laughter.
John greeted the new volunteer with a sour expression. “You were supposed to be funnier than that,” he said.
Paul’s face glistened with sweat. He looked down his nose at the other militiaman. “People were saying the same thing about you the last time you came and did your routine in my place.”
“Shall we get back to drill?” Dactylius asked, eager as usual to spread oil on troubled waters. “We all need to get better. Has anyone heard anything about what the city garrison is doing?”
“Not a word,” George said, and everyone around him nodded. He didn’t let it worry him; he hadn’t expected news so soon. He wondered whether any word would get back to Thessalonica before the soldiers came home to tell the tale themselves. With so much disorder south of the Danube, maybe not.
Rufus came striding over. He was an old man, yes, but a tough old man, a frightening old man. When he transfixed Dactylius with a glare, it was as if he’d shoved a spear into him. “Here’s something for you to think about,” he rumbled. “Suppose you’re a scout in the woods. You make a noise or some fool thing, and about twenty different Slavs all start running right toward where you’re at. What do you do then?”
“Run!” Dactylius exclaimed, turning pale at the prospect.
George snorted, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. The little jeweler had given an utterly honest answer. If it wasn’t the one Rufus was looking for, though, Dactylius was going to be in trouble. George wasn’t the only one laughing, either, and some of the others didn’t try to hide it.
Rufus turned that fearsome gaze on them. “ ‘Run’ is the right answer,” he said. “You’re outnumbered like that, what else can you do? But what should you do while you’re running?”
“Pray to God for a miracle like the one He gave Menas,” Dactylius said.
“Pray to God you don’t shit yourself while you’re running,” John said.
“One case of long odds, one case of a big mouth,” Rufus remarked. He turned to George, as he often did when he wanted a question answered in a particular way. “What should you do while you’re running?”
“If you can, you should probably lead the Slavs back toward the main body of your force, so you won’t be so outnumbered when they catch up to you.”
“That’s the right idea,” Rufus said approvingly. “Don’t just run. Think while you’re doing it. Your wits are as good a weapon as your sword.” He glowered at John. “That’s true for most people, anyhow.” The tavern funny man blew him a kiss, as if he’d paid him a compliment. The look Rufus sent up toward God was as grim as the ones he gave the militiamen.
Dactylius said, “But what if you don’t want the enemy to know where your main mass of troops is? What do you do then?”
For once, Rufus’ sour features uncurdled. “That’s a good question,” he said, in tones implying a good question was the last thing he’d expected. He turned to George again. “What are some of the things you might do?”
George thought before he spoke. The answer here was less obvious than the other for which Rufus had asked him. At last, he said, “One thing you might do is try to make the enemy think you have a lot of soldiers close by, even if you don’t.”
“That’s right.” Rufus’ big, gray head went up and down, up and down. “A friend of mine saved himself from the Goths--or was it the Franks?--back in Italy, doing that very thing. You got to think fast when you’re fighting, on account of you don’t usually get the chance to think slow. Now let’s get back to work, so you don’t have to think about fighting at all. The more you think in hand-to-hand, the worse off you’re going to be.”
John looked around at his fellow militiamen. His gaze finally fell oil Sabbatius. “We’re in good shape there, by the Mother of God. Some of us have trouble thinking even when we’re not in hand- to-hand.”
Sabbatius’ pudgy face reddened. “Are you practicing your jokes on me? You’re not as funny as you think you are, I’ll tell you that.” He would have sounded more impressively angry, though, had he seemed more certain John was really insulting him. In truth, Sabbatius wasn’t so bright as he might have been.
Despite that, George said, “Enough.” He was looking at John as he went on, “The idea is, we’re all supposed to be on the same side. If you make people hate you, they won’t help you when we really have to fight.”
John’s eyes widened. In spite of everything, he didn’t look to have realized that the militia might have to fight. He lobbed insults as automatically as he breathed. To underscore the point, George threw back his head and did his best to imitate the fearsome howl of a Slavic wolf-demon.
Before John could say anything, insulting or otherwise, Rufus nodded again. “George has it right,” he declared. “I remember in Italy, when one part of the army didn’t get along with the rest. You couldn’t trust them at your back, so you were more afraid of them than of the Goths. Works the same way here. If you get in trouble, you have to know your chums are going to come and pull you out of it. If you can’t be sure of that, you might as well give up and go home before you ever start.”
George nodded. That made sense. Rufus commonly made sense, though he had such a rough tongue that you sometimes wished he’d keep quiet more often. If you could stand to listen to him, though, it usually repaid the effort.
Sabbatius did his best to look sly. It put George in mind of a public woman trying to look chaste, but that he kept to himself. Turning to Paul, Sabbatius said, “You see? You’d better keep us in wine if you expect us to take care of you.”
“No, that’s not what Rufus meant,” Dactylius said earnestly. “We don’t help each other from hope of reward. We help each other because that’s what we need to do when we go fight.”
“Most of you lugs understand what I’m talking about,” Rufus said. “The ones who don’t…” His shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. “All we can hope is that God will have mercy on them when they see Him, on account of we already know they’re going to see Him pretty fornicating quick.”
That comment left the militiamen--perhaps even including Sabbatius--thoughtful when they returned to their exercises.
