Thessalonica

by Harry Turtledove

  He spied a familiar tall, thin figure. The Thessalonicans were so overjoyed at being delivered from the Slavs and Avars, they even included Benjamin the Jew in their celebration. No one showered him with abuse either, not now. He looked absurdly confused. He had no idea how to cope with acceptance. It wasn’t anything he’d ever had to worry about before.

  Then he spotted George. He smiled, waved, and picked his way through the crowd toward the shoemaker. He clasped his hand. “Praise the Lord, to see you here and well,” he exclaimed. “I had heard you were lost beyond the wall, which grieved me greatly.”

  “I was lost beyond the wall,” George said. “I managed to get back.”

  “God must think well of you,” Benjamin said.

  George wondered about that. If God thought so well of him, why had He put him through so much trouble and danger? Why had He inflicted Menas on him? Why, for that matter, had He cured Menas, so the noble had a fresh chance to inflict himself not just on George but also on the rest of Thessalonica?

  Before George could come up with answers for any of those questions, a different, more obvious one occurred to him. “You can see me!” he exclaimed. Of itself, his hand went to his head. Yes, he was still wearing Perseus’ cap. “How is it you can see me?”

  “With my eyes?” Benjamin suggested, which was, George supposed, about as near as the sobersided Jew came to making a joke. Before either of them could take the question further, the crowd separated them. Someone stepped on George’s toes. In the crush, whether that fellow saw him or not was irrelevant.

  Under the rim of Perseus’ cap, George scratched his head. The Slavic demons and demigods hadn’t plagued the Jewish district of Thessalonica, and now Benjamin not only penetrated the pagan Greek enchantment that lay over George, he didn’t even seem to notice there was an enchantment to penetrate. George didn’t know exactly what that meant. Whatever it was, he had the strong feeling Bishop Eusebius would not approve.

  He got stepped on several more times before he finally reached his own street, and elbowed, and kneed, and poked. In close quarters, invisibility had its disadvantages, too. When he did get to his own street, the first thing he found was Claudia arguing with the woman who lived next door to her and Dactylius. Between them was a pile of garbage someone--George didn’t know who--had thrown into the street right between the two houses. If the two women knew the Slavs and Avars had been routed and the siege of Thessalonica broken, they didn’t care. George smiled. Some things didn’t change.

  But if Claudia and her neighbor remained intent on their own private quarrel, the rest of the street celebrated along with the rest of the city. People passed jars of wine back and forth. Those who still had salt meat or candied fruit stored away brought them out and shared them with friends--and sometimes with passersby, too--confident they could replace them now.

  And, everywhere, people were embracing. George almost walked past a young couple in a doorway three or four doors down from his house and shop. They didn’t seem any different from scores of other happy pairs he’d seen ... till he noticed that one of them was Constantine the potter’s son and the other his daughter Sophia.

  He coughed. At the same time, he took off Perseus’ cap, returning to visibility. Constantine and Sophia jumped in the air, then flew apart from each other as if he’d dumped a pad of water over them.

  “Father!” Sophia exclaimed. She managed to pack a multitude of meanings into the one word: joy at having him come back again, along with something that wasn’t joy at all at having him come back at that particular moment

  “Uh, we didn’t see you, sir,” Constantine added.

  “I know. I noticed,” George said. Constantine and Sophia both turned red. The cap of invisibility wasn’t why they hadn’t seen him. They’d been otherwise occupied. If he’d kept quiet, he might have stood there for an hour before they noticed him. “Maybe you won’t see me the next time, either,” he went on. “Maybe I’ll be more annoyed about it the next time, too. Go on home, Constantine. Sophia, you come with me.”

  Constantine went, without a murmur. Only later did George realize that, with a sword on his belt and with his right arm and tunic splashed with blood obviously not his own, he looked well able to enforce any orders he might give. Even Sophia followed him without arguing.

