“It works.” Gorgonius’ leer rivaled anything Ampelus could produce. “I’ve seen more pretty girls, and more of ‘em, than you’ll ever dream about, pal, even if you live in that big city. Oh, it works, all right.”
Nephele let out a noise half giggle, half horsy snort. The satyrs’ interest in the conversation, which had been small, visibly swelled. George was all at once convinced Gorgonius was telling the truth. He didn’t know whether to be awed or appalled that Gorgonius had figured out a use for the cap so far removed from that originally intended for it.
After a moment, though, he doubted the old carpenter was the one who had only just begun that use. A lot of men’s lives lay between Perseus and Gorgonius. Surely one of the carpenter’s multiple great-grandsires had had that same inspiration. Probably a good many of them had had it.
Gorgonius walked out of the room in which they’d been talking. Instead of having his living quarters above his shop, as George did, Gorgonius lived behind his workroom: Lete was less crowded than Thessalonica and, so far as George could recall, had no buildings taller than one story.
When Gorgonius didn’t come back right away, Crotus rumbled, “Whither is the fellow gone, and for what purpose?”
“An I be not much mistaken, he hath not gone, or rather, he is returned among us,” Nephele answered.
Gorgonius said, “See what a clever lady you are.” His voice came from a point halfway between George and Nephele. His voice was there, but he wasn’t--not so far as the eye could tell, at any rate.
Then he lifted a nondescript leather cap from his head and abruptly became visible once more. “You see,” he said, and George did see. Then he put the cap on again, and George saw no more. He was tempted to cross himself, to learn whether the power of the holy sign was stronger than that of the cap which had befooled Medusa and her sisters in ancient days and, evidently, other, more attractive females since.
He held his hand still. The holy sign might destroy all the power the cap contained. It would surely rout the centaurs and satyrs, who had done so much to help him.
“Come back to our eyes, Gorgonius,” Nephele said. “Come back, that we may all take counsel together, each judging the probity of the others by examining their countenances.”
“All right.” Between speaking one word and the next, Gorgonius reappeared. “You’re saying you want me to let this fellow” --he pointed to George-- “borrow my cap here. Who’s to say I’ll ever see it again?”
“You can’t see it now, half the time,” George pointed out.
“That’s true,” the carpenter said. “Aye, that’s true.” He smiled at George, who thought he’d won a point. But even if he had, a point was not the game. Gorgonius said, “Why should I risk something that’s been in the family for so long, to help a stack of people who have no use for it, don’t believe it’s any good, and would destroy it if they could?”
He sent the question toward Nephele, but the female, Crotus, and the satyrs looked with one accord at George. “Why?” he said. “I can give you only one answer: whatever you think of the folk of Thessalonica, having the Slavs and Avars sack the city would be worse--for us and for you, too.”
“In the old days,” Gorgonius said meditatively, “I could have gone down into Thessalonica, and so could they.” He nodded toward the centaurs and satyrs. “Oh, Crotus and Nephele might not have wanted to, on account of the wine, but they could have. Now, though, one of those priests’d be on me like a fox on a rabbit. And my friends, they can’t go at all, not with all the saints and such who’ve been through there one time or another. Is that better than not having any Thessalonica at all? I wonder, George. I do wonder.”
“They think so,” George answered. Now he nodded at Ithys and Ampelus and Stusippus, at Crotus and Nephele. “They wouldn’t have brought me here if they didn’t. And they’ve seen more of the Slavs and Avars than you have.”
“You think so, do you?” Gorgonius touched the cap that had come down from Perseus. “With this, I can see what I like. I told you that already.” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I didn’t much like what I saw, I will say that. But to save arrogant Thessalonica with something the town’s too proud to believe in … it gravels me, that it does.”
