Most men would have let the rationalization satisfy them. In spite of Catherine’s calm, George could not make himself forget the satyr had said a Slavic wolf had devoured a priest who tried to banish it.
He brought the game he had killed into the shoemaker’s shop where he hadn’t worked that day, having gone hunting instead. That did not mean the shop had stood idle. With his wife Irene, his daughter Sophia, and his son Theodore to help with the work, things got done whether he was there or not. He sometimes suspected things got done better when he wasn’t there. He’d never voiced that suspicion aloud, for fear Irene would confirm it.
She looked up from the undyed leather boots she was making for Peter the miller, who lived down the street. Her eyes brightened when she saw the game George had brought home. She had a few years fewer than his thirty-five--he wasn’t sure how many, but then, he wasn’t sure whether he might not be thirty-four or thirty-six himself--and looked younger still: her hair was still dark, her skin unlined, and, despite three pregnancies, she had almost all of her teeth.
She said, “You did well there--probably better than if you’d stayed here.” Like him, she made such calculations almost as second nature. Their parents had arranged the marriage, of course, but it had proved good not just because of the properties and families it joined. They thought alike, which made them enjoy each other’s company.
“Shall we stew them with cabbage and leeks, Mother?” Sophia suggested. She was fifteen now--George was sure of that, because she’d been born in the year Maurice became Roman Emperor. Her face was long and thin like her mothers, but she had most of his nose in the middle of it. He worried that it looked better on him than on his daughter.
“That sounds all right to me,” Irene said. She looked at George. He nodded. She looked at Theodore. He pulled a sour face. He was a couple of years older than Sophia, and at the age where he pulled a sour face at anything his parents suggested. Irene chose to make the best of that she could: “I know you’re not fond of leeks. Will you put up with them tonight because everyone else in the family is?”
“I suppose so,” he mumbled; sometimes soft answers from George and Irene were harder for him to take than furious shouts would have been. George, though, was not long on furious shouts. He’d had a bellyful of them from his own father, and didn’t see that they’d done much good in making him behave.
Irene carried the hares and partridges upstairs; like a lot of artisan families, George’s lived over their shop. Before too long, a delicious smell floated down into the work area. No customers had come in since George showed up with the game, and it was getting dark outside, so he felt no hesitation about shutting the front door and letting down the bar. He didn’t expect anyone would need new boots or to have a sandal repaired so badly as to come to the shop with a torchbearer--and, in the unlikely event somebody did do that, he could always open the door again. He and the children went upstairs after his wife.
It was lighter up there than down below: safer to put windows in the second story of a building, because they were harder to break into there. Even so, Irene had lighted a couple of lamps. The smell of burning olive oil was part of” the characteristic odor of Thessalonica, along with woodsmoke, garbage, and manure. George paid no attention to the smell when he stayed in town, but it forcefully brought itself to his attention when he came back after some time away, as with his day of hunting.
Irene ladled the stew into earthenware bowls; Sophia carried them and horn spoons to the table. Irene brought in bread and honey to go with the stew. Before the family began to eat, they bowed their heads. George said grace, thanking Christ that they had enough to fill their bellies. When he was done, he glanced toward the heavens. Though all he saw were the beams of the roof, he knew God watched over him.
The blessing reminded him of what had gone on in the woods earlier that day. “I saw a satyr this afternoon,” he remarked after he’d taken his first bite, and then, in much the same tone of voice, “Good stew.”
Theodore gaped at him; Sophia made the sign of the cross. They and their mother all exclaimed--they knew George too well to let that calm, casual tone lull them. Irene, not surprisingly, was the first one to put words to her thoughts: “I hope it was from far away, and that the creature didn’t bother you.”
“It didn’t bother me.” George took another bite. Deliberately, he chewed. Deliberately, he swallowed. “I gave it some of my wine--not too much. I didn’t want it drunk.”
