“And when they say ‘moving,’ “ George told his son, “they aren’t talking about their bowels.”
“Bishop Eusebius was,” Theodore retorted, whereupon George trod upon his toes again. This time, it didn’t help. Theodore dissolved into giggles, from which occasional mumbles of “bowels” and “earthfarts” emerged.
He and his father met Irene and Sophia across the street from the church. “I see you didn’t have to kill him-- quite,” Irene said to George, again proving she knew their son as well as he did.
“I didn’t do
“Yes, and it wasn’t for lack of effort that you didn’t, either,” George said, which singularly faded to abash his son.
Sophia gasped. George whirled, expecting some Slavic or Avar demigod to be menacing his daughter or someone else close by. Pointing, Sophia said, “Look--there’s Constantine. Isn’t he
As far as George could see, the splendid one was still hulking, rather surly-looking, and pimple-besplotched. He knew Sophia was looking at the youth as much with her heart as with her eyes. Instead of examining Constantine (to his way of thinking, an unprofitable exercise), George nodded politely to Leo the potter. The father of Sophia’s object of affection nodded back. He studied Sophia and then, warily, Irene. The smile she gave Leo showed good teeth; George was sure he’d imagined fangs in her mouth. Almost sure.
“God will provide,” Irene said. Her husband wondered whether she was talking about Constantine or freedom from earthquakes. Probably both, he decided.
Several Avars on horseback stared in at Thessalonica. “They don’t look very happy, do they?” Dactylius said, sounding happy himself at the Avars’ appearance of unhappiness.
“No,” George said, and then, more sharply, “Uh-oh. Here comes that priest or wizard of theirs. I’d almost sooner pray never to see him again than for no more earthquakes for a while.”
“Amen to that,” Rufus said. “He’s caused us as much trouble as all their soldiers rolled together--throw in the Slavic wizards with him, I mean.”
“That’s so,” George agreed. “But it looks like the other Avars aren’t any happier to see him than they are to look at us, doesn’t it?”
“Good,” Rufus said with considerable relish.
One of the mounted men pointed toward Thessalonica. The priest shook his head and spread his hands in regret. Whatever the horseman wanted him to do, he couldn’t do it.
“No earthquake today?” Rufus’ voice oozed false regret. “Can’t make the walls fall down? Oh, poor ducks. What a shame they had to go up against the power of God. When you do that, you come off second best.” Realism replaced sarcasm for a moment. “Well, most of the time you do. The powers out there, they’re pretty tough.”
The Avar cuffed at the priest. George stared. Knowing how much power the man who wore furs and fringes controlled, he waited for the wizard to turn the horseman into a grub, or possibly even into a Roman scribe. But nothing happened, save that the Avar priest brought up a hand to keep the captain from hitting him more than once.
“Dissension in their ranks!” someone with a big, deep voice shouted from not far away: Menas. There he stood, atop the Litaean Gate. He’d been quiet till that moment, something so unusual it had kept George from noticing him. Now he went on, loudly obvious, “If they quarrel among themselves, our victory is assured.”
“Why doesn’t he keep still?” Dactylius asked.
“I don’t think he knows how,” George answered. “If he stops talking for long, he forgets he exists.”
“That’s no way to talk about a noble,” Rufus said in stern tones, then added, “But I won’t tell you you’re wrong, either.”
Menas waved his big, expensive, ostentatious war hammer. “We shall slaughter them, hip and thigh, root and branch.”
“Is he a wrestler, a gardener, or a soldier?” George asked.
“He’s a blowhard, that’s what he is,” Rufus said. “Haven’t seen him up on the wall for a bit. He must have heard that the truth gets told here, and the truth about him is that--”
“Hush,” Dactylius said. “He’s liable to hear you, and then you’ll have the same troubles with him that George does.”
“Not me.” Rufus’ hand dropped to the hilt of his sword. “He tries getting wise with me, he’ll regret it to the end of his days--and that’ll be soon.”
