George and Rufus shouted, too. George slapped the veteran on the back. Rufus not only endured the familiarity, he grinned wide enough to show off the worn and snaggled teeth still in his mouth. The world soon interfered with that little stretch of unexpected delight, as the world has a way of doing. Rufus, remembering he was a captain, shouted, “Let’s give the bastards a going-away present. Grab your bows, lads!”
Along with the rest of the men on the walls, George shot at the Slavs till they fled out of range. As the warriors from the tortoises withdrew, the archers who had supported them also moved away from the wall. That let the Romans peer down at the ground without the risk of taking an arrow in the face.
“We dented them,” George said, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one appeared. It was, in some instances, only literal truth; many of the big, reinforced shields the Slavs had brought up against the walls of Thessalonica were broken, while others had their iron facings badly battered.
A good many dented men lay under the wall, too, men whose shields had proved unable to protect them from the stones and arrows the Romans had showered down on them. A couple of them were almost as badly smashed as poor Father Gregory had been after the Slavic water-demigod hurled him to the cobblestones by the cistern. This too was war. George wished Theodore had come up on the wall beside him, to see the reality of what he thought so great and glorious.
Not all the Slavs who lay below the wall were dead. Groans and shrieks still rose from those whose crushed limbs or bums kept them from retreating with their comrades, and from a couple who dragged themselves along with their hands because they were dead from the waist down.
“Let’s finish them,” Rufus said. Some militiamen had already begun shooting at the helpless Slavs, and precisely aiming stones at those right under the wall. That was a hard, unpleasant business. One by one, the screams and their makers died till none was left.
Into the grim silence following that last death, Rufus said, “I think most of us can come down off the wall now. They aren’t going to be able to nerve themselves for another attack any time real soon.”
“What do we do if you’re wrong?” John asked.
Rufus shrugged. “If you’re still up on the wall, you fight ‘em. If you’re down in the city, you come running back and you fight ‘em. If they’re already down into the city before you get back here, it’s the end, but you fight ‘em anyway, and you keep fighting ‘em till they kill you. Any other questions?”
“What good would other questions do me?” John returned. “You’ve only got one answer.”
Only when he turned to head down the stairs into Thessalonica did the comic’s shoulders sag and his stride lose its jaunty spring. “Mother of God, I’m so tired,” he said over his shoulder to George, who was a couple of steps above him. “If those bastards keep coming after us like this, sooner or later they’re going to break in.”
“If they can keep coming at us, I think you’re right,” George answered. “But we’ve given them a fine set of lumps every time they’ve tried. How many men did they lose today? It had to be hundreds. Rufus is right--they’ll take a while getting over that.”
“Maybe you’re right,” John said. “Maybe Master One Blue and One Brown is right, too. But maybe not. You think the Avars care how many Slavs the ravens peck the eyes out of? It’s like spending other people’s money. If Paul tells me I can drink all I want at his place and he’s paying for it, why should I stay sober?”
“People aren’t miliaresia,” George said. “After a while, the Slavs will start saying no when the Avars send ‘em out against the wall to be slaughtered.”
“And a fat lot of good that will do them.” John jumped off the last step. “If they don’t come out here against the walls, the Avars will do the job on them for us, sure as God made the world in seven days.”
George thought that over. He decided the tavern comic was probably right. “I don’t think I’d care to be a Slav right now,” he observed.
“Leave the ‘right now’ out of it, if you please,” John said. “I can’t think of any time I’d want to be a Slav.” He turned off at the side street that led to the furnished room where he lived.
On reflection, George couldn’t think of any time when he would have wanted to be a Slav, either. He waved to John, who, filled with himself as he often was, didn’t see or didn’t notice--in any case, John didn’t wave back. Sighing, George headed on home himself.