“You should have driven it away, Father.” Now Theodore crossed himself, to show what he meant. “Those nasty demons can’t stand against the sign of the true faith.”
“I know that.” George hid his smile. In going against what his father had done, Theodore had--no doubt altogether without intending to--become perfectly conventional. George ate some more stew, then went on, “As things worked out, I’m glad I didn’t.” He told of what the satyr had said about the Slavic wolf-demon and what that demon had done to the priest.
His wife, his son, and his daughter, all made the sign of the cross then, to turn aside the evil omen. For good measure, Theodore also pulled at the neck opening to his tunic and spat down it, an apotropaic gesture older than Christianity, and one a priest might have frowned to see.
“What are we going to do?” Sophia asked. “If these barbarians and their horrible demons come against Thessalonica, how shall we be saved?”
“We have strong walls, we have soldiers, we have priests, we have faith in God,” George answered. “If all those aren’t enough, what will be?”
Sophia nodded, reassured. Irene’s eyes met George’s. Neither of them said anything. He knew what his wife was thinking: that all the things he’d named might not be enough. And it was true. Not long before Sophia was born, Sirmium, a city perhaps as great as Thessalonica, had fallen to the Slavs and Avars. Life in the Roman Empire was hard these days, and no one could say it might not get harder.
After supper, Irene and Sophia washed the dishes in a basin of water. By the time they were done, full darkness had fallen. Against its almost palpable presence, the flames from the lamps and the flickering light they cast seemed tiny and weak, the next thing to lost. George thought of the Slavs and Avars moving down toward the Aegean, and of Thessalonica, a Christian light in a sea of pagan darkness.
He went to the window and looked out. Most of Thessalonica was dark now, with a glow of candles and of holiness coming from the churches, more lights up on the walls, and here and there one moving through the streets as prominent people undertook to travel through the night. Footpads traveled through the night, too, but did not advertise their presence.
“Close the shutters, George,” his wife said, yawning. “Let’s go to bed.” Few people--mostly the rich, who could afford the lamps and candles they needed to turn night into day--stayed up long past sunset. Nor was darkness the only reason for that. When you rose with the sun and worked hard all day, you were ready to go to bed by the time night came.
The room to the left of the hall as you walked up it had been shared by Sophia and Theodore. These days, since they’d come to puberty, it had a wooden partition down the middle that turned it into two cubicles. George kept telling himself--and anyone who would listen--he would enlarge the doorway one day soon. He’d been saying it for so long, he didn’t believe it himself anymore.
He used a lamp from the kitchen to light one that rested on a stool by the bed in his own bedchamber, then, in orderly fashion, carried the first one back to where it belonged, blew it out, and used what glow came through the doorway from the second to guide him up the hall. By the time he returned, Irene was already in bed. He used the earthenware chamber pot, took off his shoes, undid his belt and took it off, and got in himself, still wearing the long tunic he’d had on all day. The straw of the mattress rustling under him, he leaned up on one elbow and blew out the lamp on the stool. The bedroom plunged into darkness.
Despite that darkness, Irene did not want to go to sleep at once. “A satyr,” she said in a low voice, one that, with luck, the children would not overhear. “I know of them, of course--everyone knows of them--but I never heard of anybody meeting one before, not even in the stories my old grandmother told me when I was little.”
“Neither did I,” George said, “not around a city that’s been Christian as long as Thessalonica. But up in the north it’s all helter-skelter; things are bubbling like porridge in a pot over a hot fire. The Roman soldiers and the Avars and Slavs keep going back and forth and round and round, but every year, in spite of what the soldiers do, there are more pagan Slavs settling on land that ought to be Roman.”
“I know,” Irene answered. “From what I hear in the marketplace, the Roman generals spend more time quarreling among themselves than they do fighting the enemy.”
“I’ve heard the same thing,” George said. “It worries me.” Irene caught her breath at that. Her husband was a man who worried a good deal, but hardly ever admitted it out loud. He went on, “And when the Slavs settle on land that ought to be Roman, their gods and demons settle on land that ought to be Christian.”
