Thessalonica

I

George was hunting rabbits in the hills not far from Thessalonica when he spied the satyr. His first thought, when its brown eyes peered out of the ugly, snub-nosed face and met his, was to make the sign of the cross and frighten it away.

He didn’t act on his first thought. He was the kind of man who commonly thought three times before he did anything. His build matched his character: he was stocky and strong, thick through the shoulders, by no means someone who moved quickly, but hard to stop once he did get moving.

Instead of crossing himself, he raised his right hand and rubbed his chin. Whiskers rasped under his fingers. He should have shaved yesterday, or maybe the day before. He thought about growing a beard. They were coming back into fashion, though many Romans, perhaps most, still plied their razors as they had since the days of Constantine the Great.

When he didn’t drive it off, the satyr cautiously came toward him, picking its way along the rocky ground with surprisingly delicate, graceful strides. He supposed getting a rock in its hoof would cause it as much trouble as that would for a horse, which the satyr resembled from the waist down.

It was certainly hung like a horse, its phallus juttingly erect. The old stories said satyrs were hard all the time. Till now, George had never had a chance to put the old stories to the test. Satyrs were rare these days, almost six hundred years after the Son of God came down and was made flesh.

What a trophy to bring hack to town, George thought. Bishop Eusebius would probably bless him from the ambo of the basilica of St. Demetrius. He could all but hear the bishop going on about another turn being given to the winding sheet Christianity was wrapping around the corpse of paganism: Eusebius was a good man, but one who sometimes had a distinctly mortuary cast of mind.

He didn’t pluck an arrow from his quiver and set it to his bow, any more than he had signed himself. He stood quiet and let the satyr approach. Up in an oak tree, a blackbird trilled. The breeze sighed through the leaves of the tree. The satyr made no sound at all. Maybe, being a creature of wood and forest, that was its way. And maybe, being more than an ordinary creature, it had ways on which Christian men were wiser not to speculate, for the sake of their souls.

It paused almost within arm’s length of him. Nervously, it stroked its erection with one hand, as a flighty woman might have played with a lock of hair while hardly noticing she was doing it. Then, as if making up its mind, the satyr pointed to the skin George carried on his belt.

“Wine?” it asked, its voice a plaintive baritone. It spoke in Greek, of course, being native to this soil. George had grown up with Latin his birth speech, but, like most Thessalonicans, he was fluent in both tongues.

“Yes, it’s wine,” he answered. Water up here in the hills was mostly good, but still, who would drink water by choice?

“Drink some, please?” The satyr’s syntax was rusty, as if it wasn’t used to speaking with men. It probably wasn’t.

These days--these centuries--few would welcome it, or even tolerate it as George was doing.

As was George’s way, he hesitated before replying. Drunken satyrs were supposed to do all sorts of appalling things. But the wineskin he carried wasn’t that large to begin with, and he’d already drunk from it. The satyr could hardly get drunk on what was left. Besides, it sounded so sad.

He unfastened the skin from his belt and handed it to the satyr. The creature’s homely features became almost beautiful for a moment as joy lit them. It fumbled with the cord that held the skin closed; obviously, it wasn’t used to dealing with any man-made things, even ones as simple as that. But it managed, and sighed with ecstasy as it poured wine into its open mouth.

Considering the quality of the wine, George was glad he’d given it to the satyr, which was taking far more pleasure from it than he ever could have. He would have been miffed, though, had the creature guzzled the skin dry. He was about to say so, in no uncertain terms, when the satyr figured that out without his help. After wiping its mouth on its hairy arm, it held the skin out to him.

“Thanks,” he said, and swigged from it himself. The wine tasted better than it had; maybe being touched by the satyr had improved it.

Being touched by wine had certainly improved the satyr. It seemed bigger, stronger, younger, and even more ithyphallic than before. It had lost its hangdog air: its eyes flashed. Its large nostrils dilated, as if to taste the wind. “That good,” it said, almost crooningly.

