Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

  His audience murmured in approval. But then, unfortunately, John started up again, asking the priest, “What does that mean, what God wants us to do? Should we be more fierce, so we can beat the barbarians and make their powers weaken, or should we be more pious, so God will take better care of us?”

  The priest gaped at him. If he’d just answered both, he would have done well and probably made John shut up, an act of virtue in itself. But John had asked whether it meant one or the other, and the priest (whose wits were, excusably, perhaps not at their swiftest then) took it that way and that way only. Any reply he gave, then, was but half a truth and, worse, contradicted the other half.

  After tossing the priest a couple of coppers, George elbowed his way through the crowd and caught John by the arm. The tavern comic whirled. He started to grab for the knife on his belt before he saw who had hold of him. Just in case he didn’t feel like stopping--his temper could turn nasty--George squeezed a little harder. He had large, strong hands. “Come along with me,” he said in a pleasant tone of voice. “Suppose I don’t feel like it?” John said. He wasn’t going for his knife, but he wasn’t coming along, either.

  George started walking. He did not let go of John. Since he was bigger and stronger than his fellow militiaman and sometimes friend, John got moving, too. He yelped. Then he cursed. If he did try to take out that knife, George figured he’d kick him where it would do the most good. If that didn’t distract John, he didn’t know what would.

  “Turn me loose,” John said.

  It was not an angry shout, and did not seem like a threat. George considered. “Will you come along if I do?” he asked. John did not say yes. But John did not say no, either. George chose to take that as assent, and let go of his arm. John did keep walking. Once they reached one of the little side streets that opened onto the market square, George stopped, turned to him, and said, “Do you want to know a secret? Getting a priest going in circles is cheap sport.”

  “I liked it well enough,” John answered. “Priests always pretend they know everything. That makes them more fun to bait--same with drunks in taverns.”

  “Baiting a drunk is one thing,” George said. “Nobody but him made him drunk. But it’s not that priest’s fault he’s here. All he did was keep from getting murdered by barbarians or eaten by wolf-demons. You can’t blame him for not knowing which end of the awl to hold right now.”

  “Who says I can’t?” John demanded. “And if he’s not to blame for the way he acts, who is?” If John couldn’t play logic-chopping games with the priest, he’d play them with George.

  The shoemaker, however, didn’t feel like playing. “Why don’t you ask the khagan of the Avars? I’ll bet he’d give you a better answer than that priest could.”

  John glared at him. George looked back steadily. That look didn’t abash Theodore anymore, but John hadn’t been exposed to it so often. He shuffled his feet like a boy caught stealing grapes. “Sometimes you’re too serious for your own good,” he grumbled.

  “Yes, that’s probably true,” George said, which only made John eye him with even more annoyance than he had before. George could make no sense of that. When he realized he could make no sense of it, he started laughing. He didn’t explain what he found funny. John got angrier still.

  The next time George went out hunting, he saw neither satyrs nor Slavs. That suited him fine. He also saw one rabbit, and missed it, which pleased him and his wife not at all. “Look on the bright side,” he told her. “I don’t have to go tell anything to Bishop Eusebius.”

  “Thank God for that,” Irene said. “You got by with saying too much to him once. Doing it twice would be tempting fate.” This was the first time she’d admitted George had got by with telling the bishop about the satyr. He decided to accept that, and gladly, and not worry too much about the rest of what she’d said. Concentrating on the good and not letting the rest get under his skin was one of the reasons his marriage went along as well as it did.

  Dactylius came in just then. Sure as sure, he was carrying bow and arrows and had a sword on his belt. Sure as sure, he said, “You’ve forgotten again.”

  “I don’t know what difference it makes,” George answered sourly. “I can’t hit anything today anyhow.” But he got his own weapons and headed down to the practice field with the jeweler.

  They went past St. Demetrius’ basilica along the way. The broad doors were open. The hexagonal silver roof of the ciborium not far inside the entrance glittered, catching a little of the slanting late-October sun.

