Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

  Dactylius let out a cry of dismay that showed how much confidence he had placed in Father Luke. George glanced over toward the priest. Father Luke’s long face was set in thoughtful lines. Seeing George’s eyes upon him, he nodded slightly. “It is as you have said all along,” he remarked. “The powers of the Slavs are strong, and now I see that the powers of the Avars are stronger still. Since the Avars rule the Slavs, I suppose I should have expected as much.”

  “What can you do about it?” George demanded. Another shattering roar from the heavens emphasized the thunder spirits’ strength more than the priest’s words could have. Somewhere not far down the wall, a militiaman screamed when an arrow pierced him. Caught in the tightly defined circle of rain, the defenders could offer no reply.

  “What can I do?” Suddenly, despite building catastrophe, Father Luke smiled. For a moment, George thought he saw in that smile the sun he’d hoped the priest would be able to restore. Father Luke said, “I could not make those powers quit this place against their will: they were too strong for that. Suppose instead, though, I give them everything they want?”

  Through drumming rain, through rumblings and thunderings above, Dactylius hissed to George: “He’s gone mad.”

  “I don’t think so,” George answered, though he had not the slightest idea what the priest intended.

  As Father Luke had before, he stared up into the sobbing sky. As he had before, he chose words from the Book of Genesis, but words of different import, perhaps inspired by Dactylius: “ ‘On the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. .. . And the waters prevailed, and increased greatly on the earth . . . And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered.’”

  “What’s he doing?” Dactylius said fretfully. “Is he trying to drown us all?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” George said. “The rain’s no worse than it was.” Before saying anything more, he paused and looked out from the wall. Something had changed. He was sure of that, but had trouble identifying what it was. And then, all at once, he laughed with glad surprise and bowed to Father Luke. “You did it, Your Reverence!”

  “Did what?” Dactylius squawked. And then, a beat behind the other two, he understood. He too bowed before the priest.

  “God gets the credit, not I,” Father Luke said. It was too wet for George to be sure his eyes twinkled, but he thought so. It was too wet all around Thessalonica, not just in the narrow circle to which the rain and lightning and thunder and rumbling had been confined. Now, like any proper storm, this one spread over the whole land.

  “Give them what they want,” George said musingly.

  “They must have been angry, penned up in such a narrow space.” Father Luke’s voice was amiable. Rainwater splashed off the tonsured crown of his head. “Now they can do as they like, where they like.”

  “And if the Slavs and Avars don’t care for it--what a pity.” George laughed out loud. Even standing here soaking wet in the chilly rain, being alive felt monstrous good. He vastly admired cleverness, and what could be more clever than turning the Avars’ powers against the priest who had loosed them in the first place?

  That, Father Luke had done. The storm of arrows that had joined the rainstorm to assail the militiamen on the walls of Thessalonica now died away: archery with wet bowstrings was as impossible for the Slavs as for the Romans. If the barbarians had planned anything more than sweeping the walls bare of defenders who could not shoot back, the sudden extension of the rain made them think again.

  George peered out toward the Avar wizard who had summoned the thirteen thunder spirits and their lesser nimbler cousins to torment Thessalonica. He could see even less now than before, what with the rain extending all the way from him to the wizard. Was that angrily dancing figure the Avar, or just a Slav irked at having his sport spoiled? The shoemaker could not be certain.

  Lightning crashed out of the heavens, striking near the dancer, whoever he was. The thunder that followed almost at once made George clap his hands to his ears. He felt as if he were standing inside God’s biggest bass drum. “Lord, have mercy!” he gasped.

  “He has had mercy on us,” Father Luke said. “Without His help, our city would have fallen. But that wasn’t what you meant, was it?”

  “Not exactly,” George said, his head still ringing.

  “I hope the Lord had no mercy at all on that cursed Avar,” Dactylius exclaimed. “I hope that lightning bolt burned him to ashes, and I hope the ashes wash into the sea and are gone forever. That’s what I hope.” He stuck out his chin, daring the other two to disagree with him.

