Theodore said, “What’s been going on out there, anyway? People have been running back and forth and shouting things that don’t make any sense. And a while ago it sounded like a budding fell down, or something like that. Are the Slavs throwing rocks--?” He paused, stood up, and set hands on hips. “I said, are the Slavs throwing rocks at us?”
His parents were laughing harder than ever, which irritated him and Sophia both. After a while, George stopped laughing. When he did, he felt as if he ought to start shaking instead. Laughing was better.
Little by little, he and Irene explained to their children what had in fact happened. By the time they were through, Theodore had turned very red and looked about ready to burst. “All that was going on not three stadia from here, and we didn’t know anything about it?” he exclaimed in what, to his credit, tried very hard not to be a shout but didn’t quite succeed. “If I’d been there, I’d have--” He made cut-and-thrust motions that merely betrayed how little he knew about handling a sword.
“Thank God you weren’t there,” George said, which only inflamed his son further. “The best adventures are the ones that happen to somebody else, believe you me. This isn’t a story, son. The priest and the women who are dead, they’re dead, and they won’t come back to life till Judgment Day. The woman with the broken leg, she may be crippled for as long as she lives. And any one of them could have been me or your mother as easy as not.” He saw he wasn’t reaching Theodore, who was at the age to believe nothing bad could ever happen to him. George turned to Irene for support, only to discover she wasn’t there to support him: she’d gone upstairs while he was talking, and he hadn’t noticed. He might as well have been Victor, the city prefect, who liked to hear himself talk.
Irene came down a moment later, carrying a cup of wine in each hand. She gave one to George, who gulped it down faster than was his usual habit. Instead of scolding him, she drained her cup, too. George took it from her and went upstairs himself. When he returned with both cups filled, she took one from him and drank it as fast as she had the first. As she had not been behind him on that first cup, he was not behind her on the second.
Her eyes were a trifle glassy as she looked toward Sophia and said, “You can fix supper tonight.” She spoke with unusual emphasis.
“All right, Mother.” Sophia had enough sense to know when not to argue. She went on, “That will be easy, anyhow, because we don’t have much besides bread and beans and oil and some prunes.”
“You can live a long time on bread and beans and oil,” George said. “People only a little poorer than we are live on them their whole lives through.” He spoke more loudly than was his usual wont, too; so much wine drunk so fast made the world seem a very certain place.
“That’s true,” Theodore said, “but the world would be a boring place without some meat every now and then.” He smacked his lips.
George was fond of meat, too. He sighed. “Can’t go out hunting. Can’t hardly keep cows or sheep inside the walls. Pigs, some pigs, and chickens. They eat anything. Ducks, maybe. And fish. The Slavs can’t keep us from fishing in the sea.” He sighed again. “Anything like that would cost plenty, even now. Pretty soon, oil will cost, too. After a while, beans and bread will cost.”
“Bishop Eusebius won’t let that happen. He won’t let the merchants make beggars of us all,” Irene said confidently. She had more faith in the bishop than George did. He didn’t want to do complicated thinking right now, but after a moment decided she might well be right. Eusebius was too good a Christian and too good a politician both to let a handful of men aggrandize themselves at the expense of the rest.
Theodore’s thoughts, meanwhile, had gone off on another tack. “Everything you said about how strong the Slavs’ powers are must be true, Father,” he said, a sentence to warm the cockles of the heart of any father of an adolescent male. “For that water-demon to show up in the middle of this city--”
“It’s a worry,” George agreed. He tried to imagine a satyr strolling into the marketplace of Thessalonica. He couldn’t. Such a thing might have happened when Galerius was Emperor, but three hundred years had gone by since then, and those powers overpowered by a greater power.
“This is the first time they’ve tried anything so horrid,” Irene said. “What will they do next?”