“If I get down there, if I can get into the city, I’ll be bringing back a priest, don’t forget,” George said. “The old powers can’t fight the Slavs and Avars and their gods and demons, not alone. We know that. What I believe in” --he had to keep coming up with circumlocutions for Christianity-- “may not be strong enough by itself, either. Together . . . we can hope, anyway.”
“Hope came out of the box last of all,” Gorgonius said. He made that clicking noise again and stood very still, taking his own time to make up his mind. When Crotus started to say something, the carpenter tossed his head in negation. “I’ve heard all I want.” The centaur did not try to speak again. The satyrs masturbated nervously.
Outside, far off in the distance, a wolf howled. But it was not an ordinary wolf; George had grown too well acquainted with the horrible howls of the Slavic wolf-demons to mistake them for anything but what they were. Very slightly, Nephele shuddered.
Maybe that howl helped Gorgonius decide. Maybe, concentrating as he was, he didn’t even hear it. But he came out of his brown study only moments after its last echoes had died away. Holding out the cap to George, he growled, “You’d better bring this back, or I’ll be angry at you.”
“If I don’t bring it back,” the shoemaker answered, “odds are I’ll be too dead to care.”
The first thing George discovered about being invisible was that he wasn’t invisible to himself. That came as something of a relief. Not being the most graceful man ever born, he had trouble planting his feet even when he could see exactly where he was putting them. Had he not known where they were going, his best guess was that he would have broken his leg, or maybe his neck, long before he got close to Thessalonica.
The next thing he discovered was that, when he was invisible, people didn’t notice him. That made perfect logical sense, of course--it was why he needed Perseus’ cap in the first place. It brought problems, too, though, problems he hadn’t expected. As he walked up and down Lete’s narrow streets, people didn’t get out of the way for him. Why should they have done so? They had no idea he was there. All the dodging was up to him. Once he had to say “Excuse me” out of thin air, which startled the man who’d collided with him.
Something else occurred to him after he bumped into the villager. He asked Gorgonius about it when he got back to the carpenter’s place. “Took me years to wonder about that,” Gorgonius said, “but, seeing what you’re going to be doing, I can understand how it would be on your mind. Best I can tell, dogs don’t take my scent when I have the cap on, and nobody and nothing hears you unless you speak out loud.”
“Oh, good,” George said. “By everything I’ve heard, wolves use their noses more than their eyes, but if dogs don’t notice your odor, I’m going to hope the wolf-demons won’t notice mine.”
“I don’t know anything about demons,” Gorgonius said. “If their power is strong enough, they might be able to beat the strength in the cap.”
“The power inhering in them is not to be despised,” Nephele said.
George didn’t despise the wolf-demons, or any of the other powers the Slavs and Avars controlled--if the control didn’t run in the other direction. They frightened him out of his wits. “I don’t see that I have much choice,” he said. “This cap is my best chance--probably my only chance--to get back to Thessalonica. I’m going to use it. I’ll be back here with Father Luke two or three days after I set out--I hope.”
“May Fortune favor you,” Nephele said. She spoke of Fortune as a power in its own right. As a Christian, George knew he wasn’t supposed to think of it that way. As a man who sat down with some friends to roll dice every now and then, he couldn’t help thinking of it so.
He slept in the straw in Gorgonius’ bam that night; it made a better bed than the one of dry leaves he’d shared with Ampelus and Stusippus, and not only because he didn’t have a couple of satyrs in it with him. When he woke up, he didn’t look like a young forest anymore: he wasn’t covered with leaves. Being covered with straw instead, he looked like a young unmowed field instead.
Gorgonius gave him a slab of bread and a stoppered jug that almost surely contained wine. Nephele and Crotus both made an elaborate pretense of not looking at it. Though they turned their heads away, their eyes had minds of their own, and kept sliding back toward the jug. The satyrs, more than humanly fond of wine, made no bones about watching the jar.
As soon as George could see his feet and the path they would take, he left Lete. His breath smoked in the chilly air. He told himself firmly that he would presume no one but he could see it. Had the truth been otherwise, Gorgonius would have mentioned it. . . wouldn’t he?