Several people on the street had blankets over their tunics like sad excuses for cloaks. George didn’t blame them. Now that he wasn’t up on the wall fighting for his life, he realized how raw the day was and wished he had a cloak himself. As was the way with such things, wishing did him little good. Along with wishing, he hurried. That not only made him a little warmer than he would have been otherwise, it also got him home sooner.
George was growing resigned to gasps of relief and excited exclamations whenever he walked through the door into his shop. They helped him understand why armies, whenever they could, fought far from home. It wasn’t so much to keep their own lands from being ravaged, as he’d always thought. More likely, it was so the soldiers could get away from their families and not have them fretting every minute of the day and night.
“Are you all right, Father?” Sophia said now, hurrying toward him. “You’ve got blood on your tunic.”
“Do I?” George looked down at himself. “Why, so I do.” He pulled the hem of the tunic up a little so he could inspect his legs. “It isn’t mine. I’ve said that before and been wrong, so I wanted to make certain this time and not look foolish.”
“What was it now?” Irene asked in a voice so flat and dull from holding in worry that it might as well have been a scream. “We hear people running and people shouting, but we never really know what’s going on till you come home. We’re always afraid till then, too.”
“I’m all right.” George held up both hands so his wife could see as much. Then he stood on one leg like a stork, and then on the other. That made Sophia and Theodore laugh, and even Irene’s smile was a little warmer than dutiful. He went on, “What was it now? The Slavs tried knocking down the foundations of the wall. It didn’t work.
We killed a lot of them and made the rest run away.”
Put that way, it sounded easy, the result seeming foreordained. The few sentences said nothing of the way the wall had shuddered under George’s feet when the Slavs attacked it with picks and pry bars, nothing of the fear that it would do more than shudder, and would come tumbling down like the walls of Jericho in the Bible story. George felt not the least bit guilty at keeping such knowledge from his family. He wished he had no part of it himself.
Theodore said, “I’ll bet you butchered them.”
“We hurt them,” George agreed tonelessly. “I was thinking at the time that you should have been there.” Theodore looked proud till he went on, “Seeing what a man looks like after a rock this big” --he gestured with his hands-- “lands on his head would keep you from going on and on about what you don’t begin to understand.”
Sophia made a small, disgusted sound. Irene looked down at the leather strap she was sewing to a sandal and didn’t say anything. Theodore did think about what his father said; George gave him credit for that. But it didn’t sink in. George could see as much.
Maybe he should have talked about the men who’d had rocks fall on them but didn’t die right away, the men with crushed limbs or broken backs. Maybe he should have talked about the men who’d screamed and screamed after a cauldronful of boiling water came down on them. Maybe he should have-- He shook his head. None of it would do any good, not till Theodore saw it for himself and, more important still, understood in his belly that it could have been he as easily as any luckless barbarian.
“I’m not afraid,” Theodore said, which so decisively proved he’d paid George no attention that the shoemaker, instead of uselessly arguing with him, walked over to his bench to get to some of the work the si
ege had kept him from doing.
He’d just picked up his awl and noted how smoothly the wooden handle fit against his palm and fingers when Irene said, “Will you come out back with me, please, dear? I want to know whether you think the fennel is ready for picking.”
George muttered under his breath. Irene knew far more about the herbs she grew back there than he did. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d asked his opinion about them. The last time he’d offered it unasked, she’d made a point of ignoring him. And he had more work to do in less time than he’d ever known before. He started to say as much. Before he did, though, he looked over at his wife. Without a word, he set the awl down on the bench and walked out with her to have a look at the fennel.
“Seems fine to me,” he said, pointing at the wispy, light green plants that stood almost as tall as he did.
Irene gave him the stare she reserved for times when she caught him being deliberately obtuse. “Of course it’s fine,” she said with an edge to her voice. “But I can’t very well talk about Sophia right there in front of her, can I?”
“Why not?” George asked. “You talk about me when I’m right there all the time.”
Irene’s left foot began tapping the muddy ground of the herb garden, a sure danger sign. “How much do you know about Constantine, the son of Leo the potter?” she asked.
