The mounted Avar, having said his piece, rode on to rejoin his comrades. The priest stood staring at the wall. Even across a couple of furlongs, he seemed to be staring straight into George’s face. George stared back, unable to take his eyes away. He felt the weight of the Avar’s persona pressing on him, and pressed back as strongly as he could.
That seemed to take the Avar by surprise. Abruptly, he turned away and went back into the tent from which the horseman had summoned him. Dactylius tapped George on the forearm. “Did you feel that?” The jeweler spoke in a whisper, though the wizard was far away.
“
“What do you suppose he’s doing in there?” Dactylius pointed to the tent into which the Avar had returned.
“I don’t know,” George answered, “but I think we’ll find out.”
He hardly thought himself worthy of being compared to Elijah or Jeremiah as a prophet, but that prediction was soon borne out. The Avar emerged from the tent carrying not only the mirror but what looked like a wooden pad of water. He set the mirror on the ground; as he did so, the sun angled off it for a moment, the flash proving to George what it was. He began to dance around it. Every so often, water splashed out of the pail onto the ground and onto the mirror.
Clouds crowded the sky, which moments before had been sunny though pale. What had been as good a day as any Thessalonica might expect in November quickly changed to one warning of storm. “Magic!” George exclaimed; nothing natural could make the weather turn so fast.
Cold rain began pelting down onto the wall almost as soon as the word passed his lips. Dactylius pointed. “Look!” he exclaimed. “It’s not falling on the Slavs out there.”
He was right. The rain seemed confined to Thessalonica alone. Past twenty or thirty cubits beyond the wall, the weather remained as it had been. George started to say something, but thunder crashed, deafeningly loud, right above his head. He staggered and almost dropped to one knee.
Another crash came, even louder than the first. George stared up into the sky. He’d never heard thunder like that. Were those just cloud shapes, or did they look like Avars thumping great drums? When the thunder rang out again, he was convinced of what he saw. Those shifting shapes, all thirteen of them, were real.
After yet another peal of thunder, rumblings continued for some time, like aftershocks from an earthquake. The rumblers were cloud shapes, too: little men or gnomes with enormous feet, all made of mist.
“Avar rain and thunder spirits!” George shouted, pointing up into the heavens. He hoped Dactylius would perceive them, too.
Before he could find out whether his friend did, an utterly mundane arrow hissed past his face. He reached for his bow to shoot back at the Slavs, then cursed the Avar wizard as foully as he knew how. No rain fell on the Slavs; their bowstrings were dry. Those of the men on the walls of Thessalonica, though, were soaked and useless.
The thunder spirits thundered. The smaller, less fearsome rumblers rumbled. The Slavs out beyond the walls kept on shooting. George and the other defenders were powerless to reply.
“Where’s Bishop Eusebius?” Dactylius shouted. “He could put a stop to this.”
Wherever Bishop Eusebius was, he was nowhere close by. Peering through the curtain of rain all around Thessalonica as if through a glass, darkly, George saw more Avars come out to confer with their priest. “I don’t know why they’re wasting time talking,” he said. “They’ll never have a better chance to attack the walls than now.”
“Look!” Dactylius pointed not to the cloud creatures in the sky, not to the Slavs and Avars beyond the rain, but to the head of the stairway leading up to the wall. “It’s Father Luke!”
That made George feel as good as seeing the bishop might have done. Father Luke was of lower rank, but George and Dactylius had already seen what his holiness could do. George said, “You beat the one water demon, Father. Can you beat these new ones as well?” He pointed at the thunderers and rumblers up in the sky.
“I don’t know,” the priest replied, putting a hand up over his eyes so he could see the Avar powers without raindrops continually blowing in his face.
“You don’t know?” Dactylius sounded horrified. “Are we just going to stand here and drown, the way people did in the great Flood?” He looked about ready to drown. The drumming rain made his hair run down over his face like so many wet snakes and plastered his tunic to him so tightly, George could count his ribs.
In a way, Father Luke’s answer horrified George, too. In another way, it pleased him. A more arrogant priest would have claimed abilities he lacked and tried to do more than he could, as Father Gregory--the late Father Gregory--had done by the cistern. If nothing else, Father Luke had humility, a virtue in any Christian man and all the more vital in a priest.
“God provided in the Flood, telling Noah to build his Ark,” Father Luke said. “I have faith God will provide for us now, if not through me, then surely through someone else.”
Again, George did not quite know what to make of the response. Admiring the depth of Father Luke’s faith, he had trouble sharing it. He knew he had not the temperament of a man like Job, to go on unceasingly praising God regardless of the misfortunes befalling him.
Instead of criticizing the priest, though, he tried to nudge him into action: “You routed one water demigod with water of your own from the baptismal font. Can you do the same with these--?” Before he could say
Father Luke’s shrug was not encouraging. “They are there” --he pointed up into the sky-- “while I remain down here. I see no way for the sanctified water to come in contact with them, as it did with the Slavic demon in the cistern.”
“All right, you can’t do that,” George said, following the logic without liking it. “What
“And you’d better do it soon, too,” Dactylius added. He sounded both insistent and frightened, neither of which George wanted. The shoemaker aimed to make Father Luke figure out what he could do and then to have him do it, not to alarm and rattle him.
Father Luke, fortunately, seemed neither alarmed nor rattled. “I can pray,” he answered.
It was, after all, what a priest was good for. Even so, George would have preferred a response somewhat more aggressive. He was beginning to feel as much like a drowned rat as Dactylius looked. “Well, if that’s what you can do, you’d better get to it,” he said roughly. “The Slavs out there aren’t going to be content with shooting at us up here on the wall, not for long they won’t. Pretty soon they’ll try knocking it down again.”
