Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

  George hefted the bracelets. More ordinary ornaments he had never seen. “Why wouldn’t you be able to give me these later?” he asked.

  “Why? Because they wouldn’t be here later, that’s why,” Dactylius said, as if that were self-explanatory. Seeing it wasn’t, he motioned George over to his worktable. “There. Now do you understand?”

  “Oh. You’ve gone into the arrowhead business, too,” George said. “Well, yes, all right, that does make sense. Benjamin the bronzeworker is doing the same thing, for the same reason.”

  Dactylius nodded. “Yes, I can see how he would be.”

  Claudia, though, let out an indignant screech from the doorway to the back room. “They have my husband, my brilliant artist of a husband, doing the same thing as a no-account Jew? Darling, you have to tell the bishop you’re quitting, and right this minute. The insult!”

  “I want to think about that before I do it,” Dactylius said.

  What George wanted to say to Claudia was, Are you out of your mind? What he did say was, “An arrowhead doesn’t care who makes it.”

  “That’s not true,” Claudia said, advancing on him so she could argue nose-to-nose with anyone presumptuous enough to disagree with her. “How is the holy Bishop Eusebius supposed to bless an arrowhead made by some nasty Jew instead of a good Christian man?”

  It was a good question--a better question, in fact, than George had looked for from Claudia. After discarding two possible answers, he came up with one he hoped might satisfy her: “Since the bishop gave Benjamin the work, he doesn’t seem worried about it.”

  Claudia sniffed. “That’s his foolishness.” A moment before, he’d been the holy bishop Eusebius; now he was a fool. Had she been born a man, Claudia might have had a fine career in the law courts. She went on, “I still say it’s a shame and a disgrace for Dactylius and a Jew to both be doing the same thing.”

  “We’re all inside the city together, dear,” Dactylius said hesitantly.

  “Maybe if we gave the Jews to the Slavs and Avars ...” Claudia began.

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” George said with what he thought of as commendable restraint.

  “It probably wouldn’t satisfy them,” Claudia agreed mournfully. That wasn’t what George had meant, or, for that matter, anything close to what he’d meant. He supposed he should have been happy he’d got her to reconsider, whatever the reason. After thanking Dactylius again for the bracelets, he beat a hasty retreat.

  Sophia smiled when he gave her the bangle, but said, “Couldn’t you have found something nicer?”

  “Not the way things are now,” George answered, and explained what both Benjamin and Dactylius were busy doing. He added, “Claudia isn’t very happy that her husband has had to come down in the world so.”

  “Claudia isn’t very happy,” Irene said with an air of finality. “I’m just glad you managed to get the buckles.”

  “Some buckles,” George said. “Fewer than I would have liked.” He shrugged. “You do the best you can with what you have. When I’ve used all these, I’ll make boots for a while. If we haven’t got rid of the Slavs and Avars by then ... well, we’re liable to be down to eating leather by then instead of turning it into shoes.”

  Sophia made a face. “You’re making that up!” She looked at him. Real worry replaced playacted disgust. “No. You’re not.”

  “You do the best you can with what you have,” George repeated. “If you don’t have much, you do the best you can with what little you do.”

  “I hope it won’t come to that,” Irene said.

  “So do I,” George said. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t. We all hoped the plague wouldn’t come to Thessalonica again--but it did.” He looked around the shop. “Well, if it comes down to eating boded leather, we’ll have a better supply than almost anyone else.”

  “That’s true,” Irene said with a smile.

  Sophia giggled. “I’d like to see Dactylius eat his stock in trade.”

  “He couldn’t do it,” George agreed solemnly. “But do you know what? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Claudia could.”

  Dactylius pointed out from the wall. “What are they doing out there?” he said. “They ought to be trying to get inside the city every moment of the day and night.” He sounded indignant, as if the Slavs and Avars were falling down on the job.

