Thessalonica

may not be too harsh.”

“I hope you’re right,” George said.

Father Luke looked concerned. “But what of you, George? You still have troubles with Menas. I will do all I can for you, but I do not know how much that will be. Menas is a powerful man. He had a will of his own even before God gave him back the use of his legs, and now--”

By way of answer, George did put Perseus’ cap on again. He patted Father Luke on the back. Then, when the priest turned one way, he went around and tapped him on the other shoulder. Father Luke turned again. George patted him on the head. A moment later, he poked him in the ribs. A grin stretched across the shoemaker’s face. Father Luke could not see that grin, which was exactly the point.

“I think I can manage,” George said out of thin air.

“I think you may be right,” Father Luke admitted, fortunately not angry at the cavalier way the shoemaker had treated him. “Try not to be so ferocious in your rejoinder that you make a new martyr.”

“I’ll--try,” George said grudgingly. Menas hadn’t shown any such restraint toward him. Menas had done his level best to get him killed, and the rich noble’s best had almost been good enough.

“Good.” Father Luke started walking toward Thessalonica George followed invisibly. The gates remained open. Some militiamen were still corning out to pursue the Slavs and Avars. Others, many with light wounds, came back into the city. No one paid much attention to Father Luke as he walked toward the Litaean Gate. No one paid any attention to George at all. Invisibility had its advantages.

On the other hand, he might have painted himself orange with green stripes and got into Thessalonica unchallenged right then. So long as the men coming in didn’t look like Slavs or Avars, the guards who stayed at the gates weren’t bothering them. The guards were not in a bothering mood. They were passing a jar of wine back and forth. He wondered what Rufus would say about that. Give me some, most likely. George walked past the guards into the city.

XII

People packed the narrow, winding streets. They pounded one another on the back. They shouted out bits of song, generally off-key. Men and women kissed in doorways or sometimes out in the middle of the street, blocking other traffic. Nobody showered them with abuse, not now. George would have bet anything anyone cared to name that not all, or even most, of the couples embracing were married to each other. Nobody cared, not now.

He spied a familiar tall, thin figure. The Thessalonicans were so overjoyed at being delivered from the Slavs and Avars, they even included Benjamin the Jew in their celebration. No one showered him with abuse either, not now. He looked absurdly confused. He had no idea how to cope with acceptance. It wasn’t anything he’d ever had to worry about before.

Then he spotted George. He smiled, waved, and picked his way through the crowd toward the shoemaker. He clasped his hand. “Praise the Lord, to see you here and well,” he exclaimed. “I had heard you were lost beyond the wall, which grieved me greatly.”

“I was lost beyond the wall,” George said. “I managed to get back.”

“God must think well of you,” Benjamin said.

George wondered about that. If God thought so well of him, why had He put him through so much trouble and danger? Why had He inflicted Menas on him? Why, for that matter, had He cured Menas, so the noble had a fresh chance to inflict himself not just on George but also on the rest of Thessalonica?

Before George could come up with answers for any of those questions, a different, more obvious one occurred to him. “You can see me!” he exclaimed. Of itself, his hand went to his head. Yes, he was still wearing Perseus’ cap. “How is it you can see me?”

“With my eyes?” Benjamin suggested, which was, George supposed, about as near as the sobersided Jew came to making a joke. Before either of them could take the question further, the crowd separated them. Someone stepped on George’s toes. In the crush, whether that fellow saw him or not was irrelevant.

Under the rim of Perseus’ cap, George scratched his head. The Slavic demons and demigods hadn’t plagued the Jewish district of Thessalonica, and now Benjamin not only penetrated the pagan Greek enchantment that lay over George, he didn’t even seem to notice there was an enchantment to penetrate. George didn’t know exactly what that meant. Whatever it was, he had the strong feeling Bishop Eusebius would not approve.

He got stepped on several more times before he finally reached his own street, and elbowed, and kneed, and poked. In close quarters, invisibility had its disadvantages, too. When he did get to his own street, the first thing he found was Claudia arguing with the woman who lived next door to her and Dactylius. Between them was a pile of garbage someone--George didn’t know who--had thrown into the street right between the two houses. If the two women knew the Slavs and Avars had been routed and the siege of Thessalonica broken, they didn’t care. George smiled. Some things didn’t change.

But if Claudia and her neighbor remained intent on their own private quarrel, the rest of the street celebrated along with the rest of the city. People passed jars of wine back and forth. Those who still had salt meat or candied fruit stored away brought them out and shared them with friends--and sometimes with passersby, too--confident they could replace them now.

And, everywhere, people were embracing. George almost walked past a young couple in a doorway three or four doors down from his house and shop. They didn’t seem any different from scores of other happy pairs he’d seen … till he noticed that one of them was Constantine the potter’s son and the other his daughter Sophia.

He coughed. At the same time, he took off Perseus’ cap, returning to visibility. Constantine and Sophia jumped in the air, then flew apart from each other as if he’d dumped a pad of water over them.

“Father!” Sophia exclaimed. She managed to pack a multitude of meanings into the one word: joy at having him come back again, along with something that wasn’t joy at all at having him come back at that particular moment

“Uh, we didn’t see you, sir,” Constantine added.