  “I hope the Avars leave off attacking us and accept our faith,” Father Luke said. George snorted--that was a pretty sentiment, but how likely was it? Father Luke’s eyes twinkled again. After a moment, he went on, “That failing, Dactylius’ hope sounds good enough for me.”

  “Do you think the lightning did cook the Avar priest?” George asked.

  “What I hope and what I think are, I fear, two different things,” the priest replied. “Those are the powers with which he is intimately familiar; I think he will be able to bring them back under his control.”

  George sighed. That made more sense than he wished it did. And Father Luke proved a good prophet, as George himself had, not long before. The rain soon eased off; the thunder stopped. A brisk breeze sprang up and blew away the storm clouds. “Here comes the sun,” George said happily. The sunshine was watery, but it was sunshine.

  And there in the sunshine stood the Avar priest. Now that George got a good look at him, he saw his bizarre costume was soaked and, with any luck at all, ruined. The wizard stared toward the wall and shook a fist at-- no, not at George; it had to be at Father Luke. And the priest nodded back toward the Avar, recognizing the other’s skill and potence.

  “You ought to blast him with an anathema,” Dactylius said.

  “I do not think he fears my anathemas,” Father Luke said. “I do not think he fears any Christian power. Only greater acquaintance with us will teach him the true strength of the Lord.”

  That was as temperate an answer as George could have looked for from any priest. But the Avars and the Romans had struggled against each other now for most of a decade. The war remained unwon on either side, which, he presumed, also meant neither God nor the gods and spirits of the Slavs and Avars had prevailed.

  He might have been able to say something to that effect to Father Luke, as he could not have to Bishop Eusebius. But when he opened his mouth to speak, his teeth chattered so loudly, he could not. He and the rest of the militiamen on the wall had stood in the driving rain longer than the Avar wizard had done, and were more drenched than he. The breeze was chilly, too.

  Father Luke took off his cloak, which was thick even if soaked, and wrapped it around Georges shoulders. “That’s all right, Your Reverence,” the shoemaker said, trying to shrug it off. “Here, you keep it.”

  “I may not be the Son of God, to give up my life for mankind, but I should be a poor sort of priest indeed if I did not give up my cloak for a friend,” Father Luke said.

  Just then, Dactylius sneezed. That gave George the excuse he needed to shed the cloak: he passed it to Dactylius. The jeweler tried to protest, too, but kept on sneezing. That let George and Father Luke ignore him, and left them both warm in spirit if less so in body.

  John and Sabbatius came up onto the wall to replace George and Dactylius. So far as George knew, nobody had told Sabbatius that John was in the habit of making jokes about him. One of these days, Sabbatius would find out, and there would be trouble. Not wishing either to borrow or to cause the latter, George kept his mouth shut and headed for home.

  When the shoemaker got to his shop, Irene said, “Wasn’t that a dreadful storm a couple of hours ago? I see you’re still all wet, poor thing, and the roof has a new leak in it, too. I put a bowl down under it to catch the drips.”
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br />   “It was quite a storm,” George agreed. If it had seemed nothing more than that to his wife, he was as well pleased.

  “Storm like that, I’m glad the Slavs didn’t attack,” Theodore said. “They could have caused all sorts of trouble, and you might not have noticed them in the rain till too late.”

  “That’s true, too,” George said, and sneezed as vigorously as Dactylius had up on the wall.

  “Come upstairs. Get out of that wet tunic.” Irene took charge of him with brisk efficiency. “Drink some warm wine with honey in it. That will make you feel better.”

  “If I don’t feel better, I won’t notice after I drink enough of it,” George said.

  Ignoring that, Irene maneuvered him much as Rufus might have done up on the wall. And, sure enough, in dry clothes and with hot wine in him, he did think the world a kindlier place than he had when he was all wet and shivery. He stretched the upper for a boot he was working on over the last and smoothed the leather with a round file.