  “You work all the time yourself,” George said, and Dactylius nodded vigorously. “I work all the time myself-- or I did, before this siege turned everything topsy-turvy.” Even if he was almost out of buckles again, with no great prospect of getting more, he still wished he were back in the shop. “But the Slavs and Avars don’t seem to do things the same way we do. They make a push and put everything they have into it. If it doesn’t work, they loll around for a while till they’re ready to try something else.”

  Lolling around they certainly were, for the time being, anyhow. They sat around campfires (days were chilly now, nights frankly cold), passing wineskins back and forth. Some of them shot dice. Some sang songs whose music echoed in George’s head even if the words were unintelligible.

  “If Rufus saw them like this, he’d scream for a sally right now,” Dactylius said. The thin little jeweler seemed to puff himself out into the shape and choleric aspect of the veteran. George clapped his hands; it was a fine bit of mimicry.

  But applause or not, he shook his head. “He’s seen them this way, and he’s all for sitting quiet. They may be idle, but they haven’t forgotten what they’re supposed to be doing. See how they have sentries round all the engines, ready to protect them if we do stick our noses outside the gates? I wouldn’t be surprised if they were trying to lure us out.”

  “Maybe so,” Dactylius said, not sounding as if he believed it. He hesitated, then went on, quite as if he wasn’t changing the subject, “I am still making arrowheads, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know,” George said, “but I thought you would, because you have too much sense to do anything else.” Then it was his turn to hesitate. “I hope your wife’s not too upset over what you’re doing.”

  “I managed to persuade her it was necessary.” The jeweler’s smile was wry. “Every now and then, I do win an argument.”

  “Good for you,” George said, wondering whether to believe it, wondering whether his friend fully believed it. “Nobody should win all the time, unless it’s us Romans over the barbarians, and that’s not the same thing.” Claudia, now, Claudia was as fierce as any Avar ever hatched, but Dactylius undoubtedly knew more on that score than he did.

  A troop of Avars came by, armored men on surprisingly big armored horses. Just by the way they rode, they gave the impression of owning everything they surveyed, and owning it beyond hope of challenge. George hadn’t seen many of the nomads since the siege began. Compared to the numbers of their Slavic subjects, he didn’t think there were many Avars. But every time he did see a few, he understood why the Slavs obeyed them.

  “I wouldn’t want to go up against those fellows in the open field,” he said, “not even if I were betting a copper follis to -win a gold solidus.”

  “Not even a half-follis,” Dactylius agreed. “But we’re not in the open field, and so--” He plucked an arrow from his quiver, set it to his bow, drew it back with a sweet, swift motion, and let fly.

  George started to chide him, because he thought the Avars were far out of range, especially for a small man like Dactylius, who couldn’t pull a strong bow. But the arrow kept going and going and going. . . . “Good shot!” George exclaimed. “Oh, good shot!”

  Dactylius cried out in exultation when the shaft he’d launched struck one of the Avars in the side. He cried out again a moment later, this time in anguish, when it rebounded from the fellow’s scalemail shirt. The Avar looked down at the arrow, then up at the wall. He shook his fist and kept on riding.

  “I had him,” Dactylius moaned. “By St. Demetrius, I had him--and he got away.” He sent another arrow at the troop of nomads.
This one fell twenty cubits short, as George had expected the other to do. It was as if Thessalonica’s patron saint had helped that first arrow along--only to see it fail in the end. If that was an omen, it was one for which George did not care.

  He set a hand on Dactylius’ shoulder. “You couldn’t have done any better,” he said. “You did better than I thought you could. If you shoot like that against the Slavs when they come to shoot at us, a lot of them won’t go back to their encampments.”

  “I know,” the jeweler said. “I hope I can. But for a few seconds there, killing that Avar seemed like the most important thing in the world. I thought I’d done it, and then--” He shook his head. “It’s not fair.”

  “No,” George agreed. “It’s not.” But for their part, the Avars would no doubt say it wasn’t fair that God and St. Demetrius had watched over Thessalonica and kept them from sacking the city. Fairness, like beauty, was in the eye of the beholder. When no two people could agree on what it meant, did it matter? George had trouble seeing how.

