He looked around to see where in the band Father Luke was. Riding behind Elatus’ torso as George rode behind Crotus’, the priest made his centaur look as if it boasted two upthrust human parts rather than the standard one. George and Crotus no doubt made the same absurd picture.
“Thessalonica!” the centaurs shouted, urging one another on and, George suspected, reminding themselves where they were going.
“Hurry!” Father Luke called to them. “In the name of whatever you hold dear, hurry! The foe ariseth in his might.” He imitated the old-fashioned Greek they spoke, which made them heed him almost as if he were one of their own. George, who could not have done the same, wished he had hands free with which to applaud.
Now, despite being in among the band of centaurs, he too could feel the gathering of power to the south. He’d known that sort of feeling in the churches of Thessalonica, but the power rising here had nothing to do with the God he worshiped. Whether it was--or could be, if fully manifested--more powerful than his God, he did not know. That frightened him worse than anything. “On the way home,” he murmured, trying to reassure himself. But the way home was, as it had been, blocked by the Slavs and Avars and by the powers that had already accompanied them into this part of the world.
A shout from the front-runners among the centaurs said they’d spotted one of those powers. Peering forward over Crotus’ shoulder, George spied a Slavic wolf-demon. The creature’s howl, this once, brought no terror with it; had it burst from a human throat, it would have been an exclamation of surprise and dismay.
The wolf turned and tried to flee, as if to take news of what it had just seen back to those with more power than it possessed. Since it was heading down toward Thessalonica, the drunken centaurs ran after it. In short order, they ran over it: the whole band, or at least as many of them as its battered body happened to pass beneath. George felt it go under Crotus’ trampling, pounding hooves. With four legs on which to stand, the centaur had no trouble keeping its balance and delivering a good stomping at the same time-Once the band had passed over the wolf, George turned and looked back over his shoulder at it. It didn’t look as if it had ever been alive; far from seeming immortal, it didn’t look as if it would ever be alive again, either. He might have been wrong: things from beyond the hills he knew were often next to impossible to slay. Not many of them, though, endured what the wolf-demon had just suffered.
Before long, the centaurs came upon more wolves. A few peeled off from the main band to chase them. The wolf-demons, more used to chasing centaurs, ran away from their numbers and their ferocity, baying as they went. But a lot of the centaurs went on yelling “Thessalonica!” at the top of their lungs. For whatever reason they did it, it helped keep most of them together.
George kept looking for Vucji Pastir. The shepherd of the wolves would be a more dangerous foe than the creatures he herded. But of Vucji Pastir there was no sign. George remembered the swordwork he had done while invisible. He still did not think he had slain the demigod; to think that, on the basis of what little he knew, would have made him both more stupid and more heroic than he actually was.
Disturbed by the centaurs’ thundering hooves and by their cries, bats rose in chittering swarms. Remembering that bats had spied on Thessalonica, George shouted a warning. The centaurs were already flinging volleys of stones and branches at the creatures. They brought down a good many, and trampled them as they had trampled that first wolf. Again, George wondered if any creature, supernatural or not, could survive such treatment.
“Close now,” Father Luke called through the din the centaurs made. “When will the Slavs and Avars notice what’s bearing down on them?”
“If we’re lucky, they’ll take one look at the centaurs and run screaming,” George answered, punctuating that with a sharp “oof!” as he came down awkwardly on Crotus’ back after the male took a particularly long bound. “Of course, if we were lucky, God wouldn’t have inflicted the Slavs and Avars on us in the first place, would He? I expect we’ll have a fight on our hands.”
Bishop Eusebius would sure have droned out some pious platitudes on the topic of all mankind’s being able to live together in peace and understanding and everyone’s worshiping God--in, of course, the orthodox fashion. That would have been wonderful, except that the Slavs and Avars had no interest in peace, understanding, or, for that matter, God.
And Father Luke, unlike most clergymen of George’s acquaintance, had little use for pious platitudes: not that he wasn’t pious--far from it--but he expressed his piety more through his life than through his talk. Now he nodded, and said, “That’s what I think, too.” He looked worried again. “I hope we aren’t too late.”