“Glad you like it,” George answered, polite as if he were talking to a monk. He cocked his head to one side, studying the satyr. “Didn’t know your kind came so close to Thessalonica anymore,” he remarked, looking back over his shoulder towards the city.

“Not like to come so close,” the satyr answered. A moment later, it added, “Hard to come so close. Saints almost everywhere to keep me away.”

George nodded, half matter-of-factly, half sympathetically. As Christianity’s hold on the land tightened, the old creatures found it harder and harder to approach holy men or holy places. The satyr hadn’t had any trouble approaching him. He shrugged. He was just a man, just a sinner. He knew it.

“Where have you been living?” he asked.

“Up in rough country.” The satyr pointed off to the north and east: rough country sure enough, well away from the Via Egnatia that still--tenuously--linked Thessalonica with the Adriatic and Italy on the one hand and with Constantinople on the other. The satyr went on, “Villages not so bad. Not so much--” Being what he was, he couldn’t make the sign of the cross, but George got the idea.

He nodded to show the satyr he followed. Bishop Eusebius was always talking about doing a better job of evangelizing the little upcountry villages. It wasn’t only satyrs that hung around them. Bacchus still came around in the fall, when the grapes were being crushed for wine. Up in the hills, Pan had a festival, too, though even there some said he was dead.

“Why didn’t you stay up in the rough country, if it was easier there?” George asked.

The satyr’s eyes got wide. It stroked itself again, as if for reassurance. Breathing wine fumes into George’s face, it answered, “Not easier there. Not so good, no. People all right, even if some--” Again, he would have crossed himself if he could. “But new things in woods.”

“What kind of things?” George tried to put the same kind of dread into the word as the satyr had, but knew he didn’t come close.

“Lots new things in the woods.” The satyr looked back toward the northeast, as if expecting those things, whatever they were, to burst from the woods and tear it to pieces. Up and down, up and down went that hand. After a moment, it added, “Wolves worst. Yes, wolves.” It nodded to itself; it might have been comparing the wolves to something else almost as dreadful.

George scratched his head. For one thing, you heard wolves howling outside the walls of Thessalonica every winter. For another-- “I wouldn’t think ordinary wolves would be the sort of things to worry you,” he remarked. Satyrs weren’t what they had been, back in the days before Christianity came to this land. They were a long way from diminishing to mere flesh and blood, though.

“Not ordinary wolves,” the satyr said. “Not ordinary, no.” It seemed grateful to George for having given it the word to describe the wolves, even if only in the negative.

“Ah,” George said. “New sorts of powers trying to come down here: is that what you mean?” The satyr nodded, head moving in rhythm with its hand. George shrugged. “I expect the priests will drive them away.”

The satyr made a noise like none he’d ever heard before. After a moment, he realized it was half moan, half giggle. “I watch priest go out to wolves,” the satyr said. “He not see me, or he” --once more, it indicated the sign of the cross without actually making it-- “and I have to run away. But he not see. He find wolf. He go up to it. He do that thing, thing make me run.”

“Yes?” George said when the satyr didn’t go on. “What happened then?”

Again, that strange mixture of mirth and terror burst from the satyr’s throat. It was an appalling sound, one that made the little hairs on George’s arms and at the back of his neck stand up as if he were a wolf himself. “Priest do that thing,” the satyr repeated. “He do it not at me, so I see safe. And wolf--eat him up.”

“Really?” George said. It was, he realized, a foolish response. He consoled himself with the thought that it was better than making the sign of the cross, which would have routed the satyr. It had been a long time--a lot longer than he’d been alive--since powers that could stand up against Christianity’s most potent symbol had come into this part of the world. He nodded slowly to himself, fitting puzzle pieces together like mosaic tesserae in the church of St. Demetrius. “They must belong to the Slavs.”

“Slavs.” The satyr spoke the word as if it had never heard of the people so named. “Who--what--are Slavs?”