  In his own doorway, he found Theodore kissing the plump daughter--plump despite the siege--of Dalmatius the oil-seller, who lived in the next street over. He hadn’t known the two of them cared about each other (for that matter, he didn’t know whether they would care about each other tomorrow, or in an hour). An evenhanded man, he coughed as loudly as he had with Sophia and Constantine.

  Theodore and his friend--her name, George remembered, was Lucretia--sprang apart, as Sophia and Constantine had done. “Hello, Father,” Theodore said sounding a little less reproachful than Sophia had.

  “Hello,” George answered mildly. Lucretia headed for home without George’s suggesting it. He wondered how many more she’d kiss before she got there. Then he wondered if Theodore was wondering the same thing.

  A moment later, such abstractions stopped troubling his mind, for Irene came running out of the shop and threw herself into his arms. He tilted her face up and kissed her, doing a good and thorough job of it. Sophia and Theodore both coughed. They sounded downright consumptive as each tried to outdo the other.

  Irene ignored them. Her lips were urgent against her husband’s. George ignored his children, too, till he started to laugh. That ruined the kiss. “We’re married,” he growled at Sophia and Theodore, and returned to what he’d been doing when he was so rudely interrupted.

  Except for his son and daughter, no one paid one more kissing couple any mind. Claudia and her next-door neighbor, by contrast, had drawn a fair-sized crowd. A quarrel in Thessalonica, just then, was remarkable for its rarity.

  “Thank God you’re safe!” Irene exclaimed when her lips separated from George’s again. She dragged him into the shop. A couple of braziers made it a little warmer in there than it had been outside. If Theodore and Sophia hadn’t followed them in, George got the idea his wife might have dragged him down onto the floor of the shop, too. Before he got in there, he doubted whether he would have been able to do anything in response to that. Just when he decided he would, he found he didn’t have the chance.

  “Were there really centaurs out there, Father?” Sophia asked. “People are saying so, but people are always saying all sorts of things that aren’t true, so they can make a better story out of them.”

  “There really were centaurs,” George said solemnly. He could feel the truth of that on the insides of his thighs. He wasn’t used to riding a donkey, let alone a horse, let alone a supernatural being with a mind of its own--a mind, when he was aboard Crotus, full of mad, drunken fury.

  “And those other things?” Irene asked. She shivered against George and crossed herself. “I didn’t want to look up in the sky, for fear I’d believe what I was seeing.”

  Only Irene, George thought with a smile, would put it like that. But the smile quickly faded. “Those other things were there, too. I’m glad they’re gone.”

  “God overcame them,” Irene said.

  George wondered about that. The Slavic thunder god and gods of sun and moon had paled before the power of the Lord, but they hadn’t vanished. And the struggle between Triglav and St. Demetrius had barely begun before the centaurs distracted and then overwhelmed the Slavic wizards and their Avar leader, thus returning the conflict, at least as George perceived it, to the mundane plane.

  “However it happened, the siege is over,” he said, “and that’s what matters.”

  Nobody argued with him. “The Slavs and Avars won’t be back here any time soon, either,” Theodore said. “We taught ‘em a proper lesson, we did.” To listen to him, he’d beaten back the barbarians single-handedly during his brief stretch of duty on the wall.

  “You still have that cap,” Irene said, pointing to it. By the way she spoke,
it might have been Joseph’s coat of many colors soaked in blood.

  “Yes, and glad of it, too,” George said. “Without it, we wouldn’t have had the centaurs in front of the city, or Father Luke with ‘em, and who knows what would have happened?

  I’ve got to go up into the hills and give it back, but I want to use it one more time before I do.”

  “I don’t want you to do that,” Irene said.

  “Well, I’m going to,” George answered in a tone that brooked no argument. Irene stared at him. He wasn’t the sort of man who commonly ignored what his wife wanted. Maybe that was what let him get away with it

  Even after midnight, revelers remained on the streets of Thessalonica. In a way, George liked that. The people of the poor, beleaguered city deserved to celebrate their victory over the Slavs and Avars. In another way, noisy roisterers on the street were a nuisance to the shoemaker. He would have preferred everything around him to be dead quiet. That would have made what he was doing more impressive.

