The shoemaker shrugged. “Not tonight, I don’t think,” he answered. “I have some work that could use finishing.” He shook his head. “I always seem to have some work that could use finishing. Ah, well--if you intend to keep eating, better to be too busy than the other way round.”
“That’s true.” Dactylius nodded several times, rapidly. “A man who isn’t doing anything can’t sell anything, and a man who can’t sell anything isn’t going to eat.”
As they drew near the basilica of St. Demetrius, George sniffed. The air in Thessalonica always smelled smoky, what with so many fires going to cook food and heat homes. Still. . . The militiaman came round a corner. George pointed. Sure enough, a black cloud was pouring out of the open doors of the church.
For a moment, everyone simply stared in dismay. As in any city, fire was the great fear in Thessalonica. Once every generation or two, a great blaze would level whole districts. Again, the shoemaker thought of all the fires burning all the time: lamps, cookfires, hearths, smiths’ fires, potters’ ovens…. No wonder the flames got loose every so often.
“It’s the saint’s ciborium burning!” Dactylius said.
Priests were dashing out of the basilica, past the six-columned dome erected over St. Demetrius’ tomb. Layfolk from nearby buildings came running. Those who had buckets of water splashed them onto the blaze. George could see at a glance that that was like trying to hold back the ocean with a spoon--the fire was far past putting out. If God was kind, it would not spread to the rest of the church, or to any other budding in Thessalonica.
“Not much wind,” Rufus said. “Sparks won’t go flying all over the place.” He’d been thinking along with George, then. “Something, anyhow,” he grunted.
Dactylius, who spent his days working with precious metal, eyed the silver dome of the ciborium. It wasn’t solid silver, but silver laid over wood--wood now burning. “That’s going to melt,” he said. “It will run just like water, and splash down onto the floor above the tomb.”
“It’ll be where anyone can grab it, you mean,” Rufus said, and Dactylius nodded. Rufus transformed himself from a tired old man walking home with his companions back into a militia officer. “We’ll have to form a perimeter around it, then, and keep people who don’t have any business inside the church from getting too close till the priests can gather up the metal.”
He drew his sword and advanced on the ciborium. George, Dactylius, and the rest of the militiamen in the group followed him. Dactylius had known what he was talking about: already melted silver was dripping down from the dome of the ciborium; smoke rose from the marble on which it landed. How much silver had been in the dome? It had to be hundreds of pounds.
“God bless you!” the priests called as the militiamen took up their stations around the monument to St. Demetrius.
“I want to tell you, He’d better,” Rufus said grimly.
George would gladly have echoed the officer. The church was filling rapidly, and not all the people were those the shoemaker was delighted to see. The smoke and the outcry the fire had created combined to bring out gawkers of every sort, from the merely curious to those who appeared at disasters to see what profit they could make from them.
When this latter sort saw the silver melting and dripping down to where they might get their hands on the lumps and globules, their expression reminded George of the look dogs wore in front of a butcher’s shop. He’d never seen so many hungry, avid, hopeful faces all together.
“Why don’t you go home?” he suggested to some of them. “Nothing here belongs to any of you.”
“Not yet,” a skinny man said. His friends laughed.
Priests and militiamen together lacked the numbers to keep the swelling crowd from doing as it would. The priests were not even armed--no, some of them had makeshift bludgeons, not that those would amount to much. George did not want to draw his sword, for fear of turning crowd into mob. Many of the Thessalonicans staring at the silver had weapons no worse than his.
“When it gets a little darker, they’ll likely rush us,” Rufus said. “That way, nobody will be able to tell for certain who does what.”
“I think you’re right,” George said, “and it gets dark a lot faster this time of year than it did a couple of months ago, say.”
Through smoke still thick enough to make him cough and force tears down cheeks no doubt sooty, the stretch of sky he could see got darker and darker. Color seemed to leach from the bricks of the basilica of St. Demetrius and the other nearby buildings.
