Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

  He said, “I wish the Slavic powers would vanish from the earth if I forgot about them. Trouble is, they’re too much in the minds of the Slavs for that to happen.”

  “What we need to do is convert the Slavs and Avars to Christianity,” Dactylius said. “Then their powers will vanish away, as they deserve to do.”

  “That would be wonderful.” George pointed out to a couple of Slavs sitting on the yellowing grass out beyond archery range. They were passing a wineskin back and forth. After a while, one of them rolled over and went to sleep. “They don’t look ready to convert right now, worse luck.”

  “That’s so,” Dactylius said. “Maybe in the time of my children--if God blesses Claudia and me with children who live.”

  George thought about making love to Claudia. She was a well-built woman, and far from homely. All the same, had she been his wife, divine intervention would almost surely have been necessary for them to start a family. On the other hand, she might simply seize little Dactylius and have her way with him when the mood took her. George turned a snort into a cough; he didn’t want his friend to know what kind of thoughts were running through his mind.

  The Slavs did not try to break into Thessalonica during the rest of their watch. When the sun had swung through a third of its arc across the heavens, Paul and John ascended to the wall to take their places. John peered out at the Slavs, most of whom seemed utterly uninterested in the siege. “Another day of martial combat!” he cried. “And now to rush at the foe with a fearsome--” After a look of intense concentration, he broke wind.

  “There you go,” George said. “If the breeze were blowing in the right direction, you’d save the city single-handed.”

  “That wasn’t my hand, you blockhead,” John said. After a little more chaffing, he and the taverner began patrolling their stretch of wall while Dactylius and George went down into the city.

  As usual, a crowd of women had gathered around the cistern in the neighborhood. Thessalonica’s water came from nearby streams and rivers through underground pipes the Slavs and Avars had not yet discovered or tried to destroy. It still filled all the cisterns and flowed unhindered from fountains not only on street comers but also in several churches.

  Among the chattering women stood Irene. Spotting George, she lowered the water jug she carried from her shoulder and waved at him. He waved back, looking around to see if she had Sophia with her. Sometimes it was hard to tell them apart from a distance--and sometimes not from a distance, too. But no; Sophia wasn’t there this time.

  Just then, the roof of the cistern flew off. Concrete chunks, some of them as big as a man, spun through the air. One of them smashed a house. More, by luck or providence, came down on empty ground. But some landed with horrible wet squashing noises.

  The women near the cistern screamed and scattered. “Irene!” George cried, and ran toward them. He had almost reached his wife when the power that had hurled the roof off the cistern stood up inside and looked around.

  It was roughly man-shaped, but five or six times as tall as a man. It looked old, old. Its hair, what there was of it, was moss-green, and its long, straggling beard was also made of moss. Its skin hardly seemed skin at all, but rather wet bark.

  Maybe George’s shout, deep among shrill, had drawn its attention to him. Whatever the reason, it turned his way. Its eyes were red, like burning coals. When he looked into them, he felt his will dripping away like olive oil out of a cracked jar.

  It reached out a hand--no, more a misshapen paw-- toward him. As a drowning man will reach for anything his fingers touch, so the shoemaker made the sign of the cross. A satyr would have fled in terror. This horrifying apparition kept right on groping for him.

  But the holy sign had not been altogether without effect. He had his wits back, and his will. He snatched an arrow from his quiver, set it in his bow, and took aim at the gigantic . . . Slavic water-demon or -demigod, he supposed the thing was.

  Irene, whose presence of mind he often admired, had not dropped the water jar she’d filled at the cistern. A smaller version of the green-bearded thing popped out of it and grabbed George’s arm, spoiling his aim. The touch of the power was clammy and piercingly cold.

  Dactylius smote the smaller water-demon with his sword. What might have been mist or might have been ichor sprayed out from the wound. Irene did drop the jar then. Water splashed up and out from it. The small apparition of the demigod went from a single one to a multitude of tiny ones spread out in the bigger puddles among the cobblestones.