“I know. I noticed,” George said. Constantine and Sophia both turned red. The cap of invisibility wasn’t why they hadn’t seen him. They’d been otherwise occupied. If he’d kept quiet, he might have stood there for an hour before they noticed him. “Maybe you won’t see me the next time, either,” he went on. “Maybe I’ll be more annoyed about it the next time, too. Go on home, Constantine. Sophia, you come with me.”

Constantine went, without a murmur. Only later did George realize that, with a sword on his belt and with his right arm and tunic splashed with blood obviously not his own, he looked well able to enforce any orders he might give. Even Sophia followed him without arguing.

In his own doorway, he found Theodore kissing the plump daughter--plump despite the siege--of Dalmatius the oil-seller, who lived in the next street over. He hadn’t known the two of them cared about each other (for that matter, he didn’t know whether they would care about each other tomorrow, or in an hour). An evenhanded man, he coughed as loudly as he had with Sophia and Constantine.

Theodore and his friend--her name, George remembered, was Lucretia--sprang apart, as Sophia and Constantine had done. “Hello, Father,” Theodore said sounding a little less reproachful than Sophia had.

“Hello,” George answered mildly. Lucretia headed for home without George’s suggesting it. He wondered how many more she’d kiss before she got there. Then he wondered if Theodore was wondering the same thing.

A moment later, such abstractions stopped troubling his mind, for Irene came running out of the shop and threw herself into his arms. He tilted her face up and kissed her, doing a good and thorough job of it. Sophia and Theodore both coughed. They sounded downright consumptive as each tried to outdo the other.

Irene ignored them. Her lips were urgent against her husband’s. George ignored his children, too, till he started to laugh. That ruined the kiss. “We’re married,” he growled at Sophia and Theodore, and returned to what he’d been doing when he was so rudely interrupted.

Except for his son and daughter, no one paid one more kissing couple any mind. Claudia and her next-door neighbor, by contrast, had drawn a fair-sized crowd. A quarrel in Thessalonica, just then, was remarkable for its rarity.

“Thank God you’re safe!” Irene exclaimed when her lips separated from George’s again. She dragged him into the shop. A couple of braziers made it a little warmer in there than it had been outside. If Theodore and Sophia hadn’t followed them in, George got the idea his wife might have dragged him down onto the floor of the shop, too. Before he got in there, he doubted whether he would have been able to do anything in response to that. Just when he decided he would, he found he didn’t have the chance.

“Were there really centaurs out there, Father?” Sophia asked. “People are saying so, but people are always saying all sorts of things that aren’t true, so they can make a better story out of them.”

“There really were centaurs,” George said solemnly. He could feel the truth of that on the insides of his thighs. He wasn’t used to riding a donkey, let alone a horse, let alone a supernatural being with a mind of its own--a mind, when he was aboard Crotus, full of mad, drunken fury.

“And those other things?” Irene asked. She shivered against George and crossed herself. “I didn’t want to look up in the sky, for fear I’d believe what I was seeing.”

Only Irene, George thought with a smile, would put it like that. But the smile quickly faded. “Those other things were there, too. I’m glad they’re gone.”

“God overcame them,” Irene said.

George wondered about that. The Slavic thunder god and gods of sun and moon had paled before the power of the Lord, but they hadn’t vanished. And the struggle between Triglav and St. Demetrius had barely begun before the centaurs distracted and then overwhelmed the Slavic wizards and their Avar leader, thus returning the conflict, at least as George perceived it, to the mundane plane.

“However it happened, the siege is over,” he said, “and that’s what matters.”

Nobody argued with him. “The Slavs and Avars won’t be back here any time soon, either,” Theodore said. “We taught ‘em a proper lesson, we did.” To listen to him, he’d beaten back the barbarians single-handedly during his brief stretch of duty on the wall.

“You still have that cap,” Irene said, pointing to it. By the way she spoke, it might have been Joseph’s coat of many colors soaked in blood.

“Yes, and glad of it, too,” George said. “Without it, we wouldn’t have had the centaurs in front of the city, or Father Luke with ‘em, and who knows what would have happened?

I’ve got to go up into the hills and give it back, but I want to use it one more time before I do.”

“I don’t want you to do that,” Irene said.

“Well, I’m going to,” George answered in a tone that brooked no argument. Irene stared at him. He wasn’t the sort of man who commonly ignored what his wife wanted. Maybe that was what let him get away with it

Even after midnight, revelers remained on the streets of Thessalonica. In a way, George liked that. The people of the poor, beleaguered city deserved to celebrate their victory over the Slavs and Avars. In another way, noisy roisterers on the street were a nuisance to the shoemaker. He would have preferred everything around him to be dead quiet. That would have made what he was doing more impressive.

Maybe I should have waited, he thought. What if he’s out celebrating? What do I do then? He shook his head. He couldn’t afford to wait, not if he wanted to keep the peace in his own home. At the moment, Irene wasn’t arguing with him. If Perseus’ cap stayed in his home for several days before he got around to using it, that would change. He knew his wife. She would come up with a reason why he shouldn’t use it, and likely reasons why he ought to get rid of it, too. And they would be good reasons--he was sure of it. If he turned them down, he would have a quarrel on his hands. He didn’t want that.

And so, instead of a quarrel on his hands, he had Perseus’ cap on his head. He slipped through Thessalonica’s streets unnoticed, unremarked upon. Some of the things he noticed while slipping