“Say, as much as I know about any of the young men who live on this street,” George answered. “He doesn’t wear baggy tunics with puffy sleeves and cut his hair short the way the young toughs do, so I suppose he’s not so bad as some. Why do you want to . . ?”
His voice traded off. Looking back, he realized it should have traded off a couple of sentences sooner. Irene’s foot was tapping harder, which showed exactly how stupid he’d been. “Yes, that’s right,” she said, as if he’d asked the right question. “Sophia has noticed him. She’s done rather more than notice him. This morning, she told me she thought he was the sweetest thing God had made since the fruit in the Garden of Eden.”
“Oh.” George suppressed a strong urge to retch. “Oh, dear.” He’d never particularly noticed young Constantine. What he had noticed was a fellow huskier than most whose beard, which he did not shave very well, had some red patches in it that were startling when seen with the dark hair on top of his head. “Is she serious, or is it just.. . foolishness?” That wasn’t the word he wanted, but he couldn’t find a better one.
“She thinks she’s serious, so she might as well be,” Irene answered, a thought convoluted enough to have made Bishop Eusebius proud.
“Am I going to have to talk to Leo?” George asked, and then, as much to himself as to his wife, “Do I want to talk to Leo?” As he had asked it, he answered his own question: “Constantine’s not the worst match I can think of.”
“No, he’s not,” Irene agreed. “But he’s not the best, either. We have to think about this, and we have to see whether Sophia changes her mind again day after tomorrow, too. I remember there were boys who--” Now she was the one who broke off.
George waggled a finger at her. “Ha! I’m usually the one who makes mistakes like that.” With his wife still flustered, he went on, “Some of the boys who might have caught her eye, well, I think I’d be praying the Slavs and Avars would sack the city before the wedding.”
“God forbid.” Irene’s voice was serious, but her eyes danced. “As you said, it could be worse. I was wondering if Theodore had his eye on anyone in particular, but he hasn’t shown any signs of that. It won’t be long, I expect.”
“No, but for now he hasn’t.” George said nothing more. At Theodore’s age, he’d had his eye on every pretty girl who walked past the open door, but he’d left it to his parents to find him one with whom to make a life. His gaze flicked back to Irene. Would he have chosen her on his own? He didn’t know, but his mother and father had done well by him.
“I can guess what you’re thinking,” Irene said, and laughed a little. That laugh meant she wasn’t guessing: she knew he’d eyed all the girls when he was younger. She continued, “With Sophia, it’s not anything we have to worry about right away, I don’t think. But if she’s still serious come summer--”
“All right,” George said Summer seemed farther away than Jerusalem, farther away than Gaul, farther away than the island that was supposed to be beyond Gaul, the island whose name, for the moment, he’d entirely forgotten. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. That would bother him till he remembered, no matter how useless knowing the name of an immensely distant island now surely infested with barbarians was.
He grunted. Thessalonica was infested with barbarians. To think of them, he didn’t need to worry about. . . “Britain!” he said happily.
“What are you talking about?” Irene asked.
Before he had to come up with an answer, Sophia called, “How much can the two of you say about fennel, anyway?”
“They’re not talking about fennel,” Theodore said in a voice George didn’t think he was supposed to overhear. “They’re talking about one of us--unless they’re talking about both of us.”
“I know that,” Sophia replied indignantly, as if her brother had mistaken her for a halfwit. “But I don’t want to come right out and say it, do I?”
George suffered a coughing fit at the same time as Irene made wheezing noises, the way some people did when flowers bloomed in springtime. Had their children been a little farther away--on the island of Britain, for instance, George thought--both of them would have howled laughter.
As they went back inside, Irene found a way to make them both serious again. She asked, “Now that the Slavs and Avars have found they can’t knock the wall down with crowbars and such, what do you think they’ll try next?”