“You’re right, of course.” Father Luke looked up to the heavens again. Now he paid no attention to the thunder spirits or the smaller rumblers, nor to the rain beating into his face. “I take my text from the Book of Genesis: ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’”
Knowing the priest’s piety, and knowing also how he had beaten the Slavic water demigod, George expected the Avars’ sky powers to be routed and the sun to break through. That did not happen. The rain kept falling. More thunder boomed, as if those powers were laughing at Father Luke’s effort to disperse them.
Dactylius let out a cry of dismay that showed how much confidence he had placed in Father Luke. George glanced over toward the priest. Father Luke’s long face was set in thoughtful lines. Seeing George’s eyes upon him, he nodded slightly. “It is as you have said all along,” he remarked. “The powers of the Slavs are strong, and now I see that the powers of the Avars are stronger still. Since the Avars rule the Slavs, I suppose I should have expected as much.”
“What can you do about it?” George demanded. Another shattering roar from the heavens emphasized the thunder spirits’ strength more than the priest’s words could have. Somewhere not far down the wall, a militiaman screamed when an arrow pierced him. Caught in the tightly defined circle of rain, the defenders could offer no reply.
“What can I do?” Suddenly, despite building catastrophe, Father Luke smiled. For a moment, George thought he saw in that smile the sun he’d hoped the priest would be able to restore. Father Luke said, “I could not make those powers quit this place against their will: they were too strong for that. Suppose instead, though, I give them everything they want?”
Through drumming rain, through rumblings and thunderings above, Dactylius hissed to George: “He’s gone mad.”
“I don’t think so,” George answered, though he had not the slightest idea what the priest intended.
As Father Luke had before, he stared up into the sobbing sky. As he had before, he chose words from the Book of Genesis, but words of different import, perhaps inspired by Dactylius: “ ‘On the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. .. . And the waters prevailed, and increased greatly on the earth . . . And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered.’”
“What’s he
“No, I don’t think so,” George said. “The rain’s no worse than it was.” Before saying anything more, he paused and looked out from the wall. Something had changed. He was sure of that, but had trouble identifying what it was. And then, all at once, he laughed with glad surprise and bowed to Father Luke. “You did it, Your Reverence!”
“Did what?” Dactylius squawked. And then, a beat behind the other two, he understood. He too bowed before the priest.
“God gets the credit, not I,” Father Luke said. It was too wet for George to be sure his eyes twinkled, but he thought so. It was too wet all around Thessalonica, not just in the narrow circle to which the rain and lightning and thunder and rumbling had been confined. Now, like any proper storm, this one spread over the whole land.
“Give them what they want,” George said musingly.
“They must have been angry, penned up in such a narrow space.” Father Luke’s voice was amiable. Rainwater splashed off the tonsured crown of his head. “Now they can do as they like, where they like.”
“And if the Slavs and Avars don’t care for it--what a pity.” George laughed out loud. Even standing here soaking wet in the chilly rain, being alive felt monstrous good. He vastly admired cleverness, and what could be more clever than turning the Avars’ powers against the priest who had loosed them in the first place?
That, Father Luke had done. The storm of arrows that had joined the rainstorm to assail the militiamen on the walls of Thessalonica now died away: archery with wet bowstrings was as impossible for the Slavs as for the Romans. If the barbarians had planned anything more than sweeping the walls bare of defenders who could not shoot back, the sudden extension of the rain made them think again.
George peered out toward the Avar wizard who had summoned the thirteen thunder spirits and their lesser nimbler cousins to torment Thessalonica. He could see even less now than before, what with the rain extending all the way from him to the wizard. Was that angrily dancing figure the Avar, or just a Slav irked at having his sport spoiled? The shoemaker could not be certain.
Lightning crashed out of the heavens, striking near the dancer, whoever he was. The thunder that followed almost at once made George clap his hands to his ears. He felt as if he were standing inside God’s biggest bass drum. “Lord, have mercy!” he gasped.
“He has had mercy on us,” Father Luke said. “Without His help, our city would have fallen. But that wasn’t what you meant, was it?”
“Not exactly,” George said, his head still ringing.
“I hope the Lord had no mercy at all on that cursed Avar,” Dactylius exclaimed. “I hope that lightning bolt burned him to ashes, and I hope the ashes wash into the sea and are gone forever. That’s what I hope.” He stuck out his chin, daring the other two to disagree with him.
“
“Do you think the lightning did cook the Avar priest?” George asked.
“What I hope and what I think are, I fear, two different things,” the priest replied. “Those are the powers with which he is intimately familiar; I think he will be able to bring them back under his control.”
George sighed. That made more sense than he wished it did. And Father Luke proved a good prophet, as George himself had, not long before. The rain soon eased off; the thunder stopped. A brisk breeze sprang up and blew away the storm clouds. “Here comes the sun,” George said happily. The sunshine was watery, but it was sunshine.
And there in the sunshine stood the Avar priest. Now that George got a good look at him, he saw his bizarre costume was soaked and, with any luck at all, ruined. The wizard stared toward the wall and shook a fist at-- no, not at George; it had to be at Father Luke. And the priest nodded back toward the Avar, recognizing the other’s skill and potence.
“You ought to blast him with an anathema,” Dactylius said.
“I do not think he fears my anathemas,” Father Luke said. “I do not think he fears any Christian power. Only greater acquaintance with us will teach him the true strength of the Lord.”