Out beyond the wall, the Avar captain was finally getting it through his head that the wizard couldn’t give him what he wanted. He shouted to his companions. One of them produced a horn of polished brass that shone like gold even on a cloudy day. The fellow raised it to his lips and blew a long, unmelodious blast.
“Uh-oh,” George said, as he had a little while before on spying the wizard.
“Oh, dear,” Dactylius added. Rufus said something that expressed the same opinion a good deal more pungently. Slavs started tumbling out of the tents and little wooden shacks in which they sheltered from the elements. And, all along the wall, more horn blasts were presumably calling more Slavs out of more encampments.
“Something’s going on,” Rufus said, as good a statement of the obvious as George had heard in a long time. A moment later, the veteran added, “Here come the Slavs, all right.”
Almost indignantly, George said, “I thought we decided the Slavs and Avars would try magic against us next.”
“Maybe they did try it and it didn’t work, thanks to the prayers we sent up to God the other day,” Rufus answered. “Or maybe we were just flat-out wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to me, and I expect not to you, either, eh?”
George didn’t answer. He was watching the Slavs, who were indeed issuing from their encampments in large numbers. Most of the barbarians were clutching bows. They trotted toward the wall of Thessalonica and started loosing great flights of arrows.
Crouching behind a battlement, Dactylius said, “This must be what they mean when they talk about shooting so many arrows, they darken the sun as they come.”
“If one of ‘em hits you square, it’ll darken the sun for you, all right, and you can take that to church,” Rufus said.
As if to underscore his words, men up and down the length of the wall shouted and screamed as they were wounded. George heard Menas say, “Here, my good fellow, lean on me. I’ll get you down to safety and the help of a physician.” The shoemaker’s lip curled. Menas had found a way to get out of the dangerous part of the fighting, and to look good while he did it.
George popped up long enough to shoot at the Slavs, then ducked back down again. Up, shoot, duck . . . up, shoot, duck .. . “They haven’t tried anything like this for a while,” he said, nocking another arrow.
“Sure haven’t,” agreed Rufus, who was also grabbing for a new shaft. “Whatever they’re doing, they’re bloody serious about it.”
“Of course they’re serious,” a newcomer said. “Have you ever seen anybody tell jokes while he was shooting a bow?”
“Hullo, John,” George said without looking up. Till you did it just now, no, I hadn’t seen anybody do that.”
“He did, didn’t he?” Dactylius said. “Is it time to change shifts already? I mean, would it be time? If I’m not there when I’m supposed to be, it will make Claudia very unhappy.”
“She’d be even more unhappy if the Slavs take the city,” Paul pointed out; the taverner had come up onto the wall with the comic. He shot at the Slavs. “Got one there, I think.”
“There are enough of them, I’ll say that,” Rufus said. “They haven’t brought the whole army forward like this since . . .” His brow, already wrinkled, furrowed still more as he thought. “Since that time they used those tortoises to try and undermine the walls.”
After George let fly with another arrow, he stayed upright longer than he had been doing. “I see more of them, getting ready to use those big shields they had then.”
“Let me have a look.” Rufus stood up beside him, ignoring the arrows humming by as if they were so many gnats. George pointed. The veteran let out a grunt. “Aye, that’s what they’re doing. Didn’t know whether they’d try the same stunt twice, but I always figured they might. And don’t the Scriptures talk about a dog coming back to its vomit?”
“That means coming back to a bad idea,” George said, loosing another shaft at the advancing Slavs. “For them, this is liable to be coming back to a good idea.” He shot again. The arrow ricocheted from one of the large, heavy shields. He cursed.
So did Rufus. “Aye, it’s liable to be,” he agreed. After he looked around at the piles of stones on the walkway, his curses put George’s to shame. “I’ve been screaming at everybody who might listen, but we still haven’t put back as many rocks as we dropped on the Slavs the last time they tried tortoises against us.” He raised his voice to a great bellow: “Water and fuel for the cauldrons!” In more conversational tones, he said to George, “We’ll never get stones up here quick enough to do much good. Dropping boiling water on the whoresons will still help, though.”