  The Avar Dactylius had shot but not wounded made his horse pull up and looked over toward Thessalonica again, as if deciding he wouldn’t brook the insult after all. He shouted something. George wouldn’t have understood it had he heard it clearly, which he didn’t.

  “Hello,” the shoemaker muttered under his breath. He might not have understood the shout, but he understood what sprang from it: out of one of the Avars’ tents near the woods came the priest or wizard who had tried to ruin the holy power in the grappling hooks on the walls of Thessalonica but had succeeded only in causing a minor earthquake.

  “What’s he carrying with him?” Dactylius asked.

  “Looks like a mirror,” George answered. “He’s in an even uglier getup than he was the last time we saw him, isn’t her” Instead of looking like some weird animal, half furry, half feathered, the Avar now resembled nothing so much as a tree all shaggy with moss. He even wore a great, untidy wreath of leaves on his head.

  He came trotting up to the horseman who had called for him. They talked together for some little while. The mounted Avar kept pointing back toward the wall, and toward that portion of it where George and Dactylius stood. Dactylius let out what could only be described as a giggle. “I don’t think he’s happy I almost let the air out of him,” the jeweler said.

  “I’d say you’re right,” George answered. “The next interesting question is, what can he do about it?” To turn any harm aside, George made the sign of the cross. The Avar wizard had shaken Thessalonica’s wall, even if he hadn’t toppled it. George didn’t want that kind of power aimed at him alone--or, come to that, at him and Dactylius together.

  The mounted Avar, having said his piece, rode on to rejoin his comrades. The priest stood staring at the wall. Even across a couple of furlongs, he seemed to be staring straight into George’s face. George stared back, unable to take his eyes away. He felt the weight of the Avar’s persona pressing on him, and pressed back as strongly as he could.

  That seemed to take the Avar by surprise. Abruptly, he turned away and went back into the tent from which the horseman had summoned him. Dactylius tapped George on the forearm. “Did you feel that?” The jeweler spoke in a whisper, though the wizard was far away.

  “Yes, I did,” George said. “I didn’t know you did, too.” Some of his pride in resistance faded. If the Avar had set that mental grip on more than one Roman at once, he was stronger than any single foe of his.

  “What do you suppose he’s doing in there?” Dactylius pointed to the tent into which the Avar had returned.

  “I don’t know,” George answered, “but I think we’ll find out.”

  He hardly thought himself worthy of being compared to Elijah or Jeremiah as a prophet, but that prediction was soon borne out. The Avar emerged from the tent carrying not only the mirror but what looked like a wooden pad of water. He set the mirror on the ground; as he did so, the sun angled off it for a moment, the flash proving to George what it was. He began to dance around it. Every so often, water splashed out of the pail onto the ground and onto the mirror.

  Clouds crowded the sky, which moments before had been sunny though pale. What had been as good a day as any Thessalonica might expect in November quickly changed to one warning of storm. “Magic!” George exclaimed; nothing natural could make the weather turn so fast.

  Cold rain began pelting down onto the wall almost as soon as the word passed his lips. Dactylius pointed. “Look!” he exclaimed. “It’s not falling on the Slavs out there.”

  He was right. The rain seemed confined to Thessalonica alone. Past twenty or thirty cubits beyond the wall, the weather remained as it had been. George started to say something, but thunder crashed, deafeningly loud, right above his head. He staggered and almost dropped to one knee.

  Another crash came, even louder than the first. George stared up into the sky. He’d never heard thunder like that. Were those just cloud shapes, or did they look like Avars thumping great drums? When the thunder rang out again, he was convinced of what he saw. Those shifting shapes, all thirteen of them, were real.

  After yet another peal of thunder, rumblings continued for some time, like aftershocks from an earthquake. The rumblers were cloud shapes, too: little men or gnomes with enormous feet, all made of mist.

  “Avar rain and thunder spirits!” George shouted, pointing up into the heavens. He hoped Dactylius would perceive them, too.