“That wolf--what it did to the priest. . .” On top of a wool blanket she had woven herself, she shuddered.
“Satyrs, now, and the other creatures from the old days,” George said musingly, “people believe in them, yes, but not the way they used to, so no wonder the true faith of Christ is stronger than they are. But the Slavs, they believe in their powers the same way we believe in the power of the Lord. That makes the wolf--and whatever other things they have like him--dangerous to us Christians.”
“Do you think the Slavs will come down as far as Thessalonica?” Irene asked.
“Farther west, bands of them have pushed deeper into Greece than we are,” he replied: Irene was not the sort of woman to be fobbed off with vague reassurances, especially when those were likely to be false. “So yes, they could come to Thessalonica. Taking the city is another question. God surely guards us here.”
“Yes, surely,” Irene agreed, but less confidently than he would have expected from her. She was worried, too, then.
She lay on her left side, facing him; he lay on his right. He set a hand on her hip, partly to reassure her, partly as a sort of silent question. He’d learned early in their marriage not to take her when she didn’t feel like being taken; the anger and arguments following that lasted for days, and were far more trouble than brief pleasure was worth. She, on the other hand, had learned not to deny him unless she was emphatically uninterested. For the most part, the compromise--about which they’d never said a word, not out loud--worked well.
If she’d flopped down onto her belly, he would have rolled over, too, and gone to sleep. Instead, she moved toward him, sliding across the linen of the mattress cover. He held her for a while, then peeled her out of her tunic and took off his own. Her body was warm, familiar, friendly in his arms. They seldom surprised each other in bed these days, but they made each other happy. As far as George was concerned, that counted for more.
Afterwards, he and Irene both used the chamber pot again, then redonned their tunics. The night was warm enough to sleep without those, but neither of them felt like startling their children in the morning. George fell asleep almost at once.
Breakfast was leftover stew, along with more bread. Irene sighed, then said, “I wonder how many women have prayed for a way to keep food fresh longer than a day or two.”
“God has bigger things than that to worry about,” George said.
“Evidently,” his wife answered, leaving him with the feeling that he’d been punctured, even if he couldn’t quite tell how.
He didn’t have time to worry about it long; with the rest of the family, he went downstairs and got to work. Whenever they didn’t have anything else to do, they worked on heavy-soled sandals in assorted sizes. Some farmers outside of town would make their own, but those were usually crude rawhide affairs, and didn’t last. George had spent years building up a reputation for solid craftsmanship.
Once, a couple of years before, Theodore had remarked, “You know, Father, if we made the leather thinner, it would wear out faster, and people would have to come back sooner to buy more.”
He’d obviously thought he was being clever. Because of that, George had been gentle when he said, “The trouble is, son, if the leather wore out faster, people would have to come back sooner, yes, but they wouldn’t come back to
And, sure enough, the first customer of the morning was a farmer named Felix. “Good to see you’re still here,” he said to George in backwoods Latin. “I’m not fixing a hole this size, I don’t think.”
He held up a sandal. The sole was mostly hole. What wasn’t hole was bits of leather, some tanned, some not, that had been sewn on over the course of years. George wouldn’t have wanted to walk around in a sandal like that even without the latest hole, but held his peace. What Felix did with--or to--shoes was his business. George did take the ruined one to remind himself how big a foot Felix had. “We made a pair about that size a few days ago, I think,” he said, and looked on the shelves set against the back wall. “Sure enough.” He held out the sandals. “Try these on--see how they feel.”
Felix did. His gnarled hands had a little trouble with the small bronze buckles, but he managed. He walked back and forth inside the shop. A smile came over his weathered face. “That’s right nice,” he said. “I’d forgotten walking doesn’t have to feel like you’ve got a sack of bumpy beans under each foot.”
“Glad you like them,” George said; starting off the day with a sale always struck him as a good omen.
