Thessalonica

George had a sudden vivid vision of Rufus proposing that Eusebius be flung off the top of the wall into a dungheap. He didn’t ask who; he didn’t ask what. But he would have bet his guess was near the truth.

“Can I do anything else for you today, George?” Father Luke asked.

“No,” the shoemaker said He checked himself. “No. Wait. Yes. Maybe you can. What do you know about Constantine, the son of Leo the potter? What do you think of him?”

“Constantine?” Father Luke’s eyes sparkled. “Are you thinking of a match?”

“I’m trying to find out if I should be thinking of a match,” George said.

“Ah.” The priest nodded. “You are a prudent man-- except when you go butting into the affairs of the clergy.” George’s ears heated. Thoughtfully, Father Luke went on, “He’s a big, strapping lad, isn’t he? Truth to tell, past that I can’t think of anything remarkable about him, for good or ill. He seems a decent enough young man, whatever that may be worth to you.”

That’s not good enough for Sophia, was George’s first thought. On the other hand, he knew himself well enough to understand he wouldn’t have reckoned the city prefect’s son good enough for his daughter, not if the lad were also handsome and saintly in the bargain. He let out a rueful chuckle. “Thanks, Your Reverence. I’ll do some looking and some more asking of my own, then. No hurry with this, God be praised, or I don’t think so, anyhow.”

“All right, George,” the priest said. “I’m sure you’ll do very well, whatever choice you and Irene make for Sophia.”

Irene would be looking and asking on her own, too. Irene, very likely, had already started doing just that. What she thought of Constantine, and of Leo, and of Leo’s wife (whose name, at the moment, escaped George), would carry enormous weight. If George approved and she didn’t, the marriage would not even be broached. If she approved and George didn’t. . . he didn’t know what would happen then, in spite of being in theory unquestioned head of the household. He was glad they thought alike most of the time.

Nodding to Father Luke, he left the church and headed back toward his shop. And there, heading the other way, his arms full of straw, came Constantine the son of Leo. He was indeed a strapping lad, with shoulders wider than George’s, which was saying something. His walk was something less than graceful, but Georges would have been, too, had he borne a like burden.

Constantine nodded at George, politely enough. He was nothing special to look at (so the shoemaker thought, anyhow; his daughter evidently had a different opinion), and pimples splashed his cheeks and chin. George nodded to him in return. He looked back over his shoulder at Constantine. To his surprise, the potter’s son was looking back at him, too. Each of them tried to pretend he’d done no such thing.

Why was Constantine looking over his shoulder? The likeliest explanation occurring to George was that he’d noticed Sophia and wanted some notion of what her father was like. That was unsettling. So was the idea that what some youthful lout thought of him might be important.

When George returned to the shop, he and Irene went out to inspect the fennel again. He caught the glance that went from Sophia to Theodore, but did his best to seem as if he hadn’t. Once he and Irene were out among the herbs, he told her of what little Father Luke had had to say about Constantine.

“Yes, that sounds about like what I’ve heard,” she answered with a brisk nod.

“Does it?” George said. “And where have you heard all this?”

“Why, from Zoe the weaver’s wife, and from Julia-- you know, the widow who sells fish because her husband sold fish--and even from Claudia, though she hasn’t the slightest idea why I was interested, and from--” Plainly, Irene was ready to go on for some time.

George, however, was not ready to let her. He interrupted with a cough. “If you’ve heard all this, dear,” he said, bearing down a little on the endearment, “why haven’t I heard any of it? From you, I mean.”

“Oh, you would have,” she said blithely. “In due time, you would have. Once I knew enough to make up my mind.”

“Once you knew enough to make up my mind,” George returned. Irene stuck out her tongue at him. He did not take that for a ringing denial. “Well, I gather he’s not so good, but he’s certainly not so bad, either. What does that leave us? To make up our own minds, I suppose.”