Off to one side of the main band of centaurs, a scream rose in the woods. It was not the sort of scream that might have come from the throat of one of the Slavic demons or demigods: it was a simple scream of human terror. The Slavs had had men hunting in the woods since before their assault on Thessalonica, as George knew full well. No doubt Slavs still roamed the woods, trying to keep their larders full. One of the small groups of centaurs that had peeled off from the main band in pursuit of a wolf-demon must have come upon a hunter instead. By the sounds the fellow had made, he wouldn’t be making any more sounds in the near future--or in the distant future, either.
A few minutes later, a centaur let out a screech filled with both fury and pain. An arrow sprouted from the creature’s right hindmost leg. Another centaur tore the shaft out, which caused the wounded male to screech again. Its bleeding slowed as quickly as George had seen to be commonplace among immortal beings. He hoped the Slav hadn’t poisoned the arrow, as his kind were known to do. If the Slav had poisoned it, he hoped the venom was not of a sort to harm supernatural creatures.
The male centaur ran on as if not badly hurt, so George supposed the arrow was either unpoisoned or harmless to the centaur regardless of poison. He did not have long to contemplate such things, for several centaurs, both males and females, galloped in the direction from which the arrow had come. Shouts rang out, some theirs, others from a man. When they rejoined the main band, blood dappled their human arms and torsos.
Before long, as they drew nearer to the encampments of the Slavs and Avars, more and more arrows began coming their way. “Keep on!” George shouted to Crotus. “If you waste your time chasing down a few archers, you won’t get to the main body of the foe till too late.”
More and more, as power built in the air around him, he got the feeling they had very little time. Whatever the Slavs and Avars were going to do, it was on the point of being done. “So that we slay them, what boots it an we slay them individually or collectively?” Crorus shouted back.
That was, George realized, the wine raging in the centaur. Sober, Crotus liked nothing better than to deliberate, to choose with great care the best possible course. Drunk, none of that mattered. All the male wanted to do was kick and stamp and tear and kill. Hows and whys and wherefores concerned it not at all.
“We have to get down to the city and break up the magic they’re working,” George said desperately. “Can’t you feel it? Can’t you sense it? If their gods fully come through into the hills we know--” He broke off. If that happened, God would have to intervene, perhaps through St. Demetrius, to save Thessalonica--if He chose to save it if He was strong enough to save it. But Crotus cared nothing about God and little about Thessalonica. George tried a different explanation: “If they manifest themselves in these hills, they’ll be too strong for you.”
Crotus bounded along, seemingly tireless. But after a few more strides, the male let out a great rambling bellow: “Thessalonica! To Thessalonica! Straight on to Thessalonica!”
The centaur sprang out ahead of the rest of the band, leading not just by shouts but by example. Straight on they went. They did not turn aside for holy ground of any sort. Maybe, in their drunken madness, the power in patches of holy ground had less effect on them than had been so while they were sober. Maybe, too, they simply happened not to run across any. George was too busy trying to stay on Crotus’ back to be sure.
The woods thinned. Followed close by the other centaurs, Crotus burst into the open ground around Thessalonica. The male shouted once more when he came out into that open country, for the Slavs and a large troop of Avar cavalry were drawn up in battle array against the city. So intent on Thessalonica were they, they did not turn against the centaurs till the drumroll of hoofbeats bearing down on them drew them away from the attack they had been about to begin on the wall.
Indeed, it might not even have been the hoofbeats from behind, but rather the shouts from the defenders of Thessalonica, that made the Slavs and Avars realize the centaurs were there. The shouts were joy, not amazement: at that distance, the defenders must have taken the centaurs for regular cavalry coming to their rescue. The surprise--even the horror--on the faces of the barbarians, who knew better, was marvelous to behold. Till then, their powers not only held their own against the Christian God, but had routed the supernatural beings native to these hills and valleys.
Perhaps the centaurs were, in true terms of strength, still overmatched. If they were, they neither knew nor cared. Maddened with wine, all they wanted was to close with the folk whose demons and demigods had done so much to them up till then. Being afraid never crossed their minds.