George’s nose was long and beaky, admirably made for exasperated exhalations. “They and the Avars have only been raiding the Roman provinces south of the Danube for the past generation,” he said, his tone perfectly matching the irritated sniff.

“Ah, only one generation,” the satyr said in some relief. “No wonder I not know.”

“Only one . . .” George fell silent. He studied the satyr. He’d shot that only one generation as if from a catapult, propelled by sarcasm rather than twisted cords. The satyr, though, had taken him literally. And why not? he realized. What was a generation to a being essentially immortal? The satyr was speaking with him now. It might have spoken with St. Peter when he traveled through Greece not long after the Incarnation, had it so chosen and had the saint not driven it from his presence by overwhelming holiness. It might have spoken with Alexander the Great. George shivered. It might have spoken with Achilles before he sailed for Troy. No wonder it took mere generations lightly.

“This wolf thing eat up priest,” the satyr repeated. It ran a tongue as long and red as its phallus around its mouth, imitating a wolf licking its chops. “Then it look over to where I am. It not blind and stupid like priest--it see me. It think about eat me up, too. I see it think. Then it decide, I full. I see that, too. Wolf get up, go away.”

George wanted to say Kyrie eleison or Christe eleison, but didn’t, for fear the holy words would make the satyr flee. He looked at it with an emotion he’d never expected to feel toward its kind: sympathy. “You’re in a hard spot, aren’t you? If you come down to places like this, the priests and holy men will get you. If you stay where you have been staying, though, the wolves will do the same.”

“Not wolves only,” the satyr said. “Other things, new things, never-seen things. Frightening things.”

Frightening because they’re new or frightening because they’re frightening? George wondered. To an immortal that had grown used to the ways of its part of the world, change of any sort had to seem like the end of that world. What must the Olympians have thought when Christ overcame them? The satyr hadn’t been so strong as all that--but the other side of the coin was, lesser threats were dangerous to it.

“What I do?” it mourned now. “What I do?” Its eyes bored into George’s as if it was sure he had the answer.

He wished he did. But he was a Christian himself. Some--many--would have said he’d already shown too much tolerance for this creature of the old dispensation. As far as he was concerned, though, the Good Samaritan made a better model than the Pharisee who went out of his way not to help lest he be defiled. And, in purely pragmatic terms, what he’d learned was worth knowing, not only for his sake but for Thessalonica’s.

None of that did the satyr any good. It made another strange noise, this one full of despair, and started for the trees. “Wine sweet,” it said, as if suddenly remembering, and then it was gone.

George strode into Thessalonica through the northwestern gate close to St. Catherine’s church. He carried a couple of hares and a couple of partridges: not a great day’s hunting, but not bad, either. He and his family would eat well tonight, and tomorrow, too.

Calm washed out of Catherine’s as he walked past it. Unlike Demetrius, she was not a warrior saint: very much the reverse. She had been martyred in Alexandria after besting several pagans in debate; when her head was struck off for her temerity, milk flowed from the wound instead of blood.

Feeling her holy influence eased George s worries … for a little while. With such spiritual strength behind it-- to say nothing of the imperial soldiers and the popular militia to which he belonged--Thessalonica could surely stand up against anything the Slavs and Avars might do, whether with their soldiers or with their gods and demons.

Most men would have let the rationalization satisfy them. In spite of Catherine’s calm, George could not make himself forget the satyr had said a Slavic wolf had devoured a priest who tried to banish it. You should pray more, he told himself, and think less. He’d been telling himself the same thing for a good many years. He did pray, frequently and sincerely. He never had been able to make himself stop thinking, though.

He brought the game he had killed into the shoemaker’s shop where he hadn’t worked that day, having gone hunting instead. That did not mean the shop had stood idle. With his wife Irene, his daughter Sophia, and his son Theodore to help with the work, things got done whether he was there or not. He sometimes suspected things got done better when he wasn’t there. He’d never voiced that suspicion aloud, for fear Irene would confirm it.

