livelier. Maybe some general of theirs came by and they were showing off for him. Maybe they just felt mean and wanted to kill themselves some Romans.”
“Does it matter?” Dactylius added.
“It might,” Theodore said. “If we knew why they did what they do, we might be able to keep them from doing it.”
Dactylius looked over toward George. “Anyone would think he was your son,” he said.
“I can’t imagine why,” the shoemaker answered, his voice dry but a sparkle in his eye. Theodore scowled at both of them. He didn’t think he sounded like his father. He didn’t think he thought like his father, either. All that proved, as far as George was concerned, was that he remained very young.
“Another blow with weapons,” Dactylius said musingly. “I suppose that means they’ll try something magical next.”
“They don’t seem willing or able to do both at once, do they?” George said. “I wouldn’t mind rattling them again with our own power. That sickness Eusebius called down on them left them this far” --he held thumb and forefinger close together-- “from having to up and go.”
“I thought the nature of the plague was that they had to up and go, Father,” Theodore said, so innocently that George had no more than a momentary temptation to pitch him off the wall onto his head.
“Anyone would think …” Dactylius repeated.
“My jokes aren’t that bad,” George said, his voice full of affronted dignity. “He couldn’t possibly be John’s son. John wasn’t anywhere near Thessalonica nine months before he was born.”
Theodore turned red. Soldiers chaffed one another harder than his friends did. And George, ever so slightly, was chaffing his mother, too. “Father!” he said, and his voice betrayed him, sliding up into a boyish treble for the second syllable of the word.
“Don’t worry about it, boy; I’m joking. Your mother would hit me if she heard me, but not very hard,” George said, adding, “If you’re worried about what she’s thinking, go home and show her you’re all right. She was convinced the only reason I’d taken you up here was to get you killed.” That was another joke, but less so than Theodore probably thought.
“Will it be all right?” the youth asked doubtfully.
“Go ahead,” George told him. “I let Rufus know I was going to bring you up here today, to see how you’d do. But you’re not on any official list. I expect you can be by this time tomorrow, though, if that’s what you’d like-- all I’ve got to do is ask him to put you there. You fought well enough; no one can say you don’t deserve it.”
“All right, Father. If that’s what you think, that’s what we should do,” Theodore answered, a more subdued response than the whoop of ecstatic glee George had expected. Maybe a firsthand look at war had sobered his son after all. With a nod, Theodore descended from the wall.
“He’s a good boy, George. You should be proud of him,” Dactylius said. Just outside the wall fluttered one of those batlike spirits that had startled George and Dactylius on their first night patrol together. Its ugly little face twisted into a nasty leer as it echoed Dactylius’ words in a high, squeaky voice: “He’s a good boy, George. You should be very proud of him.” Whether it was meant for mockery or not, it sounded scornful.
“Begone, foul flying sprite!” George exclaimed, and made the sign of the cross at it.
It bared its teeth and flapped a few feet farther away, but seemed unharmed by the gesture that would have sent one of the powers of the pagan days of Greece fleeing in abject terror. “You should be very proud,” it squeaked at the shoemaker. Was that an echo? A mocking warning? He couldn’t tell.
He drew his bow and let fly at the spirit. Maybe his arrow missed. Maybe it passed right through the thing without causing it undue harm. It did upset the spirit, which shrilled “Very proud!” and flew away, darting and dodging like a beast made of flesh and blood.
“That bat’s gone,” George said in some satisfaction.
“It was spying on us!” Dactylius said.
“Yes, I think you’re right,” George answered; that darting, dodging flight had taken the batlike spirit back toward the tents of the Slavic wizards who associated with the Avar priest. In spite of where it had gone, the shoemaker laughed. “If the Slavs think they’re going to learn how to take Thessalonica from the likes of you and me, they’ll be disappointed.”
“Oh!” Dactylius blinked. “I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right, aren’t you?”
“Unless you know more about the secrets of the city than I do, I am,” George said. He looked out toward the wizards’ tents once more. “They
“How do you know one wasn’t?” Dactylius asked.
He stood there small and smug and proud of his own cleverness. And George demolished it, not taking malicious glee in the doing as John would have but doing it anyhow, hardly noticing he was doing it, not thinking of anything but going after the truth wherever it happened to be hiding this particular day: “If the Slavs and Avars were listening to what our leaders said to one another, they’ve have a better idea of where we’re weak than they really do, and they’d do a better job of hurting us in those places.”
Dactylius stared at him. Pride leaked out of him like water from a squeezed sponge. Even with pride gone, though, integrity remained. “You’re right,” he said, a sentence he’d used twice lately but one many men would sooner have been tortured than utter. “That makes better sense than my notion.”
“It does only stand to reason,” George said, trying by his tone to imply that his friend would surely have seen the same thing had he but waited a moment longer before he spoke. He waved up and down the length of the wall. “See? We still don’t have as many stones up here as we did before the Slavs attacked the foundations with their tortoises, for instance. If they knew that, they might try again.”
“Good thing none of those little bat spirits was flying near you then,” Dactylius said. He and George both looked around anxiously to make sure that was so. George didn’t see any of the ugly little things, so he supposed it was.
The supposition cheered him less than it might have. “Sooner or later,” he said slowly, “those things are going to hear something important for no better reason than luck. If they come around often enough, they have to. And if the Slavs and Avars can figure out what to do with it--”
“We’re in trouble,” Dactylius finished for him.
“We’re in worse trouble,” George corrected him. “We’ve been in plain trouble for a while now.”
