Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yes, that sounds about like what I’ve heard,” she answered with a brisk nod.

  “Does it?” George said. “And where have you heard all this?”

  “Why, from Zoe the weaver’s wife, and from Julia-- you know, the widow who sells fish because her husband sold fish--and even from Claudia, though she hasn’t the slightest idea why I was interested, and from--” Plainly, Irene was ready to go on for some time.

  George, however, was not ready to let her. He interrupted with a cough. “If you’ve heard all this, dear,” he said, bearing down a little on the endearment, “why haven’t I heard any of it? From you, I mean.”

  “Oh, you would have,” she said blithely. “In due time, you would have. Once I knew enough to make up my mind.”

  “Once you knew enough to make up my mind,” George returned. Irene stuck out her tongue at him. He did not take that for a ringing denial. “Well, I gather he’s not so good, but he’s certainly not so bad, either. What does that leave us? To make up our own minds, I suppose.”

  “We would have anyway,” his wife said. “The best thing we can do now is wait. She can’t even think of marrying till after the siege is over, and she doesn’t have to think of it even then. She’s a long way from being an old maid-- fifteen is nothing to worry about. She may decide there are other fish in the sea before we need to do anything about Constantine.”

  “So she may,” George said. “So there are. Some of them have shells and claws. Some of them have lots of arms all covered with suckers.”

  “My dear, any boy Constantine s age seems to have lots of arms covered with suckers.” Irene cocked her head to one side. “Or isn’t that what you meant?”

  “By now, believe me, it’s hard to tell,” George said. They both laughed, and went back into the workshop laughing still. Sophia and Theodore eyed them suspiciously, sure they were up to something. Since they were, they tried all the harder to pretend they weren’t.

  “Do you know,” George said to Dactylius as they paced along the wall, bows in hand, quivers on their backs, “I used to come up here when the weather was fine, just for a promenade: take a little walk, you know, and get out of the city stink for a while if the wind was blowing in the right direction. I’m not going to do that anymore. I’ve seen altogether too much of this awl.”

  “If you weren’t a shoemaker, that would make even less sense than it really does,” Dactylius answered. “As things are, it leaves my ears ringing.”

  George took two or three steps before realizing his friend had topped him, a measure of how badly he’d been topped. He sent Dactylius a reproachful look. “John and I are the ones who make jokes like that.”

  “Contagious as the--” Dactylius had probably been about to say plague, but remembered George had lost family from it. “--the grippe,” he finished.

  “Can’t trust anybody anymore,” George said, mock-serious. Dactylius smiled in something like triumph.

  The little jeweler pointed out toward the tent where the Avar priest or wizard made his home, and to the smaller ones nearby that belonged to the Slavic wizards. “I wish they hadn’t chosen to camp near the Litaean Gate,” he said. “If they were somewhere else, we wouldn’t be able to watch them getting ready to work all their magic.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” George said. “For better or worse, I want to know what’s going on as soon as I can. It wouldn’t stop happening if we didn’t find out about it till it came down on us like a building falling over.”

  “I suppose not,” Dactylius said, “but if I didn’t see them at their sorceries, I wouldn’t worry about them so much.”

  “Of course you would,” George said, having known his friend for many years. “You’d just be shying at shadows, not at anything real.”

  Dactylius sighed. He wasn’t ignorant of his own faults; like most mortals, he had trouble doing anything about them. “You’re probably right,” he said.

  “Besides” --George sent Dactylius a sidelong look-- “sometimes you cause the trouble you complain about afterwards. If you hadn’t bounced an arrow off that Avar’s corselet, that priest of theirs wouldn’t have tried to drown the city with a thunderstorm.”

  “In the end, though, it showed the power of God,” Dactylius said, and George supposed that was true. But it had also shown the strength of the powers upon which the Avar had called. Dactylius continued in musing tones: “I wonder what they’ll try next.”

