Thessalonica

That got a laugh, too, both for the sake of the joke and, again, for the obvious truth it contained: Maurice, among the most parsimonious Roman Emperors of all time, never parted with a copper if he could help it.

John got down from the platform, went over to the bar, and spoke to Paul in a loud, wheedling voice: “How about giving me half an interest in this tavern, my good and wise friend?”

“What?” Paul jerked as if a wasp had stung him. “Are you out of your mind, John? Go away.”

“Well, if you won’t do that, how about letting me have all the roast pork I can eat for the next year?” John asked.

“Are you crazy?” said the taverner, who obviously hadn’t been paying attention to the routine. “Go back there and be funny.”

“Give me a mug of wine, then.”

Paul dipped it out for him. “There. Go on, now.”

John turned to the crowd. “You see?” he said with an enormous grin. People laughed and cheered as he finally went back to the platform, and Paul never did figure out where the joke lay. John knocked back the wine in one long draught, then ruefully shook his head. “ ‘Go back there and be funny,’ the man says. I’ll tell you people what’s funny. That’s funny. Our beloved host thinks he can tell somebody to be funny and have it happen, just like that.”

“You’d better be funny,” said Paul, who was listening now.

John ignored him. Now the comic’s face bore a wistful expression: maybe a true one, maybe only a trick of the light. “I wish it were that easy. I wish you could walk into a shop and say, ‘I’d like a pound of funny, please,’ and put it in a sack and take it home with you. Wouldn’t that be fine, if you could buy funny the way you buy a loaf of bread from Justin the baker or a pair of shoes from George here?”

Now George jumped. John hadn’t been in the habit of including him in his routines, and he would have been as well pleased had his friend left him out of this one, too.

And, sure enough, John sent a sardonic stare his way as he went on, “Come to think of it, you can buy some pretty funny shoes from George, all right.”

“I’ll remember you in my nightmares,” George called.

“Your nightmares are ugly enough without me,” John retorted; he wasn’t shy about mocking himself, either. He went on, “Besides, it’s hard to be funny in Thessalonica these days. God is punishing us for our sins. The Slavs and Avars are outside the wall, there’s not enough food inside the wall, and He gave Menas back his legs so he could go around shouting at everybody.”

Some people laughed. Others looked alarmed, either because God might have been insulted or because Menas had been. George put his elbows down on the tabletop and buried his face in his hands. Sure as sure, that crack would get back to Menas. And, sure as sure, Menas would think George had said it, not anyone else. Fourteen people might tell him it had come from John’s lips; he would hear George every time.

The shoemaker didn’t really listen to the rest of John’s routine. People laughed every so often, so he suspected his friend was doing well. And, when John finally came back to the table, the bowl he brought with him was nicely full of coins. He sorted them with his usual quick dexterity.

George said, “I do wish you wouldn’t tell jokes on Menas so often.”

“Why, in God’s name?” John didn’t look up from what he was doing. “He’s funny, is what he is. I can’t think of anybody funnier in the whole world, him swaggering around like he’s got God’s hand in his drawers.”

“The trouble is, he does--or he did, anyhow--have God’s hand in his drawers,” George said uncomfortably,

“Yes, but God didn’t put it there to play Menas’ trumpet for him,” John answered, setting a silver miliaresion off by itself with a pleased grunt. “Menas still hasn’t figured that out, even though it’s been months. He’s pretty stupid, too; he may never get the idea.”

“Regardless of how stupid he is” --a sentiment with which George heartily concurred-- “he’s rich, too, and he’ll get you in trouble if you keep making jokes about him.” He’ll get me in trouble if you keep making jokes about him. But George remained too stubborn to tell John about that.

“What’s he going to do?” the comic asked. “Make me leave town? I can’t go by land, and if he puts me on a ship he does me a favor.”

“He can make your life miserable while you’re here,” George said. “Believe me, I know.” That was as close as he would come to revealing the trouble to which his friend had contributed.

“My life is already miserable while I’m here,” John said. “A little less miserable,” he amended, “because the night’s take is pretty good. And if Verina’s in the right kind of mood--” He raised his voice and called to the barmaid: “Hello, sweetheart! What do you say you and I--”

“I say no, whatever it is,” Verina answered. “All those broken cups I was cleaning up, I wish I’d broken them over your head.” George didn’t know what John had done to her, or what she thought he’d done to her, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with him now, stalking off nose in air.

If he was embarrassed, he didn’t show it. Going up in front of an audience to tell jokes for a living had no doubt hardened him against embarrassment. “It doesn’t matter,” he said lightly. “She’s no good in bed, anyhow.”

That, for once, hadn’t been pitched to carry to Verina’s ears, but she heard it and came storming back. “For one thing, you’re a liar,” she snapped. “For another, you’ve never had the chance to find out whether you’re a liar. And for one more, you’re never going to have the chance.” Off she went again.

John got more laughs than he had through his whole routine, all of them aimed at him. Had George been publicly humiliated like that, he wouldn’t have dared show his face on the street for weeks afterwards. John took it all in stride. By the calculating look on his face, he was figuring out the jokes he’d tell about it the next time he got up in front of a crowd.

Having gone to Paul’s tavern, George was glad he had an afternoon shift on the wall the next day. He was less glad about staring into the westering sun; the day was cold but brilliantly clear. The glare in his face made it hard for him to keep an eye on whatever the Slavs and Avars might be doing.

