Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

  Thessalonica

  Harry Turtledove

  Copyright © 1997 by Harry Turtledove

  I

  George was hunting rabbits in the hills not far from Thessalonica when he spied the satyr. His first thought, when its brown eyes peered out of the ugly, snub-nosed face and met his, was to make the sign of the cross and frighten it away.

  He didn’t act on his first thought. He was the kind of man who commonly thought three times before he did anything. His build matched his character: he was stocky and strong, thick through the shoulders, by no means someone who moved quickly, but hard to stop once he did get moving.

  Instead of crossing himself, he raised his right hand and rubbed his chin. Whiskers rasped under his fingers. He should have shaved yesterday, or maybe the day before. He thought about growing a beard. They were coming back into fashion, though many Romans, perhaps most, still plied their razors as they had since the days of Constantine the Great.

  When he didn’t drive it off, the satyr cautiously came toward him, picking its way along the rocky ground with surprisingly delicate, graceful strides. He supposed getting a rock in its hoof would cause it as much trouble as that would for a horse, which the satyr resembled from the waist down.

  It was certainly hung like a horse, its phallus juttingly erect. The old stories said satyrs were hard all the time. Till now, George had never had a chance to put the old stories to the test. Satyrs were rare these days, almost six hundred years after the Son of God came down and was made flesh.

  What a trophy to bring hack to town, George thought. Bishop Eusebius would probably bless him from the ambo of the basilica of St. Demetrius. He could all but hear the bishop going on about another turn being given to the winding sheet Christianity was wrapping around the corpse of paganism: Eusebius was a good man, but one who sometimes had a distinctly mortuary cast of mind.

  He didn’t pluck an arrow from his quiver and set it to his bow, any more than he had signed himself. He stood quiet and let the satyr approach. Up in an oak tree, a blackbird trilled. The breeze sighed through the leaves of the tree. The satyr made no sound at all. Maybe, being a creature of wood and forest, that was its way. And maybe, being more than an ordinary creature, it had ways on which Christian men were wiser not to speculate, for the sake of their souls.

  It paused almost within arm’s length of him. Nervously, it stroked its erection with one hand, as a flighty woman might have played with a lock of hair while hardly noticing she was doing it. Then, as if making up its mind, the satyr pointed to the skin George carried on his belt.

  “Wine?” it asked, its voice a plaintive baritone. It spoke in Greek, of course, being native to this soil. George had grown up with Latin his birth speech, but, like most Thessalonicans, he was fluent in both tongues.

  “Yes, it’s wine,” he answered. Water up here in the hills was mostly good, but still, who would drink water by choice?

  “Drink some, please?” The satyr’s syntax was rusty, as if it wasn’t used to speaking with men. It probably wasn’t.

  These days--these centuries--few would welcome it, or even tolerate it as George was doing.

  As was George’s way, he hesitated before replying. Drunken satyrs were supposed to do all sorts of appalling things. But the wineskin he carried wasn’t that large to begin with, and he’d already drunk from it. The satyr could hardly get drunk on what was left. Besides, it sounded so sad.

  He unfastened the skin from his belt and handed it to the satyr. The creature’s homely features became almost beautiful for a moment as joy lit them. It fumbled with the cord that held the skin closed; obviously, it wasn’t used to dealing with any man-made things, even ones as simple as that. But it managed, and sighed with ecstasy as it poured wine into its open mouth.

  Considering the quality of the wine, George was glad he’d given it to the satyr, which was taking far more pleasure from it than he ever could have. He would have been miffed, though, had the creature guzzled the skin dry. He was about to say so, in no uncertain terms, when the satyr figured that out without his help. After wiping its mouth on its hairy arm, it held the skin out to him.

  “Thanks,” he said, and swigged from it himself. The wine tasted better than it had; maybe being touched by the satyr had improved it.

  Being touched by wine had certainly improved the satyr. It seemed bigger, stronger, younger, and even more ithyphallic than before. It had lost its hangdog air: its eyes flashed. Its large nostrils dilated, as if to taste the wind. “That good,” it said, almost crooningly.