  “No way to tell.” George didn’t want the jeweler working himself up into a swivet over the incalculable. But then, being who he was, the shoemaker tried to figure out what he’d just said could not be figured out. “The storm had spirits of the air in it, and maybe spirits of water, too. That water-demigod was certainly one of those. And when the Avar tried to take the bishop’s blessing off the grappling hooks, the earth shook, even if it didn’t shake very hard.”

  “Earth and air,” Dactylius said, musing still. “Water and-- It’ll be something to do with fire, I’d bet.”

  “I think you’re right,” George answered. “I hope you’re wrong.” He knew he was the one who would start worrying, start shying at shadows, now. Fire was a constant dread in every city, Thessalonica no less than others. Once it started spreading, you could do so little to put it out.

  “What can we do?” Dactylius whispered, echoing his thoughts.

  “I don’t know.” George pointed toward the Avar priest’s tent. “Keeping an eye on what he’s up to strikes me as a good idea.”

  “Well, of course it does,” Dactylius exclaimed, and then had the good grace to turn red. “You have me this time, don’t you, George? A little while ago, I said I wished that tent was somewhere else.”

  “That’s true.” George bowed to Dactylius, as he might have done before the city prefect. His friend looked puzzled. He explained: “You also just admitted you were wrong. That doesn’t happen every day, or every month, either.”

  “Oh.” Dactylius looked abashed. He started to say something more, chewed on it, and shut his mouth tight instead. George thought he could guess what his friend hadn’t said: that, living with Claudia, he’d had practice confessing he was wrong, whether he was or not. George would not have chosen to live with Claudia. But then, Dactylius hadn’t exactly chosen to live with her, either. His parents had done it for him--or rather, to him.

  One of the Slavic wizards came out of his tent and looked toward Thessalonica. His shoulders moved up and down: not a shrug, George thought, more likely a sigh. Seen by himself, the Slav, like the couple of his compatriots whom George had encountered in the woods, didn’t seem threatening. When you put him together with all his compatriots, though . ..

  Dactylius said, “He looks like he’s sick of the whole business.”

  “He does, doesn’t he?” George said. “Well, I’m sick of the whole business, too, but I’m sticking with it. I suppose he will, too, worse luck for us.” He described his conceit of a moment before for his friend, then added, “You take me by myself and I’m not what you’d call dangerous, either. But think of me as one part of the Roman Empire and I look different.”

  Dactylius studied him carefully. “No, you don’t.”

  “You’re not making this easy,” George said, clucking. “Now if you think of the whole massed weight of the Empire--” As he spoke, he waited for Dactylius, who seemed in a whimsical mood this morning, to crack a joke about the weight of the Empire’s making the wall fall down. But, since he didn’t complete his sentence, Dactylius never got the chance. Instead, George pointed out toward the wizard. “Hello. He’s got company.”

  The other Slavic wizards were coming out of their tents, too, and studying Thessalonica with the same intent look the first one had given the city. And here came the Avar priest or wizard in his costume of furs and leather and fringes. As always, George shivered when he saw him. The Avar carried a lot of spiritual force. Had he been born a Christian and a Roman rather than a barbarous pagan, he might well have become a bishop.


  Pointing again, this time toward the Avar, George said, “Can you imagine him in Eusebius’ vestments?”

  Dactylius gaped, then made a noise half giggle, half squeak. “Easily,” he said.

  And Eusebius, born a barbarian, might have been out there in furs and leather and fringes, trying to rouse his powers to break into Thessalonica and overcome the God Who held them at bay. He wondered what he himself would have been, had his life begun among the Slavs or Avars rather than the Romans. Probably not a shoemaker; from what he’d seen, the enemy had no one who made shoes for everyone else, each man being his own shoemaker and cobbler. George shrugged. He could have found something else to do.

  “What are they doing?” Dactylius asked, a question of more immediate import.

  “I don’t know,” George said. “If I had to guess, though, I’d say it’s nothing we’re going to like very much.”