It crossed George’s mind. It also crossed the minds of whole troops of Slavs, who turned and fled from the raging band. But not all the barbarians fled. Some of them began shooting arrows at the centaurs. They cried out in dismay when, even after they scored hits, their foes would not fall. Seeing that sent more of them running.
The Avars were made of sterner stuff. They shot arrows at the centaurs, too, arrows from their heavier bows. They also wheeled their armored horses around and rode into battle, some with swords, some with spears. They might never have seen these supernatural creatures before, but they showed hardly more alarm than the beings galloping at Crotus’ heels.
Here and there, one of those centaurs, shot through the chest or perhaps the eye, crashed to the ground and thrashed toward death. Not even their marvelous flesh was proof against an arrow lodged in the heart or in the brain.
George knew too well that his own flesh, marvelous only to him, was proof against very little. Not wanting the Avars to take any special notice of him, he clapped Perseus’ cap onto his head. He held it with his left hand. With a great many misgivings, he drew his sword with his right. That left no hands with which to hold on to Crotus’ human torso. Clenching the centaur’s equine barrel with legs inexperienced at horsemanship, he hoped he would not fall off and be trampled like a wolf-demon.
While a few centaurs went down, most of them, even those who were wounded, stormed on toward the Avars. As the Slavs had before them, the mounted men lost spirit when their most telling shots evaded them little. And the stones the centaurs flung smote as if they came from the hurling arms of the siege engines on the walls of Thessalonica. When one of those stones struck home, an Avar pitched from his saddle or, despite armor of iron, a horse staggered, limbs half unstrung.
And then it was no longer a fight of arrows and stones. The onrushing centaurs were in among the Avars, wrenching the spears from their hands, wrenching riders off the backs of their horses, and throwing them to the ground. The Avars remained brave. They also retained the arrogance that made them believe they had the right to rule everything they could reach. When confronted by immortal madmen who also could and did kick like mules, none of that did them much good.
George slashed away with his sword. Every so often, edge or point would find a gap in an Avar’s scalemail. The barbarian would howl with pain and look around wildly to see who had wounded him. He would discover that he, like Polyphemus in the
Remembering that Father Luke lacked the option of invisibility, George looked around to see how the priest fared. He was glad to find he had a lot of trouble picking Father Luke’s human torso out from those of the centaurs in whose midst the holy man rode. He would have had more trouble still had Father Luke divested himself of his robes, but, while the priest’s piety was more flexible than that of Bishop Eusebius, George was certain it would not bend so far as that.
An Avar in a gilded helmet shouted something that sounded incendiary even if George couldn’t understand a word of it. Crotus struck the man with a powerful fist. The Avar’s iron armor warded him against the blow. George hit him, too: in the face, with the edge of his blade. Blood spurted. The Avar screamed. He clutched at himself. George wished he’d served Menas the same way.
Losing the officer’s steadying hand helped unsettle the Avars. So did their foes’ furious, unyielding attack. The nomads found themselves moving back instead of forward. That unsettled them more. Now men began to break away from the fight instead of rushing toward it.
The centaurs seemed oblivious to the way their foes fought.
And the centaurs did not stay unarmed long. Many of them--those, George thought, rather less maddened by wine than some of the others--not only wrested spears and swords from the men they were fighting, they used them and weapons picked up from the ground with wicked effect.
George reveled in his own invisible deadliness. Whenever the melee brought Crotus close enough to an Avar, the shoemaker on the centaur’s back struck and struck hard. The nomads did not know why Crotus was a particularly dangerous enemy, but soon figured out the male was such, and did their best to stay away from it. In the press of battle, that best was too often not nearly good enough.
Quite suddenly, the press loosened. With a small shock, George saw that the centaurs had fought their way through the entire troop of Avars. Some of the nomads rode away from them, urging their horses to the best turn of speed they could. More were down on the ground behind Crotus, dead or wounded. More than a few riderless horses were mixed among the centaurs. Seeing the horses in that company, George thought they looked oddly incomplete, which only proved how used to centaurs he had grown over the past few days.
Only a few warriors--some stubborn Avars, some Slavs rushing up to try to plug the gap in the line their overlords’ overthrow had created--remained between the centaurs and… what? Though