  “Glad you like it,” George answered, polite as if he were talking to a monk. He cocked his head to one side, studying the satyr. “Didn’t know your kind came so close to Thessalonica anymore,” he remarked, looking back over his shoulder towards the city.

  “Not like to come so close,” the satyr answered. A moment later, it added, “Hard to come so close. Saints almost everywhere to keep me away.”

  George nodded, half matter-of-factly, half sympathetically. As Christianity’s hold on the land tightened, the old creatures found it harder and harder to approach holy men or holy places. The satyr hadn’t had any trouble approaching him. He shrugged. He was just a man, just a sinner. He knew it.

  “Where have you been living?” he asked.

  “Up in rough country.” The satyr pointed off to the north and east: rough country sure enough, well away from the Via Egnatia that still--tenuously--linked Thessalonica with the Adriatic and Italy on the one hand and with Constantinople on the other. The satyr went on, “Villages not so bad. Not so much--” Being what he was, he couldn’t make the sign of the cross, but George got the idea.

  He nodded to show the satyr he followed. Bishop Eusebius was always talking about doing a better job of evangelizing the little upcountry villages. It wasn’t only satyrs that hung around them. Bacchus still came around in the fall, when the grapes were being crushed for wine. Up in the hills, Pan had a festival, too, though even there some said he was dead.

  “Why didn’t you stay up in the rough country, if it was easier there?” George asked.

  The satyr’s eyes got wide. It stroked itself again, as if for reassurance. Breathing wine fumes into George’s face, it answered, “Not easier there. Not so good, no. People all right, even if some--” Again, he would have crossed himself if he could. “But new things in woods.”

  “What kind of things?” George tried to put the same kind of dread into the word as the satyr had, but knew he didn’t come close.

  “Lots new things in the woods.” The satyr looked back toward the northeast, as if expecting those things, whatever they were, to burst from the woods and tear it to pieces. Up and down, up and down went that hand. After a moment, it added, “Wolves worst. Yes, wolves.” It nodded to itself; it might have been comparing the wolves to something else almost as dreadful.

  George scratched his head. For one thing, you heard wolves howling outside the walls of Thessalonica every winter. For another-- “I wouldn’t think ordinary wolves would be the sort of things to worry you,” he remarked. Satyrs weren’t what they had been, back in the days before Christianity came to this land. They were a long way from diminishing to mere flesh and blood, though.

  “Not ordinary wolves,” the satyr said. “Not ordinary, no.” It seemed grateful to George for having given it the word to describe the wolves, even if only in the negative.

  “Ah,” George said. “New sorts of powers trying to come down here: is that what you mean?” The satyr nodded, head moving in rhythm with its hand. George shrugged. “I expect the priests will drive them away.”

  The satyr made a noise like none he’d ever heard before. After a moment, he realized it was half moan, half giggle. “I watch priest go out to wolves,”
the satyr said. “He not see me, or he” --once more, it indicated the sign of the cross without actually making it-- “and I have to run away. But he not see. He find wolf. He go up to it. He do that thing, thing make me run.”

  “Yes?” George said when the satyr didn’t go on. “What happened then?”

  Again, that strange mixture of mirth and terror burst from the satyr’s throat. It was an appalling sound, one that made the little hairs on George’s arms and at the back of his neck stand up as if he were a wolf himself. “Priest do that thing,” the satyr repeated. “He do it not at me, so I see safe. And wolf--eat him up.”

  “Really?” George said. It was, he realized, a foolish response. He consoled himself with the thought that it was better than making the sign of the cross, which would have routed the satyr. It had been a long time--a lot longer than he’d been alive--since powers that could stand up against Christianity’s most potent symbol had come into this part of the world. He nodded slowly to himself, fitting puzzle pieces together like mosaic tesserae in the church of St. Demetrius. “They must belong to the Slavs.”