  Maybe I should have waited, he thought. What if he’s out celebrating? What do I do then? He shook his head. He couldn’t afford to wait, not if he wanted to keep the peace in his own home. At the moment, Irene wasn’t arguing with him. If Perseus’ cap stayed in his home for several days before he got around to using it, that would change. He knew his wife. She would come up with a reason why he shouldn’t use it, and likely reasons why he ought to get rid of it, too. And they would be good reasons--he was sure of it. If he turned them down, he would have a quarrel on his hands. He didn’t want that.

  And so, instead of a quarrel on his hands, he had Perseus’ cap on his head. He slipped through Thessalonica’s streets unnoticed, unremarked upon. Some of the things he noticed while slipping through the streets were themselves remarkable, but he kept quiet.

  The district by the citadel, up in the northeastern part of the city, was where the rich people lived. One of the privileges of being rich was taking shelter in the citadel if the city wall was breached. George went slowly; he seldom came to that part of town. From the outside, the house he was looking for wouldn’t be much different from its neighbors. And, in the darkness, the differences were next to impossible to make out.

  “I don’t want to knock on the wrong door,” the shoemaker muttered. “I really don’t want to knock on the wrong door.”

  At last, he found what he thought was the right door. He tried it, gently, so as not to disturb anyone inside. It was barred. He muttered again. He’d known it would be, but had hoped that, just this once, life would make things easy for him. No such luck. He rapped loudly on the door, as if he had every right in the world to go straight in. When nothing happened, he rapped again, even louder.

  A tiny window with a metal grate was set into the timbers of the door. After a little while, a small part of a face, dimly lit by a lamp or taper, appeared on the other side of the window. “Who disturbs Menas’ rest at this ungodly hour?” asked a voice presumably connected to the face.

  “I am an angel,” George announced. He stood very close to the door, so the servant inside could tell where his voice was coming from--and could note that he was hearing it without being able to see anyone speaking. “I am come to test both you and your master. Open at once, or you will share his fate.”

  In a way, this was the weak part of his plan, and he knew it. If Menas’ servant liked the rich noble and was loyal to him, he would leave the door closed, and George wouldn’t be able to get in. The only thing invisibility would be good for then was to keep anyone from seeing how foolish he looked.

  Coming to Menas’ home, though, he’d pinned his hopes on the idea that no one who knew Menas and had to work for him was likely to like him. And so it proved. The door flew open. The servant said, “If you want Menas, you can bloody well have him!”

  “You have passed your test,” George said, and squeezed past the fellow, careful not to touch him as he did so.

  Lamps set in wall niches lighted the halls of Menas’ home; George wished he could have afforded to use oil so prodigally. There were a lot of corridors, too--he wandered for a bit before finding the one that led to Menas’ bedchamber The noble’s own snores guided the shoemaker down the corridor to the proper room.

  There, dim shadows, lay Menas and his wife. She snored, too. George took a deep breath, then shouted at the top of his lungs: “Injustice!”

  Both shapes sat up in bed and looked around wildly. Menas started to cry out. George whacked him with the flat of his blade. The rich noble tried to reach down under the bed, where he likely kept a sword of his own. George stepped on his hand.

  About then, Menas realized that, while he could hear and feel whoever was in the chamber with him, he couldn’t see anyone but his wife. “Injustice!” George shouted again. Menas’ wife opened her mouth to scream. George yelled once more: “Silence!”

  Menas’ wife didn’t scream. The noble did: “Ho! My men! Help! To me! A murder! To me!”

  George whacked him again. He howled. Down the hall, George heard the servants stirring. That was liable to be trouble. If they came after him, they could trap him in these narrow halls without having to see him. Then, if he wanted to escape, he’d have to cut his way through them, which he hadn’t intended to do.

  But the servants did not come to Menas’ rescue. Instead one after another, they ran outside, into the chilly night. Maybe the doorman had told them what sort of visitor the household had. Maybe they weren’t interested in rescuing Menas any which way. George wouldn’t have been.

