Thessalonica

Felix, all at once, looked less happy than he had a moment before. “Guess I shouldn’t have said that. Now you’re going to charge me more on account of it.” He cast an apprehensive eye toward George. “What are you going to charge me?”

“That’s a good pair of sandals--you did say so yourself,” George answered. “I was thinking … six miliaresia.”

“Half a solidus?” Felix exclaimed. He made as if to throw the shoes at George. “I figured you’d say something more like two.”

After an argument they both enjoyed, they split the difference. Felix also promised to bring a sack of raisins to the shop the next time he was in Thessalonica. Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. The four silver coins he did pay were enough for George to turn a profit on the deal.

“How are things treating you these days?” the shoemaker asked, to make sure no bad feelings lingered after the haggle--and because life would have been boring if he let people out of his shop without finding out what they knew.

“Not bad, not bad,” Felix answered. “Always a lot of fairies and such about, there away from town. It’s quiet here, God be praised: everybody inside the walls believes in Him, pretty much. Not like that out in the country, you know. Old ways hang on.”

“That’s so,” George agreed. “I saw a satyr myself yesterday, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen them, too,” Felix said. “I chase my daughters into the house when they’re about, just on account of you never know--you know? But these I saw a few days ago, they weren’t like anything I seen before. Pretty women, they looked like, with long yellow hair and with wings on their backs. Not angel wings, with feathers and all--more like beetle wings, all clear and shimmery. I made the cross at them, like a good Christian ought to, but they stood there and smiled at me. It was like they never seen it before.”

“Maybe they hadn’t,” George said, and told him about the wolf. “New people on the move, new gods and demons moving with them.”

Felix clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Hard times, sure enough,” he said. “Well, God will protect us, I expect I hope He will, anyhow.” He headed out of the shop, then turned back. “The sandals feel good, George. I thank you for that.” With a wave, he was gone.

George turned back to his son. “There, do you see, Theodore? Do a proper job and your customers come back to you.”

“Yes, I see, Father.” Theodore grinned mischievously. “Make four miliaresia every five or six years from a farmer and you can use it to buy gold plates to eat off of.”

The shoemaker didn’t know whether to smack the youth or start laughing. He let out a strangled snort, which satisfied neither of those impulses. If God did protect Thessalonica, he thought, it would be either because He ignored the younger generation or because He was even more merciful than the Holy Scriptures said. As George pondered those two choices, he realized one didn’t necessarily exclude the other.

He was delicately tapping an awl to produce a tooled pattern on a boot for a prominent jurist when Dactylius stuck his head into the shop. “Archery practice this afternoon!” the little Greek jeweler exclaimed. He carried a bow and had a quiver on his back. “Have you forgotten? I’ll bet you have!”

“You’re right, I did forget,” George admitted. “I start doing this fine work”--he pointed to the boot-- “and I don’t think about anything else.”

“Go on, dear,” Irene told him. “Germanus won’t be expecting those boots for at least another week. You’ll have plenty of time to finish them.”

“You’re right.” He didn’t know why he bothered saying that; Irene was generally right. To Dactylius, he said, “I’ll go get my bow and arrows--be right back.” He hurried upstairs, grabbed the bow off the pegs where he’d hung it, and picked up his own quiver. He slung it over his shoulder as he returned to the ground floor.

Dactylius was hopping from foot to foot, as if he needed to visit the latrine. He seemed all the more excitable when paired with stolid George. “Come on!” he said. “Rufus will yell at us if we’re late.”

One of George’s eyebrows quirked upward. “He’ll yell at us if we’re not late, too. You go to church to pray, You go to militia practice to get yelled at.”

Taking no notice of that, Dactylius grabbed him by the sleeve of his tunic and dragged him out into the street. Behind him, he heard Irene laugh softly. He was never late enough to matter, and most of the time his punctuality had nothing to do with Dactylius. For that matter, he kept the jeweler out of trouble more often than the other way round.