In the gathering gloom, someone hissed, “Come on. Let’s get it. They can’t hardly spy us now.” The serpent’s voice must have sounded like that when it was tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Only a few feet away from George, Rufus suddenly jerked, as if he’d been hit by an arrow. For a moment, the shoemaker thought that was what had happened. Then he felt the power in the air, strong enough to make the hair stand straight up on his head. He looked around wildly, wondering if lightning was about to strike.
But it was not lightning, or not mere lightning. Rufus’ eyes were wide and staring. Whatever he saw had nothing to do with the burning ciborium or the thieves gathering around it. His mouth started to move. At first, no words came from it, as if the power about to speak through him had trouble matching its needs to those of his flesh and blood.
Then it did speak, in a voice that would have made George’s hair stand on end if it hadn’t been doing that already: “Men, citizens--barbarians around the wall!” After a moment, Rufus, or Whoever was using him as a channel, cried out again: “They’ve appeared unexpectedly, but all of you, all of us, we’ll hasten with arms for our homeland!”
Rufus repeated himself twice more, using, so far as George could tell, the identical words each time. By the time he fell silent, staggered, and almost fell as he came back to himself, the basilica was nearly empty. Almost everyone who had heard him had rushed to obey.
He turned toward George, who was having all he could do to keep from rushing to the walls at that very instant himself. “The saint…” Rufus began, and then tried again: “The martyr . . .” He shook his head. “Something happened,” he muttered, “but what?” He might have been the only person in the basilica of St. Demetrius who did not know what he’d said.
George started to explain, but a cry of wonder from behind him made him stop before he’d got out more than a couple of words. A priest was pointing at the wreckage of the ciborium. Wreckage it remained, but it was no longer burning. “We did not put out this fire,” he exclaimed, his eyes almost as round as Rufus’ had been. “God put out this fire.”
“Christ and God helped us, with the intercession of the glorious martyr,” Rufus said, again in a voice not quite his own. “The fire is quenched, and nothing here destroyed by it.” Where before he had given orders to the crowd, now he commanded the priests: “Shut the doors to the church and gather up the silver in peace and quiet. And remember that this place remains in good order because of what the martyred saint established.”
The veteran shivered like a man coming out of a warm house into an icy wind. Gently, cautiously, George touched him on the arm. “Come on,” the shoemaker said. “The Slavs are attacking the walls.”
“They are?” Rufus exclaimed. “What are we wasting time here in the church for, then?” Now he was himself again, and no one else. “Let’s get moving. We’ll teach the whoresons a lesson they’ll remember one cursed long time.”
He trotted out of the church at a ground-eating lope. George followed, along with the handful of other militiamen who had resisted the call that came through Rufus and stayed by the man himself. Behind them, the doors to the basilica slammed shut, with their bars thudding down to hold them so. Inside, the priests would be collecting the spilled silver … in peace and quiet.
People were running through the streets of Thessalonica, brandishing the spears and bows and swords and knives and occasional axes they had snatched up from their homes. “This is marvelous,” Rufus said. “I wouldn’t have thought even the barbarians at the gates would get everybody moving this way. I wonder what did it.”
“It was you,” George said, but Rufus, now, paid little attention to him when he tried to tell what had happened. Power had not only filled him, but filled him to overflowing, so that he had neither memory nor even great interest in what he had set in motion. So, at any rate, it appeared to George, who was viewing it from the outside. He wondered what being filled with the power of the saint felt like. He doubted he would ever know.
Many of the townsfolk, not being part of the militia, had no assigned place on the walls. They went up anyway, and shouted curses and abuse at whoever was on the far side. George supposed that would do Thessalonica no harm; if any of those curses stuck to the Slavs, it might even do some good.
His own place on the wall was on the western stretch where he and his comrades in the militia had taken their turns as watchmen, near the Litaean Gate. That meant traversing most of the city, as St. Demetrius’ church stood over in the northeastern part of town.
