“Oh!” Dactylius blinked. “I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right, aren’t you?”
“Unless you know more about the secrets of the city than I do, I am,” George said. He looked out toward the wizards’ tents once more. “They are strong: the Slavs, I mean. They aren’t very bright, though, or they’re not very good at using the power they do have. Otherwise, one of those little bat things would have been listening to Rufus and Eusebius, not to us.”
“How do you know one wasn’t?” Dactylius asked.
He stood there small and smug and proud of his own cleverness. And George demolished it, not taking malicious glee in the doing as John would have but doing it anyhow, hardly noticing he was doing it, not thinking of anything but going after the truth wherever it happened to be hiding this particular day: “If the Slavs and Avars were listening to what our leaders said to one another, they’ve have a better idea of where we’re weak than they really do, and they’d do a better job of hurting us in those places.”
Dactylius stared at him. Pride leaked out of him like water from a squeezed sponge. Even with pride gone, though, integrity remained. “You’re right,” he said, a sentence he’d used twice lately but one many men would sooner have been tortured than utter. “That makes better sense than my notion.”
“It does only stand to reason,” George said, trying by his tone to imply that his friend would surely have seen the same thing had he but waited a moment longer before he spoke. He waved up and down the length of the wall. “See? We still don’t have as many stones up here as we did before the Slavs attacked the foundations with their tortoises, for instance. If they knew that, they might try again.”
“Good thing none of those little bat spirits was flying near you then,” Dactylius said. He and George both looked around anxiously to make sure that was so. George didn’t see any of the ugly little things, so he supposed it was.
The supposition cheered him less than it might have. “Sooner or later,” he said slowly, “those things are going to hear something important for no better reason than luck. If they come around often enough, they have to. And if the Slavs and Avars can figure out what to do with it--”
“We’re in trouble,” Dactylius finished for him.
“We’re in worse trouble,” George corrected him. “We’ve been in plain trouble for a while now.”
Dactylius looked out toward the enemy encampment. “Well, yes,” he said.
VIII
A barmaid sidled up to George, smiling a bright, professional smile. “More salted olives?” she asked. Partly, that was to help make him thirsty. Partly, it was pride that Paul’s tavern still had salted olives to sell. Whatever it was, George had already gone through one bowl of them, and a fresh mug of wine sat in front of him. He shook his head.
A kithara gently wept, accompanying the singer’s plaintive song of lost love. Across the table from George,
John made a face. “If I had to listen to this fellow all day long, I’d have left him, too,” the comic said.
“Practice for your act?” George asked: his friend wore the intent look he donned whenever he was about to perform.
But John shook his head. “Paul told me he’d throw me out on my ear if I ever badmouthed any of the other people he brought up onstage to make the customers forget how lousy his wine is.” His flexible features displayed great gobs of scorn. “As if anybody needs me to tell him what a bad mouth this singer has.” He wasn’t on the platform yet, but his quips drew blood even so.
Before long, the kithara player mercifully finished his last song. He got a tepid round of applause, half praise, half relief that he was done. Paul shouted, “And now-- here’s John!” The comic bounded up onto the little stage. The kithara player gave him a fanfare he looked as if he could have done without.
“I thought I was going to have good news for everybody tonight,” John said. “I thought the siege would be over by now. When I was out on the wall a couple of weeks ago, one of the Avars told me their women were getting pretty tired of how long this whole business is taking, and they said they wouldn’t sleep with their men unless they gave up and made peace with us Romans.”
“You’re stealing that from Aristophanes!” yelled a heckler with an education in the classics.
“The frogs are loud tonight,” observed John, who also had one. “Koax! Koaxl But that’s from the wrong play, and besides, anybody see the siege ending? Nope, the Avars are still here, all right, and what’s more, half their sheep are pregnant.”
Somebody threw an olive at him. He caught it out of the air and ate it. “It’s not a tough crowd if they don’t throw things from the swordsmith’s shop,” he remarked. Maybe that was supposed to be a joke. Maybe it was just how a tavern comic went about gauging his audience.
John said, “One thing this siege has done is make me glad I’m a Christian. I have enough trouble keeping one God happy. Try and keep all the gods the Slavs and Avars have happy and you end up as worn out as an old man trying to keep a young harem happy.” He pantomimed limp exhaustion--limp in every sense of the word.
After exactly the right pause, he recovered as if by magic and started counting on his fingers. “How many gods have we seen? Water god, thunder gods, fire god--I expect any minute now they’re going to sic the god of shrunken tunics on us.” Again, he let his body get his laughs for him, twisting and jerking as he tried to handle an imaginary bow in a tunic that was squeezing his arms like a serpent.
“And somebody,” he said, sitting down on his stool once more, “told the chief tax collector the Slavs have so many gods, they even have one who inflicts high interest on delinquent returns. From what I hear, the tax man jumped over the wall and converted day before yesterday.”
That got a loud laugh. Every tax collector George had ever known would have worshiped a god like that. He watched the men in the taverns looking around at one another. Half of them would have worshiped a god like that, too. Enough people owed George money that he might have been tempted into a brief bit of fiscal paganism himself.