  The Slavs and the Avars had huddled together like small boys before a mime show they’d thought up. That George recognized: they wanted everything right. When they broke apart, the Avar priest shouted something that was, as usual, unintelligible from the wall. Also as usual, it got prompt results. Several Slavs with the harassed look of slaves began building a great fire from so much wood and brush that George, who’d often been chilly because Thessalonica lacked fuel, grew warm with angry jealousy.

  One of the slaves thrust a torch into the brush. The fire caught swiftly. Flames leaped higher than a man. The Slavic wizards drew close to the blaze, whether for warmth or for the sake of ritual George could not tell. Staring out at the fire, Dactylius sighed longingly.

  Another Slav led a billy goat up close to the fire, tethering the beast to a stake driven into the ground. The Avar priest walked all around the goat, raising his hands and chanting in a scale that had little to do with any sort of music George had heard before.

  When the Avar got round behind the goat, he drew a knife from his belt; firelight flashed off the edge of the blade. With one swift motion, he reached down and castrated the goat. Blood spurted. The animal gave a bleat of startled agony. A moment later, the Slavic wizards took up the strange chant the Avar had been using.

  He, after holding the goat’s testicles aloft as if in triumph, flung them into the heart of the fire. It flared up for a moment in a blaze more nearly white than honest red-gold. The Avar priest and his Slavic acolytes--for so they seemed to George to be--began a new and different chant, one the shoemaker thought might be a name: “Odkan Galakan Eke! Odkan Galakan Eke!” They called the name or phrase over and over again, till it echoed in George’s mind.

  Dactylius crossed himself. “The goat!” he said. “Look at the goat.”

  Watching the Avar and the Slavs, George had almost forgotten the poor unfortunate animal, whose role in the ceremony he had assumed to be over. Now he found he was mistaken. “Holy Virgin Mother of God,” he whispered, and also made the sign of the cross.

  It had no effect. The woman now riding on the goat (she might have been Odkan Galakan Eke; George thought of her thus, rightly or wrongly he did not know), though plainly supernatural, was as plainly not the Virgin Mother of God. Half again the size of a man, she and her clothing seemed made all from fire.

  Her tunic might at first glance have been woven of crimson silk, but was in fact flames. Her face was the color of melted butter, but glowed like the fire that would have melted it. Her eyes . . . George looked away from her eyes. Something more than mere fire blazed there, the mother substance from which all fire sprang. Men were not meant to see such directly.

  “What are they going to do?” Dactylius said, staring at the beautiful and terrible being who rode the goat without consuming it.

  “I don’t know,” George answered with a small shudder. Talking about the Slavs’ and Avars’ using fire against Thessalonica was one thing. Having them actually go and do it was something else, something daunting. “I wish Father Luke were up here with us.”

  “I was thinking of Bishop Eusebius, but you’re right,” Dactylius said.

  When the fire goddess appeared atop the castrated goat, the Slavic wizards drew back from her in what looked to George like awe and wonder. That made the shoemaker think they’d never seen her before, and that, even though they’d helped evoke her, she was likelier to be an Avar power than one of their own. The way the Avar priest shouted at them, as if drawing them back to a task they’d forgotten, but still needed to finish, strengthened that impression.

  They began a new chant, this one low and rambling, altogether different from that which had summoned Odkan Galakan Eke. On her bleeding mount, the fire goddess stirred restlessly. Dactylius whispered, “I don’t think she likes what they’re doing.”

  “I don’t think so, either.” George whispered, too, not wanting to draw the notice of that beautiful, flaming, unearthly creature in any way. He added, “Question is, will we like it any better?”

  Chanting still, the Slavic wizards picked up swords and spears and thrust them into the fire that had summoned Odkan Galakan Eke. Despite the fierce blaze, the wooden spearshafts did not catch. The fire goddess writhed again. “She doesn’t like that,” Dactylius insisted.

  Had George been a fire goddess, he wouldn’t have liked it, either. The Slavic wizards seemed to be trying to wound the bonfire, not to sustain it. One of them took a spear out of the flames, another a sword. Each pointed his weapon at Thessalonica. All the wizards, and the Avar who led them, cried out together.