She looked up from the undyed leather boots she was making for Peter the miller, who lived down the street. Her eyes brightened when she saw the game George had brought home. She had a few years fewer than his thirty-five--he wasn’t sure how many, but then, he wasn’t sure whether he might not be thirty-four or thirty-six himself--and looked younger still: her hair was still dark, her skin unlined, and, despite three pregnancies, she had almost all of her teeth.

She said, “You did well there--probably better than if you’d stayed here.” Like him, she made such calculations almost as second nature. Their parents had arranged the marriage, of course, but it had proved good not just because of the properties and families it joined. They thought alike, which made them enjoy each other’s company.

“Shall we stew them with cabbage and leeks, Mother?” Sophia suggested. She was fifteen now--George was sure of that, because she’d been born in the year Maurice became Roman Emperor. Her face was long and thin like her mothers, but she had most of his nose in the middle of it. He worried that it looked better on him than on his daughter.

“That sounds all right to me,” Irene said. She looked at George. He nodded. She looked at Theodore. He pulled a sour face. He was a couple of years older than Sophia, and at the age where he pulled a sour face at anything his parents suggested. Irene chose to make the best of that she could: “I know you’re not fond of leeks. Will you put up with them tonight because everyone else in the family is?”

“I suppose so,” he mumbled; sometimes soft answers from George and Irene were harder for him to take than furious shouts would have been. George, though, was not long on furious shouts. He’d had a bellyful of them from his own father, and didn’t see that they’d done much good in making him behave.

Irene carried the hares and partridges upstairs; like a lot of artisan families, George’s lived over their shop. Before too long, a delicious smell floated down into the work area. No customers had come in since George showed up with the game, and it was getting dark outside, so he felt no hesitation about shutting the front door and letting down the bar. He didn’t expect anyone would need new boots or to have a sandal repaired so badly as to come to the shop with a torchbearer--and, in the unlikely event somebody did do that, he could always open the door again. He and the children went upstairs after his wife.

It was lighter up there than down below: safer to put windows in the second story of a building, because they were harder to break into there. Even so, Irene had lighted a couple of lamps. The smell of burning olive oil was part of” the characteristic odor of Thessalonica, along with woodsmoke, garbage, and manure. George paid no attention to the smell when he stayed in town, but it forcefully brought itself to his attention when he came back after some time away, as with his day of hunting.

Irene ladled the stew into earthenware bowls; Sophia carried them and horn spoons to the table. Irene brought in bread and honey to go with the stew. Before the family began to eat, they bowed their heads. George said grace, thanking Christ that they had enough to fill their bellies. When he was done, he glanced toward the heavens. Though all he saw were the beams of the roof, he knew God watched over him.

The blessing reminded him of what had gone on in the woods earlier that day. “I saw a satyr this afternoon,” he remarked after he’d taken his first bite, and then, in much the same tone of voice, “Good stew.”

Theodore gaped at him; Sophia made the sign of the cross. They and their mother all exclaimed--they knew George too well to let that calm, casual tone lull them. Irene, not surprisingly, was the first one to put words to her thoughts: “I hope it was from far away, and that the creature didn’t bother you.”

“It didn’t bother me.” George took another bite. Deliberately, he chewed. Deliberately, he swallowed. “I gave it some of my wine--not too much. I didn’t want it drunk.”

“You should have driven it away, Father.” Now Theodore crossed himself, to show what he meant. “Those nasty demons can’t stand against the sign of the true faith.”

“I know that.” George hid his smile. In going against what his father had done, Theodore had--no doubt altogether without intending to--become perfectly conventional. George ate some more stew, then went on, “As things worked out, I’m glad I didn’t.” He told of what the satyr had said about the Slavic wolf-demon and what that demon had done to the priest.