“That same god went down into the Jews’ quarter,” John added. “They told him to come back once he had some experience.” No one was safe from John. That was a lot of what made him funny. It was also what made the people whose vanity he flicked hate him.
A barmaid carrying a wooden tray filled with empty mugs stumbled over somebody’s outstretched foot. She squealed and managed to stay upright, but several of the mugs flew off the tray. Being the cheapest of cheap crockery, they shattered.
“Pick up the pieces, Verina,” Paul said wearily when the noise stopped. “That’ll come out of your pay, you know.”
“What a kind and generous host we have,” John exclaimed--not sarcasm, as George first thought, but the lead-in to a joke, for the comic continued, “Puts me in mind of the two fellows who owned a slave in common. One day one of them came into their shop and found the other one whacking the slave with a stick. “What are you doing? he asked his partner. And the other fellow told him, ‘I’m beating my half.’ “
As Verina swept up the shards of the broken mugs, John said, “Like I told you, Paul’s a good fellow. Instead of taking it out of Verina s pay, he could have taken it out some other way.” He leered at the barmaid. The largely male crowd whooped. Verina looked ready to throw the pieces of crockery at him. Again, though, he’d only used the situation to help set up a story: “I remember the poor fool who was talking with a good-looking woman, and he said to her, ‘I wonder whether you or my wife tastes better.’” He leered again, and ran his tongue lewdly over his lips. “And the woman said, “Why don’t you ask my husband? He’s tasted us both.’”
He got his laugh, but George, listening to it, thought it had a certain nervous undertone. Not everyone had as much confidence in his wife as he did with Irene, and everyone there, no doubt, had been devastated by an unexpected answer at one time or another, even if not by that particular unexpected answer. When John’s jokes worked well, they tou
ched a central core of humanity all his listeners shared.
“Then,” said the comic, “there was the fellow who went to Maurice and wanted to be named Augustal prefect of Egypt. ‘I already have one,’ Maurice told him. ‘Well, all right, you’re the Emperor--make me governor of Thrace,’ the man said. And Maurice answered, ‘I can’t do that, either--I like the job the man there now is doing.’ And the fellow said, ‘In that case, give me twenty solidi!’ So Maurice did. As the fellow was walking out of the palace with his gold pieces, his friend asked, ‘Aren’t you disappointed you got so little?’ And the fellow said, ‘Are you crazy? I never would have got this much if I hadn’t asked for all the other stuff.’ “
That got a laugh, too, both for the sake of the joke and, again, for the obvious truth it contained: Maurice, among the most parsimonious Roman Emperors of all time, never parted with a copper if he could help it.
John got down from the platform, went over to the bar, and spoke to Paul in a loud, wheedling voice: “How about giving me half an interest in this tavern, my good and wise friend?”
“What?” Paul jerked as if a wasp had stung him. “Are you out of your mind, John? Go away.”
“Well, if you won’t do that, how about letting me have all the roast pork I can eat for the next year?” John asked.
“Are you crazy?” said the taverner, who obviously hadn’t been paying attention to the routine. “Go back there and be funny.”
“Give me a mug of wine, then.”
Paul dipped it out for him. “There. Go on, now.”
John turned to the crowd. “You see?” he said with an enormous grin. People laughed and cheered as he finally went back to the platform, and Paul never did figure out where the joke lay. John knocked back the wine in one long draught, then ruefully shook his head. “ ‘Go back there and be funny,’ the man says. I’ll tell you people what’s funny. That’s funny. Our beloved host thinks he can tell somebody to be funny and have it happen, just like that.”
“You’d better be funny,” said Paul, who was listening now.
John ignored him. Now the comic’s face bore a wistful expression: maybe a true one, maybe only a trick of the light. “I wish it were that easy. I wish you could walk into a shop and say, ‘I’d like a pound of funny, please,’ and put it in a sack and take it home with you. Wouldn’t that be fine, if you could buy funny the way you buy a loaf of bread from Justin the baker or a pair of shoes from George here?”
Now George jumped. John hadn’t been in the habit of including him in his routines, and he would have been as well pleased had his friend left him out of this one, too.
And, sure enough, John sent a sardonic stare his way as he went on, “Come to think of it, you can buy some pretty funny shoes from George, all right.”
“I’ll remember you in my nightmares,” George called.
“Your nightmares are ugly enough without me,” John retorted; he wasn’t shy about mocking himself, either. He went on, “Besides, it’s hard to be funny in Thessalonica these days. God is punishing us for our sins. The Slavs and Avars are outside the wall, there’s not enough food inside the wall, and He gave Menas back his legs so he could go around shouting at everybody.”
Some people laughed. Others looked alarmed, either because God might have been insulted or because Menas had been. George put his elbows down on the tabletop and buried his face in his hands. Sure as sure, that crack would get back to Menas. And, sure as sure, Menas would think George had said it, not anyone else. Fourteen people might tell him it had come from John’s lips; he would hear George every time.
The shoemaker didn’t really listen to the rest of John’s routine. People laughed every so often, so he suspected his friend was doing well. And, when John finally came back to the table, the bowl he brought with him was nicely full of coins. He sorted them with his usual quick dexterity.
