“Earth, most likely,” Rufus said. “They’ve tried air and fire and water more. I don’t know whether they can make the wall come down that way, but that’s what the bishop thinks they’ll try.”
“It does make sense, I suppose.” George kicked at the walkway. “I don’t want the wall to crumble under my feet.”
“Neither do I,” Rufus said. “They’ve come too cursed close to managing that without using any magic at all. If they have some gods whose special province is earthquakes, say. . .”
“That could be very bad,” George agreed. “Are there any special prayers we can use to keep earthquakes from happening?”
“Eusebius is looking for some,” Rufus answered. “Me, I have my doubts. If there really were prayers like that, everybody would know them and use them, and we wouldn’t have earthquakes anymore.”
“Something to that, I shouldn’t wonder.” It was, in fact, the sort of logical look at a problem George might have used himself. He said, “If we can’t pray to stop a quake, what can we do?”
“Pray that the gods of the Slavs and Avars can’t start one that wouldn’t have happened without them, I suppose,” Rufus said. “That’s better than nothing, and it lets us fight them on our own ground.” George grimaced. Rufus grinned. “Relax, pal. I’m not smart enough to do that on purpose.”
“If you say so,” George answered, which won him a dirty look from the veteran. He held up a placating hand. “If you were stupid, Rufus, you would have done something that got you killed years ago.”
Rufus laughed. “Ah, there’s a deal of truth in that, I tell you. A soldier starting out, he’s all balls and no brains.” He laughed again, on a different note this time. “Maybe it’s a good thing I came to the trade with Narses for my first general. He didn’t have any balls at all--first eunuch I ever heard of who wanted to be a fighting man, and oh! wasn’t he a fine one--but brains? That man had more brains than any five I’ve met since.” After looking around, he lowered his voice. “And that includes Eusebius, too.”
Also quietly, George said, “I’ve always thought the bishop’s pretty smart.”
“Oh, he is, he is,” Rufus said. “That’s what he is, sure enough: pretty smart. Lf we had Narses here in Thessalonica, now, if we had Narses, the Slavs and Avars would have gone away weeks ago, and they would have thought it was their idea, and they would have been proud of it.”
“He sounds like quite a leader,” George said, thinking he sounded like Rufus’ beloved first commander, seen across most of a lifetime through a warm haze of memory.
“He was,” Rufus said. “Remember, he’s the fellow who finished the job of conquering Italy from the Goths after Belisarius marched up and down and up and down till his feet got flat but couldn’t make those shaggy bastards he down and quit. And Narses only had dribs and drabs of money and men to work with, too, on account of most everything got sent to the frontier with the Persians when the war started up there.”
“That’s so,” George said slowly. Maybe Rufus knew what he was talking about after all. He had a way of knowing what he was talking about. But-- “Isn’t Italy full of Lombards nowadays?”
“It sure is,” Rufus said. “And do you know what? That’s Narses’ doing, too. After Justinian finally upped and dropped dead, Sophia--his nephew Justin’s wife, you know: the new Empress--heard how Narses had booted all the Goths and Franks out of Italy, and you know what she did?”
“What?” George asked, willing to oblige the veteran.
He needn’t have bothered; Rufus talked right through him: “She sent him a distaff so he could spin thread. He was a eunuch, after all, so she figured she could insult him no matter what he’d done for the Roman Empire. But he had his revenge. He’d had Lombard mercenaries on his side fighting in Italy, and he invited the whole cursed tribe down. They were plenty glad to come, too, I’ll bet. The country next door to theirs was filling up with Avars about then.”
George thought about that. His shiver had nothing to do with the weather. “Any country next door to the Avars is a good one to get out of, you ask me.”
“You mean, like this one?” Rufus asked, which was such a good question, George didn’t answer it.
At first, George thought the service at St. Demetrius’ basilica convened for prayer against earthquakes a coincidence. Then he reminded himself that Rufus and Eusebius had been putting their heads together. If they thought the Slavs and Avars liable to try working earth magic, the bishop would naturally do his best to forestall it.
