Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

  And here came Bishop Eusebius, gorgeous in silks encrusted with pearls and precious stones. He made his way to the altar and celebrated the divine liturgy with a zeal that matched the meaning of his name in Greek: “pious.” As he usually did, he conducted the services in Greek. George did not mind that, even if Latin was his preferred tongue. Maybe the powers that had lived in this land before Christianity might also hear petitions in Greek.

  Had he spoken that thought to Eusebius, the bishop would no doubt have berated him. But then, being a bishop, Eusebius was no doubt on intimate terms with God. George was just a shoemaker, and not inclined to be picky about which powers helped Thessalonica against those of the Slavs and Avars.

  When the service was completed, Eusebius addressed the congregation: “Brothers and sisters under God, we must remember always that we are in His hands. And we must remember always that our fate is in our hands as well as His. If we do not prove ourselves worthy of His aid, we shall not receive it. Instead, we shall be chastised for the multitude of our sins. The instruments of His chastisement lurk beyond our walls.

  “I have heard it said the pagans number a double handful of myriads, a hundred thousand men. I do not know if this be true, but it would not surprise me. Our own numbers are not so large, but numbers alone I do not fear, for is it not written, and written truly, “How should one chase a thousand, And two put ten thousand to flight, Except their Rock had given them over, and the Lord had delivered them up. For their rock is not as our Rock’?”

  The rhetoric was strong and heartening, and lifted George’s spirits. But then he wondered, as he had once or twice before, what the men who talked with the powers and gods of the Slavs and Avars were saying to their followers. They had no Holy Scriptures, of course, but he would have been surprised if they told their fellow barbarians anything much different from Eusebius’ words. All men believed their gods the mightiest, till the test came.

  Then George had a truly appalling thought, one that had not crossed his mind till now: what if the men who talked with the powers and gods of the Slavs and Avars were right, and Bishop Eusebius mistaken?

  He shivered like a man out at night in a cold rain. The Avars and the Slavs who did so much of their fighting for them had beaten the Romans at least as often as they had tasted defeat. What did that say about the relative strength of the powers involved?

  He did not care for what he thought it might say. Brooding thus, he missed some of what Eusebius was saying; his attention returned to the bishop in midsentence: “--is because God demands much of us Romans. If we sin, He punishes us, as we deserve. If we want Him to stay His hand and not bring His flail down upon our backs, we must live our lives in holiness, showing Him we deserve to be saved.”

  A hum of approval ran through the basilica. How many people would give up gambling and blaspheming and fornicating because of the bishop’s words, though? Bishops had been inveighing against sin since the beginning of Christianity, yet sin remained loose in the world and loose in Thessalonica.

  Eusebius said, “We are men. We are sinners. We are imperfect. God does not expect all of us can be saints; He knows our hearts too well. But He does expect each of us to do all he can. If all of us, together, do enough, our foes shall not prevail against us.”

  George always felt clever when he thought along with someone, especially with someone who was clever himself, as Eusebius undoubtedly was. As alarm had a little while earlier, pride made him miss a few of the bishop’s words: “--pray that we shall be brave enough to withstand the barbarians’ onslaught, which cannot now long be delayed. And we shall also pray that the measures we take against the foe, both on the walls and in the spiritual realm, shall be crowned with success.”

  “Amen!” The response came loud and strong. George joined in along with everyone else. Nobody in Thessalonica was crazy enough not to want to be delivered from the Slavs and Avars. Even the Jews were probably praying for that deliverance. The Slavs and the Avars wouldn’t hate them for being Jews, but would hate them for being Romans. The Jews got a poor bargain, any which way.

  Eusebius stooped and picked up something that lay behind the altar. He held up a large iron grappling hook. “With defenses such as this, we shall turn aside the engines of the barbarians. Let us pray virtue into them.”

  “Amen!” the worshipers cried out again.