His wife, his son, and his daughter, all made the sign of the cross then, to turn aside the evil omen. For good measure, Theodore also pulled at the neck opening to his tunic and spat down it, an apotropaic gesture older than Christianity, and one a priest might have frowned to see.

“What are we going to do?” Sophia asked. “If these barbarians and their horrible demons come against Thessalonica, how shall we be saved?”

“We have strong walls, we have soldiers, we have priests, we have faith in God,” George answered. “If all those aren’t enough, what will be?”

Sophia nodded, reassured. Irene’s eyes met George’s. Neither of them said anything. He knew what his wife was thinking: that all the things he’d named might not be enough. And it was true. Not long before Sophia was born, Sirmium, a city perhaps as great as Thessalonica, had fallen to the Slavs and Avars. Life in the Roman Empire was hard these days, and no one could say it might not get harder.

After supper, Irene and Sophia washed the dishes in a basin of water. By the time they were done, full darkness had fallen. Against its almost palpable presence, the flames from the lamps and the flickering light they cast seemed tiny and weak, the next thing to lost. George thought of the Slavs and Avars moving down toward the Aegean, and of Thessalonica, a Christian light in a sea of pagan darkness.

He went to the window and looked out. Most of Thessalonica was dark now, with a glow of candles and of holiness coming from the churches, more lights up on the walls, and here and there one moving through the streets as prominent people undertook to travel through the night. Footpads traveled through the night, too, but did not advertise their presence.

“Close the shutters, George,” his wife said, yawning. “Let’s go to bed.” Few people--mostly the rich, who could afford the lamps and candles they needed to turn night into day--stayed up long past sunset. Nor was darkness the only reason for that. When you rose with the sun and worked hard all day, you were ready to go to bed by the time night came.

The room to the left of the hall as you walked up it had been shared by Sophia and Theodore. These days, since they’d come to puberty, it had a wooden partition down the middle that turned it into two cubicles. George kept telling himself--and anyone who would listen--he would enlarge the doorway one day soon. He’d been saying it for so long, he didn’t believe it himself anymore.

He used a lamp from the kitchen to light one that rested on a stool by the bed in his own bedchamber, then, in orderly fashion, carried the first one back to where it belonged, blew it out, and used what glow came through the doorway from the second to guide him up the hall. By the time he returned, Irene was already in bed. He used the earthenware chamber pot, took off his shoes, undid his belt and took it off, and got in himself, still wearing the long tunic he’d had on all day. The straw of the mattress rustling under him, he leaned up on one elbow and blew out the lamp on the stool. The bedroom plunged into darkness.

Despite that darkness, Irene did not want to go to sleep at once. “A satyr,” she said in a low voice, one that, with luck, the children would not overhear. “I know of them, of course--everyone knows of them--but I never heard of anybody meeting one before, not even in the stories my old grandmother told me when I was little.”

“Neither did I,” George said, “not around a city that’s been Christian as long as Thessalonica. But up in the north it’s all helter-skelter; things are bubbling like porridge in a pot over a hot fire. The Roman soldiers and the Avars and Slavs keep going back and forth and round and round, but every year, in spite of what the soldiers do, there are more pagan Slavs settling on land that ought to be Roman.”

“I know,” Irene answered. “From what I hear in the marketplace, the Roman generals spend more time quarreling among themselves than they do fighting the enemy.”

“I’ve heard the same thing,” George said. “It worries me.” Irene caught her breath at that. Her husband was a man who worried a good deal, but hardly ever admitted it out loud. He went on, “And when the Slavs settle on land that ought to be Roman, their gods and demons settle on land that ought to be Christian.”

“That wolf--what it did to the priest. . .” On top of a wool blanket she had woven herself, she shuddered.

“Satyrs, now, and the other creatures from the old days,” George said musingly, “people believe in them, yes, but not the way they used to, so no wonder the true faith of Christ is stronger than they are. But the Slavs, they believe in their powers the same way we believe in the power of the Lord. That makes the wolf--and whatever other things they have like him--dangerous to us Christians.”

