enrageth us.”
They could have stood around for the next several days, talking about the ramifications of moving and not moving. George realized Crotus
“I cry huzzah for mortal celerity,” Crotus said. “On to Thessalonica!” It went back to the lean-to it shared with Nephele and talked with its mate for a while, then with the rest of the centaurs, and at last with the satyrs, who seemed to require less in the way of instruction and debate than its own kind. However much it tried to hurry, more than an hour went by before George, all the centaurs (even little Demetrius), and the satyrs started down from the hills toward the city.
In purely physical terms, going down was easier than coming up had been. But purely physical terms were far from the only ones that mattered. For one thing, George was not entirely certain he remained in the hills he knew. For another, after a while he began to feel as if every step he took required a distinct effort of will. When he remarked on that, Nephele tossed its head and replied in that disconcerting baritone:” “ ‘Tis but a cantrip of the barbarians circling round the city, and hardly one of potency overwhelming.” Its sniff declared the Slavs and Avars should have done better.
The spell’s potency might not have been overwhelming to the female centaur, but it was of different substance from George, who found the going ever harder. And then, suddenly, he had no trouble at all setting one foot in front of the other, and went along as ready as he might have done on the street outside his shop in the city. “That’s better,” he said.
Only when the words were out of his mouth did he notice that his companions had stopped, as if they’d walked into Thessalonica’s wall. After a moment, Ampelus and Stusippus gathered themselves and came toward him. The centaurs needed longer than the satyrs, and advanced as if pushing their way through glue, not air.
“What’s wrong?” George asked. “Did that cursed Avar priest make the spell stronger? He’s not to be taken lightly, that one.”
“The barbarian?” Crotus had to fight to get the words out one by one. “Nay, that was naught of his doing. Meseems you are prayed for inside the city toward which we fare.”
George thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand Of course he was prayed for back in Thessalonica. His wife and children would be in St. Elias’ now--if they weren’t in St. Demetrius’. His friends would be in one church or another, too, if they weren’t up on the wall.
And their prayers had succeeded in weakening the spells the Slavs and Avars had been using to keep him from approaching Thessalonica. The only trouble with that was, the prayers also seemed to have weakened the supernatural beings aiding him. That wasn’t good. He had doubts about being able to get down from the lulls with the centaurs and satyrs helping him. Without them, he had no doubts: he wouldn’t make it.
He saw how vulnerable they were to the power of God. As a Christian, that made him proud. As someone trying to save his own neck, it worried him. If he was going to keep on being proud, he hoped he’d soon be able to start worrying less.
“The weakness passeth,” Xanthippe said after a bit, tossing its head in an impatient gesture a horse without human excrescences might have made. “The petition, methinks, was not aimed straight against us, else the hurt had been greater.”
Gaining strength with her, the other centaurs also came on. Down the game tracks they went with the satyrs and George. He was thoughtful and quiet. The prayer had surely been aimed at the Slavs and Avars. It had weakened their spell, to be sure, but he doubted it had done them the harm it had his companions. That meant those companions were weaker than the powers of the Slavs and Avars. He’d known as much, but didn’t care to be reminded of it.
Little by little, the shock of God’s power wore away. The satyrs took to playing with themselves again. That amused Demetrius, the immature centaur, who, having seen such things for only a few centuries, still found them funny. George didn’t laugh. He took the masturbation as a sign the satyrs remained alarmed, even if at the Slavs and Avars, not at the Lord.
Smiling like a good dog, the first wolf stepped out from between two trees half a bowshot in front of George. It was, obviously, no ordinary wolf. It was bigger than a wolf had any business being, its teeth were longer and sharper, its very stance fiercer and more alert than an ordinary wolfs could have been.
Ampelus, who had been walking alongside of George, sprang nimbly back with a gasp of fright. The shoemaker gasped, too, and made the sign of the cross. He’d already done it before he remembered the company he was keeping. But the satyr had said he’d watched a Christian priest make the holy sign when confronted by a Slavic wolf-demon. It hadn’t been aimed at Ampelus, and so had had no effect on him.
Nor did the satyrs and centaurs flee George now. But the sign of the cross, though it made the wolf draw back a pace and turned that doglike smile into a snarl, did not rout it. George remembered that the wolf the priest had met had killed him in short order. He yanked out his sword. This wolf would not have such an easy time. He had more defenses than the spiritual alone.
The wolf snarled again, as if angry at itself for yielding even slightly to the strength of the Christian sign. Then it sprang for him. He raised his shield.
From behind him, a rock flew through the air and caught the wolf-demon on the tip of its nose. Its agonized yelp was sweet music in George s ears. It skidded to a stop and stared past him to the centaurs, as if it had never imagined they would do such a thing to it.
Another stone hit it, this one in the chest. It staggered, threw back its head, and loosed one of those horrifying howls George had heard corning out of the forest from the walls of Thessalonica.
The shoemaker crossed himself again. Growling deep in its throat, the wolf retreated a few paces. Perhaps because it was hurt, the sign of the cross had more power over it than had been true a moment before. It howled again, this time more in pain than to cause fear among its foes. George took a step toward it, and it drew back once more.
“Move aside, that we may pelt the creature according to its deserts,” Crotus called.
“I don’t care about its pelt,” George heard himself answer: his mouth ran wild and free, disconnected from such wits as he had. “Besides, this is my fight, too.” He advanced on the wolf, which backed away from him.
But now other howls rose in answer to those the creature had loosed. Other wolves came out of the woods to stand with the first, and still others made leaves rustle in the forest to either side of the path. Such creatures could surely have traveled silent as a thought, had they so chosen. But they must have wanted George and his companions to know they were there, so as to put them in fear. George stared now this way, now that. He and the satyrs and centaurs were outflanked.