  George started stamping the tiny ones, as if they were so many cockroaches. They crunched under his sandals like cockroaches. The great demigod in the cistern roared and bellowed as he crashed its smaller simulacra--or perhaps they were all part of the same entity, so that the big one felt the pain he inflicted on the others as if on itself.

  More water-demons began springing out of the jars of other women who hadn’t dropped them. George and Dactylius shouted for the women to do just that. Crockery crashed on cobbles. And George and Dactylius and Irene fled away from the cistern as fast as they could run.

  “Do you suppose,” Dactylius panted, “these horrible things--are in every--cistern in the city?”

  “I hope not,” George answered, just as short of wind. “I hadn’t--thought of that. I wish--you hadn’t--either.”

  Their flight carried them past the church of St. Elias, the church nearest their homes and shops. It was close enough to the cistern for a couple of priests to have come out to try to learn what the commotion was about. Irene stopped and gasped out an explanation. The priests exclaimed in dismay. “Heathen powers loose in our God-guarded city?” one of them, Father Luke, said. “We’ll exorcise them forthwith.”

  “Have a care,” George told them, still trying to catch his breath. “These things are strong, Your Reverence. You didn’t see the roof go flying.”

  “A roof is a material thing, a thing of this world,” the priest replied. “In matters of the spirit, the power of God shall overcome all others. Did not He, through the intercession of St. Demetrius our patron, vouchsafe a warning that our city was about to be attacked?”

  “Yes, He did, no doubt about it. I was there, and I saw it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears,” George said. “But the Slavs are such raw pagans, their powers are strong in the world of the spirit, too.” As he had so many times by now, he warned them of the wolf-demon that had slain a priest.

  One of the men who had come out of St. Elias’ church turned pale and made as if to go back inside. Father Luke remained unperturbed. “This means only that our own faith shall have to be stronger. Come, Father Gregory. If we fear the pagan spirits, we give them power over us.”

  Father Gregory looked anything but delighted at the prospect of facing a water-demon of the might of this one. But facing a water-demon was liable to be as nothing when set against facing Father Luke--to say nothing of facing Bishop Eusebius. Muttering something that might have been a prayer or a curse, Gregory followed his colleague up the street toward the cistern.

  “Go back to the shop,” George told Irene. “Let the children know you’re all right.”

  “What are you going to do?” his wife demanded.

  He pointed to the priests. “You never can tell what sort of help they might need, or who might be able to give it to them.” He still didn’t know what an arrow might do to the demigod or whatever it was. On the off chance he might have to find out, he started after Father Luke and Father Gregory.

  Dactylius followed him. So did Irene. He wondered for a moment why she chose such inconvenient times not to listen to him. He had no time to argue, and the only way to force her to go back would be to drag her, which would mean he couldn’t help Father Luke. Resolving to take it up with her later (a wasted resolution if ever there was one, as he knew even at the time), he hurried to catch up with the priests.

  Then Father Luke, confusing things further, spun around on his heel and ran back into the church. He em
erged a moment later, leaving George mystified. “Let’s go!” he said, and go they did.

  The open square by the cistern was almost bare of people: of living people, at any rate. A couple of women were down and not moving under shards of what had been the roof. Others writhed and wailed. The liquid puddled around them was red and sticky and of no interest to demons concerning themselves only with water.

  “By She Who bore God!” Father Gregory gasped when he got his first glimpse of the water-demon looming out of the cistern. A few smaller copies--or parts--of the demigod still stood in puddles left by shattered water jars. They were hideous, too, but hardly worth noticing with the great one about.

  Those red eyes swung toward the newcomers. The demigod made a strange, wet, bubbling noise, something that sounded as if it might be a question about what people were doing coming toward the cistern rather than running away from it. A good question, George thought. He wondered what he was doing, too. But he kept doing it. Each foot kept going in front of the other.