  Before he could find out whether his friend did, an utterly mundane arrow hissed past his face. He reached for his bow to shoot back at the Slavs, then cursed the Avar wizard as foully as he knew how. No rain fell on the Slavs; their bowstrings were dry. Those of the men on the walls of Thessalonica, though, were soaked and useless.

  The thunder spirits thundered. The smaller, less fearsome rumblers rumbled. The Slavs out beyond the walls kept on shooting. George and the other defenders were powerless to reply.

  “Where’s Bishop Eusebius?” Dactylius shouted. “He could put a stop to this.”

  Wherever Bishop Eusebius was, he was nowhere close by. Peering through the curtain of rain all around Thessalonica as if through a glass, darkly, George saw more Avars come out to confer with their priest. “I don’t know why they’re wasting time talking,” he said. “They’ll never have a better chance to attack the walls than now.”

  “Look!” Dactylius pointed not to the cloud creatures in the sky, not to the Slavs and Avars beyond the rain, but to the head of the stairway leading up to the wall. “It’s Father Luke!”

  That made George feel as good as seeing the bishop might have done. Father Luke was of lower rank, but George and Dactylius had already seen what his holiness could do. George said, “You beat the one water demon, Father. Can you beat these new ones as well?” He pointed at the thunderers and rumblers up in the sky.

  “I don’t know,” the priest replied, putting a hand up over his eyes so he could see the Avar powers without raindrops continually blowing in his face.

  “You don’t know?” Dactylius sounded horrified. “Are we just going to stand here and drown, the way people did in the great Flood?” He looked about ready to drown. The drumming rain made his hair run down over his face like so many wet snakes and plastered his tunic to him so tightly, George could count his ribs.

  In a way, Father Luke’s answer horrified George, too. In another way, it pleased him. A more arrogant priest would have claimed abilities he lacked and tried to do more than he could, as Father Gregory--the late Father Gregory--had done by the cistern. If nothing else, Father Luke had humility, a virtue in any Christian man and all the more vital in a priest.

  “God provided in the Flood, telling Noah to build his Ark,” Father Luke said. “I have faith God will provide for us now, if not through me, then surely through someone else.”

  Again, George did not quite know what to make of the response. Admiring the depth of Father Luke’s faith, he had trouble sharing it. He knew he had not the temperament of a man like Job, to
go on unceasingly praising God regardless of the misfortunes befalling him.

  Instead of criticizing the priest, though, he tried to nudge him into action: “You routed one water demigod with water of your own from the baptismal font. Can you do the same with these--?” Before he could say things, the thirteen thunder spirits let loose with another crash, one so enormous he thought it would split his head open.

  Father Luke’s shrug was not encouraging. “They are there” --he pointed up into the sky-- “while I remain down here. I see no way for the sanctified water to come in contact with them, as it did with the Slavic demon in the cistern.”

  “All right, you can’t do that,” George said, following the logic without liking it. “What can you do? You have to be able to do something.”

  “And you’d better do it soon, too,” Dactylius added. He sounded both insistent and frightened, neither of which George wanted. The shoemaker aimed to make Father Luke figure out what he could do and then to have him do it, not to alarm and rattle him.

  Father Luke, fortunately, seemed neither alarmed nor rattled. “I can pray,” he answered.

  It was, after all, what a priest was good for. Even so, George would have preferred a response somewhat more aggressive. He was beginning to feel as much like a drowned rat as Dactylius looked. “Well, if that’s what you can do, you’d better get to it,” he said roughly. “The Slavs out there aren’t going to be content with shooting at us up here on the wall, not for long they won’t. Pretty soon they’ll try knocking it down again.”

  “You’re right, of course.” Father Luke looked up to the heavens again. Now he paid no attention to the thunder spirits or the smaller rumblers, nor to the rain beating into his face. “I take my text from the Book of Genesis: ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’”

  Knowing the priest’s piety, and knowing also how he had beaten the Slavic water demigod, George expected the Avars’ sky powers to be routed and the sun to break through. That did not happen. The rain kept falling. More thunder boomed, as if those powers were laughing at Father Luke’s effort to disperse them.