“Here we are,” Rufus said when they reached their proper section of the wall. The old veteran sounded winded. George did not blame him, and contented himself with a nod by way of reply. When you made shoes, you sat or stood in the same place all day, which did not do wonders for your endurance. George’s heart thudded like a drum.
Climbing the stairs up to the wall made it beat even harder and faster; he wondered if anyone had fallen over dead rushing to the defense of Thessalonica. They gained the walkway and looked out into the gathering dusk. His heart pounded harder still, now not from exertion but from astonishment and alarm.
Beside him, Rufus murmured, “Sweet Mother of God, it’s a whole swarm of them.”
The word was better than any George had found to apply to the Slavs. Thousands of men milled around outside the city, all of them carrying weapons of one kind or another. Some looked to be mounting attacks against the monastery of St. Matrona, leaning ladders against its walls and trying to climb up them. The monks overturned some of those ladders as George watched, and threw stones down onto the heads of the Slavs down below.
“Do you know,” he said, discovering he had breath enough to speak again, “I think they think they’re attacking the city wall.”
“They couldn’t be that stupid,” Rufus said, but then, after he’d watched them for a couple of minutes, he shook his head in wonder. “I take it back. Maybe they
“It’s getting dark,” George said. “There’s a little mist in the air. They must have taken the long way round to get at Thessalonica from the west, because everything we’ve heard about the fighting is that it’s been off to the east and north. So here they’ve come, they’ve never been anywhere near the city before, and what do they do? They see strong walls, so they think they’re doing the right thing by storming them.”
“You make sense,” Rufus said, a compliment that delighted the shoemaker. His superior went on, “Now how long will they take to figure out that a city’s bigger than a monastery?”
The Slavs did not take long. Some of them kept on assailing the monastery. More, though, drawn by the more distant walls and the people on them, came on and discovered Thessalonica. No sooner had they discovered it than they began to try to take it. They flung javelins and shot arrows at the militiamen and simple citizens on the wall.
An arrow slammed into the stonework not far from George’s head. He heard the shaft snap, much as he did when he broke one of his own arrows hunting rabbits. But the Slav who’d shot this arrow had not been out for game. He’d had killing George in mind, or if not George then Rufus or someone else nearby.
More arrows flew. One zipped past Georges head, hissing like a snake. The first realization he was a target had shocked him. The second .. . He pulled an arrow of his own from the quiver, nocked it, and shot it at one of the barbarians down below. He didn’t know whether he scored a hit or not--the Slav was running around among several others, and they were hard to tell apart: growing harder by the moment, too, as the light failed.
He also had other troubles. “We should have practiced shooting from the top of the wall,” he said to Rufus. “It’s a different business from shooting on the level.”
“Aye, you’re right--it is,” the veteran answered. “Have to talk to the city prefect about that, or maybe to the bishop.”
“You should talk to the bishop,” George said. “If he won’t listen to the man the saint spoke through, whom will he hear?”
“Nobody, maybe,” Rufus said. Having dealt with Eusebius not long before, George thought that had a chance of being true. Eusebius, he suspected, listened to himself first and everyone else afterwards. But with Thessalonica being in his hands more than anyone else’s this side of St. Demetrius, he might well pay attention to anything that would help him defend the city.
Sabbatius and Paul came up onto the wall then. Paul was somber and self-contained; Sabbatius reeked of wine. The contrast did not particularly surprise George. A taverner who got too fond of the goods he sold would not stay a taverner long: his business would fail, and he’d end up drinking at someone else’s.
Sabbatius stared down at the Slavs. “Mother of God!” he muttered. “How many of ‘em are out there? Must be ten or twenty myriads, easy.”
“Even if you’re seeing double, there aren’t that many-- not anywhere close,” Rufus said. He scratched his chin. “I don’t know if there’re ten myriads of people