The question hung in the air. George looked out the door. All he could see was the shop across the narrow street. He couldn’t see the wall, let alone what lay beyond it, not with his fleshly eyes. His mind’s eye reached further. Somewhere out there, the chieftains of the Avars would be deciding what to do next. If they and the Slavs they led succeeded with it, whatever it was, the city would fall. That was very simple. For once, George wished things might be more complex.
IV
Axes rang in the woods around Thessalonica. George watched an oak tremble, sway, fall. A crew of Slavs began lopping off branches and cutting the trunk into lengths they found useful. Not far away, a mounted Avar watched his subjects.
“He’s working hard, isn’t he?” John said, pointing out from the wall to the horseman, who, but for occasionally pointing, wasn’t doing anything much.
“Not so you’d notice,” George answered, “but the Slavs are working harder because he’s there.”
“The noble comes round to see how his building is going up, you’d best believe the carpenters work harder,” John said. “Me, I’m funnier when I know the fellow behind the bar at the tavern is listening to me. If he doesn’t like what he’s hearing, I have to try to find someplace else to work the next night.”
“Carpenters build buildings,” George said. “What do Slavs build? They can’t be making a village out there, can they?”
“I know what they’re making,” John said: “they’re making trouble.”
“They’ve already done that.” George looked along the wall instead of out from it. No sooner had he done so than he stood more erect and gripped his bow more firmly. Out of the side of his mouth, he said, “Here comes Rufus. Think of him as the fellow behind the bar.”
John obviously did think of Rufus that way, for, like George, he did his best to project an air of martial ferocity. Like George’s, his best left something to be desired. Rufus surveyed diem with his brown eye, with his blue eye, and with both eyes together. He looked dissatisfied all three ways. “God must be watching over Thessalonica,” he said, “if it hasn’t fallen with the likes of you two holding off the Slavs and Avars.”
George didn’t argue with the veteran; on the whole, he agreed with him. And John surprised Rufus by putting an arm around him and kissing him on the bristly cheek. “Thank you, great captain,” he said in a voice gooey with counterfeit emotion. “You’ve made us what we are today.”
Rufus wiped his cheek with the back of one hand. “The good news about that is that it’s true,” he said. “And the bad news about it... is that it’s true.”
Another tree went over with a crash. The Slavs started trimming it as they had the oak they’d felled a few minutes before. “What are they doing out there?” George asked Rufus.
The veteran clapped to his forehead the hand he’d just used to wipe his cheek. “God help all of us if you’re as I made you,” he said. “Anyone with enough sense to rub his fingers on his tunic after he blows his nose can see that they’re cutting the timber they need for siege engines.”
“Siege engines?” George and John spoke together. John went on, “They’re barbarians. They don’t have any cities. What are they doing with siege engines?”
“They don’t have cities, no,” Rufus said. “That’s not the point. The point is, we have cities. If they want to take them away from us, they have to get inside. The way to get inside a walled town is with siege engines. They know that; they may be barbarians, but they aren’t stupid.”
By the way he said it, his opinion was that the two militiamen were stupid. George’s ears got hot. Righty or wrongly, he prided himself on his wits. Having Rufus scorn them was bitter as wormw
ood to him. He said, “All right, they know what they need to do to break into our cities. But how do they know? Siege engines can’t be easy to make.”
“Anything is easy--if you know how to do it,” Rufus said. “And they do.” His face darkened with anger. “The Avars were besieging some town up near the Danube, way I heard the story. I forget the name of the place; this was, oh, I don’t know, ten years ago, something like that. They caught a soldier outside the walls, fellow called . . , called . . . Bousas, that was it.”
“They learned to make siege engines from us Romans?” George said, appalled. “Did this Bousas tell them how?”
Rufus nodded. “That’s what he did, all right. They were going to kill him. He told them to take him back to this town, whatever its name was, and the people there would pay ransom to get him back.”
John’s chuckle was cold and cynical. “Didn’t happen, eh?”