George said, “I do wish you wouldn’t tell jokes on Menas so often.”
“Why, in God’s name?” John didn’t look up from what he was doing. “He’s funny, is what he is. I can’t think of anybody funnier in the whole world, him swaggering around like he’s got God’s hand in his drawers.”
“The trouble is, he does--or he did, anyhow--have God’s hand in his drawers,” George said uncomfortably,
“Yes, but God didn’t put it there to play Menas’ trumpet for him,” John answered, setting a silver miliaresion off by itself with a pleased grunt. “Menas still hasn’t figured that out, even though it’s been months. He’s pretty stupid, too; he may never get the idea.”
“Regardless of how stupid he is” --a sentiment with which George heartily concurred-- “he’s rich, too, and he’ll get you in trouble if you keep making jokes about him.” He’ll get me in trouble if you keep making jokes about him. But George remained too stubborn to tell John about that.
“What’s he going to do?” the comic asked. “Make me leave town? I can’t go by land, and if he puts me on a ship he does me a favor.”
“He can make your life miserable while you’re here,” George said. “Believe me, I know.” That was as close as he would come to revealing the trouble to which his friend had contributed.
“My life is already miserable while I’m here,” John said. “A little less miserable,” he amended, “because the night’s take is pretty good. And if Verina’s in the right kind of mood--” He raised his voice and called to the barmaid: “Hello, sweetheart! What do you say you and I--”
“I say no, whatever it is,” Verina answered. “All those broken cups I was cleaning up, I wish I’d broken them over your head.” George didn’t know what John had done to her, or what she thought he’d done to her, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with him now, stalking off nose in air.
If he was embarrassed, he didn’t show it. Going up in front of an audience to tell jokes for a living had no doubt hardened him against embarrassment. “It doesn’t matter,” he said lightly. “She’s no good in bed, anyhow.”
That, for once, hadn’t been pitched to carry to Verina’s ears, but she heard it and came storming back. “For one thing, you’re a liar,” she snapped. “For another, you’ve never had the chance to find out whether you’re a liar. And for one more, you’re never going to have the chance.” Off she went again.
John got more laughs than he had through his whole routine, all of them aimed at him. Had George been publicly humiliated like that, he wouldn’t have dared show his face on the street for weeks afterwards. John took it all in stride. By the calculating look on his face, he was figuring out the jokes he’d tell about it the next time he got up in front of a crowd.
Having gone to Paul’s tavern, George was glad he had an afternoon shift on the wall the next day. He was less glad about staring into the westering sun; the day was cold but brilliantly clear. The glare in his face made it hard for him to keep an eye on whatever the Slavs and Avars might be doing.
John didn’t worry about that, and had some reason not to worry: the barbarians’ encampment seemed as quiet as it ever had since the siege began. The comic said, “They’re probably all out with their sheep.”
“You told that one last night, John,” George said patiently.
“Go on, complain about every little thing,” John said. “I think--”
George didn’t find out what John thought. Up farther north along the wall, someone started shouting in a very loud, unpleasant voice: “Call yourself a fighting man, do you? A fighting man is supposed to be alert in the presence of danger. He is supposed to--”
Had Rufus been giving that dressing-down, neither George nor John would have thought anything of it. As it was, John’s face gave the impression that he’d smelled some meat several days later than it should have been smelled. George’s lip also curled. “Menas,” he said.
Menas it was, and he was, to George s dismay, heading in the direction of the Litaean Gate, spreading joy and good cheer in front of him. John glanced his way and said, “What’s that thing he’s carryi
ng? Besides his big, ugly belly, I mean.”
“His war hammer--is that what you’re talking about?” George said. “I’ve seen him lugging that around before. It’s a rich man’s toy, if you ask me--something that makes him feel like a soldier even if he’s not.”
He wasn’t a soldier himself, as any member of Thessalonica’s regular garrison would have told him in as much detail as he could stand. But he’d done real fighting since the Slavs and Avars infested the city, which was more than Menas could have said. George checked himself. No: it was more than Menas could truthfully have said.
And here came the noble, twirling the hammer around by the leather strap attached to the end of the handle. He glared at George as if at a moldy spot on a chunk of bread. “Haven’t I told you to stop insulting me?” he growled. “Haven’t I warned you I’ll get my own back if it’s the last thing I do?”
“You’ve done all those things, sir,” George answered. “What I haven’t done is insult you.”
“Liar!” Menas shouted, loud enough to make militiamen within a bowshot of him turn their heads his way. “The latest is, you say God cured me so I could go around shouting at people.”
Whoever had reported John’s joke to him had got the words right, but Menas had got the source wrong, as George had known would happen. The shoemaker wondered if John would own up to having said it, and if Menas would believe him if he did. Since John kept quiet, the latter didn’t become an issue. George said, “I did not say that about you, sir.”
“Liar!” Menas shouted again.
“I did not say that,” George repeated. “If you keep doing the things that someone said about you, though, I will start saying them myself. I’ll have to start saying them myself, because you’ll have made them true.”
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