’s whiskers, snarled--but at the newcomer, not at him. The second wolf-demon whined appeasingly and fell into place beside the one that had warned it.

“Maybe I’ll have the whole pack of them by the time we get to Thessalonica,” George said gaily. Ampelus didn’t answer, but he didn’t run away or masturbate, either, which meant he was happy enough.

And then, without warning, Vucji Pastir reappeared right beside George. The wolves stared at the Slavic demigod and the shoemaker, as if realizing they might have made a mistake. Vucji Pastir snatched back the bit of beard George had trimmed from him. He set it against the rest of his green whiskers; it grew fast to them almost at once. “Mine,” he said, and disappeared again.

George thought he was a dead man. By the way Ampelus moaned, the satyr expected the wolves to tear them to pieces in the next instant, too. But they didn’t. Some small part of Vucji Pastir’s glamour still clung to George. The wolves, however, did whine and growl when he tried to go forward. When he turned around and started uphill, the way he had come, they were silent.

“I think,” he said carefully, “we’d better head back.”

“See?” Ampelus said. “I told you so.”

“You’ll make someone a fine wife one day,” George snapped. The satyr laughed at him. He looked over his shoulder. The wolves were not tagging along at his heels, as they had before. That made him more glad than otherwise: sooner or later, they were going to figure out that he’d duped them. He didn’t want them anywhere near his heels then.

As things happened, he’d put most of a mile between himself and the wolves before a furious howling broke out at his back. They didn’t catch up with him and Ampelus before the two of them had returned to the encampment from which they’d set out. Nor did they prove willing to attack the centaurs there. After more hideous howls, they went away.

“I can’t go to Thessalonica in the daytime,” George muttered, “and I can’t go at night, either. What does that leave?” He didn’t think it left anything, but there had to be a way into the city. No--he wanted a way into the city. There was, unfortunately, all too often a difference between what he wanted and what there was.