“Sure didn’t,” Rufus agreed. “One of the nobles there was either screwing Bousas’ wife or else wanted to screw her, I misremember which, and he persuaded the people not to give the Avars even a follis for Bousas.”
“And Bousas paid them back?” George said.
“That’s what he did, all right,” Rufus repeated, with another nod. “Said he’d give ‘em the town if they let him live, and then went on to teach ‘em how to make stone-throwers.” He scowled. “That’s how they’ve taken so many towns since, and that’s how they know about engines.”
George was a man who liked to get to the bottom of things. “What happened to Bousas, and to his wife, and to the noble who kept the people from ransoming him?
“If Bousas isn’t dead, he’s still with the Avars,” Rufus answered. “I don’t know what happened to the woman or the other fellow. Whatever it was, my bet is that it wasn’t pretty. I’ve seen what happens to towns in a sack.” His lined face went very harsh for a moment. George wondered what pictures he was watching inside his head, and hoped Thessalonica wouldn’t find out.
John said, “If the Slavs do break in, nice to know it’s on account of our sins and not theirs, isn’t it?”
“Maybe we should sally and break those engines, or else burn them, before the barbarians can bring them up against the walls,” George said.
Rufus studied the ground outside the wall. After what must have been a couple of minutes, he regretfully shook his head. “I wish we could, but I don’t think we can. Too stinking many Slavs out there--Slavs here, there and everywhere. They can afford to waste whole great stacks of men holding us off, and we can’t afford the ones we’d have to spend. Anybody says the militia ought to try it, I’m going to say no as loud as I have to, to make people listen. If we had some regulars, now--”
Regulars would have armor to match the scalemail the Avars and their horses wore, and most of them would be mounted, too. If the militiamen fought the Slavs out in the open, they would lack the advantage in weapons and position and be outnumbered to boot. George decided Rufus was right.
Then the veteran looked thoughtful. “Wouldn’t want to send militiamen out against the Slavs in broad daylight, I sure wouldn’t, not unless things were different from the way they are now. Sliding a postern gate open at night, though, and going out and seeing what we could do then ...” His eyes didn’t match, but they both saw clearly.
So George thought, at any rate. John hopped straight up in the air, a motion startling enough to make a couple of Slavs look up from their carpentry and point his way. “At night?” he said with anger that sounded genuine. “You’re going to try to take my audience away? I like that!”
“Don’t worry about it, pup.” Rufus set a hard, much-scarred hand on his shoulder. “Nobody’d be listening to you anyway.” He tramped on down the walkway atop the wall, leaving John, for once speechless, behind him.
More and more Slavs came down from the northeast. More and more Avars came with them, to make sure they stuck to their work. With alarming speed, a variety of siege engines took shape under the Avars’ direction. George, who knew plenty about shoes but had never been besieged before, needed help telling one sort from another. Rufus gave it.
“You see the ones on the broad bases?” he said. “The ones that taper up till they’re thinner on top? Those are the stone-throwers. They’ll try and knock the wall down so the barbarians can swarm through the breach.”
“That’s what all those things are for, isn’t it?” George said.
“Well, of course it is, but there are different ways of going about it,” the veteran answered, tossing his head in annoyance at the shoemaker’s naiveté. “Those hide-covered sheds shaped like triangles, they’re going to hang battering rams from those. You see that log with the pointed iron beak? That’s going to be a ram. They’ll bring that little present up to the gate or try and fill in some of the ditch in front of the wall so they can come right up close and pound away.”
“And the shields all piled over there?” George looked out to the very edge of the forest. Even from that distance, the shields were obviously not of the ordinary sort. They were bigger than those either militiamen or regulars carried, and extravagantly faced with iron.
“Tortoises,” Rufus said. “The Slavs’ll stand under ‘em and try to dig out the stones at the bottom of the wall so the ones above ‘em fall down. Of course, life gets interesting under a tortoise. I’ve been under one a time or three, and it’s something I could do without.”