  Father Gregory shouted, “In the holy name of God, go back to whatever accursed place spawned you!” He made the sign of the cross.

  He must not have been listening when George warned of what the Slavic powers could do. Or, possibly, he hadn’t believed George, who was, after all, only a shoemaker.

  A power from the days of the pagan Greeks would have been routed. A power from the days of the pagan Greeks, though, could never have made its way into Thessalonica in the first place, not when the city was warded by God through St. Demetrius.

  Far from being routed, the water-demon roared angrily and reached out for Father Gregory. As it was several times longer than a man, it had a correspondingly longer reach. George shot an arrow into its arm. A slight mist sprinkled down onto him. Other than that, the shaft had no effect.

  Dactylius aimed for the thing’s torso. In what might have been the shot of his life, he sank an arrow that should have pierced the demigod’s heart. It seemed, however, not to have a heart: at any rate, his arrow did no more good than George’s had.

  “Run!” George shouted. He didn’t know whether he meant it more for Father Gregory, on whom the water-demons hand was closing, or for Irene. No, that wasn’t true: he did know. He wanted his wife away from the power. The first denial must have sprung from embarrassment at putting her safety above that of the holy man.

  It didn’t matter. Neither his wife nor the priest listened to him. The huge hand closed on Father Gregory. He screamed like a lost soul. Considering his circumstances, that seemed fitting enough. He called on God and the Virgin and on Christ, using the holy names as if they were curses. They did no good against the Slavic demigod. George, in the midst of his own terror, was saddened but not surprised. Revenge and reverence were not the same.

  Father Luke ran toward the cistern. The water-demon reached out its other hand toward him. George and Dactylius both sent arrows into that arm. The shoemaker never knew for certain whether that did any good. What he did know was that, when the demigod snatched at the priest, it missed.

  Instead of grabbing again at once, it chose to pay attention to Father Gregory, whom it had already seized. It raised him high, then threw him down onto the cobbles of the square. Blood splashed out from his body when it struck, as if he too were a shattered jar. He screamed no more.

  That brief hesitation, though, had let Father Luke reach the side of the big concrete basin with the wrecked roof. He pulled a small jar out from inside his robe, yanked off the stopper, made the sign of the cross over the jar, and tossed it up into the cistern. The demigod reached down to treat him as it had his colleague. Father Luke waited, unafraid. A moment before those great hands grabbed him, George heard a small splash: the jar had gone into the water.

  The demon disappeared.

  Silence slammed down in the square, silence punctuated by distant screams. George realized he’d been hearing those with the back of his mind for some time, which was a good argument in favor of the notion that the water demigod had appeared in every cistern in Thessalonica. As he stood there still half-stunned by his escape, those screams changed in tone from terror to amazement, which was a good argument in favor of the notion that, whatever Father Luke had done, whatever force he had called upon, had rid every cistern in Thessalonica of the demigod in the same instant.

  On legs still wobbly with fright, George walked up to him, taking a few steps around the smashed horror that had been Father Gregory. “Bless you, Your Reverence,” he said, most sincerely.

  “Bless you for your courage,” the priest answered, sounding as shaken as the shoemaker felt. “Without courage and faith, I fear, we shall be lost in the dark days that He ahead.”

  George nodded. He looked back toward what was left of Father Gregory. The other priest had proved not to have quite enough of either, there when the ultimate test came. George suspected Father Luke would have found a way to prevail even without... whatever he’d thrown into the cistern. George’s bump of curiosity, always easy to excite, began itching furiously now. “What was in that jar, Your Reverence?” he asked.

  “Water from the baptismal font,” Father Luke answered. “Fighting fire with fire is as ancient a proverb as I know. Here I thought it better to--”

  “--Fight water with water,” George interrupted, an enormous smile stretching itself across his face. The priest showed himself a man of enormous charity as well as piety: he did not get angry with George for stepping on his line.

