Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

  Rufus, for once, had not been up on the wall when trouble started. He got there a little while after the catapults had stopped flinging stones at the city. “Busy time you had, looks like,” he said, with which George could hardly disagree. The veteran peered down at the stones at the base of the wall. He let out a loud whistle. “Looks like they cut the tips off some mountains and tossed ‘em this way,” he remarked.

  “That’s what it felt like,” George said, and Paul nodded.

  “I believe it,” Rufus said. “I’ve been bombarded. It’s not what I’d care to do for fun, thank you very much.” He raised his voice so the militiamen along a big stretch of Thessalonica’s wall could hear him: “Let’s get this matting pulled up and stacked again. We may need it again, you know.”

  As George hauled the lengths of thick cloth back over the wall, he said, “I didn’t see it helped very much.”

  “It doesn’t help very much,” Rufus agreed. “But it does help some. You can’t know beforehand whether putting it down or not putting it down will make the difference between a wall that stays up and one that doesn’t, for no one hit makes a wall fall down. Since you can’t say beforehand, you don’t take the chance. You didn’t take the chance, and you were right.”

  George knew Rufus wasn’t praising him personally, but praise from the veteran, even if aimed at all the defenders, felt good. Raising an eyebrow, the shoemaker asked, “Where were you, anyway? Hardly seemed like a proper fight without you running around up here screaming at us.”

  “You’ll pay for that,” Rufus said, though he didn’t sound angry. “Where was I?” He peered this way and that. “I’ll tell you and Paul, but I don’t want it all over the city. I was closeted with Bishop Eusebius, is where I was. We’re trying to figure out how we’re doing.”

  “All right, that makes sense,” George said, and then, as Rufus didn’t say anything more, “Well, how are we doing?”

  “Fair,” the veteran answered. “I’d say fair would be a . . . fair way to put it.” Ignoring George’s groan and Paul’s sour look, he went on, “We’re low on a lot of things. We don’t have as much food or firewood as we ought to, and we aren’t as good with what we do have as we might be. Food and firewood and other things, I mean.” He pointed to the heaps of stones on the walkway. “We haven’t replenished those the way we should, for instance. The Slavs and Avars might try tortoises again, but nobody’s worrying about it. We have so many things to worry about; we can’t keep track of all of them at once, even if that’s what we need to do most. And it is.”

  “We need a real general,” Paul observed. “You’ve worked wonders, Rufus, don’t take me wrong, but you never tried keeping track of a whole city before. Eusebius is used to doing that, but he doesn’t know what all soldiers need to keep track of.”

  “You’re not as foolish as you look,” Rufus said, to which Paul, one of the least foolish looking men in Thessalonica, responded with a dry chuckle. Rufus continued, “A lot of what we talked about was just that: what all needed doing and who would take charge of doing it.”

  “What was the rest?” George asked. Again, Rufus did not appear forthcoming. George said, “Come on, you just told us not to gossip. Now out with it.”

  Rufus let out a long sigh. Then he said, “Well, it’s not anything you haven’t seen for yourselves, and it’s not anything you couldn’t figure out for yourselves, either. The bishop’s not happy about how strong the powers of the Slavs and Avars have turned out to be.”

  “He’s not happy?” Paul exclaimed. “I’m not happy, either. If they were mild little powers, the way everybody hoped, the Slavs and Avars would have given up on the siege a long time ago.”

  “I tried to tell him,” George said. “Before we saw even a single Slav around the city, I tried to tell him. He was polite to me, and made as if he believed what I was saying, but it must not have sunk in till he saw it for himself.”

  “Life is like that,” Rufus said. “If we really learned things from what other people told us, we’d all be smarter and richer than we are right now, and fathers wouldn’t want to clout their sons over the head with rocks about the time the brats started shaving.”

  “Amen to that,” George said with a laugh. “And speaking of brats who haven’t been shaving long, I think I’m going to bring Theodore up onto the wall with me next time it’s my shift. He knows how to shoot a bow, so he won’t be altogether useless up here, and it’s about time he has a look at the way this particular part of the world works.”