George knew the direction in which he’d have to go. He’d traveled part of that road already. He wished he’d been able to travel all of it. Then he wouldn’t have had to involve himself with such potent pagan powers as Perseus’ cap. Even if he was less devout than many in Thessalonica, he did believe.
“Well,” he murmured, “if Eusebius wants to impose a penance on me after all this is over, I’ll observe it. I just want this to
He hadn’t been walking for more than half an hour before he spotted Xanthippe and Demetrius out on a meadow. The female centaur and the young one (young enough, perhaps,
They also showed no sign of having any idea he was around. He did not call out to them. No telling who-- or what---might be listening.
Even that uncharitable judgment of his friend reminded George how much he missed Thessalonica and all its people. He shook his head, revising that thought as soon as he had it. He didn’t miss Menas even a tittle.
He drank some wine. Between that and the steady exercise of tramping through the hill country, he felt warm enough, though the early-morning air still had a chilly edge to it. The right side of his mouth twisted up into an ironic smile. He’d had more exercise lately than he’d ever wanted.
The morning was still young when he saw his first wolf. It wasn’t far from the place where he and the centaurs and satyrs had fought the Slavic demons, and stood by the side of the path, as if waiting for him to come past so it could finish him for good instead of just driving him back into the hills.
He stopped in his tracks. Knowing he was invisible was one thing. Believing it when his life depended on its being so proved something else again. The wolf-demon’s tongue lolled out, impossibly red against its dark gray fur. Its eyes glittered with alertness. Its head turned this way and that. For a moment, it looked straight at him. Dared he believe it could not see him, could not sense him?
If he didn’t dare believe that, what point to going any farther? He walked past the wolf, close enough so that he could have kicked it in the ribs. As he moved past, the wolf-demon let out a puzzled whine, as if it had the feeling it should have been noticing something it was missing. George reached up and touched the leather cap. Now he believed.
He went almost jauntily after that. He caught himself just before he started whistling a happy little tune. That would have been stupid--odds were, fatally stupid.
More wolves than the first one guarded the trails down to Thessalonica. He passed them all. Some seemed to have no notion he was anywhere nearby. Others, like the first, looked and sounded discontented, but could not understand why they dimly suspected something was wrong.
And then George approached Vucji Pastir. The Slavic demigod who shepherded wolves had a couple of his charges close by; he was talking to them in a language made up of yips and growls. His glowing green beard, George saw, had grown out to its full magnificence once more: the barbering his own sword had done proved as impermanent as the wounds the centaurs had taken.
Vucji Pastir knew he was coming. That was the impression he got, anyhow, from the demigod’s demeanor. Vucji Pastir urged his wolves out onto the trail as a man hunting boar would have urged on his hounds. The wolf-demons whined and lashed their tails.
They were, George realized joyfully, trying to tell their master they could find no sign of any impertinent Christian shoemaker. Vucji Pastir peered this way and that. Once, as the wolves had done before, the demigod looked right at George--and, evidently, saw nothing.
Or perhaps, as the wolves had also done, Vucji Pastir saw next to nothing. He frowned, scratched at the roots of his green hair--and then looked in another direction. George let out a silent sigh of relief. He didn’t think Perseus’ cap would get a harder test till he drew far closer to Thessalonica.
He was soon proved wrong. He hadn’t gone more than another couple of furlongs before he encountered Vucji Pastir again, this time with a different pack of wolf-demons. Again the Slavic demigod almost spotted him. Again the demigod apparently could not believe his own eyes.
As George hurried on toward the city, he wondered how Vucji Pastir had been behind him and then in front of him without, so far as an impertinent Christian shoemaker could tell, crossing the intervening space. Had the shepherd of the wolves been first in one place and then in the other? Or had he manifested himself in both at once? “Would he show up again and again, on the lookout for George, all the way down to the city wall?
