Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

  Menas stared at him. Being a rich and prominent man, being a man to whom God had granted a miracle (for what reason, George could not imagine, and he’d tried-- how he’d tried!), the noble was not accustomed to having anyone speak so pointedly to him. He raised the hammer, as if to strike George down.

  George sprang backwards. He had an arrow on the string and the bow down almost as soon as his feet hit the walkway again. The point of the arrow--a bronze point, perhaps made by Benjamin--was aimed at a spot a palm’s breadth above Menas’ navel.

  As nothing George said had ever managed to do, that made Menas thoughtful. He lowered the silver-chased hammer. George lowered the bow so the arrow pointed toward the walkway rather than Menas’ brisket. He held it at full draw, though, ready to bring it up in a hurry if the noble was only pretending to back away from a fight.

  “How you’ll pay!” Menas snarled. “You’ll wish the Slavs and Avars had got hold of you by the time I’m done.” He stamped south along the walkway. George resisted the temptation to put the arrow in his bow straight through Menas’ left kidney. It wasn’t easy. He had to make himself replace the arrow in the quiver one motion at a time.

  “Getting credit for my lines, are you?” John said when Menas started bellowing at some other luckless militiaman farther down the wall. “That’s a trouble you could probably do without.”

  “Now that you mention it, yes,” George answered. John was bolder with his insults when the target wasn’t standing right there in front of him. George tried to get angry at that, but found he couldn’t. Most men were made the same way.

  “That’s why you’ve been after me not to tell jokes about him anymore,” John said, with the air of a man for whom a dark corner of the world has suddenly become bright.

  “In a manner of speaking,” George said.

  “Well, I won’t,” John promised. And then, an instant later, he backtracked: “I don’t think I will, anyhow. But if something comes to me while I’m up there in front of a bunch of people, who knows what I’ll do?”

  “No one,” George said sadly. “Not a single, solitary soul. Not even you. You’d be better off if you did.”

  “Maybe,” John said. “But if I knew ahead of time everything I’d do when I got up on a platform, and if I did just what I’d thought beforehand I was going to do ... I wouldn’t be me. Like you say, I might be better off. But I might not be able to perform at all.”

  George thought about that. He’d made shoes all his life, learning the trade from his father. But if, for some reason, he couldn’t make shoes anymore, he was sure he’d be happy enough as a potter or a miller instead, once he’d learned one of those businesses. If, however, a man had in his makeup something that had to come out if he was to be happy, he couldn’t very well go through life denying it was there.

  “I will try,” John said, which, as a pledge, left something to be desired.

  “Do the best you can.” George sounded weary, even to himself. “The damage is probably done by now, any which way.”

  A man whom George needed a moment to recognize was in the shop when he came back from the wall: a burly fellow of about his own age, with rather heavy features pitted by scars from either a light case of smallpox or a bad set of pimples as a youth. The latter, George thought, and that let him figure out who the visitor was a moment before Irene said, “Dear, of course you know Leo the potter.”

  “Yes, of course,” George said, and clasped Leo’s hand. The potter had a firm grip, and very smooth skin on his palm from using it to shape clay: a great contrast to the scars and punctures that marked a shoemaker’s hands. “A pleasure to see you. Will you drink some wine with me?”

  “Your lady already gave me a cup,” Leo answered, holding it up. “I got here myself not two minutes ago, matter of fact.” Irene poured a cup for her husband, who took it with a word of thanks. He looked around for Sophia and Theodore, both of whom seemed to have vanished. But no: shadows at the top of the stairway said they were lingering as discreetly as they could, no doubt with hands cupped to their ears to hear the better.

  As much to annoy them as for any other reason, George stretched small talk longer than he might have done. But small talk was also a way of getting acquainted with Leo, whom he did not know well. After a while, casually, George said, “You’re Constantine’s father, aren’t you?” Had Leo still had his youthful pimples, he and Constantine might have been two brothers, not father and son. George stretched a point: “Fine-looking boy.”