  “Aye, go ahead and do that,” Rufus told him. “First battle, first brothel--those are the memories that’ll stick with you, even when you get old. I ought to know about that, eh?”

  “If I’m as hale as you are when I have your years, I won’t be doing too bad,” George said. He hoped he managed to pile on as many years as Rufus had, in whatever shape he might be at that time. The veteran had to be getting close to his threescore and ten, but George had seen again and again how much vitality he still had in him. George caught himself in a yawn. He didn’t have all that much vitality himself these days.

  Theodore flew up the stairs to the top of the wall. George plodded after him. The shoemaker was still feeling anything but vital. Maybe Rufus should have taken Theodore up on the wall, not the youth’s tired old father.

  When George got to the top and looked out toward the encampment of the Slavs and Avars, Theodore was already taking aim at the first Slav he saw who wasn’t impossibly far out of arrow range. George made him rum the bow aside before any of the other militiamen had to come rushing over and do it for him.

  “But, Father!” Theodore exclaimed, aghast. “That’s the enemy!” By the way he spoke, the skinny, draggled-looking Slav at whom he wanted to shoot might have been the general commanding the barbarians, not a tired soldier who looked to want nothing so much as a mug of wine and a place close by the fire to sleep.

  “When the Slavs shoot at us, we shoot at them,” George said patiently. “When they don’t shoot, we don’t do much shooting, either. For one thing, it wastes arrows. For another, if we start shooting at them, they’ll start shooting at us, and more of us are liable to get hurt. If they’re quiet, we’re happy enough to let ‘em stay that way.”

  Everyone within earshot nodded. Theodore proved the point Rufus had made a couple of days before, saying, “But if they’re the enemy, we need to kill them. How can we kill them if we don’t shoot at them?”

  “All we need to do is keep them out of Thessalonica,” George said. “We don’t have to kill them. If they can’t get in, sooner or later they’ll go away.”

  Dactylius came up onto the wall then. He beamed at Theodore, and failed to notice Theodore wasn’t beaming back. “Young blood,” the little jeweler said. “Young blood. Makes me feel old and useless.”

  “You know what young blood was going to do?” one of the nearby militiamen said. “He was going to start shooting at the first Slav he saw, and probably go right on shooting after that. Christe eleison, we’d have been ducking for days if George here hadn’t stopped him.”

  Theodore looked and sounded ready to burst. “This isn’t fighting!” he said. “This is all make-believe and cowardice!”

  A couple of militiamen laughed, which only made matters worse. But before Theodore could do or say anything irrevocable, George looked out from the wall. “Hello,” he said, and then, to Theodore, “Son, if you want fighting, I’m afraid you may get it.” He pointed toward the troop of Avars riding out of their encampment toward Thessalonica.

  As they did whenever he saw them, the Avars alarmed him. Part of that was their gear: not only did they armor themselves in scalemail from head to foot, they armored their horses the same way. Part of it was their horsemanship: they might almost have been centaurs, attached to their mounts from birth. And part of it was the arrogance that flowed off them in waves, the feeling that they were convinced they were the toughest people in the world.

  Their powers were convinced they
were the toughest powers in the world, too. George also got that feeling from the Avars, and very strongly, as strongly as the churches of Christian saints reflected their special traits.

  He wasn’t the only one who got that feeling, either. Dactylius said, “They give you the chills just looking at them, don’t they? I’m glad they let the Slavs do so much of the dirty work for them.”

  “Yes,” George said, warily watching the Avars shake themselves out from a column to a line paralleling the wall. They were, he thought, still out of arrow range of the militiamen on the wall. They did not share his opinion. Instead of quivers, they carried cases holding both bow and arrows. As if inspired by a single will, they took out the bows and started shooting.

  Those bows must have been better than the ones the Slavs used--better than the ones the militiamen on the walls of Thessalonica used, too. The fellow who’d been mocking Theodore’s aggressive inexperience made a hideous gobbling noise and toppled over onto his side. His hands clutched at the arrow that had suddenly sprouted from his neck. Bright red blood streamed out between his fingers and puddled on the walkway. It steamed in the chill air of early morning. The militiaman’s feet drummed and were still.