  The reflections drew George’s eyes to the church. His glance was wary, as if he expected Bishop Eusebius to burst out and rush toward him with either more questions or, just possibly, with red-hot pincers. Nothing of the sort happened; the only person who did come out of the church was a gray-haired woman wearing black, who had probably gone in to pray for the soul of some recently deceased relative.

  George did hit the mark a few times. No one harassed him for not shooting better, because Paul the taverner seemed unable to frighten the targets, let alone hit them. “Next time, you don’t want to drink up all the wine in the place before you take your shots,” Rufus told him.

  “I did no such thing,” Paul said indignantly. “It’s only that other people have had more practice than I have.”

  “Well, in that case, go gather up your arrows--if you can find them all; God only knows where some of them have got to--and shoot off another quiverful. This time, at least try to shoot ‘em toward the targets.” Rufus pointed at the bales of hay.

  “You don’t want to give him too hard a time, or he’ll cut you off at his tavern,” John said, stirring up trouble.

  He got it Rufus expressed in great detail what he would do if Paul presumed to take so rash a course. Cutting it off was one of the milder things he came up with. His bloodthirsty bellowing formed the background to Paul’s search for his missing arrows. The taverner took a long time to find them, despite or maybe because of Rufus’ running commentary.

  “No wonder Jesus had nasty things to say about publicans,” John remarked. That got him back in Rufus’ good graces, but made Paul send him such a dirty look, George wondered if he’d ever be welcome to perform at the taverner’s place of business again. Sometimes paying attention to something more than the moment’s joke was a good idea.

  By the time Paul did stick the last arrow into his quiver--and by the time Rufus counted them all (counted them twice, in fact, when he lost track on his fingers the first time)--daylight was fast draining out of the sky. “I think you did it on purpose,” the militia commander said. “Now all you lugs get off with less work than you might.”

  “Maybe we could get enough torches to keep on practicing even after sunset,” Dactylius said.

  “Maybe we could light you up instead,” Sabbatius muttered. “For once, we get off easy, and you want to spoil it?”

  Rufus, fortunately, did not hear that. “It’d be too expensive,” he told Dactylius. “Bishop Eusebius, if it’s for the church, he’ll pay whatever it takes. But if it’s for anything else, you got to cut the coppers out of him with a knife. You’d think so, anyhow, way he bellyaches.” He stretched and grunted and pointed northwest, back toward the part of the city where most of the militiamen lived. “To hell with it. Tonight, we go home.”

  Not even Dactylius argued with him after that. George, for instance, knew Irene would be glad to see him home. Carrying his gear with him, he trudged off the practice field.

  “Who’s for some wine?” Paul asked when they neared his tavern. After a moment, he added, “Everyone can come on in.” Rufus kept walking. Paul sighed. He was more worried about profit than about the insults he’d taken from the veteran. Sabbatius did go in. Knowing him, he would be there well into the night and wake up with a thick head in the morning.

  “What about you, George?” Dactylius asked.

  The shoemaker shrugged. “Not tonight, I don’t think,” he answered. “I have some work that could use fin
ishing.” He shook his head. “I always seem to have some work that could use finishing. Ah, well--if you intend to keep eating, better to be too busy than the other way round.”

  “That’s true.” Dactylius nodded several times, rapidly. “A man who isn’t doing anything can’t sell anything, and a man who can’t sell anything isn’t going to eat.”

  As they drew near the basilica of St. Demetrius, George sniffed. The air in Thessalonica always smelled smoky, what with so many fires going to cook food and heat homes. Still. . . The militiaman came round a corner. George pointed. Sure enough, a black cloud was pouring out of the open doors of the church.

  For a moment, everyone simply stared in dismay. As in any city, fire was the great fear in Thessalonica. Once every generation or two, a great blaze would level whole districts. Again, the shoemaker thought of all the fires burning all the time: lamps, cookfires, hearths, smiths’ fires, potters’ ovens.... No wonder the flames got loose every so often.