Interesting was not the word George would have used. The Thessalonicans already had piles of stones waiting along the walkway. They also had stacked firewood and collected a goodly number of iron pots in which to boil water. All of the stones and the boiling water would come down on the Slavs. Maybe the shields would hold off the rocks. Could they hold out scalding water?
“What we need,” John said, “is St. Demetrius coming down and working another miracle. I mean, a miracle besides talking through a homely old sinner like our captain here.”
“For a follis, two at the outside,” Rufus growled, “I’d go and tell Bishop Eusebius to lower your worthless carcass down in front of the wall and use it to pad the stonework against the boulders the barbarians are going to fling at us. Any boulder that bounced off your hard head would be gravel the next instant, that’s certain sure.”
“You’ve got your nerve, running down miracles,” George said to John. “What do you think God would do to you for that?”
John flashed his impudent grin. “God is a god of mercy, right? That means He’ll forgive me, I hope.”
“Now there’s a doctrine that would get Bishop Eusebius hopping mad,” George said. John did have his nerve; George, as often with his friend, didn’t know whether to be admiring or horrified.
“Who’s running down miracles?” a deep voice behind them demanded. George turned. There stood Menas, solid and blocky and altogether cured of his paralysis. The noble had a helmet on his head and a stout hammer in his hand. He looked like a man with whom no one sensible would want to trifle. “Where would I be today without God’s kindness?”
John started to answer him. Afraid of what the answer would be, George stepped on his fellow militiaman’s foot. John hissed like a viper. George didn’t care about that. To Menas, he said, “I’m sure you must fit into God’s plan for saving Thessalonica.”
“What?” Menas snapped. That thought plainly hadn’t occurred to him; all he’d worried about was God’s plan for saving Menas. He had a fine glower, one that no doubt struck terror into the souls of everybody who owed him money. “You’re the shoemaker, aren’t you?”
“That’s me,” George answered evenly.
“I’ll remember you,” Menas rumbled. He strutted off, chest out, thick legs striding along as if they hadn’t been useless sticks for years. Maybe that strut was what made a couple of Slavs shoot arrows his way. The shafts missed, but Menas moved a lot faster and with a lot less self-conscious magniloquence after they zipped past his head.
John whispered. “You don’t want to get important pe
ople angry at you, George.” He spoke with unwonted sincerity. “I know about that. Why do you think I’m not living in Constantinople anymore?”
“I don’t know,” George answered. “They’re supposed to have good taste back there; that probably has something to do with it.”
Rufus gave him an admiring look. “The Slavs shoot poisoned arrows every now and then. I wonder what they did for poison before your tongue came along.”
“You people don’t need me,” John said. “I think I’ll go off into the garden and eat worms.”
“Thessalonica’s not that hungry yet,” Rufus told him, “and besides, your stretch on the wall here isn’t up yet, either. We’re stuck with you a while longer.”
But out beyond the walls, the sounds of logging and carpentry went on and on.
People filed into the church of St. Demetrius to pray for the salvation of the city and to listen to what Bishop Eusebius had to say both about divine aid and about what mere men needed to do to save Thessalonica.
“We’ll meet you across the square from the church after the service is over,” Irene said. George nodded. His wife and Sophia took the stairs up to the women’s gallery. He and Theodore walked on down the central aisle of the basilica, to get as close to the altar as they could. Not only did that give them a more concentrated feeling of the saint’s warlike power, it also let them have a better chance of actually hearing Eusebius.
George looked up toward the filigreed screen intended to keep men at prayer from being distracted by looking at and thinking about women. In a way, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. In another way, it faded, for he kept trying to spot Irene and Sophia through the screen’s ornately patterned holes.
Chanting priests swinging thuribles advanced toward the altar from either side. Clouds of incense drifted up from the censers: fragrant frankincense and bitter myrrh. Like any church, St. Demetrius’ was steeped in those fragrances even without their reinforcement. When George smelled them, his thoughts automatically went to holy things.
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