  He laughed, unpleasantly. “You see what the wages of injustice are,” he boomed, trying to sound as impressive-- and as much unlike George the shoemaker--as he could.

  “Who--who--who are you?” Menas, now, Menas sounded like an owl.

  His wife had a different question: “What are you?”

  “I am an angel,” George declared, as he had for the servant. Menas’ wife crossed herself. George had already seen--and was very glad--that that did not destroy the power in Perseus’ cap. He went on, speaking to Menas: “Wretch, God did not give you back your legs so that you could use your regained bodily vigor to wrong those who have done you no harm. The grave awaits such wickedness, the grave and eternal torment.”

  He didn’t sound like himself. After a moment, he realized he did sound like Bishop Eusebius. That was all right, he supposed; angels could reasonably sound like churchmen. Churchmen certainly thought they sounded like angels.

  “But--I’ve never done anything like that.” This was not the angry, blustering Menas George had come to know and loathe. This was a frightened Menas. But it was also an utterly bewildered Menas. With no small shock, George realized the noble had no idea he’d done anything wrong or reprehensible.

  Hesitantly, Menas’ wife spoke up: “Maybe, dear, maybe the angel means that shoemaker who was persecuting you.”

  George felt like kissing her, though that wouldn’t have done his impersonation any good. If he’d had to mention himself, Menas was liable to have put two and two together.

  On the other hand, maybe he wouldn’t have. Menas seemed to have trouble putting one and one together. “That Gregory or George or whatever his name was?” he exclaimed. “Not likely! He deserved whatever happened to him, the way he spread lies about me through the city.”

  He never knew how close he came to having his big belly ripped open by a sword he never saw. “Fool!” George shouted. “Arrogant idiot!” He whacked Menas with the flat of the blade again. The temptation to let it turn in his hand, to slash instead of whacking, was as strong in his mouth as the maddening taste of wine in a centaur’s. Menas cringed. Fighting down the urge to murder, George went on, “Being a liar and a cheat yourself, you reckon all men possessed of a like mean-spiritedness.” He knew he was stealing that phrase from Father Luke, but did not think the priest would mind. “The shoemaker told you the truth: he did not slander you.”

  Menas hadn’t even bothered to remember his name. That infuriated him more th
an almost anything else.

  “Really?” The rich noble sounded astonished. “Everyone said he did.”

  “And you believed gossips and liars, not the man himself,” George said scornfully. “Know you not what rumor and gossip are worth?” He still thought Menas hadn’t listened very well to what “everybody” said, too, but kept quiet about that, not wanting to escape trouble by putting John into it.

  “What must he do to be saved?” Menas’ wife asked the question, perhaps because she thought her husband wouldn’t.

  Stirred by that, Menas spoke up, in a petulant voice: “I suppose you’re going to tell me I have to pay him ten pounds of gold, or something outrageous like that.” He stuck out his chin and looked stubborn.

  Did he suspect George was George, and not an angel at all? Or had he been visited by a veritable angel before, and made to pay compensation for whatever he’d done to prompt the visit? George wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He answered, “Leave the man at peace and trouble him no more. That will suffice. Obey me not, and the grave and the pangs of hell await you.”

  “I’ll obey,” Menas said quickly. “I will.” Now he sounded perfectly tractable. George wondered why. It occurred to him that, if Menas were an angel (an unlikely thought), he would have demanded money in exchange for good behavior. George’s not doing so must have struck the noble as particularly holy, even downright angelic.

  He didn’t mind Menas’ thinking him holy. He didn’t want Menas thinking him soft. He walloped the noble with the flat of the blade again, and shouted, “Obey!”

  By then, Menas’ head was probably ringing like a gong. George hoped he hadn’t broken that head, although his own heart wouldn’t have broken if it turned out he had.

  Deciding the wisest thing he could do was not overstay his welcome, he left the bedchamber then. For good measure, he slammed the door shut behind him, which made Menas’ wife scream. George didn’t mind that; if she was impressed with him as an angel, she would help hold her husband to the straight and narrow.