“They think so,” George answered. Now he nodded at Ithys and Ampelus and Stusippus, at Crotus and Nephele. “They wouldn’t have brought me here if they didn’t. And they’ve seen more of the Slavs and Avars than you have.”
“You think so, do you?” Gorgonius touched the cap that had come down from Perseus. “With this, I can see what I like. I told you that already.” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I didn’t much like what I saw, I will say that. But to save arrogant Thessalonica with something the town’s too proud to believe in ... it gravels me, that it does.”
“If I get down there, if I can get into the city, I’ll be bringing back a priest, don’t forget,” George said. “The old powers can’t fight the Slavs and Avars and their gods and demons, not alone. We know that. What I believe in” --he had to keep coming up with circumlocutions for Christianity-- “may not be strong enough by itself, either. Together . . . we can hope, anyway.”
“Hope came out of the box last of all,” Gorgonius said. He made that clicking noise again and stood very still, taking his own time to make up his mind. When Crotus started to say something, the carpenter tossed his head in negation. “I’ve heard all I want.” The centaur did not try to speak again. The satyrs masturbated nervously.
Outside, far off in the distance, a wolf howled. But it was not an ordinary wolf; George had grown too well acquainted with the horrible howls of the Slavic wolf-demons to mistake them for anything but what they were. Very slightly, Nephele shuddered.
Maybe that howl helped Gorgonius decide. Maybe, concentrating as he was, he didn’t even hear it. But he came out of his brown study only moments after its last echoes had died away. Holding out the cap to George, he growled, “You’d better bring this back, or I’ll be angry at you.”
“If I don’t bring it back,” the shoemaker answered, “odds are I’ll be too dead to care.”
The first thing George discovered about being invisible was that he wasn’t invisible to himself. That came as something of a relief. Not being the most graceful man ever born, he had trouble planting his feet even when he could see exactly where he was putting them. Had he not known where they were going, his best guess was that he would have broken his leg, or maybe his neck, long before he got close to Thessalonica.
The next thing he discovered was that, when he was invisible, people didn’t notice him. That made perfect logical sense, of course--it was why he needed Perseus’ cap in the first place. It brought problems, too, though, problems he hadn’t expected. As he walked up and down Lete’s narrow streets, people didn’t get out of the way for him. Why should they have done so? They had no idea he was there. All the dodging was up to him. Once he had to say “Excuse me” out of thin air, which startled the man who’d collided with him.
Something else occurred to him after he bumped into the villager. He asked Gorgonius about it when he got back to the carpenter’s place. “Took me years to wonder about that,” Gorgonius said, “but, seeing what you’re going to be doing, I can understand how it would be on your mind. Best I can tell, dogs don’t take my scent when I have the cap on, and nobody and nothing hears you unless you speak out loud.”
“Oh, good,” George said. “By everything I’ve heard, wolves use their noses more than their eyes, but if dogs don’t notice your odor, I’m going to hope the wolf-demons won’t notice mine.”
“I don’t know anything about demons,” Gorgonius said. “If their power is strong enough, they might be able to beat the strength in the cap.”
“The power inhering in them is not to be despised,” Nephele said.
George didn’t despise the wolf-demons, or any of the other powers the Slavs and Avars controlled--if the control didn’t run in the other direction. They frightened him out of his wits. “I don’t see that I have much choice,” he said. “This cap is my best chance--probably my only chance--to get back to Thessalonica. I’m going to use it. I’ll be back here with Father Luke two or three days after I set out--I hope.”
“May Fortune favor you,” Nephele said. She spoke of Fortune as a power in its own right. As a Christian, George knew he wasn’t supposed to think of it that way. As a man who sat down with some friends to roll dice every now and then, he couldn’t help thinking of it so.
He slept in the straw in Gorgonius’ bam that night; it made a better bed than the one of dry leaves he’d shared with Ampelus and Stusippus, and not only because he didn’t have a couple of satyrs in it with him. When he woke up, he didn’t look like a young forest anymore: he wasn’t covered with leaves. Being covered with straw instead, he looked like a young unmowed field instead.
Gorgonius gave him a slab of bread and a stoppered jug that almost surely contained wine. Nephele and Crotus both made an elaborate pretense of not looking at it. Though they turned their heads away, their eyes had minds of their own, and kept sliding back toward the jug. The satyrs, more than humanly fond of wine, made no bones about watching the jar.
As soon as George could see his feet and the path they would take, he left Lete. His breath smoked in the chilly air. He told himself firmly that he would presume no one but he could see it. Had the truth been otherwise, Gorgonius would have mentioned it. . . wouldn’t he?
George knew the direction in which he’d have to go. He’d traveled part of that road already. He wished he’d been able to travel all of it. Then he wouldn’t have had to involve himself with such potent pagan powers as Perseus’ cap. Even if he was less devout than many in Thessalonica, he did believe.
“Well,” he murmured, “if Eusebius wants to impose a penance on me after all this is over, I’ll observe it. I just want this to be all over.”