“Do you think the Slavs will come down as far as Thessalonica?” Irene asked.

“Farther west, bands of them have pushed deeper into Greece than we are,” he replied: Irene was not the sort of woman to be fobbed off with vague reassurances, especially when those were likely to be false. “So yes, they could come to Thessalonica. Taking the city is another question. God surely guards us here.”

“Yes, surely,” Irene agreed, but less confidently than he would have expected from her. She was worried, too, then.

She lay on her left side, facing him; he lay on his right. He set a hand on her hip, partly to reassure her, partly as a sort of silent question. He’d learned early in their marriage not to take her when she didn’t feel like being taken; the anger and arguments following that lasted for days, and were far more trouble than brief pleasure was worth. She, on the other hand, had learned not to deny him unless she was emphatically uninterested. For the most part, the compromise--about which they’d never said a word, not out loud--worked well.

If she’d flopped down onto her belly, he would have rolled over, too, and gone to sleep. Instead, she moved toward him, sliding across the linen of the mattress cover. He held her for a while, then peeled her out of her tunic and took off his own. Her body was warm, familiar, friendly in his arms. They seldom surprised each other in bed these days, but they made each other happy. As far as George was concerned, that counted for more.

Afterwards, he and Irene both used the chamber pot again, then redonned their tunics. The night was warm enough to sleep without those, but neither of them felt like startling their children in the morning. George fell asleep almost at once.

Breakfast was leftover stew, along with more bread. Irene sighed, then said, “I wonder how many women have prayed for a way to keep food fresh longer than a day or two.”

“God has bigger things than that to worry about,” George said.

“Evidently,” his wife answered, leaving him with the feeling that he’d been punctured, even if he couldn’t quite tell how.

He didn’t have time to worry about it long; with the rest of the family, he went downstairs and got to work. Whenever they didn’t have anything else to do, they worked on heavy-soled sandals in assorted sizes. Some farmers outside of town would make their own, but those were usually crude rawhide affairs, and didn’t last. George had spent years building up a reputation for solid craftsmanship. When you buy from George, you get your money’s worth, people said.

Once, a couple of years before, Theodore had remarked, “You know, Father, if we made the leather thinner, it would wear out faster, and people would have to come back sooner to buy more.”

He’d obviously thought he was being clever. Because of that, George had been gentle when he said, “The trouble is, son, if the leather wore out faster, people would have to come back sooner, yes, but they wouldn’t come back to us. They’d pick another shoemaker, one who gave them sandals that didn’t fall to pieces in a hurry.”

And, sure enough, the first customer of the morning was a farmer named Felix. “Good to see you’re still here,” he said to George in backwoods Latin. “I’m not fixing a hole this size, I don’t think.”

He held up a sandal. The sole was mostly hole. What wasn’t hole was bits of leather, some tanned, some not, that had been sewn on over the course of years. George wouldn’t have wanted to walk around in a sandal like that even without the latest hole, but held his peace. What Felix did with--or to--shoes was his business. George did take the ruined one to remind himself how big a foot Felix had. “We made a pair about that size a few days ago, I think,” he said, and looked on the shelves set against the back wall. “Sure enough.” He held out the sandals. “Try these on--see how they feel.”

Felix did. His gnarled hands had a little trouble with the small bronze buckles, but he managed. He walked back and forth inside the shop. A smile came over his weathered face. “That’s right nice,” he said. “I’d forgotten walking doesn’t have to feel like you’ve got a sack of bumpy beans under each foot.”

“Glad you like them,” George said; starting off the day with a sale always struck him as a good omen.

Felix, all at once, looked less happy than he had a moment before. “Guess I shouldn’t have said that. Now you’re going to charge me more on account of it.” He cast an apprehensive eye toward George. “What are you going to charge me?”