“Why does the earth quake, Father?” Sophia asked as they walked toward the basilica.
“Because God is angry with us,” Irene said before George could answer.
“I know that,” Sophia said impatiently. “What I mean is, how does He make the earth shake? Or how do the gods of the Slavs and Avars do that, so He can stop them?”
“They jump up and down inside the earth, and when their feet hit, everything in there shakes, and so do we,” Theodore said.
“Let’s say that’s true,” George said. “What is there for their feet to land on that’s any harder than anything else? And if there isn’t any one part inside the earth that’s harder than another, how can they jump up and down at all?”
“They’re gods,” Theodore said, “or demons, anyhow. Who knows what they can or can’t do? Besides that Avar wizard, I mean.”
George chewed on that. “Of course God--and demons, I suppose--can break natural laws now and then. That’s what miracles are. But if natural laws got broken all the time, we wouldn’t have any natural laws.”
“Earthquakes only happen every now and then,” Sophia said.
“Thank God,” Irene added, and made the sign of the cross.
Theodore, being of the age where he constantly had to challenge his father, did so: “If demons jumping up and down inside the earth don’t make earthquakes, what does?”
“My father said that his father said he once heard a philosopher traveling to Athens say--” George began.
Irene’s loud and pointed sniff interrupted him. “Philosophers followed the pagan gods,” she reminded him, “and God proved the stronger. So why should anyone care what the philosophers said?”
“Why should anyone care if I get a word in edgewise?” George said. “I don’t think anyone does care if I get a word in edgewise.” Having won a small space of silence with that outburst, he proceeded to fill it: “What this fellow said, if I have it right, didn’t have anything to do with God or demons at all. He said the earth is full of caves and caverns that go deep, deep, deep underground, and when air rumbles through them in underground storms, that’s what makes earthquakes.”
Theodore delightedly clapped his hands together. “Earthfarts!” he cried, hopping in the air with glee. “Let’s all pray that God can keep the Slavic demons from farting underground. Amen!”
“I get asked a serious question, I give a serious answer, and what thanks do I get for it?” George asked the air. “This. Straighten up, you foolish loon,” he growled at Theodore, who had doubled over in laughter. He was having a hard time not laughing himself, but he would have given himself over to the city torturer before admitting it.
He was not the only one who knew their son well, either. In tones suggesting the Last Judgment, Irene said, “Theodore, before you think of breaking wind in the middle of Bishop Eusebius’ prayer, imagine what your father will do to you after you come out of the church.”
Theodore did imagine it. George could see him weighing whether the disaster to follow would be worth the entertainment during. What he could not see, and what worried him, was which way his son would decide.
When they got to the basilica, Irene and Sophia went upstairs to the women’s gallery. George and Theodore made their way toward the altar. Along with keeping his elbows up to move other men out of the way, George kept looking around to see where Menas was. When he spotted the rich nobleman, he made a point of staying away from him. It wasn’t fear: more on the order
of not borrowing trouble, since every time the two of them came anywhere near each other, things only got worse.
People muttered back and forth while they waited for Bishop Eusebius. Not everyone knew why the bishop had summoned the folk of Thessalonica. Theodore made himself look wise and well connected by explaining to anyone who would listen. George kept his own counsel. Being thought close to the powerful was nothing he deemed important. Besides, Eusebius would do his own explaining soon enough.
Here came the bishop, behind a couple of muscular deacons swinging thuribles from which came the incense George often thought of as the odor of piety. Eusebius, his clever face more deeply lined than it had been when the siege began, took his place behind the altar. He raised his hands in a gesture of benediction that was at the same time a request for silence. When that silence proved slow in coming, the deacons stared out at the congregation so sternly, they soon obtained it.
“Kyrie eleison--Lord, have mercy,” Eusebius said. “Christe eleison--Christ, have mercy.” George echoed those prayers. So did everyone else in the basilica, the women in their gallery along with the men below. Eusebius said, “Servants of Christ, brethren, my friends: I have not bid you come to any ordinary divine liturgy. We are indeed here to beg God to have mercy on us in our struggle against the barbarians’ vicious onslaughts.”