He hadn’t been walking for more than half an hour before he spotted Xanthippe and Demetrius out on a meadow. The female centaur and the young one (young enough, perhaps, not to have been in a position to know St. Paul when he’d traveled through this land more than five centuries before) both moved easily, showing no signs of the wounds they’d taken from the Slavic wolf-demons, wounds that would have laid George up for weeks or lolled him.
They also showed no sign of having any idea he was around. He did not call out to them. No telling who-- or what---might be listening. Good thing Ampelus didn’t rescue John, the shoemaker thought. He wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut long enough to get full good from this cap.
Even that uncharitable judgment of his friend reminded George how much he missed Thessalonica and all its people. He shook his head, revising that thought as soon as he had it. He didn’t miss Menas even a tittle.
He drank some wine. Between that and the steady exercise of tramping through the hill country, he felt warm enough, though the early-morning air still had a chilly edge to it. The right side of his mouth twisted up into an ironic smile. He’d had more exercise lately than he’d ever wanted.
The morning was still young when he saw his first wolf. It wasn’t far from the place where he and the centaurs and satyrs had fought the Slavic demons, and stood by the side of the path, as if waiting for him to come past so it could finish him for good instead of just driving him back into the hills.
He stopped in his tracks. Knowing he was invisible was one thing. Believing it when his life depended on its being so proved something else again. The wolf-demon’s tongue lolled out, impossibly red against its dark gray fur. Its eyes glittered with alertness. Its head turned this way and that. For a moment, it looked straight at him. Dared he believe it could not see him, could not sense him?
If he didn’t dare believe that, what point to going any farther? He walked past the wolf, close enough so that he could have kicked it in the ribs. As he moved past, the wolf-demon let out a puzzled whine, as if it had the feeling it should have been noticing something it was missing. George reached up and touched the leather cap. Now he believed.
He went almost jauntily after that. He caught himself just before he started whistling a happy little tune. That would have been stupid--odds were, fatally s
tupid.
More wolves than the first one guarded the trails down to Thessalonica. He passed them all. Some seemed to have no notion he was anywhere nearby. Others, like the first, looked and sounded discontented, but could not understand why they dimly suspected something was wrong.
And then George approached Vucji Pastir. The Slavic demigod who shepherded wolves had a couple of his charges close by; he was talking to them in a language made up of yips and growls. His glowing green beard, George saw, had grown out to its full magnificence once more: the barbering his own sword had done proved as impermanent as the wounds the centaurs had taken.
Vucji Pastir knew he was coming. That was the impression he got, anyhow, from the demigod’s demeanor. Vucji Pastir urged his wolves out onto the trail as a man hunting boar would have urged on his hounds. The wolf-demons whined and lashed their tails.
They were, George realized joyfully, trying to tell their master they could find no sign of any impertinent Christian shoemaker. Vucji Pastir peered this way and that. Once, as the wolves had done before, the demigod looked right at George--and, evidently, saw nothing.
Or perhaps, as the wolves had also done, Vucji Pastir saw next to nothing. He frowned, scratched at the roots of his green hair--and then looked in another direction. George let out a silent sigh of relief. He didn’t think Perseus’ cap would get a harder test till he drew far closer to Thessalonica.
He was soon proved wrong. He hadn’t gone more than another couple of furlongs before he encountered Vucji Pastir again, this time with a different pack of wolf-demons. Again the Slavic demigod almost spotted him. Again the demigod apparently could not believe his own eyes.
As George hurried on toward the city, he wondered how Vucji Pastir had been behind him and then in front of him without, so far as an impertinent Christian shoemaker could tell, crossing the intervening space. Had the shepherd of the wolves been first in one place and then in the other? Or had he manifested himself in both at once? “Would he show up again and again, on the lookout for George, all the way down to the city wall?
Sure enough, George saw him and he did not see George several more times, there in the hill country. Toward the end of the day--and also a good deal of the way toward Thessalonica--the shepherd of the wolves looked so upset at having faded to spot George that the shoemaker was tempted to go up to him, tap him on the shoulder, and say, “Excuse me there, friend, but can I help you find somebody?”
He convinced himself, after some silent argument, that that was not a good idea, no matter how he would have enjoyed watching a demigod jump.
Despite Vucji Pastir, despite the wolf-demons, George made better time down toward Thessalonica than he’d expected, approaching the city before the sun had sunk in the west. That was not what he wanted. If he went up to a postern gate in the dead of night, he could slip off Perseus’ cap and claim no one had noticed him till he got there. If he tried that in the afternoon, the guards would see him materialize out of thin air. So would the Slavs, with results liable to be unpleasant.
Waiting for nightfall proved harder than he’d expected. The woods near Thessalonica were full of Slavs, some hunting, others taking axes to trees and bushes to fuel their fires. They had no notion he was there but, like the fellow back in Lete, kept doing their best to blunder into his invisible but not incorporeal form. If one of them did chance to trip over his foot, he did not think a simple, friendly “Excuse me” would set matters right.
Carefully, he worked his way around the wall till he neared the Litaean Gate. The men on the wall there would be likeliest to know him and to recognize his voice when he came up to the gate. So would the men at the postern gate by the main gateway. If he presented himself and they wouldn’t let him into the city... he didn’t want to think about that.