  “Slavs.” The satyr spoke the word as if it had never heard of the people so named. “Who--what--are Slavs?”

  George’s nose was long and beaky, admirably made for exasperated exhalations. “They and the Avars have only been raiding the Roman provinces south of the Danube for the past generation,” he said, his tone perfectly matching the irritated sniff.

  “Ah, only one generation,” the satyr said in some relief. “No wonder I not know.”

  “Only one . . .” George fell silent. He studied the satyr. He’d shot that only one generation as if from a catapult, propelled by sarcasm rather than twisted cords. The satyr, though, had taken him literally. And why not? he realized. What was a generation to a being essentially immortal? The satyr was speaking with him now. It might have spoken with St. Peter when he traveled through Greece not long after the Incarnation, had it so chosen and had the saint not driven it from his presence by overwhelming holiness. It might have spoken with Alexander the Great. George shivered. It might have spoken with Achilles before he sailed for Troy. No wonder it took mere generations lightly.

  “This wolf thing eat up priest,” the satyr repeated. It ran a tongue as long and red as its phallus around its mouth, imitating a wolf licking its chops. “Then it look over to where I am. It not blind and stupid like priest--it see me. It think about eat me up, too. I see it think. Then it decide, I full. I see that, too. Wolf get up, go away.”

  George wanted to say Kyrie eleison or Christe eleison, but didn’t, for fear the holy words would make the satyr flee. He looked at it with an emotion he’d never expected to feel toward its kind: sympathy. “You’re in a hard spot, aren’t you? If you come down to places like this, the priests and holy men will get you. If you stay where you have been staying, though, the wolves will do the same.”

  “Not wolves only,” the satyr said. “Other things, new things, never-seen things. Frightening things.”

  Frightening because they’re new or frightening because they’re frightening? George wondered. To an immortal that had grown used to the ways of its part of the world, change of any sort had to seem like the end of that world. What must the Olympians have thought when Christ overcame them? The satyr hadn’t been so strong as all that--but the other side of the coin was, lesser threats were dangerous to it.

  “What I do?” it mourned now. “What I do?” Its eyes bored into George’s as if it was sure he had the answer.

  He wished he did. But he was a Christian himself. Some--many--would have said he’d already shown too much tolerance for this creature of the old dispensation. As far as he was concerned, though, the Good Samaritan made a better model than the Pharisee who went out of his way not to help lest he be defiled. And, in purely pragmatic terms, what he’d learned was worth knowing, not only for his sake but for Thessalonica’s.

  None of that did the satyr any good. It made another strange noise, this one full of despair, and started for the trees. “Wine sweet,” it said, as if suddenly remembering, and then it was gone.

  George strode into Thessalonica through the northwestern gate close to St. Catherine’s church. He carried a couple of hares and a couple of partridges: not a great day’s hunting, but not bad, either. He and his family would eat well tonight, and tomorrow, too.

  Calm washed out of Catherine’s as he walked past it. Unlike Demetrius, she was not a warrior saint: very much the reverse. She had been martyred in Alexandria after besting several pagans in debate; when her head was struck off for her temerity, milk flowed from the wound instead of blood.

  Feeling her holy influence eased George s worries ... for a little while. With such spiritual strength behind it-- to say nothing of the imperial soldiers and the popular militia to which he belonged--Thessalonica could surely stand up against anything the Slavs and Avars might do, whether with their soldiers or with their gods and demons.

  Most men would have let the rationalization satisfy them. In spite of Catherine’s calm, George could not make himself forget the satyr had said a Slavic wolf had devoured a priest who tried to banish it. You should pray more, he told himself, and think less. He’d been telling himself the same thing for a good many years. He did pray, frequently and sincerely. He never had been able to make himself stop thinking, though.

  He brought the game he had killed into the shoemaker’s shop where he hadn’t worked that day, having gone hunting instead. That did not mean the shop had stood idle. With his wife Irene, his daughter Sophia, and his son Theodore to help with the work, things got done whether he was there or not. He sometimes suspected things got done better when he wasn’t there. He’d never voiced that suspicion aloud, for fear Irene would confirm it.