Dactylius looked out toward the enemy encampment. “Well, yes,” he said.
VIII
A barmaid sidled up to George, smiling a bright, professional smile. “More salted olives?” she asked. Partly, that was to help make him thirsty. Partly, it was pride that Paul’s tavern still had salted olives to sell. Whatever it was, George had already gone through one bowl of them, and a fresh mug of wine sat in front of him. He shook his head.
A kithara gently wept, accompanying the singer’s plaintive song of lost love. Across the table from George,
John made a face. “If I had to listen to this fellow all day long, I’d have left him, too,” the comic said.
“Practice for your act?” George asked: his friend wore the intent look he donned whenever he was about to perform.
But John shook his head. “Paul told me he’d throw me out on my ear if I ever badmouthed any of the other people he brought up onstage to make the customers forget how lousy his wine is.” His flexible features displayed great gobs of scorn. “As if anybody needs me to tell him what a bad mouth this singer has.” He wasn’t on the platform yet, but his quips drew blood even so.
Before long, the kithara player mercifully finished his last song. He got a tepid round of applause, half praise, half relief that he was done. Paul shouted, “And now-- here’s John!” The comic bounded up onto the little stage. The kithara player gave him a fanfare he looked as if he could have done without.
“I thought I was going to have good news for everybody tonight,” John said. “I thought the siege would be over by now. When I was out on the wall a couple of weeks ago, one of the Avars told me their women were getting pretty tired of how long this whole business is taking, and they said they wouldn’t sleep with their men unless they gave up and made peace with us Romans.”
“You’re stealing that from Aristophanes!” yelled a heckler with an education in the classics.
“The frogs are loud tonight,” observed John, who also had one. “
Somebody threw an olive at him. He caught it out of the air and ate it. “It’s not a tough crowd if they don’t throw things from the swordsmith’s shop,” he remarked. Maybe that was supposed to be a joke. Maybe it was just how a tavern comic went about gauging his audience.
John said, “One thing this siege has done is make me glad I’m a Christian. I have enough trouble keeping one God happy. Try and keep all the gods the Slavs and Avars have happy and you end up as worn out as an old man trying to keep a young harem happy.” He pantomimed limp exhaustion--limp in every sense of the word.
After exactly the right pause, he recovered as if by magic and started counting on his fingers. “How many gods have we seen? Water god, thunder gods, fire god--I expect any minute now they’re going to sic the god of shrunken tunics on us.” Again, he let his body get his laughs for him, twisting and jerking as he tried to handle an imaginary bow in a tunic that was squeezing his arms like a serpent.
“And somebody,” he said, sitting down on his stool once more, “told the chief tax collector the Slavs have so many gods, they even have one who inflicts high interest on delinquent returns. From what I hear, the tax man jumped over the wall and converted day before yesterday.”
That got a loud laugh. Every tax collector George had ever known would have worshiped a god like that. He watched the men in the taverns looking around at one another. Half of them would have worshiped a god like that, too. Enough people owed George money that he might have been tempted into a brief bit of fiscal paganism himself.
“That same god went down into the Jews’ quarter,” John added. “They told him to come back once he had some experience.” No one was safe from John. That was a lot of what made him funny. It was also what made the people whose vanity he flicked hate him.
A barmaid carrying a wooden tray filled with empty mugs stumbled over somebody’s outstretched foot. She squealed and managed to stay upright, but several of the mugs flew off the tray. Being the cheapest of cheap crockery, they shattered.
“Pick up the pieces, Verina,” Paul said wearily when the noise stopped. “That’ll come out of your pay, you know.”
“What a kind and generous host we have,” John exclaimed--not sarcasm, as George first thought, but the lead-in to a joke, for the comic continued, “Puts me in mind of the two fellows who owned a slave in common. One day one of them came into their shop and found the other one whacking the slave with a stick. “What are you doing? he asked his partner. And the other fellow told him, ‘I’m beating my half.’ “
As Verina swept up the shards of the broken mugs, John said, “Like I told you, Paul’s a good fellow. Instead of taking it out of Verina s pay, he could have taken it out some other way.” He leered at the barmaid. The largely male crowd whooped. Verina looked ready to throw the pieces of crockery at him. Again, though, he’d only used the situation to help set up a story: “I remember the poor fool who was talking with a good-looking woman, and he said to her, ‘I wonder whether you or my wife tastes better.’” He leered again, and ran his tongue lewdly over his lips. “And the woman said, “Why don’t you ask my husband? He’s tasted us both.’”
He got his laugh, but George, listening to it, thought it had a certain nervous undertone. Not everyone had as much confidence in his wife as he did with Irene, and everyone there, no doubt, had been devastated by an unexpected answer at one time or another, even if not by that particular unexpected answer. When John’s jokes worked well, they touched a central core of humanity all his listeners shared.
“Then,” said the comic, “there was the fellow who went to Maurice and wanted to be named Augustal prefect of Egypt. ‘I already have one,’ Maurice told him. ‘Well, all right, you’re the Emperor--make me governor of Thrace,’ the man said. And Maurice answered, ‘I can’t do that, either--I like the job the man there now is doing.’ And the fellow said, ‘In that case, give me twenty solidi!’ So Maurice did. As the fellow was walking out of the palace with his gold pieces, his friend asked, ‘Aren’t you disappointed you got so little?’ And the fellow said, ‘Are you crazy? I never would have got this much if I hadn’t asked for all the other stuff.’ “