In spite of the fiercely scowling deacons, a low murmur ran through the basilica from people who hadn’t heard why Eusebius wanted them there or had got a garbled account that needed correcting.
Eusebius went on, “We have reason to believe the Slavs and Avars are wickedly consorting with the demons who, in their pride, reckon themselves gods, and seek to inspire those demons, whose province is the infernal regions, to overthrow the fortifications of this great and God-guarded city--fortifications the aforementioned barbarians have proved unable to overcome--by causing the ground to tremble and shake in the horrors of an earthquake, thereby transforming Thessalonica in the wink of an eye from town to tomb.”
He brought out the sentence all in one breath, without the slightest hesitation. George admired that as much as he resigned himself to yet another dose of Eusebius’ mortuary rhetoric.
The bishop went on, “We pray Thee, God, all of us here, individually and collectively, to spare Thy city and thwart and bind the powers of the demons, in accordance with the greatness of Thine own power. Let us live as we have lived, secure in Thy bosom and that of the Roman Empire Thou lovest. Preserve the calm Thou hast ordained in the bowels of the earth.”
Theodore’s face assumed a look of intense concentration. Acting with the reflexive speed he’d acquired in combat on the walls of Thessalonica, George stepped on his son’s foot, hard enough to make Theodore grimace in pain. Whatever might have happened, didn’t.
After that, assuming a properly reverential attitude, one that might persuade God to pay some small attention to his prayer, wasn’t easy for George. He did his best, and had to hope it was good enough. He suspected the only prayer Theodore had offered up to the Lord was one for timely flatulence, and George had managed to keep that one from being granted.
Fortunately, Theodore hadn’t howled when George stepped on him. That meant the reverence of the rest of the congregation remained undisturbed all the way up to Eusebius’ final “Amen.” People filed out of the basilica of St. Demetrius chattering approvingly about what a moving prayer service it had been.
“And when they say ‘moving,’ “ George told his son, “they aren’t talking about their bowels.”
“Bishop Eusebius was,” Theodore retorted, whereupon George trod upon his toes again. This time, it didn’t help. Theodore dissolved into giggles, from which occasional mumbles of “bowels” and “earthfarts” emerged.
He and his father met Irene and Sophia across the street from the church. “I see you didn’t have to kill him-- quite,” Irene said to George, again proving she knew their son as well as he did.
“I didn’t do anything,” Theodore protested, a cry that would have resounded with greater sincerity had he not still been snickering from time to time.
“Yes, and it wasn’t for lack of effort that you didn’t, either,” George said, which singularly faded to abash his son.
Sophia gasped. George whirled, expecting some Slavic or Avar demigod to be menacing his daughter or someone else close by. Pointing, Sophia said, “Look--there’s Constantine. Isn’t he splendid?”
As far as George could see, the splendid one was still hulking, rather surly-looking, and pimple-besplotched. He knew Sophia was looking at the youth as much with her heart as with her eyes. Instead of examining Constantine (to his way of thinking, an unprofitable exercise), George nodded politely to Leo the potter. The father of Sophia’s object of affection nodded back. He studied Sophia and then, warily, Irene. The smile she gave Leo showed good teeth; George was sure he’d imagined fangs in her mouth. Almost sure.
“God will provide,” Irene said. Her husband wondered whether she was talking about Constantine or freedom from earthquakes. Probably both, he decided.
Several Avars on horseback stared in at Thessalonica. “They don’t look very happy, do they?” Dactylius said, sounding happy himself at the Avars’ appearance of unhappiness.
“No,” George said, and then, more sharply, “Uh-oh. Here comes that priest or wizard of theirs. I’d almost sooner pray never to see him again than for no more earthquakes for a while.”
“Amen to that,” Rufus said. “He’s caused us as much trouble as all their soldiers rolled together--throw in the Slavic wizards with him, I mean.”