John didn’t worry about that, and had some reason not to worry: the barbarians’ encampment seemed as quiet as it ever had since the siege began. The comic said, “They’re probably all out with their sheep.”

“You told that one last night, John,” George said patiently.

“Go on, complain about every little thing,” John said. “I think--”

George didn’t find out what John thought. Up farther north along the wall, someone started shouting in a very loud, unpleasant voice: “Call yourself a fighting man, do you? A fighting man is supposed to be alert in the presence of danger. He is supposed to--”

Had Rufus been giving that dressing-down, neither George nor John would have thought anything of it. As it was, John’s face gave the impression that he’d smelled some meat several days later than it should have been smelled. George’s lip also curled. “Menas,” he said.

Menas it was, and he was, to George s dismay, heading in the direction of the Litaean Gate, spreading joy and good cheer in front of him. John glanced his way and said, “What’s that thing he’s carrying? Besides his big, ugly belly, I mean.”

“His war hammer--is that what you’re talking about?” George said. “I’ve seen him lugging that around before. It’s a rich man’s toy, if you ask me--something that makes him feel like a soldier even if he’s not.”

He wasn’t a soldier himself, as any member of Thessalonica’s regular garrison would have told him in as much detail as he could stand. But he’d done real fighting since the Slavs and Avars infested the city, which was more than Menas could have said. George checked himself. No: it was more than Menas could truthfully have said.

And here came the noble, twirling the hammer around by the leather strap attached to the end of the handle. He glared at George as if at a moldy spot on a chunk of bread. “Haven’t I told you to stop insulting me?” he growled. “Haven’t I warned you I’ll get my own back if it’s the last thing I do?”

“You’ve done all those things, sir,” George answered. “What I haven’t done is insult you.”

“Liar!” Menas shouted, loud enough to make militiamen within a bowshot of him turn their heads his way. “The latest is, you say God cured me so I could go around shouting at people.”

Whoever had reported John’s joke to him had got the words right, but Menas had got the source wrong, as George had known would happen. The shoemaker wondered if John would own up to having said it, and if Menas would believe him if he did. Since John kept quiet, the latter didn’t become an issue. George said, “I did not say that about you, sir.”

“Liar!” Menas shouted again.

“I did not say that,” George repeated. “If you keep doing the things that someone said about you, though, I will start saying them myself. I’ll have to start saying them myself, because you’ll have made them true.”

Menas stared at him. Being a rich and prominent man, being a man to whom God had granted a miracle (for what reason, George could not imagine, and he’d tried-- how he’d tried!), the noble was not accustomed to having anyone speak so pointedly to him. He raised the hammer, as if to strike George down.

George sprang backwards. He had an arrow on the string and the bow down almost as soon as his feet hit the walkway again. The point of the arrow--a bronze point, perhaps made by Benjamin--was aimed at a spot a palm’s breadth above Menas’ navel.

As nothing George said had ever managed to do, that made Menas thoughtful. He lowered the silver-chased hammer. George lowered the bow so the arrow pointed toward the walkway rather than Menas’ brisket. He held it at full draw, though, ready to bring it up in a hurry if the noble was only pretending to back away from a fight.

“How you’ll pay!” Menas snarled. “You’ll wish the Slavs and Avars had got hold of you by the time I’m done.” He stamped south along the walkway. George resisted the temptation to put the arrow in his bow straight through Menas’ left kidney. It wasn’t easy. He had to make himself replace the arrow in the quiver one motion at a time.

“Getting credit for my lines, are you?” John said when Menas started bellowing at some other luckless militiaman farther down the wall. “That’s a trouble you could probably do without.”

“Now that you mention it, yes,” George answered. John was bolder with his insults when the target wasn’t standing right there in front of him. George tried to get angry at that, but found he couldn’t. Most men were made the same way.

“That’s why you’ve been after me not to tell jokes about him anymore,” John said, with the air of a man for whom a dark corner of the world has suddenly become bright.

“In a manner of speaking,” George said.

“Well, I won’t,” John promised. And then, an instant later, he backtracked: “I don’t think I will, anyhow. But if something comes to me while I’m up there in front of a bunch of people, who knows what I’ll do?”

“No one,” George said sadly. “Not a single, solitary soul. Not even you. You’d be better off if you did.”

“Maybe,” John said. “But if I knew ahead of time everything I’d do when I got up on a platform, and if I did just what I’d thought beforehand I was going to do … I wouldn’t be me. Like you say, I might be better off. But I might not be able to perform at all.”

George thought about that. He’d made shoes all his life, learning the trade from his father. But if, for some reason, he couldn’t make shoes anymore, he was sure he’d be happy enough as a potter or a miller instead, once he’d learned one of those businesses. If, however, a man had in his makeup something that had to come out if he was to be happy, he couldn’t very well go through life denying it was there.

“I will try,” John said, which, as a pledge, left something to be desired.

“Do the best you can.” George sounded weary, even to himself. “The damage is probably done by now, any which way.”

A man whom George needed a moment to recognize was in the shop when he came back from the wall: a burly fellow of about his own age, with rather heavy features pitted by scars from either a light case of smallpox or a bad set of pimples as a youth. The latter, George thought, and that let him figure out who the visitor was a moment before Irene said, “Dear, of course you know Leo the potter.”

“Yes, of course,” George said, and clasped Leo’s hand. The potter had a firm grip, and very smooth skin on his palm from using it to shape clay: a great contrast to the scars and punctures that marked a shoemaker’s hands. “A pleasure to see you. Will you drink some wine with me?”