  “The Lord God shall see that we do all we can in our own behalf, and, being merciful toward us and filled with loving kindness, shall grant us a measure of His strength as well.” Eusebius waved the grappling hook about. If he’d gone fishing with it, he might have snagged a whale. But whales were not its intended prey; it was made for catching rams and their sheds.

  Just for a moment, George thought the grappling hook glowed with a light that did not spring from the candles and lamps in the basilica of St. Demetrius. Before he could be sure he hadn’t imagined it, Bishop Eusebius set down the hook with a clank of iron and held up another. Again, he and the Thessalonicans prayed. Again, George thought he saw a glow surround the hook with light apparently not from any natural source. Again, he admitted to himself that he couldn’t be sure.

  Another clank of iron heralded Eusebius’ setting down the second hook and picking up a third. All in all, the congregation must have sought to pray virtue into at least a dozen grappling hooks. George wondered how the bishop kept track of which ones had been prayed over and which hadn’t. Did one of them, by some mischance, have a double dose of divine power prayed into it while another went without? Or could Eusebius sense the difference between a grappling hook the Lord had been invited to fortify and one He had not?

  “When the enemy attacks, we shall all stand fast,” Eusebius declared. “The liturgy is accomplished. Go in peace, but knowing you shall be tested in the fire of war.”

  “We’ll smash them, won’t we, Father?” Theodore said eagerly as they walked out of the church. “God will help us.”

  “I hope so.” George’s eyes went to the ruins of the ciborium, and to the smoke stains still blackening the columns and ceiling nearby. God had helped then, dousing the flames and speaking through Rufus to get the people up onto the walls when the Slavs first appeared in large numbers.

  But, even as he walked across the square to the meeting place on which he’d agreed with Irene, he heard drums thundering outside Thessalonica: not drums calling men to battle--alarms would have come from the wall had that happened--but more likely summoning the gods and demons of the Slavs and Avars to fortify the onslaught that was to come. Men against men, walls against siege engines, God against gods ...

  “There’s Mother.” Theodore pointed. George waved to Irene. Theodore, having spotted her, cast his eyes on some of the other women--younger, unmarried women-- coming out of the basilica. Some people might have disapproved of such concupiscent thoughts on the heels of the divine liturgy. In theory, George disapproved of them, too. In practice, he remembered having done the same thing when he was a youth. And, for that matter, he still looked at pretty girls when he got the chance, even if he had no intention of doing anything but looking. He remembered the one he’d seen when the garrison marched away.

  That, unfortunately, made him remember the garrison had marched away, something he would sooner have forgotten. The militiamen had kept Thessalonica safe so far, but the Slavs and Avars hadn’t yet seriously assaulted the walls. Soon--maybe as soon as tomorrow--they would. Having a couple of thousand professionals in place alongside people like him would have made him rest easier of nights.

  “Well, let’s go home,” Irene said when she’d made her way through the crowd to George’s side. Then she spoke to Sophia, in a low tone George didn’t think he was meant to hear: “Don’t stare at them that way, dear. You’re supposed to be--reserved.”

  “Mother!” Sophia’s reply hit the indignant high note every young woman seems to find by instinct. Her ears turned pink.

  George knew young women eyed young men, too. He smiled to himself; by the way Ir
ene addressed her daughter, that was supposed to be a secret of sorts. He shrugged. One of these days, if he found the right chance, maybe he’d tease his wife about it.

  “I always feel better coming out of church after the liturgy,” Irene said. “It reminds me of how much in God’s hands I am.”

  “Yes, Bishop Eusebius said the same thing,” George answered, and let it go at that. His own faith, while real, was harder to kindle.

  But after a few more paces, Irene said, “While Bishop Eusebius was praying over those hooks, though, I couldn’t help but wonder what the Slavs and Avars were doing at the same time.”

  “Yes,” George said again, this time in an altogether different tone of voice. He set a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I’m glad our parents thought we were a good match for each other. They were right in more ways than they knew. I was thinking the same thing myself.”

