not shave very well, had some red patches in it that were startling when seen with the dark hair on top of his head. “Is she serious, or is it just.. . foolishness?” That wasn’t the word he wanted, but he couldn’t find a better one.
“She thinks she’s serious, so she might as well be,” Irene answered, a thought convoluted enough to have made Bishop Eusebius proud.
“Am I going to have to talk to Leo?” George asked, and then, as much to himself as to his wife, “Do I want to talk to Leo?” As he had asked it, he answered his own question: “Constantine’s not the worst match I can think of.”
“No, he’s not,” Irene agreed. “But he’s not the best, either. We have to think about this, and we have to see whether Sophia changes her mind again day after tomorrow, too. I remember there were boys who--” Now she was the one who broke off.
George waggled a finger at her. “Ha! I’m usually the one who makes mistakes like that.” With his wife still flustered, he went on, “Some of the boys who might have caught her eye, well, I think I’d be praying the Slavs and Avars would sack the city before the wedding.”
“God forbid.” Irene’s voice was serious, but her eyes danced. “As you said, it could be worse. I was wondering if Theodore had his eye on anyone in particular, but he hasn’t shown any signs of that. It won’t be long, I expect.”
“No, but for now he hasn’t.” George said nothing more. At Theodore’s age, he’d had his eye on every pretty girl who walked past the open door, but he’d left it to his parents to find him one with whom to make a life. His gaze flicked back to Irene. Would he have chosen her on his own? He didn’t know, but his mother and father had done well by him.
“I can guess what you’re thinking,” Irene said, and laughed a little. That laugh meant she wasn’t guessing: she knew he’d eyed all the girls when he was younger. She continued, “With Sophia, it’s not anything we have to worry about right away, I don’t think. But if she’s still serious come summer--”
“All right,” George said Summer seemed farther away than Jerusalem, farther away than Gaul, farther away than the island that was supposed to be beyond Gaul, the island whose name, for the moment, he’d entirely forgotten. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. That would bother him till he remembered, no matter how useless knowing the name of an immensely distant island now surely infested with barbarians was.
He grunted. Thessalonica was infested with barbarians. To think of them, he didn’t need to worry about. . . “Britain!” he said happily.
“What
Before he had to come up with an answer, Sophia called, “How much can the two of you say about fennel, anyway?”
“They’re not talking about fennel,” Theodore said in a voice George didn’t think he was supposed to overhear. “They’re talking about one of us--unless they’re talking about both of us.”
“I know
George suffered a coughing fit at the same time as Irene made wheezing noises, the way some people did when flowers bloomed in springtime. Had their children been a little farther away--
As they went back inside, Irene found a way to make them both serious again. She asked, “Now that the Slavs and Avars have found they can’t knock the wall down with crowbars and such, what do you think they’ll try next?”
“I don’t know if they’ve found they can’t knock the wall down this way,” George answered “I just think the Slavs took as much punishment as they could stand right then, which may not be the same thing.” He considered. “They seem to be taking turns, soldiers one try, powers the next We still don’t know all the different powers they have, but my bet is, we’ll find out.”
“Find out what?” Theodore asked when they came into the workroom.
“Find out who’s been trying to listen to every word we say,” his father answered with a growl that concealed memories of trying to find out what his own parents had been up to when he was Theodore’s age and younger.
“Is the fennel all right?” Sophia asked, mildly enough to keep George from thinking she was practicing one of John’s routines.
“The fennel is fine,” George said. “The two of you, on the other hand, are nosy. Irene, which of them do you suppose is nosier than the other?”
“Both,” Irene said, which confused George but confused Theodore and Sophia even more, thereby accomplishing its purpose.
Claudia came in with the sandal George had repaired not long before. Now it had two broken straps, not just one. Despite that detail, Claudia said, “You didn’t fix this very well, George.”
“I am sorry,” George replied, examining the damage. “If you use a shoe to hit people, you know, it won’t wear so well as it would if you only walked in it.”