The practice field was just that: a field in the southeastern part of the city, not far from the hippodrome and fairly close to the sea. In the time of George s greatgrandfather, a grandee had had a mansion there, but no one had ever rebuilt the place after it burned down.

A scrawny brown dog sprawled in the grass and watched the rnilitiamen at their exercises. The commander of the regular garrison, up in the citadel on the high ground at the northeastern comer of Thessalonica, would either have laughed or suffered a fit of apoplexy to see it. The amateur soldiers were indifferent archers, poor spearmen, swordsmen longer on ferocious spirit than skill.

George knew he’d never use his bow as well as a professional soldier, even if he did bring back game when he went out hunting. Dactylius shot straighter than he did, though his own bow had a stronger pull. After he missed a shot from a range where he should have hit, he yanked a new arrow out of his quiver and made as if to break it over his knee.

Another of his fellow rnilitiamen, a gangly, curly-haired man named John, not only had the gall to hit the canvas target but then said, “You might as well shoot that arrow, George. After it’s gone wild, someone who knows what he’s doing may find it. If you break it, it’s gone for good.”

“I’ll have you know I bagged two rabbits and two birds yesterday,” George said with dignity.

“Aye, and if the bunnies carried bows, they’d have bagged you first,” John retorted. You didn’t want to get into an argument with him; he made his living, such as it was, by going from tavern to tavern telling jokes. People said he’d come from Constantinople, that he’d been run out of town when some of his jokes there got too pointed to suit the men in power.

In the militia, though, your mouth would take you only so far. Rufus, the squadron commander, was a gray-haired veteran who’d fought the Ostrogoths in Italy under Narses the eunuch. He had one blue eye, one brown eye, and one nasty disposition. “Let’s see you hit it again, John, before you make like you’re the Second Coming.”

“You couldn’t have your second coming till a month after the first one,” John muttered. But he made sure Rufus didn’t hear him. George blamed him not at all for that. Rufus had to be nearing his threescore and ten, but George wouldn’t have wanted to fight him with any weapons or none.

John nocked his next arrow, drew the bow back to his ear, let fly--and missed, almost as badly as George had done. Rufus laughed raucously. John muttered again. This time, not even George could make out what he said. The shoemaker decided that was probably just as well.

Somebody shot an arrow at the dog. The shaft thumped into the ground six or eight feet away from the beast. The dog never moved. “He’s in the safest place he could be,” Rufus said, and laughed again.

“I would hate him, if only he weren’t right,” Dactylius said. “We have to get better.” His face was probably more intent than when he was setting a ruby into a golden necklace. He aimed, shot-- and missed.

“You lugs are all hopeless.” Rufus rolled his eyes. “Come on--all together now.” A ragged volley followed. “By Jesus, the Virgin, and all of the saints, what will you do if the Slavs and Avars ever do come down on Thessalonica”

“Probably something like this,” John said, shivering as if he were about to freeze to death. “Or maybe this.” He gave an alarmingly realistic impression of a man suddenly seized by diarrhea. “Or this.” Now he mimed jumping onto a horse and galloping away as fast as he could go.

George was a sober, serious fellow most of the time. He found himself laughing helplessly at John’s antics. He would have felt worse about it, but everyone else was laughing, too. Rufus had a soul as flinty as any this side of a tax collector’s, but he guffawed with the militiamen he commanded. “You’re a funny fellow, all right,” he said to John. “I’d like you better, though, if your work with the bow weren’t so funny.”

John’s next arrow not only hit the target, it pierced the center of the bull’s-eye. “How about that?” he said triumphantly.

“That’s even funnier than when you were doing the fellow shitting himself,” Rufus said, leaving the comic, for once, altogether at a loss for words.

On their way back to their places in the workaday world, several of the rnilitiamen, George among them, stopped in a tavern for a mug of wine. “Maybe even for two mugs of wine,” George said, liking to spell things out as precisely as he could beforehand.