  “Were you?” Irene walked on a little farther. “Well, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you I was surprised, not after all those years you wouldn’t. And since I’m not surprised, anyhow--”

  They both laughed, easy and happy with each other. Theodore and Sophia looked at them not quite as if they’d suddenly sprouted second heads, but certainly as if they were peculiar. Maybe they were. George thought about Dactylius and Claudia. He would have been astonished if they knew this camaraderie. But then, a lot of things about that marriage astonished him.

  “Do you know,” Irene observed, “I think Dactylius and Claudia would have been happier together if one of her babies had lived.”

  “You’re right--he’s said as much.” George let it go at that. Had his wife been watching Theodore and Sophia watching them, too? If she had, her thoughts had gone from there in exactly the same direction as had his. Coincidence? George didn’t believe it. It had happened too many times. Whatever it was, he liked it.

  George and Sabbatius had the dawn-to-midmorning shift the next day. As was his habit, George reached the stretch of wall near the Litaean Gate a quarter-hour or so early. That gave him the chance to shoot the breeze with Rufus and Paul, who’d been up there to watch the Slavs and Avars through the late hours of the night, and to see for himself what the besiegers might be up to.

  He also saw something new: one of the grappling hooks Bishop Eusebius and the congregation had blessed in the basilica of St. Demetrius. Attached to a good length of chain, it lay on the walkway above the gate. Rufus said, “They’ll try and break in where it’s easiest, same as we would. They won’t try knocking down stones if knocking down timbers will do the job for them.”

  “That makes sense,” George agreed. He peered out toward the encampments of the Slavs and Avars. A light mist kept him from telling what they were doing. He turned his head back toward the east. Here came the sun, rising red through the ground fog. Before long, it would bum the fog away. George wondered whether he really wanted to see the full range of the barbarians’ armaments after all.

  Paul yawned. “I’m for bed,” he said. Footsteps sounded on the stairs leading up to the wall. “And here comes Sabbatius. Since I’m not leaving us shorthanded--” The taverner started for the stairway.

  “Wait,” Rufus said. He spoke rough army-Latin, which Paul, who used Greek by choice, didn’t follow at once. Rufus ran after him and grabbed him. “Wait, curse you!” he said, shouting now. He still spoke Latin. “Don’t you hear? They’re moving out there.”

  They were, too, in a way they hadn’t done since the earliest days of the siege. Shouts and clankings and the sounds of heavy things being dragged along the ground came out of the thinning mist. All at once, George understood why Rufus seemed to have forgotten his Greek: Latin was the language he’d used when he was a soldier, and he thought he was about to be a soldier again.

  The mist thinned a little more, and the people and things moving through it came closer to the city. As they did so, cries of alarm and horn calls rang out up and down the wall. This would not be another quiet day. Too bad, George thought; he’d grown fond of quiet days.

  “Do you think they’re going to attack?” Sabbatius asked, staring out at the battering ram moving slowly toward the gate, and at the swarms of Slavic archers who ran along beside and in front of it. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than an arrow hummed past his head and shattered off the stone behind him.

  Rufus clapped a hand to his forehead. “No, fool, I think they’ve come to get drunk with us and dance the kordax.” He kicked his legs high in a couple of steps from the obscene dance. Then, apparently deciding sarcasm was wasted on Sabbatius, he pointed to the grappling hook. “Let’s throw that over the side and show the sons of a thousand fathers they aren’t going to have everything their own way.”

  “What if they try to run up ladders, too?” George asked.

  “You sound like Dactylius,” Rufus said. “With the horns screaming like that, we’ll have more men on the walls soon enough. First things first.”

  Since that was good advice-^-advice he’d given a good many times himself--George took it. He trotted with his fellow militiamen to the grappling hook. As soon as he grabbed the chain, he knew the prayers in the church of St. Demetrius had been effective. He felt strong and brave and able to overcome anything, as a man touched by the power of the military saint should have felt.