  “It’s the saint’s ciborium burning!” Dactylius said.

  Priests were dashing out of the basilica, past the six-columned dome erected over St. Demetrius’ tomb. Layfolk from nearby buildings came running. Those who had buckets of water splashed them onto the blaze. George could see at a glance that that was like trying to hold back the ocean with a spoon--the fire was far past putting out. If God was kind, it would not spread to the rest of the church, or to any other budding in Thessalonica.

  “Not much wind,” Rufus said. “Sparks won’t go flying all over the place.” He’d been thinking along with George, then. “Something, anyhow,” he grunted.

  Dactylius, who spent his days working with precious metal, eyed the silver dome of the ciborium. It wasn’t solid silver, but silver laid over wood--wood now burning. “That’s going to melt,” he said. “It will run just like water, and splash down onto the floor above the tomb.”

  “It’ll be where anyone can grab it, you mean,” Rufus said, and Dactylius nodded. Rufus transformed himself from a tired old man walking home with his companions back into a militia officer. “We’ll have to form a perimeter around it, then, and keep people who don’t have any business inside the church from getting too close till the priests can gather up the metal.”

  He drew his sword and advanced on the ciborium. George, Dactylius, and the rest of the militiamen in the group followed him. Dactylius had known what he was talking about: already melted silver was dripping down from the dome of the ciborium; smoke rose from the marble on which it landed. How much silver had been in the dome? It had to be hundreds of pounds.

  “God bless you!” the priests called as the militiamen took up their stations around the monument to St. Demetrius.

  “I want to tell you, He’d better,” Rufus said grimly.

  George would gladly have echoed the officer. The church was filling rapidly, and not all the people were those the shoemaker was delighted to see. The smoke and the outcry the fire had created combined to bring out gawkers of every sort, from the merely curious to those who appeared at disasters to see what profit they could make from them.

  When this latter sort saw the silver melting and dripping down to where they might get their hands on the lumps and globules, their expression reminded George of the look dogs wore in front of a butcher’s shop. He’d never seen so many hungry, avid, hopeful faces all together.

  “Why don’t you go home?” he suggested to some of them. “Nothing here belongs to any of you.”

  “Not yet,” a skinny man said. His friends laughed.

  Priests and militiamen together lacked the numbers to keep the swelling crowd from doing as it would. The priests were not even armed--no, some of them had makeshift bludgeons, not that those would amount to much. George did not want to draw his sword, for fear of turning crowd into mob. Many of the Thessalonicans staring at the silver had weapons no worse than his.

  “When it gets a little darker, they’ll likely rush us,” Rufus said. “That way, nobody will be able to tell for certain who does what.”

  “I think you’re right,” George said, “and it gets dark a lot faster this time of year than it did a couple of months ago, say.” When I get home, Irene will yell at me for being seven different kinds of fool for letting myself get caught in what’s likely to be a riot. That was his first thought. Only after it had gone through his mind did he think to wonder how and if he would get home once the riot got rolling.

  Through smoke still thick enough to make him cough and force tears down cheeks no doubt sooty, the stretch of sky he could see got darker and darker. Color seemed to leach from the bricks of the basilica of St. Demetrius and the other nearby buildings.

  In the gathering gloom, someone hissed, “Come on. Let’s get it. They can’t hardly spy us now.” The serpent’s voice must have sounded like that when it was tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden.

  Only a few feet away from George, Rufus suddenly jerked, as if he’d been hit by an arrow. For a moment, the shoemaker thought that was what had happened. Then he felt the power in the air, strong enough to make the hair stand straight up on his head. He looked around wildly, wondering if lightning was about to strike.

  But it was not lightning, or not mere lightning. Rufus’ eyes were wide and staring. Whatever he saw had nothing to do with the burning ciborium or the thieves gathering around it. His mouth started to move. At first, no words came from it, as if the power about to speak through him had trouble matching its needs to those of his flesh and blood.

