Thessalonica

“Good to see you back, George,” Paul said. You always pay your scot, you drink enough so you don’t just fill up a stool, and you don’t get rowdy and tear the place apart. And you don’t soak your tongue in vinegar before you come in, either.” He gave John a hard look.

The tavern comic, who had seen a lifetime of them, did not seem unduly damaged. “Behold perfection,” he said with a mocking bow to George.

“Well, I like the wine,” Sabbatius said. That, however, was a recommendation not even Paul could view with pride. Sabbatius liked the wine because it was wine, not because it was good wine. As if to prove as much, he held out his cup. “Fill me up again. I don’t care with what.”

“Sawdust might be good,” John said musingly. “Or maybe rocks.”

Sabbatius folded his right hand into a fist. “Here’s one rock.” He closed his left hand, too. “And here’s another one. How would you like to meet up with the two of them?”

“Any time,” John jeered. “Any time you’re awake, anyhow.”

Sabbatius started to surge up off his stool. Rufus grabbed him by the shoulders and slammed him down. Too early to start brawling--didn’t you hear Paul?” Sabbatius was bigger and stronger than the veteran, and less than half as old. He obeyed him without question anyhow. That was what made Rufus a man to lead men.

“Don’t start on your friends,” George advised John, “or after a while you’ll go around wondering why you haven’t got any.”

“I don’t wonder,” John said. “I know.” He held out his cup to Paul for a refill, too. When the taverner gave it to him, he gulped it down.

Dactylius said, “If you know your jokes annoy people, why do you keep making them?” The little jeweler plainly did not aim to be annoying; as usual, he sounded serious and sincere.

John’s eye glinted. With one more cup of wine in him, he would have wondered aloud why Dactylius stayed with Claudia if he knew she was a harridan. George could see that. He shifted so he could kick John in the ankle if he began to ask the question. Rather to his surprise, John kept quiet. Maybe he’d listened to George. George wasn’t used to having people listen to him, but understood why: he spent most of his time talking to his children.

The tavern filled up fast. Since the Slavs and Avars broke off the siege, the people of Thessalonica had been in a mood to have a good time. Sooner than he might otherwise have done, Paul called, “And now, to make you laugh, to take your troubles away, and maybe to give you new ones, here’s John.”

“Ha!” John said as he got to his feet and hurried to the platform with a sort of boneless lope. “He knows me too well.” He paused and looked out over the crowd, then shook his head. “You’re a bloody poor lot if you’ve come here for a good time. You should all be home with your wives.” He paused again, as if contemplating what he’d just said. “Well, that explains that.”

“What does he mean?” asked Sabbatius, who was not only unwed but already drunk. Without waiting for an answer, he laughed anyhow, a loud, empty bray.

“Here we are, all safe and sound” John said thoughtfully. “There were times when I wouldn’t have believed it, not during the siege I wouldn’t.” He pointed to the table from which he’d come. “There are the valiant militiamen who defended the wall near here. Would you think they could keep out a pack of howling barbarians?”

“Thank you, John,” George and Dactylius called out together, one in Latin, the other in Greek. They grinned at each other.

“Hey, I’m a militiaman, too,” John said. “Would you think I could keep out a pack of howling barbarians?”

“If they understood what you were calling ‘em, yes,” somebody said loudly.

John didn’t annihilate him, as he did most critics. The remark fit too well with the way his routine was heading. “Maybe,” he said. “It all worked out, thanks be to God. You even see rich people over on this side of town, and you didn’t hardly do that during the siege, did you? No. Most of them stayed over on the east side, where they could duck into the citadel in a hurry if they needed to.”

George listened with wary attention. After the putatively angelic visit, Menas had left him alone. If John started poking fun at him--for he was one of the rich men who had been on the western wall of Thessalonica--George knew he was liable to get blamed for whatever the comic said. That might mean the immunity he’d won would unravel.

But John chose a different tack, saying, “During the siege, those rich people hardly even knew they were living in the same city with us. Somebody told one of them that there was an assault going on, and he said, “Well, no need to panic. It’s only the Litaean Gate the Slavs and Avars are attacking.”

“Why is that funny?” Sabbatius demanded. He hadn’t fallen asleep yet, as he usually did sooner than this.

Patiently, George explained: “Because the rich fool thinks that what happens over at the Litaean Gate couldn’t matter to his part of the city.”

“Oh.” After a bit, Sabbatius let out that braying laugh again.

By explaining, George had missed some of John’s routine. The comic was saying, “--and the fellow’s son promised to come back from the sally with a Slav’s head. ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ the fellow answered. ‘I don’t care if you come back without a head.’”

Somebody threw a roll at him. He caught it and ate it. “That’s one way to get something to eat around this place,” he said pointedly, and stared over toward Paul.

After a moment, the taverner had a barmaid bring over a plate of olives. John made as if to grab the girl instead of the plate, and stared out at his audience in mock indignation after she escaped. “How did she know what I wanted to eat?” he said. The barmaid threw a roll at him. He caught that one, too.

“We all had a hard time,” he said. “No two ways around that. What I want to know is, why didn’t the barbarians have the decency to besiege us in the summertime, when we wouldn’t have had to stay up on the wall in such miserable weather? I know one fellow” --he pointed to Sabbatius, who had started to snore by then-- “who stood out in the rain so long, he jumped in the river to get dry.”

“Christ!” Rufus said. “They were telling that joke in Italy when I was a lad.”

“They were telling that joke in Italy when Caesar was a lad,” George said, and couldn’t resist adding, “and he’s only a little younger than you.”