  Irene frowned at him. He nodded, very slightly, to let her know he’d seen. Had he been buying a donkey, he wouldn’t have praised anything about the animal till it was his. A marriage dicker, though, was a different sort of business--or so he thought.

  “He’s a good lad, if I do say so my own self,” Leo answered, “and, since he’s not here, there’s nobody but me to say it for him. Helen--my wife, you know--she didn’t come through the plague a couple of years ago.” Absentmindedly, he scratched himself. “I hate fleas.”

  “They are a nuisance,” George agreed. “Yes, the plague was a hard time for all of us. This siege is another hard time. I hadn’t intended speaking to you till it was over and done, and things were back to normal again.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” Leo said. “But I drew a different lesson from the plague, and that is, don’t wait. Things may never be--what was that word you used?--normal, that’s it, normal again. No telling what’ll happen tomorrow, I say, so we’d better arrange today the best we can. And on account of that, I didn’t figure I ought to wait before I came to see you.”

  George hesitated before replying. As far as he was concerned, Leo’s lesson was absolutely the wrong one. Festina lente ran through his mind: make haste slowly. But the fact that Leo did draw lessons, even mistaken lessons, from what went on around him bumped the potter up a notch in George’s estimation. Most people, he was convinced, went through life without a clue it might hold patterns they could use.

  Irene said, “Your brother is a potter, too, isn’t he?”

  “Zeno? That’s right, though his shop is over by the other side of St. Demetrius’ church.” Leo smiled at Irene. “Either you have a right fine memory, or you’ve been asking questions about me.”

  “Everyone in this family has a very good memory,” Irene said primly. That was on the whole true, even if Theodore sometimes showed a maddening inability to remember what George had told him to do five minutes earlier.

  “That’s nice,” Leo said, willing to pretend to believe Irene hadn’t been investigating his family. He’d also been doing some investigating, for he went on, “I’m sorry God didn’t give either of you sibs who lived.”

  “I had an older brother,” George said. “I don’t even remember him; he died when I was a baby.”

  “I had an older sister and a younger brother.” Irene’s eyes were sad as she looked into the past. “God’s will.” She grew brisk once more. “But you didn’t come here to talk about old sorrows, but the chance for new joys.”

  “The chance, yes.” Leo scratched his nose. “You do keep a clean shop, George, I’ll say that for you. Hardly any stink of leather in the air.”

  Though George bristled, he made a point of not letting Leo notice. Making and repairing shoes was a perfectly respectable trade, but not one of high class. By implying as much, Leo was making a bid for a bigger dowry to accompany Sophia if she married Constantine: it was astonishing how a fatter bride portion could balance social stigma in the scales.

  But George in turn remarked, “You and your son are lucky fellows, not to be melted to tallow standing in front of your kilns day after day.” He had no intention of conceding that potters stood any higher on the social scale than did shoemakers.

  Leo grunted. “Well, when we talk about Sophia’s dowry, what are we talking about? Twenty solidi, something like that?”

  George stared at him, admiring the effrontery of such a forthright thief. “You’re going to lose this girl if you go on that wa
y” he said. “We aren’t nobility, and neither are you.”

  Sulkily, Leo said, “How much, then? It would have to be a pretty price, I’ll tell you. Constantine has his admirers, yes he does.”

  Irene said, “When you married Helen, Leo, her bride portion was what? Two solidi and a little silver, wasn’t it?”

  “How did you know that?” Leo turned red as the fire under one of his kilns. George wondered the same thing, although his wife’s skill at ferreting out such tidbits roused respect in him, not the horror Leo obviously felt. By that horror, George judged Irene had the straight goods.

  “Never mind how I know,” she said crisply. “That hasn’t got anything to do with anything. What matters is, it’s true. Are you so much richer than your father that you think people want to beggar themselves to join your family? And I hear Zeno s wife brought a smaller dowry than yours.”