  Theodore stared, eyes wide. George set a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to get some fighting whether we want it or not,” he said. “The Avars aren’t going to care whether we and the Slavs spend the next week shooting at each other. You’ve got that bow. You’d better use it now.”

  Before Theodore could, an arrow hissed between him and his father. He jumped, coming to the same horrible realization George had at the start of the siege: people out there were trying to kill him. Then he shouted several words George had never heard him use at home, yanked an arrow from his quiver, and let fly at the Avars.

  George thought that a healthy reaction. But after Theodore had sent a couple of more arrows after the first, the shoemaker said, “Take it easy, son. They have better bows than we do, so they can reach the wall and we probably can’t hit them.”

  Theodore stared at him as if he’d started speaking Slavic. George realized the youth hadn’t had the slightest idea where his arrows were going, except that he was shooting at the foe. He said, “You’re right, Father. I see that. But what keeps them from--?”

  Before he could finish the question, an Avar arrow pierced another militiaman not far away. The fellow howled like a wolf, then started cursing in such a manner as to leave Theodore’s earlier bad language in the shade. “Christ’s stinking foreskin, I’m bleeding like a stuck hog!” he shouted. “Hold a bowl under me, and you can make blood sausage tomorrow.” He plainly wasn’t on the point of death, but as plainly wasn’t happy with what life had just given him, either.

  Theodore tried again: “What keeps the Avars from doing what they’re doing: shooting at us from so far away we can’t shoot back?”

  “Our bows can’t reach them,” George answered. “Our catapults can.”

  Now the engines on top of the walls of Thessalonica were not engaging the stone-throwers the Avars had built. They were taking on the Avars themselves, and throwing stones themselves, not fire. Theodore cheered when a frying rock knocked a horse and rider flat. But he watched thoughtfully as the animal and the man writhed about, with neither one of them showing any sign of being able to get up.

  The Avars’ scalemail turned ordinary arrows at long range (Dactylius told Theodore the story of the Avar he’d hit but hadn’t hurt, and then for good measure told it over again). No matter how far away the nomad horsemen were, though, when a dart hit them, it struck home. An Avar let out a shriek clearly audible from the wall when one of those darts pinned his leg to the horse he was riding. The horse shrieked, too, and galloped madly away, but soon went crashing down. Again, George didn’t think it or its rider would be of much use after that.

  With the Romans’ catapults in the fight, the Avars moved even farther from the wall than they had been. Their arrows began falling short. Seeing that, they abandoned their effort as abruptly as they had started it, trotting back toward their encampment with hardly a backward glance.

  “We did it, Father!” Theodore burst out. “We drove them away!”

  “That’s true,” George said. “We did.” He didn’t say anything about the militiaman who had caught the arrow in the neck and who now lay dead only a few feet away. Nor did he look in the direction of the dead man. Somehow he contrived, by not saying and not looking, to allude to the man as loudly as if he’d shouted.

  Loudly himself, at least at the outset, Theodore said, “That wouldn’t happen to me. There’s no way in the world that could . . .” His voice, which had been fading, traded away altogether as he obviously remembered the arrow that hadn’t missed him by much.

  “He did well,” Dactylius said. “He did very well.” Without children of his own, Dactylius didn’t have to worry about raising them. He would, in fact, have made a splendid indulgent grandfather.

  But he wasn’t altogether wrong, either, not here. George nodded. “Aye, he’ll do,” he said. “He kept shooting at the Avars--even if he wanted to start too bloody soon-- and he didn’t start puking when people got hurt around him.”

  “You sound like Rufus.” Theodore laughed.

  George didn’t. “Rufus may be old and crude, but I’ll tell you this, son: if there’s one thing in the world he knows, it’s what makes a soldier and what doesn’t. When I’m talking about soldiers, I don’t mind at dl if I sound like him.”

  He waited for Theodore or Dactylius to argue with him. Neither of them did. Dactylius nodded. Theodore changed the subject: “Why do you suppose the Avars started shooting at us like that? You said the Slavs and we were happy enough to live and let live.”