  “That’s good work, Father,” Theodore said, looking over his shoulder.

  He paid more attention to it himself than he had been doing. “It is, isn’t it?” he said, surprised at how surprised he sounded. Looking down at his hands, he added, “They know what they’re up to, anyhow. Now if I could only leave them behind to work while the rest of me goes upstairs to supper or off to the tavern, that would be pretty fine.”

  Theodore snorted. “While you’re at it, why not wish for a bronze man, like the one the Poet says Hephaestus made to help him with his work?”

  “Why not indeed?” George said mildly--too mildly to suit his son, who might have been hoping for an argument, as he often did these days. He went back to work himself.

  George let his hands guide the file over the leather once more, since they’d proved they could tend to that by themselves. When Theodore had learned to read Greek, the teacher taught him Homer, from whose poems boys had been learning to read for more than a thousand years. Even now, in these Christian times, the Iliad and the Odyssey gave the old gods a shadowy life they would not have had without them.

  Was that good or bad? Homer wrote so well that, while you were reading him, you couldn’t help believing in his gods and heroes--George remembered as much from his own days in school. No wonder some bishops would sooner have had students taught from the Holy Scriptures alone, thereby interring the memory of the pagan gods for good.

  “But the words are so fine,” George murmured. While he’d mused, his hands had smoothed out the whole toe of the boot. He opened and closed them, almost as if to make sure they were still willing to respond to his will. Maybe he’d come closer to imitating Hephaestus than either he or his son had thought.

  That night, Irene said, “Something more happened today than you let on in front of the children--or in front of me, either, come to that. What was it?”

  He didn’t bother asking how she knew. They’d slept side by side more than half their lives; he often wondered if she knew him better than he knew himself. “It wasn’t an ordinary storm,” he said, and went on to explain how the thirteen thunder spirits and however many little rumblers there had been had let the Slavs shoot at the Romans for a while without fear of reprisal, and how they’d nearly let the Slavs do worse than that, too.

  Irene shivered, then took him in her arms, as much, he judged, to reassure herself he still lay beside her as because the night was chilly. “That is a terrible thing,” she said in the quiet dark: “That the power of the Lord could not rout these sky-things the Avars worship.”

  “It is a terrible thing,” George answered, remembering how frightened he’d been when Father Luke’s first prayer faded to drive the thunder spirits and rumblers away from Thessalonica. “It’s what I’ve been saying: the powers feed off the belief the Slavs and Avars give them.”

  “God doesn’t feed off our power. He gives us power, the way He did with Rufus in the church of St. Demetrius. The pagan powers from the old days that still lurk here fear Him. Why don’t these others?”

  “Because they’re stronger,” George said patiently. “I think Father Luke did very well. When he saw he couldn’t force the Avar powers out of the sky, he went with them instead of against them. He used their own nature to get them to drench the barbarians along with us, and that ruined whatever plan the Avars had.”

  “It worked, but was it right?” Irene asked. “Satan will give you what you want, too, if you ask it of him. Asking is the sin.”

  “I don’t think Father Luke sinned. I think he did what he had to do. And I think he was clever to come up with it so quickly after the first prayer faded.”

  Irene shivered again, and held him tighter. “I hope you’re right.”

  “So do I,” George said. He didn’t want to think about what being wrong might mean. That his wife was holding him, and he her, gave him something else to think about. Since he was a man, what that something was soon became evident. Irene laughed a quiet laugh, deep down in her throat, and reached between them.

  They made love with their tunics hiked up rather than naked; the night was cold. They were generally happy with each other in bed, one reason they got on well with each other outside the bedroom. Tonight, though, Irene responded to his caresses with more fervor than she’d shown in ... he couldn’t remember how long. Her excitement drove his, too.

  Only afterwards, his tunic down past his knees again to warm as much of him as it could, did he wonder whether Irene also had a good many things she was trying not to think about.