  Rufus himself handled the hook. He said, “We’ll show it to ‘em, let ‘em know we have it ready and waiting.” He looked tough and confident, too. “If they come on anyhow, I’ll hook the shed like I was fishing for bream, and then we all pull hard as we can, and shout for help, too. God willing, we lift the shed up and twist it so the ugly lugs under it get what they deserve. Everybody ready?”

  When no one said no, he tossed the grappling hook over onto the outer surface of the wall. The iron rang off the gray stone.

  George stood right behind the militia officer, ready to do whatever he ordered. The shoemaker stared out toward the shed advancing on the Litaean Gate. Against the massive construction of timber and hides, against the iron-headed log inside, the grappling hook seemed small and unreliable.

  But, although the Slavic archers kept swarms of arrows in the air, the shed halted outside archery range from the wall. A couple of Slavs came out of it and pointed toward the gate. No, George realized joyously, they weren’t pointing to the gate, but to the hook hanging over it. If it worried them, it stopped worrying George.

  An Avar rode up to the shed on his armored horse and shouted to the Slavs, gesticulating angrily. George didn’t need to know any of the barbarians’ languages to understand what he was saying: something like, Why don’t you pick that thing up and get it moving again?

  The Slavs’ answering gestures were every bit as emphatic as those of their overlord. The Avar looked toward the gate himself. He made a sign with his left hand. When nothing happened, he jerked his horse’s head around hard and rode off at a gallop.

  “We’ve beaten them!” Sabbatius exclaimed.

  “Not yet,” George said.

  Paul agreed: “That fellow on the horse is heading back for friends. The business I’m in, I’ve seen that kind of thing more times than I can count. One chap loses a fight, he goes off, he comes back with some friends, and they have another go at it.”

  “Aye, that’s how it’ll be here, I think,” Rufus said. “They haven’t gone to all this trouble to quit before they use their toys.”

  They weren’t going to use them right away, though. Rumor raced round the circuit of the wall, confirming what George had hoped: all the rams the Slavs and Avars had built were now halted. “What are they waiting for?” Paul asked, as if his comrades could see into the mind of the khagan of the Avars.

  “I think we’re going to find out,” George said, pointing to the Avar who now walked up toward the ram stalled in front of the Litaean Gate. Instead of wearing scalemail like all the other Avars George had seen, this one was fantastically decked out in furs and feathers and fringes.

  “He’s an ugly customer, isn’t he?” Sa
bbatius said with a scornful curl of the hp. “If that’s what the Avars wear when they aren’t in armor, no wonder they’re in armor so much.”

  “He’s one of the people who treat with their gods,”

  George said, wondering what kind of gods or powers the Avars had. Unpleasant ones, probably. The shoemaker went on, “You can see it in how he carries himself. You can feel it, too, the way you can with the bishop.”

  “I still say he’s ugly,” Sabbatius said. Since George was a long way from finding the Avar attractive, he let that go. Sabbatius had a gift for fixing on the least important aspect of almost any matter and clinging to it as if it were at the core of the question.

  The Avar studied the grappling hook. George watched him rub his chin in consideration, as a physician might have done while evaluating a patient with a fever whose nature he did not immediately recognize. Whatever the fellow saw did not satisfy him. He walked past the shed holding the ram and up toward the wall.

  “Shoot the son of a whore!” Rufus shouted as soon as he came within arrow range. The command, while eminently sensible, was also to some degree wasted, for the archers on the wall--more of them now than had been there a little while before--were already sending arrows at the Avar.

  None bit. George could not see any of them swerving aside or disappearing or bursting into flames. They all simply missed. The odds of that happening by itself struck him as somewhere between astonishingly poor and astonishing. Sure enough, the Avar had powers of his own.

  “Christ with me!” John shouted, drawing an arrow back to the ear. When he thought he needed divine help, he called for it. George wondered what God thought about that.

  Maybe God decided He wasn’t going to answer John’s prayer, considering some of the other things John said and did. Maybe the Avar’s own gods protected him. And maybe his arrow would have missed with or without invocations of God and gods--John’s archery, like that of most of the militiamen, was not all it might have been.