  Dactylius and Irene came up then. George put an arm around his wife. She shivered against him for a moment, but then said, “I’ll have to buy a new jug to replace the one I broke here.”

  More than jugs had been broken in the square. Along with Father Gregory, several women lay there. Some might be helped. One was groaning and shrieking and clutching her leg, which streamed blood out onto the cobbles. A big chunk of concrete from the roof the demigod had destroyed lay by her.

  George used his sword to cut a strip from the bottom of her tunic to bandage the leg. She screamed abuse at him all the while, as if the tunic were more important than anything else. He took no notice of that; the lower part of the leg was out of true with the rest. “A bandage isn’t all she needs,” he said, pointing. “That leg is broken.”

  “I’ll fetch a physician,” Dactylius said. “This could have been Claudia, as easily as not.” George might not have bet on the water-demon against Claudia, but he knew the little man was right. Dactylius hurried away.

  Father Luke came up to the woman and prayed over her. His entreaties might have eased her pain a little, but no more than that. Routing the Slavic demigod was a matter of power against power. Something as mundane as a broken leg wasn’t, barring a miracle. Barring--

  “Pity we can’t take her to the healing spring outside the city,” George said. “But the Slavs have to be prowling there nowadays.”

  “It is the will of God,” Father Luke said. “We are in His hands.”

  He believed that with every fiber of his being. Not least because of his strong faith, he’d been able to vanquish the water-demon. But had he not had the wit to bring with him water from the baptismal font, all his faith would have done him no good. George, shorter on faith, tried to be sharp of wit. He had trouble understanding how God’s purpose included things like a broken leg inflicted, so far as any man could tell, at random.

  Father Luke would have called him presumptuous for wanting God’s purpose to make sense to a mere man. He supposed the priest would have had a point, too. Some of his own purposes didn’t make sense to Theodore and Sophia, who were in essence his equals, not inferiors, as he was an inferior to God. Even so . . .

  He waited by the woman till Dactylius brought back the doctor, who took one look at the leg, nodded, and began the business of setting it. “I told him it was broken,” Dactylius said, “so he brought the boards for splints.”

  “Good,” George said. He turned to Irene. “Do I remember rightly? Wasn’t I on my way home from a stret
ch on the wall?” He glanced at the sun to gauge the time. “Not very long ago, either.” He shook himself, like a dog coming out of a pond. “Only seems a year’s gone by since then, I guess.”

  “Bless you,” Father Luke said again as he and his wife left the square. Weary and worn as he was, he walked straighter. When a priest like Father Luke blessed you, you felt blessed.

  He wondered what the priests of the Slavs and the Avars were doing, now that their effort to make it impossible to draw water inside Thessalonica had failed. Wading and gnashing their teeth, with any luck at all. But they probably wouldn’t go on wailing and gnashing their teeth for long. They’d probably bring more of their gods and demons to bear against the God-guarded city.

  He shrugged. The Thessalonicans couldn’t do anything about that till it happened, if and when it did. Not only did they have God guarding them, they also had the militia. George had got almost to his own street before he wondered whether that counted for or against them.

  Irene put her hand in his. “You were very brave,” she said.

  “I was what?” George said. Father Luke had praised his courage, too. He had trouble following that. “If I hadn’t done what I did, I figured something worse would happen. If that’s courage, then I’m--”

  “Someone who talks too much,” Irene said firmly He was about to make an indignant denial; she could truthfully have accused him of a good many things, but not that. After he opened his mouth, though, he shut it without saying anything. If his wife thought he was brave and he went around denying it, didn’t that count for talking too much?

  When he and Irene walked into the shop, their children looked up from the shoes they’d been repairing. “Where’s the water jar, Mother?” Sophia asked.

  Irene and George looked at each other and started to laugh. Sophia spluttered in annoyance; how dared her parents share what was obviously a joke when she had no idea why it was funny?