  Then it did speak, in a voice that would have made George’s hair stand on end if it hadn’t been doing that already: “Men, citizens--barbarians around the wall!” After a moment, Rufus, or Whoever was using him as a channel, cried out again: “They’ve appeared unexpectedly, but all of you, all of us, we’ll hasten with arms for our homeland!”

  Rufus repeated himself twice more, using, so far as George could tell, the identical words each time. By the time he fell silent, staggered, and almost fell as he came back to himself, the basilica was nearly empty. Almost everyone who had heard him had rushed to obey.

  He turned toward George, who was having all he could do to keep from rushing to the walls at that very instant himself. “The saint...” Rufus began, and then tried again: “The martyr . . .” He shook his head. “Something happened,” he muttered, “but what?” He might have been the only person in the basilica of St. Demetrius who did not know what he’d said.

  George started to explain, but a cry of wonder from behind him made him stop before he’d got out more than a couple of words. A priest was pointing at the wreckage of the ciborium. Wreckage it remained, but it was no longer burning. “We did not put out this fire,” he exclaimed, his eyes almost as round as Rufus’ had been. “God put out this fire.”

  “Christ and God helped us, with the intercession of the glorious martyr,” Rufus said, again in a voice not quite his own. “The fire is quenched, and nothing here destroyed by it.” Where before he had given orders to the crowd, now he commanded the priests: “Shut the doors to the church and gather up the silver in peace and quiet. And remember that this place remains in good order because of what the martyred saint established.”

  The veteran shivered like a man coming out of a warm house into an icy wind. Gently, cautiously, George touched him on the arm. “Come on,” the shoemaker said. “The Slavs are attacking the walls.”

  “They are?” Rufus exclaimed. “What are we wasting time here in the church for, then?” Now he was himself again, and no one else. “Let’s get moving. We’ll teach the whoresons a lesson they’ll remember one cursed long time.”

  He trotted out of the church at a ground-eating lope. George followed, along with the handful of other militiamen who had resisted the call that came through Rufus and stayed by the man himself. Behind them, the doors to the basilica slammed shut, with their bars thudding down to hold them so. Inside, the priests would be collecting the spilled silver ... in peace and quiet.

  People were running thr
ough the streets of Thessalonica, brandishing the spears and bows and swords and knives and occasional axes they had snatched up from their homes. “This is marvelous,” Rufus said. “I wouldn’t have thought even the barbarians at the gates would get everybody moving this way. I wonder what did it.”

  “It was you,” George said, but Rufus, now, paid little attention to him when he tried to tell what had happened. Power had not only filled him, but filled him to overflowing, so that he had neither memory nor even great interest in what he had set in motion. So, at any rate, it appeared to George, who was viewing it from the outside. He wondered what being filled with the power of the saint felt like. He doubted he would ever know.

  Many of the townsfolk, not being part of the militia, had no assigned place on the walls. They went up anyway, and shouted curses and abuse at whoever was on the far side. George supposed that would do Thessalonica no harm; if any of those curses stuck to the Slavs, it might even do some good.

  His own place on the wall was on the western stretch where he and his comrades in the militia had taken their turns as watchmen, near the Litaean Gate. That meant traversing most of the city, as St. Demetrius’ church stood over in the northeastern part of town.

  “Here we are,” Rufus said when they reached their proper section of the wall. The old veteran sounded winded. George did not blame him, and contented himself with a nod by way of reply. When you made shoes, you sat or stood in the same place all day, which did not do wonders for your endurance. George’s heart thudded like a drum.

  Climbing the stairs up to the wall made it beat even harder and faster; he wondered if anyone had fallen over dead rushing to the defense of Thessalonica. They gained the walkway and looked out into the gathering dusk. His heart pounded harder still, now not from exertion but from astonishment and alarm.