“That’s so,” George agreed. “But it looks like the other Avars aren’t any happier to see him than they are to look at us, doesn’t it?”
“Good,” Rufus said with considerable relish.
One of the mounted men pointed toward Thessalonica. The priest shook his head and spread his hands in regret. Whatever the horseman wanted him to do, he couldn’t do it.
“No earthquake today?” Rufus’ voice oozed false regret. “Can’t make the walls fall down? Oh, poor ducks. What a shame they had to go up against the power of God. When you do that, you come off second best.” Realism replaced sarcasm for a moment. “Well, most of the time you do. The powers out there, they’re pretty tough.”
The Avar cuffed at the priest. George stared. Knowing how much power the man who wore furs and fringes controlled, he waited for the wizard to turn the horseman into a grub, or possibly even into a Roman scribe. But nothing happened, save that the Avar priest brought up a hand to keep the captain from hitting him more than once.
“Dissension in their ranks!” someone with a big, deep voice shouted from not far away: Menas. There he stood, atop the Litaean Gate. He’d been quiet till that moment, something so unusual it had kept George from noticing him. Now he went on, loudly obvious, “If they quarrel among themselves, our victory is assured.”
“Why doesn’t he keep still?” Dactylius asked.
“I don’t think he knows how,” George answered. “If he stops talking for long, he forgets he exists.”
“That’s no way to talk about a noble,” Rufus said in stern tones, then added, “But I won’t tell you you’re wrong, either.”
Menas waved his big, expensive, ostentatious war hammer. “We shall slaughter them, hip and thigh, root and branch.”
“Is he a wrestler, a gardener, or a soldier?” George asked.
“He’s a blowhard, that’s what he is,” Rufus said. “Haven’t seen him up on the wall for a bit. He must have heard that the truth gets told here, and the truth about him is that--”
“Hush,” Dactylius said. “He’s liable to hear you, and then you’ll have the same troubles with him that George does.”
“Not me.” Rufus’ hand dropped to the hilt of his sword. “He tries getting wise with me, he’ll regret it to the end of his days--and that’ll be soon.”
Out beyond the wall, the Avar captain was finally getting it through his head that the wizard
couldn’t give him what he wanted. He shouted to his companions. One of them produced a horn of polished brass that shone like gold even on a cloudy day. The fellow raised it to his lips and blew a long, unmelodious blast.
“Uh-oh,” George said, as he had a little while before on spying the wizard.
“Oh, dear,” Dactylius added. Rufus said something that expressed the same opinion a good deal more pungently. Slavs started tumbling out of the tents and little wooden shacks in which they sheltered from the elements. And, all along the wall, more horn blasts were presumably calling more Slavs out of more encampments.
“Something’s going on,” Rufus said, as good a statement of the obvious as George had heard in a long time. A moment later, the veteran added, “Here come the Slavs, all right.”
Almost indignantly, George said, “I thought we decided the Slavs and Avars would try magic against us next.”
“Maybe they did try it and it didn’t work, thanks to the prayers we sent up to God the other day,” Rufus answered. “Or maybe we were just flat-out wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to me, and I expect not to you, either, eh?”
George didn’t answer. He was watching the Slavs, who were indeed issuing from their encampments in large numbers. Most of the barbarians were clutching bows. They trotted toward the wall of Thessalonica and started loosing great flights of arrows.
Crouching behind a battlement, Dactylius said, “This must be what they mean when they talk about shooting so many arrows, they darken the sun as they come.”
“If one of ‘em hits you square, it’ll darken the sun for you, all right, and you can take that to church,” Rufus said.
As if to underscore his words, men up and down the length of the wall shouted and screamed as they were wounded. George heard Menas say, “Here, my good fellow, lean on me. I’ll get you down to safety and the help of a physician.” The shoemaker’s lip curled. Menas had found a way to get out of the dangerous part of the fighting, and to look good while he did it.
Thessalonica Page 27