“I don’t know if they’ve found they can’t knock the wall down this way,” George answered “I just think the Slavs took as much punishment as they could stand right then, which may not be the same thing.” He considered. “They seem to be taking turns, soldiers one try, powers the next We still don’t know all the different powers they have, but my bet is, we’ll find out.”
“Find out what?” Theodore asked when they came into the workroom.
“Find out who’s been trying to listen to every word we say,” his father answered with a growl that concealed memories of trying to find out what his own parents had been up to when he was Theodore’s age and younger.
“Is the fennel all right?” Sophia asked, mildly enough to keep George from thinking she was practicing one of John’s routines.
“The fennel is fine,” George said. “The two of you, on the other hand, are nosy. Irene, which of them do you suppose is nosier than the other?”
“Both,” Irene said, which confused George but confused Theodore and Sophia even more, thereby accomplishing its purpose.
Claudia came in with the sandal George had repaired not long before. Now it had two broken straps, not just one. Despite that detail, Claudia said, “You didn’t fix this very well, George.”
“I am sorry,” George replied, examining the damage. “If you use a shoe to hit people, you know, it won’t wear so well as it would if you only walked in it.”
“That’s not very good.” Claudia’s voice was indignant. Not only did irony roll off her like dye from a well-greased area of leather on a boot, she also remained as convinced nothing was ever her fault as if she were an aristocrat rather than an artisan’s wife. “Shoes should be strong enough to stand up to whatever you do to them.”
“I’ll try to get this back to you in a couple of days,” George said resignedly He knew he wasn’t going to make her see the world or her place in it any differently. What Dactylius saw in her--except someone bigger and stronger and fiercer than he--was beyond the shoemaker.
Claudia’s pale eyes flashed fire. “A couple of days?” she said.
Not being married to her, George could take a firmer line than her husband. “Yes, a couple of days, I’m afraid,” he answered. “I have a lot of work here
that I’m trying to do, and I don’t have a lot of time to do it. You can blame that on the Slavs and Avars, if you like, along with everything else.”
“I do. Oh, I do,” Claudia said. “They’ve done nothing but make my life miserable ever since they got here. As far as I’m concerned, they ought to go away and never come back.”
“As far as I’m concerned, they ought to go away and never come back, too,” George said, though he concerned himself with the Slavs and Avars more for what they were liable to do to Thessalonica as a whole than for how they were inconveniencing him in particular.
Claudia let out a melodramatic sigh she probably meant to be martyred instead. “All right, George. A couple of days, since you’re the one who says so.” She swept out, dissatisfied but doing her best to bear up under the disappointment: an actor in a mime troupe couldn’t have conveyed the emotion more clearly.
Once she was gone and George was sure she wouldn’t make any sudden reappearances, he said, “I admire Claudia--I really do.” That drew from the rest of his family the disbelieving exclamations he’d expected. He held up a hand. “No, wait. Hear me out. How many other people in this whole city can you think of who make me glad to go up on the wall and fight the Slavs and Avars?”
No one answered him, by which he concluded he’d won his point.
George and Theodore jostled for places near the altar in St. Demetrius’ basilica. Up in the women’s gallery, Irene and Sophia were probably doing the same thing. They sometimes came home from church with stories of pushing and shoving. Once or twice, they’d come home with bruises on their arms.
Theodore twisted past a plump man. Turning back to his father, he said, “I’ll bet Dactylius’ wife watches the divine liturgy from wherever she pleases.”
“Claudia? I’ll bet you’re right, son,” George answered. Then he stopped and really listened to what Theodore had said. That meant he all but had to kick the plump man out of the way to keep up with his son, but he didn’t care. He didn’t even snarl back when the plump man used several expressions not often heard in church. Theodore had thought along with him as effortlessly and accurately as Irene sometimes did. The boy--no, the young man now--had had a lifetime of practice doing just that, of course, but his lifetime hadn’t been very long, not to George’s way of thinking. The shoemaker suddenly felt more like a grandfather than a father.
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