“That’s not very good.” Claudia’s voice was indignant. Not only did irony roll off her like dye from a well-greased area of leather on a boot, she also remained as convinced nothing was ever her fault as if she were an aristocrat rather than an artisan’s wife. “Shoes should be strong enough to stand up to whatever you do to them.”
“I’ll try to get this back to you in a couple of days,” George said resignedly He knew he wasn’t going to make her see the world or her place in it any differently. What Dactylius saw in her-- except someone bigger and stronger and fiercer than he--was beyond the shoemaker.
Claudia’s pale eyes flashed fire. “A couple of days?” she said.
Not being married to her, George could take a firmer line than her husband. “Yes, a couple of days, I’m afraid,” he answered. “I have a lot of work here that I’m trying to do, and I don’t have a lot of time to do it. You can blame that on the Slavs and Avars, if you like, along with everything else.”
“I do. Oh, I do,” Claudia said. “They’ve done nothing but make my life miserable ever since they got here. As far as I’m concerned, they ought to go away and never come back.”
“As far as I’m concerned, they ought to go away and never come back, too,” George said, though he concerned himself with the Slavs and Avars more for what they were liable to do to Thessalonica as a whole than for how they were inconveniencing him in particular.
Claudia let out a melodramatic sigh she probably meant to be martyred instead. “All right, George. A couple of days, since you’re the one who says so.” She swept out, dissatisfied but doing her best to bear up under the disappointment: an actor in a mime troupe couldn’t have conveyed the emotion more clearly.
Once she was gone and George was sure she wouldn’t make any sudden reappearances, he said, “I admire Claudia--I really do.” That drew from the rest of his family the disbelieving exclamations he’d expected. He held up a hand. “No, wait. Hear me out. How many other people in this whole city can you think of who make me
No one answered him, by which he concluded he’d won his point.
George and Theodore jostled for places near the altar in St. Demetrius’ basilica. Up in the women’s gallery, Irene and Sophia were probably doing the same thing. They sometimes came home from church with stories of pushing and shoving. Once or twice, they’d come home with bruises on their arms.
Theodore twisted past a plump man. Turning back to his father, he said, “I’ll bet Dactylius’ wife watches the divine liturgy from wherever she pleases.”
“Claudia? I’ll bet you’re right, son,” George answered. Then he stopped and really listened to what Theodore had said. That meant he all but had to kick the plump man out of the way to keep up with his son, but he didn’t care. He didn’t even snarl back when the plump man used several expressions not often heard in church. Theodore had thought along with him as effortlessly and accurately as Irene sometimes did. The boy--no, the young man now--had had a lifetime of practice doing just that, of course, but his lifetime hadn’t been very long, not to George’s way of thinking. The shoemaker suddenly felt more like a grandfather than a father.
Deacons and acolytes and altar boys scurried up and down the aisle, keeping it clear so Bishop Eusebius could advance to the altar. A rising hum of conversation said he was on his way. George craned his neck, but taller people around him kept him from seeing the bishop. Rumor declared Eusebius would say something important this morning, which was why George and his family had come to St. Demetrius’. Rumor, frustratingly, was mute about what the bishop would say.
Celebrating the divine liturgy in a church as splendid as any outside Constantinople was of itself enough to leave George convinced the longer walk than usual had been worth making. But when Bishop Eusebius finally got around to his sermon, more jostling and pushing and shoving started up, with everyone trying to get closer to hear him better.
“My children,” he began, “the vicious barbarians outside our gates still seek to inter Thessalonica in a sarcophagus of their design.” George smiled to himself; Eusebius remained fond of trotting out tombs and coffins. “Thanks to the power of God and of our own holy saint, we have thus far prevented them from achieving their wicked ends.”
The bishop went on, “But our hold on safety is not secure. Far from it! The Slavs and Avars, being ignorant of the power of the one true God, have at their beck and call a host of vile powers, whom they have summoned again and again to try to overwhelm us. They have come too close to success.”
A murmur of agreement ran through the basilica, much of it, George thought, from militiamen. He added his small part to the murmur, whispering to Theodore, “They certainly have.” His son nodded but waved for him to be quiet so they could hear what Eusebius was saying.