“We have to go back!” George shouted.
Ampelus and Stusippus scampered away toward the encampment from which they’d set out that morning. All the centaurs, though, stared at George with blank incomprehension. That look told him more clearly than anything else could have why even the pagans of ancient Greece, without the power of God behind them, had been able to drive the powerful creatures deep into the hill country: the very notion of retreat seemed alien to them, however necessary it might be.
Only when wolves burst out at them from left and right at the same time did the centaurs suddenly seem to catch on to what George had meant. He hoped that wasn’t so late, it would get them all lolled--and him with them.
A wolf sprang at Xanthippe’s flank. The female centaur whirled, startlingly quick, and kicked out with its hind legs. The hooves slammed into the wolf s snout. It rolled away, yowling in pain. Blood spurting from its wounds. Any natural creature, any creature of flesh and blood, would have had its head caved in.
Demetrius let out a sound half-scream, half-whinny, as a wolf raked the young--but not so young--centaur’s side with its teeth. The wolf rammed the centaur, overbore it, and came darting back to tear out its throat.
Shouting, George ran to the--colt’s?--aid. The first swipe of his sword lopped off a couple of digits’ worth of the wolf s tail. That got its attention. It whirled away from Demetrius and toward George. The end with the teeth looked much more dangerous than the end with the tail.
The wolf-demon leaped straight for his face. He got his shield up--Rufus would have been proud of him--and cut at the creature. He felt his blade bite into its side, but it didn’t seem to mind in the least. It hit him like a boulder. Try as he would to keep his feet, he went over backwards.
He did all the things he’d reminded himself to do when the first wolf-demon had been about to attack him. He kept his shield up; the wolf s fangs scraped on the leather facing. He kept slashing with his sword. None of that would have mattered very long. The wolf was immensely stronger than he, and his sword seemed unable to do it much harm.
But then, just as it was scrabbling with paws unnaturally clever to pull down the shield so its teeth could do their deadly work,
George scrambled to his feet. Elatus grabbed the wolf with human arms and hands, lifted it off the ground in an amazing display of strength, and then threw it down, hard. The male centaur trampled the wolf-demon with both pairs of equine hooves.
The wolf howled and twisted and then clamped its jaws on Elatus’ left hindmost leg. The centaur cried out in anguish as George rushed to its aid. He stabbed the wolf-demon in the belly with his sword. It screamed; supernatural or not, it was sorely hurt. Its blood smelled hot and metallic and almost spicy: an odor much stronger and more distinctive than that of the blood of ordinary living things.
Elatus was bleeding, too. That did not keep the centaur from flailing away with its three good horse’s legs at the wolf-demon, which finally broke away and fled, not just from the male centaur but from the right as a whole.
“We can’t go forward,” George said. “There are still too many of them. We have to go back.”
“A truth may be bitter but a truth naytheless,” Elatus said. The male dipped its shaggy head to George. “And I own myself in your debt, mortal. That was bravely done.” It twisted so it could look at its wounded leg. Scabs were already forming over the bites. In a day or two, George supposed, Elatus would be altogether healed. And, in a day or two, the wolf-demon the shoemaker had stabbed would probably be well again, too. He sighed. Had he been a proper hero out of myth, he would have slain it.
Elatus shouted: a great sound without words George could discern, but one that must have had meaning to the other centaurs. They began to retreat down the path Ampelus and Stusippus had taken. George went with them. The wolves made as if to pursue, but gave up when the centaurs, having opened a little distance from them, bombarded them with showers of stones.
None of the centaurs had escaped without wounds, but all of them were well on the way toward healing by the time they got back to the encampment from which they’d set out. George counted himself lucky to have got away with nothing worse than cuts and scrapes and bruises; no sharp teeth had pierced his tender flesh. He ached and stung as things were. Being in the company of the supernatural beings did not make him so close to immune to hurt as they were.
“Manifest it is,” Crotus said, scratching what had been a bite and was now a rough red scar, “that these folk and their powers desire not your return to the city whenee you were abstracted.”
“I didn’t want to be abstracted from it,” George said. When he thought of Menas, his hands bunched into fists. “I didn’t get what I wanted. I don’t see any reason the Slavs and Avars should get what they want.”
“One reason doth suggest itself,” Nephele observed: “namely and to wit, that they have the power to enforce that which they desire.”
Ampelus came up to George. All the centaurs glared at the satyr, who had been of such little use in the fight against the wolf-demons. Sensitive to that scorn, Ampelus spoke with something like embarrassment: “Not good to go in day. Maybe good to go in night.”
George clapped a hand to his forehead. “When I wanted to do that, everyone said it would be worse than trying it in the daytime.”
“What can be worse than that?” the satyr asked reasonably. “Try in day, not go. Try in night, likely not go, but maybe go.”
George could see one way in which things might be worse. He’d come out of this try alive, even if unsuccessful. If things went wrong again .. .
He wondered what was happening back at Thessalonica. The sally from inside the city had driven back the Slavs undermining the walls beneath the shelter of their tortoises, but had the barbarians attacked again? Had the Avar priest or wizard found yet another set of demigods to hurl against the protective power that came from St. Demetrius and from God?
And on those questions depended the answer to the truly important one: how were Irene and Theodore and Sophia?
“We’d better try and get back, any way we possibly can,” George said. “If it can’t be by day, it will have to be by night.” The children of Israel had traveled by night as well as by day, he reminded himself, with a pillar of fire to light their way as they went.
