favor of the notion that the water demigod had appeared in every cistern in Thessalonica. As he stood there still half-stunned by his escape, those screams changed in tone from terror to amazement, which was a good argument in favor of the notion that, whatever Father Luke had done, whatever force he had called upon, had rid every cistern in Thessalonica of the demigod in the same instant.
On legs still wobbly with fright, George walked up to him, taking a few steps around the smashed horror that had been Father Gregory. “Bless you, Your Reverence,” he said, most sincerely.
“Bless you for your courage,” the priest answered, sounding as shaken as the shoemaker felt. “Without courage and faith, I fear, we shall be lost in the dark days that He ahead.”
George nodded. He looked back toward what was left of Father Gregory. The other priest had proved not to have quite enough of either, there when the ultimate test came. George suspected Father Luke would have found a way to prevail even without… whatever he’d thrown into the cistern. George’s bump of curiosity, always easy to excite, began itching furiously now. “What was in that jar, Your Reverence?” he asked.
“Water from the baptismal font,” Father Luke answered. “Fighting fire with fire is as ancient a proverb as I know. Here I thought it better to--”
“--Fight water with water,” George interrupted, an enormous smile stretching itself across his face. The priest showed himself a man of enormous charity as well as piety: he did not get angry with George for stepping on his line.
Dactylius and Irene came up then. George put an arm around his wife. She shivered against him for a moment, but then said, “I’ll have to buy a new jug to replace the one I broke here.”
More than jugs had been broken in the square. Along with Father Gregory, several women lay there. Some might be helped. One was groaning and shrieking and clutching her leg, which streamed blood out onto the cobbles. A big chunk of concrete from the roof the demigod had destroyed lay by her.
George used his sword to cut a strip from the bottom of her tunic to bandage the leg. She screamed abuse at him all the while, as if the tunic were more important than anything else. He took no notice of that; the lower part of the leg was out of true with the rest. “A bandage isn’t all she needs,” he said, pointing. “That leg is broken.”
“I’ll fetch a physician,” Dactylius said. “This could have been Claudia, as easily as not.” George might not have bet on the water-demon against Claudia, but he knew the little man was right. Dactylius hurried away.
Father Luke came up to the woman and prayed over her. His entreaties might have eased her pain a little, but no more than that. Routing the Slavic demigod was a matter of power against power. Something as mundane as a broken leg wasn’t, barring a miracle. Barring--
“Pity we can’t take her to the healing spring outside the city,” George said. “But the Slavs have to be prowling there nowadays.”
“It is the will of God,” Father Luke said. “We are in His hands.”
He believed that with every fiber of his being. Not least because of his strong faith, he’d been able to vanquish the water-demon. But had he not had the wit to bring with him water from the baptismal font, all his faith would have done him no good. George, shorter on faith, tried to be sharp of wit. He had trouble understanding how God’s purpose included things like a broken leg inflicted, so far as any man could tell, at random.
Father Luke would have called him presumptuous for wanting God’s purpose to make sense to a mere man. He supposed the priest would have had a point, too. Some of his own purposes didn’t make sense to Theodore and Sophia, who were in essence his equals, not inferiors, as he was an inferior to God. Even so . . .
He waited by the woman till Dactylius brought back the doctor, who took one look at the leg, nodded, and began the business of setting it. “I told him it was broken,” Dactylius said, “so he brought the boards for splints.”
“Good,” George said. He turned to Irene. “Do I remember rightly? Wasn’t I on my way home from a stretch on the wall?” He glanced at the sun to gauge the time. “Not very long ago, either.” He shook himself, like a dog coming out of a pond. “Only seems a year’s gone by since then, I guess.”
“Bless you,” Father Luke said again as he and his wife left the square. Weary and worn as he was, he walked straighter. When a priest like Father Luke blessed you, you felt blessed.
He wondered what the priests of the Slavs and the Avars were doing, now that their effort to make it impossible to draw water inside Thessalonica had failed. Wading and gnashing their teeth, with any luck at all. But they probably wouldn’t go on wailing and gnashing their teeth for long. They’d probably bring more of their gods and demons to bear against the God-guarded city.
He shrugged. The Thessalonicans couldn’t do anything about that till it happened, if and when it did. Not only did they have God guarding them, they also had the militia. George had got almost to his own street before he wondered whether that counted for or against them.
Irene put her hand in his. “You were very brave,” she said.
“I was what?” George said. Father Luke had praised his courage, too. He had trouble following that. “If I hadn’t done what I did, I figured something worse would happen. If that’s courage, then I’m--”
“Someone who talks too much,” Irene said firmly He was about to make an indignant denial; she could truthfully have accused him of a good many things, but not that. After he opened his mouth, though, he shut it without saying anything. If his wife thought he was brave and he went around denying it, didn’t that count for talking too much?
When he and Irene walked into the shop, their children looked up from the shoes they’d been repairing. “Where’s the water jar, Mother?” Sophia asked.
Irene and George looked at each other and started to laugh. Sophia spluttered in annoyance; how dared her parents share what was obviously a joke when she had no idea why it was funny?
Theodore said, “What’s been going on out there, anyway? People have been running back and forth and shouting things that don’t make any sense. And a while ago it sounded like a budding fell down, or something like that. Are the Slavs throwing rocks--?” He paused, stood up, and set hands on hips. “I
His parents were laughing harder than ever, which irritated him and Sophia both. After a while, George stopped laughing. When he did, he felt as if he ought to start shaking instead. Laughing was better.