  She looked up from the undyed leather boots she was making for Peter the miller, who lived down the street. Her eyes brightened when she saw the game George had brought home. She had a few years fewer than his thirty-five--he wasn’t sure how many, but then, he wasn’t sure whether he might not be thirty-four or thirty-six himself--and looked younger still: her hair was still dark, her skin unlined, and, despite three pregnancies, she had almost all of her teeth.

  She said, “You did well there--probably better than if you’d stayed here.” Like him, she made such calculations almost as second nature. Their parents had arranged the marriage, of course, but it had proved good not just because of the properties and families it joined. They thought alike, which made them enjoy each other’s company.

  “Shall we stew them with cabbage and leeks, Mother?” Sophia suggested. She was fifteen now--George was sure of that, because she’d been born in the year Maurice became Roman Emperor. Her face was long and thin like her mothers, but she had most of his nose in the middle of it. He worried that it looked better on him than on his daughter.

  “That sounds all right to me,” Irene said. She looked at George. He nodded. She looked at Theodore. He pulled a sour face. He was a couple of years older than Sophia, and at the age where he pulled a sour face at anything his parents suggested. Irene chose to make the best of that she could: “I know you’re not fond of leeks. Will you put up with them tonight because everyone else in the family is?”

  “I suppose so,” he mumbled; sometimes soft answers from George and Irene were harder for him to take than furious shouts would have been. George, though, was not long on furious shouts. He’d had a bellyful of them from his own father, and didn’t see that they’d done much good in making him behave.

  Irene carried the hares and partridges upstairs; like a lot of artisan families, George’s lived over their shop. Before too long, a delicious smell floated down into the work area. No customers had come in since George showed up with the game, and it was getting dark outside, so he felt no hesitation about shutting the front door and letting down the bar. He didn’t expect anyone would need new boots or to have a sandal repaired so badly as to come to the shop with a torchbearer--and, in the unlikely event som
ebody did do that, he could always open the door again. He and the children went upstairs after his wife.

  It was lighter up there than down below: safer to put windows in the second story of a building, because they were harder to break into there. Even so, Irene had lighted a couple of lamps. The smell of burning olive oil was part of” the characteristic odor of Thessalonica, along with woodsmoke, garbage, and manure. George paid no attention to the smell when he stayed in town, but it forcefully brought itself to his attention when he came back after some time away, as with his day of hunting.

  Irene ladled the stew into earthenware bowls; Sophia carried them and horn spoons to the table. Irene brought in bread and honey to go with the stew. Before the family began to eat, they bowed their heads. George said grace, thanking Christ that they had enough to fill their bellies. When he was done, he glanced toward the heavens. Though all he saw were the beams of the roof, he knew God watched over him.

  The blessing reminded him of what had gone on in the woods earlier that day. “I saw a satyr this afternoon,” he remarked after he’d taken his first bite, and then, in much the same tone of voice, “Good stew.”

  Theodore gaped at him; Sophia made the sign of the cross. They and their mother all exclaimed--they knew George too well to let that calm, casual tone lull them. Irene, not surprisingly, was the first one to put words to her thoughts: “I hope it was from far away, and that the creature didn’t bother you.”

  “It didn’t bother me.” George took another bite. Deliberately, he chewed. Deliberately, he swallowed. “I gave it some of my wine--not too much. I didn’t want it drunk.”

  “You should have driven it away, Father.” Now Theodore crossed himself, to show what he meant. “Those nasty demons can’t stand against the sign of the true faith.”

  “I know that.” George hid his smile. In going against what his father had done, Theodore had--no doubt altogether without intending to--become perfectly conventional. George ate some more stew, then went on, “As things worked out, I’m glad I didn’t.” He told of what the satyr had said about the Slavic wolf-demon and what that demon had done to the priest.