“God will punish you for that,” Rufus growled, convincingly angry, “and if He doesn’t, I will.” They laughed together, as old friends will. Why not? The siege was over.

George laughed at John’s jokes, too: at some more than others, as is the way of such things. What pleased him best about the comic’s routine was that John did not mention Menas even once. Maybe, however late in life, he’d learned the beginnings of discretion. Or maybe, and perhaps more likely, events of the past few weeks had given him so much new material that, for the time being, he didn’t need to bait the rich noble.

John ran a hand through his hair and said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I don’t have so much up here these days.” His hair was cut a little shorter than it had been before George got locked out of Thessalonica, but only a little. He went on, “I have to tell you, it’s Rufus’ fault.”

“Just because you have to tell it, that doesn’t make it so,” Rufus exclaimed.

John ignored him. “There at the end of the siege, he was throwing us up onto the wall with anybody who was still healthy, not just with men from our own company.” Because George had been out of the city, he didn’t know whether that was so or not. John continued, “Me, one night I was up there doing a shift with old bald Basil and with Victor the barber. Sometimes, when nothing much is happening, you’ll doze up there instead of tramping back and forth all the damn time.”

“You’d better not!” Another exclamation from Rufus, this one in an altogether different tone of voice.

John kept right on ignoring him, saying, “So that’s what I did, and Basil, too. I told Victor to wake me in an hour’s time, and then I’d do the same for him. I fell asleep, good and hard. So did Basil. Well, Victor got bored while we were snoring away. He got out his little razor and shaved my head for a joke. When he finally shook me, I thought it was colder than it should have been, and I rubbed my head and found out I didn’t have any hair left. “What a fool you are,’ I told Victor. You’ve gone and woke Baldy there instead of me.’”

“Here,” somebody called. “I’ll give you a miliaresion not to tell that one again.”

John leered at him. “And how much will you give me not to tell the next one on you?” He looked over the crowd and held out his bowl. “Or on you? Or on you there, with the ugly tunic. Yes, you. You know who I mean.”

He was grinning when he came back to the table, the bowl nicely heavy with money. “Not a bad take,” he said. “Not a bad take at all.” He started separating the coins with his usual quick dexterity, then looked up from his work. “Where are you going, George?”

“Home,” the shoemaker answered with a yawn. “I’m not like Sabbatius” --who was still snoring away-- “I don’t sleep in taverns.”

“And besides,” Dactylius put in, “you don’t want to wake up bald, the way John says he did.”

“Everybody thinks he can do my job,” John muttered darkly. Then he brightened. “Ha! Justus really did give me silver. Now you can go home, George.”

“I don’t take orders from you,” George said. “I take orders from Rufus.”

“Go home, George,” Rufus said. laughing, George did.

George said, “Dear, I think we really have to dicker with Leo now.”

Irene let out a sigh. “I wish we didn’t. Constantine’s not a bad lad, mind you, but I think we can do better for Sophia.”

“I don’t think Sophia wants better. She wants Constantine, and I think she’s going to get him no matter what we say about it.” George told how the two of them had been kissing when he came back into Thessalonica after the Slavs and Avars gave up the siege.

“And what did you do about that?” his wife asked.

“I coughed. They jumped apart,” George answered. “They were embarrassed. But they’ll do it again whenever they find the chance. You don’t take one kiss like that without wanting another. If they find the chance, they’ll do more than kiss.”

He expected Irene to be affronted at the way he’d impugned Sophia’s care about guarding her virtue. Instead his wife sighed and laughed a laugh half wry, half genuinely amused. “All right, we’d better talk with Leo,” she said.

“You pick the oddest times to be sensible,” George remarked. Irene, luckily for him, was already intent on the dickering that lay ahead, and so paid less attention to him than she might have done.

Rain pattered down outside. Some of it turned to ice when it struck the ground. George didn’t mind. He was under a roof that didn’t leak too badly, a couple of braziers spread heat, and woodcutters could go out into the forest again, even if they did go with armed guards to make sure no lurking Slavs picked them off. Some of the woodcutters wanted armed guards against the centaurs and satyrs. George knew that was foolish for any number of reasons, but said nothing. He was not a man to whom people listened on such matters.

“The one thing we have to do,” Irene said, her mind running ahead on its own road, “is make certain Sophia doesn’t do anything out of the way”--a euphemism George hadn’t heard before, but clear enough-- “till the dickering is done. When I tell her it would hurt the bargain we’re striking, she’ll understand that.” She looked sidelong at her husband. “My mother told me the same thing about you.”

“Did she?” George said. “You never mentioned that before.”

“A time for everything, and everything in its season,” Irene answered: not quite the language of the Holy Scriptures, but close. She grew brisk again. “Now--how do we approach Leo without making it too obvious we’re approaching him?”

“Why don’t you go buy a pot from him?” George said. “If you like, you can break one over my head, so the story will get round that we need a new one.”

“I usually get them from old grouchy Antonius, but that will do, I think.” Irene gave him a kiss for coming up with a good idea. Musingly, she went on, “I don’t think I have to break one on you. Maybe I don’t even want people to think I did that. I’m not Claudia, after all.”

George kissed her this time. “And a good thing, too, says I.”

Irene came back with a fine new pot--George was ready to admit (though he never would have done so to Leo’s face) it was better than any they already had. She also came back with a triumphant smile lighting her features. “I didn’t even have to start the dickering,” she told her husband. “Leo did that, as soon as I walked through the door. Constantine must be giving him some heat.”

“That’s very good,” George said equably. “Do we have a bargain? Do we have a bride-price set? Do we have a day for the wedding?”