  “I don’t think the Avars are happy letting anything live that they don’t rule,” George answered. “Maybe they thought the Slavs have been getting too soft and they needed to make the fight livelier. Maybe some general of theirs came by and they were showing off for him. Maybe they just felt mean and wanted to kill themselves some Romans.”

  “Does it matter?” Dactylius added.

  “It might,” Theodore said. “If we knew why they did what they do, we might be able to keep them from doing it.”

  Dactylius looked over toward George. “Anyone would think he was your son,” he said.

  “I can’t imagine why,” the shoemaker answered, his voice dry but a sparkle in his eye. Theodore scowled at both of them. He didn’t think he sounded like his father. He didn’t think he thought like his father, either. All that proved, as far as George was concerned, was that he remained very young.

  “Another blow with weapons,” Dactylius said musingly. “I suppose that means they’ll try something magical next.”

  “They don’t seem willing or able to do both at once, do they?” George said. “I wouldn’t mind rattling them again with our own power. That sickness Eusebius called down on them left them this far” --he held thumb and forefinger close together-- “from having to up and go.”

  “I thought the nature of the plague was that they had to up and go, Father,” Theodore said, so innocently that George had no more than a momentary temptation to pitch him off the wall onto his head.

  “Anyone would think ...” Dactylius repeated.

  “My jokes aren’t that bad,” George said, his voice full of affronted dignity. “He couldn’t possibly be John’s son. John wasn’t anywhere near Thessalonica nine months before he was born.”

  Theodore turned red. Soldiers chaffed one another harder than his friends did. And George, ever so slightly, was chaffing his mother, too. “Father!” he said, and his voice betrayed him, sliding up into a boyish treble for the second syllable of the word.

  “Don’t worry about it, boy; I’m joking. Your mother would hit me if she heard me, but not very hard,” George said, adding, “If you’re worried about what she’s thinking, go home and show her you’re all right. She was convinced the only reason I’d taken you up here was to get you kil
led.” That was another joke, but less so than Theodore probably thought.

  “Will it be all right?” the youth asked doubtfully.

  “Go ahead,” George told him. “I let Rufus know I was going to bring you up here today, to see how you’d do. But you’re not on any official list. I expect you can be by this time tomorrow, though, if that’s what you’d like-- all I’ve got to do is ask him to put you there. You fought well enough; no one can say you don’t deserve it.”

  “All right, Father. If that’s what you think, that’s what we should do,” Theodore answered, a more subdued response than the whoop of ecstatic glee George had expected. Maybe a firsthand look at war had sobered his son after all. With a nod, Theodore descended from the wall.

  “He’s a good boy, George. You should be proud of him,” Dactylius said. Just outside the wall fluttered one of those batlike spirits that had startled George and Dactylius on their first night patrol together. Its ugly little face twisted into a nasty leer as it echoed Dactylius’ words in a high, squeaky voice: “He’s a good boy, George. You should be very proud of him.” Whether it was meant for mockery or not, it sounded scornful.

  “Begone, foul flying sprite!” George exclaimed, and made the sign of the cross at it.

  It bared its teeth and flapped a few feet farther away, but seemed unharmed by the gesture that would have sent one of the powers of the pagan days of Greece fleeing in abject terror. “You should be very proud,” it squeaked at the shoemaker. Was that an echo? A mocking warning? He couldn’t tell.

  He drew his bow and let fly at the spirit. Maybe his arrow missed. Maybe it passed right through the thing without causing it undue harm. It did upset the spirit, which shrilled “Very proud!” and flew away, darting and dodging like a beast made of flesh and blood.

  “That bat’s gone,” George said in some satisfaction.

  “It was spying on us!” Dactylius said.

  “Yes, I think you’re right,” George answered; that darting, dodging flight had taken the batlike spirit back toward the tents of the Slavic wizards who associated with the Avar priest. In spite of where it had gone, the shoemaker laughed. “If the Slavs think they’re going to learn how to take Thessalonica from the likes of you and me, they’ll be disappointed.”