Mosquitoes buzzed in the night. Crickets chirped. Somewhere not far outside the walls of Thessalonica, an owl hooted. Since it was nighttime, George knew the pagan Greeks would have taken that for a good sign, a sign Athena was nearby. Even he, good and believing Christian though he was, got nervous on the rare times when he heard an owl calling by daylight.
He looked out from the wall, west toward the woods and toward the monastery of St. Matrona, which was a little fortress in its own right. It was far enough from the city that it disappeared from view, or nearly so, at night or during the misty days so common by the sea.
Beside George, Sabbatius whistled while he walked. The shoemaker glanced over at his companion in some annoyance, though Sabbatius was only another dim shape in the darkness. “Can’t you put a stopper in that?” George said. “If there are barbarians lurking in the bushes, they’ll know just where we are.”
“So what?” Sabbatius answered cheerfully. “You can’t shoot a bow for anything during the night, and I like to whistle.”
“I’d like it more if you did it less often, or if you did it better,” George told him, that seeming likelier to have good results than something like,
He might as well have said exactly what he meant, for Sabbatius grumbled, “You’re as bad as John,” and subsided into hurt silence. Since it was silence, George had no trouble putting up with the hurt that informed it. When he didn’t apologize, that only hurt Sabbatius more.
Somewhere out in the woods, a wolf howled. Sabbatius gasped and tried to yank out his sword and nock an arrow at the same time, thereby succeeding none too well at either task.
“I think that’s only a wolf, not one of the Slavs’ demons,” George said. “Hearing it doesn’t make your blood turn to water.”
“No, eh?” Sabbatius was breathing hard; the howl had given him a good fright. “Well, I think it was one.”
“All right,” George said. “I might be wrong.” He didn’t feel like arguing about it. For one thing, he had no way to prove he was right. For another, arguing with Sabbatius wasn’t usually interesting enough to be entertaining. He yawned. The two of them had the middle watch this time. Eventually, he would be able to go home and go back to bed. At the moment,
Sabbatius, in a touchy mood, decided to be offended because George wouldn’t passionately insist he was correct. “You must not think you know much,” he said loftily.
“Well, yes,” his comrade said, with the air of a man making a great concession, “but--” He stopped suddenly with a wordless exclamation of dismay, flailing his hands around his head. “Gah! A bat! It almost flew into my face.”
“They eat bugs, I think.” George scratched a mosquito bite. “I’m in favor of anything that eats bugs.”
“This one looked like it wanted to eat me,” Sabbatius returned. “Didn’t you see its glittering eyes?”
“I didn’t see it at all.” That was true, but it had the effect of offending Sabbatius all over again, as if George had called him a liar. George had done nothing of the sort, but trying to convince Sabbatius of that would have been more trouble than it was worth. He sighed and kept quiet.
And then, suddenly, the bat was fluttering in front of him. He’d never paid bats much attention; they skimmed through the night, when he mostly stayed indoors. He was sure, though, he’d never seen one like this. Sabbatius might not have been bright, but he knew what he’d seen: the bat’s eyes did glitter, red as blood.
Its teeth glittered, too, as if it wanted to sink them into something larger and more flavorful than a moth or a mosquito. Of itself, George’s hand shaped the sign of the cross. The bat’s eyes no longer glittered; just for a moment, they glowed, as if torches had been kindled behind them. Then the creature flew away: or, for all George knew, it simply disappeared. At any rate, it no longer flapped its wings in front of his face.
He turned to Sabbatius. “You were right. That was a large bat.”
“What? You mean you did see it, too?” Now Sabbatius sounded amazed.
“I don’t know whether it was the same one you saw, but I saw a bat, yes.” When George changed his mind or found he’d made a mistake, he said so, straight out. He never had quite figured out why that caused so much surprise and even consternation among his fellow human beings, but it did, more often than not.
“It was a nasty sort of thing, wasn’t it?” Sabbatius said.
Soberly, he said, “I’ve had visitors I liked better--even my mother-in-law, come to think of it.” That was a slander upon Irene’s mother; before Helena had died of the plague in the epidemic a couple of years earlier, she had been as pleasant a woman as anyone could want to know.
“You can be a funny fellow, George--you know that?”
Sabbatius said. “And you’re not mean when you’re funny, the way John is.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the shoemaker replied. “My mother-in-law, God rest her soul, would have thought you were wrong.” He let a judicious pause stretch. “But Irene would be angry if I called her a bat.”
“Heh, heh--if you called her a bat. Heh, heh.” Sabbatius’ shoulders shook with laughter. “That’s good. I wish I’d thought of that, so I could have said it for myself.”
Very likely, Sabbatius
The shoemaker strode along the wall, looking out into the darkness beyond the city with fresh intensity. Looking availed him little. For all he knew, a vast army of large bats with glittering red eyes and glittering white teeth flapped and flew out there, just beyond where his eyes could reach.
All at once, he turned and strode to the opposite side of the walkway atop the wall, the side that let him see down into Thessalonica. In the middle of the night, though, the city was nearly as dark as the rough and overgrown country beyond it.
“What are you doing?” Sabbatius asked. “It’s almost like you think the bats are spying on us, or something.”
George hadn’t thought that. No. George hadn’t fully realized he thought that. But once Sabbatius said it, he knew it was true. He wished the satyr he’d met had mentioned these bats along with the wolves. Then he would have had a better idea of whether he was shying at shadows. With the notion firmly planted in his mind, he was going to worry till he found out about them one way or the