  He yawned and snuggled closer to her. She was already nearly asleep. All the jokes said that was something men did, but it happened with her more often than with him. Not that he wasn’t sleepy himself, no indeed. Soon after her breathing grew deep and regular, his did, too. The last thought he remembered having was a vague hope that she would find herself worried more often.

  “You! Shoemaker!”

  The gruff growl made George look up from his work. There in the doorway stood Menas, looking large and well fed and unpleasant. One look at his proud, meaty face said he remembered and still resented Georges remark up on the wall: he was the sort of man who would remember for a long time anything diminishing his self-importance.

  No help for it. “What can I do for you today, sir?” George asked.

  “I hear you’ve been telling lies about me,” Menas said heavily.

  “No, sir,” George said, surprised now. “So far as I know, sir, I haven’t said anything about you at all.”

  “Lying again,” Menas said. “Well, you’ll pay for that, too. You’re going to tell me the stinking joke going through the taverns, the one that says God gave me my legs back so I could run away from the Slavs, that isn’t yours?”

  “No, that’s not mine,” the shoemaker said. But he had heard it--where? At Paul’s tavern, coming out of John’s mouth, that was where. He’d worried it would land John in trouble with Menas. He’d never imagined it would land him in trouble with the noble instead.

  “Not only a liar, but a bad liar.” Menas thrust out his big, square chin. “If it’s not your joke, wretch, whose is it?” His thick-fingered hands opened and closed, opened and closed, as if around the neck of anyone rash enough to tell jokes on him.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know that.” George lied without hesitation. If he threw John to this wolf--no, this bear, a better description for Menas--how was he supposed to live with himself afterwards?

  “Of course you don’t--it’s yours. Who else would have wanted to tarnish God’s miracle by calling me a coward?”

  “I’ve never wanted to tarnish any of God’s miracles,” George replied with absolute conviction.

  Menas would hear none of it. He shook his fist at the shoemaker. “Not a true word comes out of your mouth. Tell me you didn’t say to my face that God’s curing me didn’t mean anything in particular, and that He cared more about the city than about any of the people in it.”

  “That’s not what I said, si
r,” George told him, aware as he spoke that he had no hope of being believed. The noble had closed his mind, locked the door, arid thrown away the key.

  “You mocked me then and you’ve made vicious jokes about me ever since,” Menas declared, heedless not only of George’s denials but also of having mentioned only one joke bare moments before.

  George stood up. If he could not convince Menas he had done him no harm, maybe he could convince him he might do harm if provoked. “Sir, I tell you again I did not do those things, but I also tell you you’re starting to make me sorry I didn’t.”

  “You’re not sorry,” Menas said. “You don’t know what sorry is. But I tell you this, shoemaker--you’re going to find out.” He turned on his heel and stamped up the street, waves of indignation rising from his back as heat rose from a blacksmith’s forge.

  Theodore and Sophia both stared at George. “He’s an important fellow, Father,” Sophia said worriedly. “I wish he weren’t angry at you.”

  “I wish he weren’t, too,” George answered steadily.

  “That’s not your joke,” Irene said. “I know who tells jokes like that.” To his relief, she did not upbraid him for protecting John.

  “Do you know who told that joke?” Theodore asked. George nodded. His son burst out, “Then why didn’t you tell Menas?”

  “Because a man who betrays his friends has no friends left after a while--and doesn’t deserve any, either,” George said. “And because, if Menas weren’t angry at me for this, he’d be angry at me for something else. He’s decided he’s going to be angry at me, and he’s the kind of man who doesn’t change his mind about things like that.”

  “It’s one thing if a tanner or a butcher is angry at you,” Sophia said. “All they can do is insult you in the street, or something like that. But if Menas is angry at you, he could . . .” She paused, trying to think of the worst thing she could. After a moment, she went on, “He could set lawyers on you.”