  “Did she?” Leo exclaimed. “She puts on airs she doesn’t deserve, then.” Now he sounded indignant. He also sounded as if he hadn’t known what his sister-in-law’s bride portion had been. George wondered from whom Irene had pried that little nugget.

  “If you’re going to be unreasonable about these things, there’s no point in us even talking,” George said. “In fact, I probably wouldn’t even be talking with you now if I didn’t know how sweet Constantine was on Sophia.” He didn’t know that, but had a feeling it was so from the way the youth had glanced back at him when they passed on the street.

  And, for a wonder, his shot proved as effective as Irene’s had been. Leo turned red again, this time from annoyance rather than embarrassment. He said, “I told him not to show that on the sleeve of his tunic.”

  “I have nothing against love matches,” George said. “A lot of times, they work out as well as the other sort. But I don’t see any reason a bride should pay a fancy price so she and the groom can end up doing what they’ve wanted to do anyhow.”

  “If she brings a small portion, that makes your family and mine both look bad,” Leo said. “People will find out about it and gossip.” He sent Irene a glance filled with anything but delight unalloyed.

  “I don’t gossip,” she said sweetly. “But I will say you have a point, since I know people who do.”

  Leo got to his feet. “I thank you for the wine. Maybe you were right after all, and we shouldn’t talk this all the way through till we know Thessalonica is safe. After this, I don’t know as I want to talk with anybody else, either.

  Good day to you both.” He edged out of the shop and fled.

  No sooner had he gone than Sophia and Theodore hurried downstairs. Angrily, Sophia said, “Now look what you did! You scared him away. He won’t come back anymore, and my life is ruined. Ruined!” She burst into tears.

  George and Irene, by contrast, burst into laughter. That made Sophia cry harder than ever. She glared at them from red, wet eyes. George said, “He will be back, little one--I promise. The only thing your mother and I did was show him the two of us weren’t fools.”

  Sophia stared at him doubtfully. “Do you really think so?” She wanted to believe him, that was plain.

  “No doubt about it,” Irene said. “He thought we’d dower you with everything we own, just for the sake of joining his snooty family. Now that he knows better, we should get on well enough.”

  “He wants this match, too,” George added. “Otherwise, he would have waited till the siege was over before he started talking about it, the way we were going to do.”

  “Oh,” Sophia said in a small voice. Her smile was like the sun coming out from behind rain clouds. “I hope you’re right.” It was evident she wanted the match at least as much as Constantine did. George resolved not to let Leo know that; it would make the dickering harder.

  Theodore asked, “Mother, how did you know what bride portions Constantine’s mother and aunt brought with them?”

  “From Claudia, of all people,” Irene answered. Before George could say anything worried, she went on, “It didn’t have anything to do with this match, either. I forget whether it was last year or the year before--last year, I guess, because it was after the plague--and Claudia was complaining about people who pretended they were finer than they really were, and she mentioned Helen and her dowry, and her sister-in-law, too. I thought it was in poor taste myself, poor Helen being dead and all, but I didn’t forget it, either. And when I turned out to need it, there it was.”

  “Your mother,” George told Theodore, not joking at all, “never forgets anything.”

  “Me?” Irene said. “Me? Who was it, about the time we got married, who could tell which team had won the chariot races at every running for the past fifty years before then, and which rider had the most wins for each team, and how this one bald driver hadn’t missed a running for fifteen years--”

  George maintained a dignified silence. That was how he thought of it, at any rate. Its chief effect was making his wife and both his children laugh at him. Seeing that, he tried the opposite course: “That bald fellow had a brother who was a driver, too, and their father trained their horses, same as he’d been doing for twenty-three years before that, and ...”

  Such arcana proved every bit as risible as dignified silence. George gave up and started repairing a sandal. Sophia, having swung from sad to furious to eager and hopeful in the course of a couple of minutes, came over and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you, Papa,” she said.

  “For what?” George asked, confused now.

  “For a bald charioteer,” his daughter answered, which confused him worse than ever. But he’d just started talking about marrying her off, and she didn’t hate him for it. Confused or not, he didn’t suppose he was doing too badly there.