“We would have anyway,” his wife said. “The best thing we can do now is wait. She can’t even think of marrying till after the siege is over, and she doesn’t have to think of it even then. She’s a long way from being an old maid-- fifteen is nothing to worry about. She may decide there are other fish in the sea before we need to do anything about Constantine.”

“So she may,” George said. “So there are. Some of them have shells and claws. Some of them have lots of arms all covered with suckers.”

“My dear, any boy Constantine s age seems to have lots of arms covered with suckers.” Irene cocked her head to one side. “Or isn’t that what you meant?”

“By now, believe me, it’s hard to tell,” George said. They both laughed, and went back into the workshop laughing still. Sophia and Theodore eyed them suspiciously, sure they were up to something. Since they were, they tried all the harder to pretend they weren’t.

“Do you know,” George said to Dactylius as they paced along the wall, bows in hand, quivers on their backs, “I used to come up here when the weather was fine, just for a promenade: take a little walk, you know, and get out of the city stink for a while if the wind was blowing in the right direction. I’m not going to do that anymore. I’ve seen altogether too much of this awl.”

“If you weren’t a shoemaker, that would make even less sense than it really does,” Dactylius answered. “As things are, it leaves my ears ringing.”

George took two or three steps before realizing his friend had topped him, a measure of how badly he’d been topped. He sent Dactylius a reproachful look. “John and I are the ones who make jokes like that.”

“Contagious as the--” Dactylius had probably been about to say plague, but remembered George had lost family from it. “--the grippe,” he finished.

“Can’t trust anybody anymore,” George said, mock-serious. Dactylius smiled in something like triumph.

The little jeweler pointed out toward the tent where the Avar priest or wizard made his home, and to the smaller ones nearby that belonged to the Slavic wizards. “I wish they hadn’t chosen to camp near the Litaean Gate,” he said. “If they were somewhere else, we wouldn’t be able to watch them getting ready to work all their magic.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” George said. “For better or worse, I want to know what’s going on as soon as I can. It wouldn’t stop happening if we didn’t find out about it till it came down on us like a building falling over.”

“I suppose not,” Dactylius said, “but if I didn’t see them at their sorceries, I wouldn’t worry about them so much.”

“Of course you would,” George said, having known his friend for many years. “You’d just be shying at shadows, not at anything real.”

Dactylius sighed. He wasn’t ignorant of his own faults; like most mortals, he had trouble doing anything about them. “You’re probably right,” he said.

“Besides” --George sent Dactylius a sidelong look-- “sometimes you cause the trouble you complain about afterwards. If you hadn’t bounced an arrow off that Avar’s corselet, that priest of theirs wouldn’t have tried to drown the city with a thunderstorm.”

“In the end, though, it showed the power of God,” Dactylius said, and George supposed that was true. But it had also shown the strength of the powers upon which the Avar had called. Dactylius continued in musing tones: “I wonder what they’ll try next.”

“No way to tell.” George didn’t want the jeweler working himself up into a swivet over the incalculable. But then, being who he was, the shoemaker tried to figure out what he’d just said could not be figured out. “The storm had spirits of the air in it, and maybe spirits of water, too. That water-demigod was certainly one of those. And when the Avar tried to take the bishop’s blessing off the grappling hooks, the earth shook, even if it didn’t shake very hard.”

“Earth and air,” Dactylius said, musing still. “Water and-- It’ll be something to do with fire, I’d bet.”

“I think you’re right,” George answered. “I hope you’re wrong.” He knew he was the one who would start worrying, start shying at shadows, now. Fire was a constant dread in every city, Thessalonica no less than others. Once it started spreading, you could do so little to put it out.

“What can we do?” Dactylius whispered, echoing his thoughts.

“I don’t know.” George pointed toward the Avar priest’s tent. “Keeping an eye on what he’s up to strikes me as a good idea.”

“Well, of course it does,” Dactylius exclaimed, and then had the good grace to turn red. “You have me this time, don’t you, George? A little while ago, I said I wished that tent was somewhere else.”