“Maybe.” Dactylius sounded nervous. He might have been a trooper in the militia, but his wife Claudia, whose gray eyes and fair skin spoke of Gothic blood, was larger and brawnier and of a sharper temper than he.

The taverner, a long-faced, swarthy man named Paul, seemed gladder to see the rnilitiamen than was his wont. He filled their mugs up to the top and didn’t scrutinize the coppers they passed across the bar as if certain every other one was a counterfeit. “Are you feeling well, host of ours?” asked a plump fellow named Sabbatius.

“As well as a forest when the birds fly south for the winter,” Paul answered in a gloomy croak. “Aye, the birds are flying, sure enough.”

“Are you making riddles?” Sabbatius asked, swigging at his wine. He was liable to stay for more than a mug or two--or three or four.

“I don’t think he is,” George said. He studied Paul. “I think he’s heard something. You have heard something, haven’t you?”

“Good thing you make shoes instead of asking the questions when the torturer’s doing his job,” the taverner said. “Aye, I’ve heard something, and if it’s so, you militiamen are going to be all that’s in the way between us and trouble for a while.”

“What do you mean? Four or five of the amateur soldiers asked the question at the same time.

Paul shrugged. “My line of work, you do hear things. Some of the things you hear, you wish you hadn’t, if you know what I mean. This is one of them. If I did hear right, most of the regular garrison is heading out of town.”

“Christ have mercy!” Sabbatius said, beating George and several others to the punch. “Why do they want to go and do a fool thing like that?”

“Don’t know that they want to,” Paul answered. “When you’re a soldier, though, you don’t do what you want to. You do what they tell you to. Way I hear it is, Priscus the general is in trouble against the Avars and the Slavs somewhere off in the back of beyond”--he pointed vaguely toward the northeast--”and he needs soldiers, so off they’re going to go.”

“That’s not so good,” George said. He looked around the tavern, then back to Paul. “Would you want Thessalonica defended by the likes of us?”

“If I say no to that, you people will throw things at me,” Paul replied, a smile stretching his face in unfamiliar directions, “but if I say yes I’ll be lying. What am I supposed to do about that?”

“I will have two mugs of wine after all,” Dactylius said, as if that were a matter more important than the regular garrison’s leaving Thessalonica.

While the taverner filled his mug with a dipper, George pondered the question he’d asked. In due course, he told Paul, “Maybe you ought to join the militia, too. Then you’d have no one but yourself to blame for whatever might go wrong.”

“Aye, maybe I ought to at that,” Paul said. “I don’t have forty years on me yet, and if I’m no Hercules, I’m no tun of suet, either, like some people I could name.” He looked pointedly toward Sabbatius.

The chubby militiaman glared right back. “Step out into the street and we’ll talk some more about that,” he offered.

Paul reached under the counter and pulled out a stout club studded with nails. He set it on the bar. “If I step out into the street, I do my talking with this,” he said. Sabbatius’ sword was a better weapon, but he didn’t push it, peering down into his mug of wine instead. Paul grunted and put the club away.

“You do join the militia, join our company,” George said. “And bring your friend there.” He tapped the bar to show what he meant. “Rufus sees that club, he won’t just let you join, he’ll try to steal it from you.”

“Maybe I will,” the taverner said again. Most of the time, that meant, Not on your life, but I’m polite about it. This time, George thought it meant he probably would.

Dactylius gulped down that second mug of wine and hurried out of the tavern. George’s opinion was that he shouldn’t have poured it down so fast; he was walking at a slant. If he was working on anything delicate, it wouldn’t turn out so well as it might have. Claudia would notice, too--as far as George could tell, Claudia noticed everything, whether it was there or not--and make Dactylius regret it.

Although Sabbatius liked to drink, he was next to sidle out the door. He’d been staring down where Paul had stowed the nasty club. He was bold enough shooting at targets in the field, and at