  The outcry looked to have mollified Odkan Galakan Eke. She stretched out a long, shining arm toward Thessalonica, as if she too were holding a weapon in it. But the fire goddess did not hold a weapon; she was a weapon. For a moment, her voice joined with those of the Avar and the Slavs. All the hair on the back of George’s neck rose in alarm. The Avar had power, wielded power: George had been forced to acknowledge as much. But Odkan Galakan Eke was power, power raw and terrifying.

  And then, suddenly, she was gone. The bonfire, suddenly, was but a bonfire. The billy goat, which had been awed into silence while the fire goddess rode him, began to bawl once more, though his bawling would never restore what the Avar had taken from him.

  Dactylius and George looked at each other. “Did they fail?” Dactylius asked. “Did they offend her so she fled?”

  “Not to look at them, they didn’t,” George answered, pointing out at the Avar and the Slavs, who did indeed look pleased at what they had wrought. Why they were pleased, George did not understand. As far as he could see, they hadn’t changed anything, as they had done with the water-demigod and, more subtly, with the magic aimed against the blessed grappling hooks.

  From further north along the wall, one of the Romans called to another: “Say, Bonosus, let me light a torch at your fire, will you? Ours went out some way. Don’t know how, but. ..” The voice traded away. George would have bet the speaker was shrugging a hapless shrug.

  After a brief silence, another militiaman, presumably Bonosus, answered, “I would if I could, Julius, but ours is out, too. Funny, ain’t it?”

  “They were careless,” George said with more than a hint of smugness. “It’s a good thing we’ve kept our fire-- “ He glanced toward the fire at which he and Dactylius had been in the habit of warming their hands. He did not say going, as he’d intended, for the fire wasn’t going anymore.

  “How did that happen?” Dactylius asked, realizing the same thing at the same time.

  “Don’t know,” George answered. “It hasn’t rained, and you wouldn’t think a gust of wind could . . .”

  His voice trailed off again. Dactylius’ eyes got big and round. “You don’t think--?” he began.

  He and George both seemed to be speaking in half-sentences. The shoemaker said, “What I think is, the Avars and the Slavs and their fire goddess didn’t fad at all. I think they did just what they intended to do, and I think” --he took a deep breath-- “I think every fire in Thessalonica may be out right now.”

  “That’s--that’s terrible, if yo
u’re right,” Dactylius exclaimed. “How will people get any work done? Smiths, potters, jewelers too . . .” He stopped, looking even more appalled than he had before. “How will people cook their food? Christ and the saints, how will people stay warm?”

  “I don’t know the answers to any of those questions,” George said. “I don’t know if any of those questions have answers.” They may all have the same answer: people won’t, he thought.

  The growing commotion down in the city suggested he and Dactylius had been right. People came running out onto the streets: looking in rather than out, George watched them pointing and gesticulating. He couldn’t hear what they were saying; only a confused Babel of Greek and Latin came to his ears.

  Dactylius tried to make the best of the Avars’ successful magic: “They can’t have put out the fires in the churches.

  Those are holy, and--” He cut himself off again, looking foolish.

  “Turning into a Persian fire-worshiper, are you?” George asked, spelling out the reason for his friends confusion. He wondered if any Persians were in the city. Merchants from the distant eastern land did come here every so often when their kingdom was at peace with the Roman Empire, as it had been these past five years. But he did not recall any of them being around now. Too bad, he thought. He would have liked to take advantage of their faith, false though he reckoned it.

  And then he spied, along with the townsfolk of Thessalonica, some tonsured priests. They looked as bewildered and bereft as anyone else. Dactylius saw that, too, and groaned. “Look at them! They must be without fire, too.”

  “I don’t know about must be, but it’s the way to bet,” George agreed.

  “How will we bake our bread?” Dactylius demanded.

  George didn’t know the answer to that, either. And then, all at once, he did, or he thought he did. “Remember when the water-demigod showed up in all the cisterns in Thessalonica at the same time?” he said.