“It had better,” George said. The tortoise crews moved steadily forward. The shoemaker pointed to them. “They’ve learned from what went wrong the first time. Now they’ve got the shields up to make their shells right from the start.”
“Only way to do it,” Rufus said absently, and then, “I wish they were as stupid as those Goths and Franks and Lombards over in Italy. The German tribes didn’t know how to do anything except bash and slash, and they didn’t want to learn, either.”
Under George’s feet, the wall shivered. The first tortoise had reached it and, under cover of the iron-faced shields, the Slavs were using pry bars and hammers and chisels to try to pull stones out of the base and send the whole thing tumbling down. George set down his bow, picked up a stone, and dropped it down toward the attackers. It landed with a dull thud, not a clatter, telling him he’d missed.
Dactylius threw a stone down on the Slavs, too. He cheered when he heard a crash, but the barbarians kept chipping away at the wall, which meant the shields above them had turned the stone.
John said, “If this goes on much longer, it could get very boring.” After a moment, he added, “Running out of rocks up here could be boring, too.”
Rufus lifted a stone. It was not one of the enormous boulders he’d picked up the first time the Slavs tried tortoises, but of more ordinary size and weight. Even so, it was enough to make him stagger. George decided God really had been helping him then. He also decided God wasn’t helping Rufus now. When the veteran dropped the stone, he missed the tortoise, as George had.
The vibration underfoot got worse as more and more
Slavic crews got to work at the base of the wall. “We aren’t going to have enough rocks to smash all of them,” Paul said. “I don’t know how else we’re going to stop them, either.” George had been thinking the same thing. He’d kept quiet, hoping it wouldn’t be true if he didn’t say it. Now Paul had said it. It was true.
Rufus’ face was haggard, for once showing every one of his years. “We’re in trouble,” he said, each word dragged from him.
“A sally?” George asked, as he had before.
He saw how much Rufus wanted to say no, to keep fighting from the top of Thessalonica’s wall, the wall that had for so long warded the Romans within from the barbarians outside. But the wall trembled beneath their feet, and might crumble beneath those feet at any moment. Looking as if every word tasted bad, Rufus said, “Aye, a sally.” The decision made, he wasted no time wondering whether he should change his mind. Instead, he shouted, “Come on, you lugs! Grab your swords and shields and get down to the gate. If we can’t make the Slavs leave the wall alone any other way, we’ll have to chase ‘em off!”
Having set down all his arms but his bow and arrow when he got up to the walkway, George had to snatch them up in a hurry now. Several of his comrades were doing the same thing. Rufus had already started down the stairway toward the Litaean Gate. John, Paul, George, and Dactylius hurried after him, along with a couple of dozen other militiamen from farther away.
Down on the ground, Rufus was shoving every able-bodied man he could find in the direction of the gate. “Here, what are you doing?” Menas shouted in anger and alarm. “Do you know who I am?”
Rufus kept shoving. “You’re not much more than half my age, and you’ve got that big, fancy hammer in your hand,” he answered. “Past that, pal, I don’t care who you are.”
This time, the soldier at the postern gate gave Rufus no argument when he ordered it open. “Doesn’t this look like fun!” John exclaimed. But the tavern comic was the first one through the gate, out into the hostile world beyond the wall.
George followed a moment later. He let out the loudest shout he could, both to frighten the Slavs and to try to make himself believe he wasn’t frightened. He didn’t know how he did on the first count. On the second, he faded miserably.
He ran toward the tortoise closest to the Litaean Gate. Arrows hissed past, bouncing back from the wall or shattering against it. To his relief, the Slavic archers didn’t come rushing forward to engage his comrades and him in hand-to-hand combat. There were enough of them that they might have overwhelmed the militiamen by force of numbers alone.
Behind their shields, the Slavs in the tortoise saw the Romans running at them and shouted in alarm. John pulled one of the shields aside and slashed at the men it sheltered. Suddenly, the