George had, to his annoyance, missed a few words. “--so they think we can use our own power, the power of truth and righteousness, only for defense,” the bishop declared. “But, my fellow Christians, I tell you they are mistaken. God not only heals His flock, He curses the wolves who seek to pray upon it. Let us beseech Him to curse the Slavs and Avars, who so plainly need to become acquainted with His wrath.”
Back in Paul’s tavern, George had casually wished a pestilence on the Slavs. He was sure half the people in Thessalonica, likely more, had expressed similar wishes. That was not the sort of thing Bishop Eusebius was talking about. A shiver ran through George. When a bishop formally asked God to bring a curse down on an evildoer’s head, the Lord was likely to deliver.
Eusebius said, “God has granted such prayers before,” echoing George’s thought. The bishop went on, “When Pharaoh of Egypt would not let the children of Israel depart his lands in peace, God visited upon him the Ten Plagues. Did Pharaoh of Egypt oppress the children of Israel more harshly than the khagan of the Avars oppresses the people of Thessalonica? I think not, my children.”
Was Eusebius right? George wondered. The Slavs and Avars had ravaged the countryside and killed and wounded a number of militiamen on the walls, but they hadn’t enslaved the Thessalonicans or forced them to make bricks without straw. And they’d been here for weeks; they hadn’t held the Thessalonicans in bondage for generations. But if the Avars ever broke into Thessalonica, what they would do was liable to be worse than anything Pharaoh had visited upon the Israelites. George gave Eusebius the benefit of the rhetorical doubt.
The bishop went on, “When the wicked Assyrians, who knew God not, besieged Jerusalem, the Lord sent a plague into their camp, so that they had to give over the siege. What He did for Jerusalem, He shall surely be willing to do as well for this famous city of Thessalonica, which, as He has shown, He enfolds under His protecting arm.”
Thessalonica did indeed have a name for being a God-guarded city. And it was more than a name, or Rufus would not have been inspired to warn of the Slavs’ onset. That thought passed through George’s mind in a moment. The one that followed and stayed longer was curiosity about how Benjamin the Jew would have felt, listening to Eusebius going on about miracles worked on behalf of his people, not on behalf of Christians.
If that inconsistency bothered Eusebius, he gave no sign of it, continuing, “What God has done in days gone by, He can surely do again, for, as we have seen with our own eyes, my children, the age of miracles is not yet past. And so let us with full hearts and reverent spirits offer up a prayer to God our Lord that He have mercy upon us now as He did upon the Israelites in days gone by and smite the Slavs and Avars with plagues and pestilences such that they are compelled to withdraw from the environs of this God-protected city, and such that they suffer from the aforesaid sickness as they deserve for the suffering they have inflicted upon us. Let us pray that they are requited as justice demands.”
That was a prayer to conjure with, literally and figuratively. George shivered again. He could think of no one who could hope to come through safe based only on justice, with no mercy thrown onto the scales to temper the verdict. How much more would that be true of the
Slavs and Avars than of people at least acquainted with the Christian faith?
Someone stepped on his foot. He looked around. There stood Menas, who, by the smug expression on his fleshy face, hadn’t done it by accident. George sent up a prayer of his own, for some undoubted divine justice to come to the nobleman who had taken a dislike to him.
Bishop Eusebius looked up through the beams of the roof to the heavens beyond. “We pray, O Lord our God, that Thou savest Thy city of Thessalonica and Thy Christian people in it” --not a word about the Jews in it, George noted, despite Eusebius’ citations of the Lord’s aid to the Israelites in days gone by-- “by smiting the Slavs and Avars with loathsome plagues and diseases, showing forth Thy power in that way and making the barbarians whom Thou hast accursed withdraw in terror and disorder. Amen.”
“Amen,” the worshipers in the basilica said solemnly, Menas and George for once agreeing. George hadn’t been willing to pray for Menas’ getting an arrow in the face when Theodore suggested