By the time he’d found a position from which he could keep an eye on the gate, twilight was falling. The Slavs built up the fires in their encampments and started cooking their supper. The odors of roasted meat and bubbling porridge made George’s stomach growl. He’d long since finished the bread and wine Gorgonius had given him.
Night quickly swallowed twilight. George waited for the campfires to the back to embers, and for most of the Slavs to shelter under blankets and furs and whatever else they used to ward off the cold of night. George wasn’t using anything to ward off the cold of night. His teeth chattered. If he froze to death out here in the woods, would his corpse stay invisible till a storm knocked the cap off his head?
“One more thing I don’t want to find out,” he muttered.
By what he judged to be the fourth hour of the night, the encampments were about as quiet as they ever got. He started picking his way between a couple of disorderly clumps of huts and tents. One hand held the cap tight on his head, the other was on his swordhilt. If by some mischance he did run into a Slav, he thought his best bet was to kill the fellow quickly, giving him no chance to cry out.
Instead of a Slav, he almost ran into the Avar wizard.
The fellow loomed up before him, outline distorted by the fringes and furs of his costume. George froze: metaphorically, to go with the literal cold that had afflicted him. From everything Gorgonius had said, from everything George himself had seen, the Avar should have had no idea he was there.
But the wizard was as wary as the wolves and as Vucji Pastir. He murmured something in his incomprehensible language and stared right at--right through--George. He took a step forward, one hand outstretched, as if to seize the shoemaker.
Heart pounding, George jumped to one side. If the Avar priest had pursued him, he would have run for the gate with every bit of strength he had left. But the Avar kept on walking toward his own tent, which, George saw, lay not far away. Maybe he hadn’t sensed George at all. The shoemaker could not make himself believe it.
He looked up to the wall, wondering which of his friends were on it now. When Menas locked him out of Thessalonica and the Slavs bore down on him, he hadn’t thought such things would matter again. How glad he was to discover they did.
He was within bowshot of the wall now, in the empty area the Slavs and Avars entered only when they were attacking. There was the iron-plated bulk of the Litaean Gate ahead, and there, inset into the wall, the postern gate beside it. That postern gate drew him like a lodestone.
Once there, he found a new question: how hard to rap on it. Too softly, and the guards wouldn’t notice. Too hard, and the Slavs would. His first tap was too tentative. His second was so loud, it frightened him. He looked anxiously back toward the barbarians’ encampment. No shouts rose there. He knocked again.
A tiny grill in the center of the gate opened. “Who’s there?” a guard demanded. “Stand and be recognized.”
“It’s me--George,” George said. “For the love of--” He cut that off, not knowing what God’s name would do to the cap. “I managed to get away from the Slavs and Avars and make it back here. Let me in.”
Through the iron grill, he saw one of the guard’s eyes and part of his cheek. “Stand and be recognized,” the fellow repeated. “If you’re really a Slav who speaks Latin, you’re going to be a dead Slav who used to speak Latin.”
“But I’m in front of-- Oh.” Again, George broke off. He was glad the guard couldn’t see him blush. The guard couldn’t see him at all, because he was still wearing the cap he hadn’t wanted to test with God’s name. He’d remembered it in that context, but not in the context of making him invisible. Feeling a fool once more, he took it from his head.
The guard recoded. “Kyrie eleison!” he exclaimed. “It is you, George. How in Christ’s holy name did you just spring out of thin air like that? I’d have sworn nobody was there.”
“Let me in,” George said. If the cap couldn’t bear holy names, it wouldn’t be much good in Thessalonica, or maybe ever after. George hoped that wasn’t so; otherwise, he’d have a much harder time getting Father Luke out to Lete. “Open the gate, curse it, before the Slavs figure out I’m here.”
Wood
scraped on wood as the guard unbarred the postern gate. It swung open. George darted back into the city. The guard closed the gate after him and set the bars back in place. George allowed himself the luxury of a long, heartfelt sigh of relief.
“Don’t know how you managed to stay in one piece out there, but I’m glad you did,” the guard said. He turned away, continuing over his shoulder. “Come along with me. Tell the rest of the crew how you did it.”
George didn’t want to tell anybody how he’d done it. He also didn’t want to return to his normal routine, which would make slipping out of Thessalonica again all the harder. And so, wondering what would happen, he set the leather cap back on his head.
“I want to tell you, George, you frightened me out of--” The guard noticed George hadn’t answered. He turned around to look for the man he’d admitted. “George?” His eyes got big. He crossed himself. “George? Where in the devil’s name did you go?” He scratched his head. “Were you ever here at all, or am I daydreaming--nightdreaming? I’ve got to get more sleep, that’s all there is to it.” He yawned.
“What’s going on there?” one of the other guards called from the main gate. Since the fellow who had admitted George didn’t know what was going on, his explanation was fumbling at best. While he stuttered and mumbled, George slipped past him, heading home.
He was glad he could do so still cloaked in invisibility. When the guard signed himself, he’d again feared the magic in Perseus’ cap would dissolve. He wondered why it hadn’t: perhaps because the guard had made the sign of the cross to protect himself, not to lash out at that which had startled him.
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