“That’s true.” George bowed to Dactylius, as he might have done before the city prefect. His friend looked puzzled. He explained: “You also just admitted you were wrong. That doesn’t happen every day, or every month, either.”

“Oh.” Dactylius looked abashed. He started to say something more, chewed on it, and shut his mouth tight instead. George thought he could guess what his friend hadn’t said: that, living with Claudia, he’d had practice confessing he was wrong, whether he was or not. George would not have chosen to live with Claudia. But then, Dactylius hadn’t exactly chosen to live with her, either. His parents had done it for him--or rather, to him.

One of the Slavic wizards came out of his tent and looked toward Thessalonica. His shoulders moved up and down: not a shrug, George thought, more likely a sigh. Seen by himself, the Slav, like the couple of his compatriots whom George had encountered in the woods, didn’t seem threatening. When you put him together with all his compatriots, though . ..

Dactylius said, “He looks like he’s sick of the whole business.”

“He does, doesn’t he?” George said. “Well, I’m sick of the whole business, too, but I’m sticking with it. I suppose he will, too, worse luck for us.” He described his conceit of a moment before for his friend, then added, “You take me by myself and I’m not what you’d call dangerous, either. But think of me as one part of the Roman Empire and I look different.”

Dactylius studied him carefully. “No, you don’t.”

“You’re not making this easy,” George said, clucking. “Now if you think of the whole massed weight of the Empire--” As he spoke, he waited for Dactylius, who seemed in a whimsical mood this morning, to crack a joke about the weight of the Empire’s making the wall fall down. But, since he didn’t complete his sentence, Dactylius never got the chance. Instead, George pointed out toward the wizard. “Hello. He’s got company.”

The other Slavic wizards were coming out of their tents, too, and studying Thessalonica with the same intent look the first one had given the city. And here came the Avar priest or wizard in his costume of furs and leather and fringes. As always, George shivered when he saw him. The Avar carried a lot of spiritual force. Had he been born a Christian and a Roman rather than a barbarous pagan, he might well have become a bishop.

Pointing again, this time toward the Avar, George said, “Can you imagine him in Eusebius’ vestments?”

Dactylius gaped, then made a noise half giggle, half squeak. “Easily,” he said.

And Eusebius, born a barbarian, might have been out there in furs and leather and fringes, trying to rouse his powers to break into Thessalonica and overcome the God Who held them at bay. He wondered what he himself would have been, had his life begun among the Slavs or Avars rather than the Romans. Probably not a shoemaker; from what he’d seen, the enemy had no one who made shoes for everyone else, each man being his own shoemaker and cobbler. George shrugged. He could have found something else to do.

“What are they doing?” Dactylius asked, a question of more immediate import.

“I don’t know,” George said. “If I had to guess, though, I’d say it’s nothing we’re going to like very much.”

The Slavs and the Avars had huddled together like small boys before a mime show they’d thought up. That George recognized: they wanted everything right. When they broke apart, the Avar priest shouted something that was, as usual, unintelligible from the wall. Also as usual, it got prompt results. Several Slavs with the harassed look of slaves began building a great fire from so much wood and brush that George, who’d often been chilly because Thessalonica lacked fuel, grew warm with angry jealousy.

One of the slaves thrust a torch into the brush. The fire caught swiftly. Flames leaped higher than a man. The Slavic wizards drew close to the blaze, whether for warmth or for the sake of ritual George could not tell. Staring out at the fire, Dactylius sighed longingly.

Another Slav led a billy goat up close to the fire, tethering the beast to a stake driven into the ground. The Avar priest walked all around the goat, raising his hands and chanting in a scale that had little to do with any sort of music George had heard before.

When the Avar got round behind the goat, he drew a knife from his belt; firelight flashed off the edge of the blade. With one swift motion, he reached down and castrated the goat. Blood