  “Magic,” Rufus said decisively, peering out toward the encampment of the Slavs and Avars.

  “I think you’re right.” George nodded. “That’s what they’ll hit us with next.” He sniffed. The wind was out of the west, and swept the savory odors of roasting mutton and beef from the enemy’s camp into the city. Sighing, he said, “They’re still eating well. I wish we were.”

  “We’ve got enough to get us through,” Rufus answered, which lifted George’s spirits: if anyone knew how Thessalonica stood for food, the veteran was the man.

  He went on, “What surprises me is that the barbarians are keeping their army so well fed. They must have dragged in all the livestock for miles around, the bastards. Even after they go, the countryside’ll be bare as a sheared sheep for years.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” George said, an admission that bothered him: he was the sort of man who tried to think as far ahead as he could. “Meat will be expensive for a long time to come.”

  “We can always eat old Avars,” Rufus said, “except I think they’d be tougher than your shoeleather.”

  “Shoeleather!” George exclaimed. “If they’re slaughtering all the cattle and sheep, what will I use for shoeleather?”

  “Don’t know that one, either,” Rufus said, if not cheerfully than with a good deal less concern than George had for the question. “What we’ve got to do is, we’ve got to get the siege over with so we can worry about things like shoeleather again.”

  Things like deciding whether I want to see Sophia marry Constantine, George thought. But the veteran was right. “What sort of magic do you think they’ll throw at us?” he asked.

  “The bishop and I have been talking about that,” Rufus answered. George had a hard time gauging his tone: was he proud of having become part of the city’s inner circle or scornful of the man with whom he was conferring? A bit of both, the shoemaker judged. Rufus continued, “Eusebius thinks we’re going to come up against it before too long, that they’re going to throw all the magic they have at us to try and break in. If they don’t make it, they’ll likely give up and go away.”

  “That sounds sensible,” George said.

  “It may be true anyway.” Rufus’ smile was crooked. “The bishop kept giving me all sorts of reasons out of the Holy Scri
ptures why he thought it was so. After a while, I started to doze off.”

  “You don’t think he’s right?” the shoemaker asked.

  “Oh, I think he’s right, but not for any of the reasons he was going on about,” Rufus said. “You look at what’s left for the Slavs and Avars to eat out there, you look at the really bad weather that’s bound to come, and you can’t see them besieging us forever. The only thing about the cold I don’t like is that it makes pestilences spread slower--but their magic for that sort of thing is pretty good anyhow. We’ve found out about that.”

  “We’ve found out their magic for a lot of different things is pretty good,” George said. “I tried telling that to Eusebius, but--”

  Rufus held up his hand. “I’ve heard that story, you know, George. And do you know what Bishop Eusebius said to me? He said, “Rufus, if I’d only listened to that shoemaker, what’s-his-name, we’d all be better off now, because he sure knew how strong the Slavs’ magic was.’ “

  “Really?” George’s eyes widened. He didn’t even mind being called what’s-his-name. “Did he really say that?”

  Rufus leered evilly. “No.”

  The gesture George used invited Rufus to perform an act so vile, and so anatomically unlikely, that God, when He was writing the Holy Scriptures, hadn’t thought to condemn it. The veteran laughed till he held his sides. “If you could have seen the look on your face . . .” He dissolved again.

  “Funny,” George said. “I laugh.”

  “Sorry,” Rufus said, sounded about a quarter sincere. “I couldn’t resist.”

  “You didn’t try,” George said. Rufus did not deny it. By the nature of things, Rufus hardly could have denied it. George thought for a bit. He could either stay angry at the veteran or he could forget about it. He forgot about it, suffusing himself in a warmly Christian glow of virtue. Besides, forgetting about it let him keep on questioning Rufus instead of cursing him. His relentless curiosity insisted that was the better choice. He asked, “What kind of magic does Bishop Eusebius think will be in the next big push from the Slavs and Avars? You never quite answered.”