Little by little, he and Irene explained to their children what had in fact happened. By the time they were through, Theodore had turned very red and looked about ready to burst. “All that was going on not three stadia from here, and we didn’t know anything about it?” he exclaimed in what, to his credit, tried very hard not to be a shout but didn’t quite succeed. “If I’d been there, I’d have--” He made cut-and-thrust motions that merely betrayed how little he knew about handling a sword.
“Thank God you weren’t there,” George said, which only inflamed his son further. “The best adventures are the ones that happen to somebody else, believe you me. This isn’t a story, son. The priest and the women who are dead, they’re
Irene came down a moment later, carrying a cup of wine in each hand. She gave one to George, who gulped it down faster than was his usual habit. Instead of scolding him, she drained her cup, too. George took it from her and went upstairs himself. When he returned with both cups filled, she took one from him and drank it as fast as she had the first. As she had not been behind him on that first cup, he was not behind her on the second.
Her eyes were a trifle glassy as she looked toward Sophia and said, “You can fix supper tonight.” She spoke with unusual emphasis.
“All right, Mother.” Sophia had enough sense to know when not to argue. She went on, “That will be easy, anyhow, because we don’t have much besides bread and beans and oil and some prunes.”
“You can live a long time on bread and beans and oil,” George said. “People only a little poorer than we are live on them their whole lives through.” He spoke more loudly than was his usual wont, too; so much wine drunk so fast made the world seem a very certain place.
“That’s true,” Theodore said, “but the world would be a boring place without some meat every now and then.” He smacked his lips.
George was fond of meat, too. He sighed. “Can’t go out hunting. Can’t hardly keep cows or sheep inside the walls. Pigs, some pigs, and chickens. They eat anything. Ducks, maybe. And fish. The Slavs can’t keep us from fishing in the sea.” He sighed again. “Anything like that would cost plenty, even now. Pretty soon, oil will cost, too. After a while, beans and bread will cost.”
“Bishop Eusebius won’t let that happen. He won’t let the merchants make beggars of us all,” Irene said confidently. She had more faith in the bishop than George did. He didn’t want to do complicated thinking right now, but after a moment decided she might well be right. Eusebius was too good a Christian and too good a politician both to let a handful of men aggrandize themselves at the expense of the rest.
Theodore’s thoughts, meanwhile, had gone off on another tack. “Everything you said about how strong the Slavs’ powers are must be true, Father,” he said, a sentence to warm the cockles of the heart of any father of an adolescent male. “For that water-demon to show up in the middle of this city--”
“It’s a worry,” George agreed. He tried to imagine a satyr strolling into the marketplace of Thessalonica. He couldn’t. Such a thing might have happened when Galerius was Emperor, but three hundred years had gone by since then, and those powers overpowered by a greater power.
“This is the first time they’ve tried anything so horrid,” Irene said. “What will they do next?”
The question hung in the air. George looked out the door. All he could see was the shop across the narrow street. He couldn’t see the wall, let alone what lay beyond it, not with his fleshly eyes. His mind’s eye reached further. Somewhere out there, the chieftains of the Avars would be deciding what to do next. If they and the Slavs they led succeeded with it, whatever it was, the city would fall. That was very simple. For once, George wished things might be more complex.
IV
Axes rang in the woods around Thessalonica. George watched an oak tremble, sway, fall. A crew of Slavs began lopping off branches and cutting the trunk into lengths they found useful. Not far away, a mounted Avar watched his subjects.
“He’s working hard, isn’t he?” John said, pointing out from the wall to the horseman, who, but for occasionally pointing, wasn’t doing anything much.
“Not so you’d notice,” George answered, “but the Slavs are working harder because he’s there.”
“The noble comes round to see how his building is going up, you’d best believe the carpenters work harder,” John said. “Me, I’m funnier when I know the fellow behind the bar at the tavern is listening to me. If he doesn’t like what he’s hearing, I have to try to find someplace else to work the next night.”
“Carpenters build buildings,” George said. “What do Slavs build? They can’t be making a village out there, can they?”
“I know what they’re making,” John said: “they’re making trouble.”
“They’ve already done that.” George looked along the wall instead of out from it. No sooner had he done so than he stood more erect and gripped his bow more firmly. Out of the side of his mouth, he said, “Here comes Rufus. Think of him as the fellow behind the bar.”
John obviously did think of Rufus that way, for, like George, he did his best to project an air of martial ferocity. Like George’s, his best left something to be desired. Rufus surveyed diem with his brown eye, with his blue eye, and with both eyes together. He looked dissatisfied all three ways. “God must be watching over Thessalonica,” he said, “if it hasn’t fallen with the likes of you two holding off the Slavs and Avars.”
George didn’t argue with the veteran; on the whole, he agreed with him. And John surprised Rufus by putting an arm around him and kissing him on the bristly cheek. “Thank you, great captain,” he said in a voice gooey with counterfeit emotion. “You’ve made us what we are today.”
Rufus wiped his cheek with the back of one hand. “The good news about that is that it’s true,” he said. “And the bad news about it… is that it’s true.”
Another tree went over with a crash. The Slavs started trimming it as they had the oak they’d felled a few minutes before. “What
The veteran clapped to his forehead the hand he’d just used to wipe his cheek. “God help all of us if you’re as I made you,” he said. “Anyone with enough sense to rub his fingers on his tunic