“That’s a good pair of sandals--you did say so yourself,” George answered. “I was thinking … six miliaresia.”

“Half a solidus?” Felix exclaimed. He made as if to throw the shoes at George. “I figured you’d say something more like two.”

After an argument they both enjoyed, they split the difference. Felix also promised to bring a sack of raisins to the shop the next time he was in Thessalonica. Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. The four silver coins he did pay were enough for George to turn a profit on the deal.

“How are things treating you these days?” the shoemaker asked, to make sure no bad feelings lingered after the haggle--and because life would have been boring if he let people out of his shop without finding out what they knew.

“Not bad, not bad,” Felix answered. “Always a lot of fairies and such about, there away from town. It’s quiet here, God be praised: everybody inside the walls believes in Him, pretty much. Not like that out in the country, you know. Old ways hang on.”

“That’s so,” George agreed. “I saw a satyr myself yesterday, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen them, too,” Felix said. “I chase my daughters into the house when they’re about, just on account of you never know--you know? But these I saw a few days ago, they weren’t like anything I seen before. Pretty women, they looked like, with long yellow hair and with wings on their backs. Not angel wings, with feathers and all--more like beetle wings, all clear and shimmery. I made the cross at them, like a good Christian ought to, but they stood there and smiled at me. It was like they never seen it before.”

“Maybe they hadn’t,” George said, and told him about the wolf. “New people on the move, new gods and demons moving with them.”

Felix clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Hard times, sure enough,” he said. “Well, God will protect us, I expect I hope He will, anyhow.” He headed out of the shop, then turned back. “The sandals feel good, George. I thank you for that.” With a wave, he was gone.

George turned back to his son. “There, do you see, Theodore? Do a proper job and your customers come back to you.”

“Yes, I see, Father.” Theodore grinned mischievously. “Make four miliaresia every five or six years from a farmer and you can use it to buy gold plates to eat off of.”

The shoemaker didn’t know whether to smack the youth or start laughing. He let out a strangled snort, which satisfied neither of those impulses. If God did protect Thessalonica, he thought, it would be either because He ignored the younger generation or because He was even more merciful than the Holy Scriptures said. As George pondered those two choices, he realized one didn’t necessarily exclude the other.

He was delicately tapping an awl to produce a tooled pattern on a boot for a prominent jurist when Dactylius stuck his head into the shop. “Archery practice this afternoon!” the little Greek jeweler exclaimed. He carried a bow and had a quiver on his back. “Have you forgotten? I’ll bet you have!”

“You’re right, I did forget,” George admitted. “I start doing this fine work”--he pointed to the boot-- “and I don’t think about anything else.”

“Go on, dear,” Irene told him. “Germanus won’t be expecting those boots for at least another week. You’ll have plenty of time to finish them.”

“You’re right.” He didn’t know why he bothered saying that; Irene was generally right. To Dactylius, he said, “I’ll go get my bow and arrows--be right back.” He hurried upstairs, grabbed the bow off the pegs where he’d hung it, and picked up his own quiver. He slung it over his shoulder as he returned to the ground floor.

Dactylius was hopping from foot to foot, as if he needed to visit the latrine. He seemed all the more excitable when paired with stolid George. “Come on!” he said. “Rufus will yell at us if we’re late.”

One of George’s eyebrows quirked upward. “He’ll yell at us if we’re not late, too. You go to church to pray, You go to militia practice to get yelled at.”

Taking no notice of that, Dactylius grabbed him by the sleeve of his tunic and dragged him out into the street. Behind him, he heard Irene laugh softly. He was never late enough to matter, and most of the time his punctuality had nothing to do with Dactylius. For that matter, he kept the jeweler out of trouble more often than the other way round.

The practice field was just that: a field in the southeastern part of the city, not far from the hippodrome and fairly close to the sea. In the time of George s greatgrandfather, a grandee had had a mansion there, but no one had ever rebuilt the place after it burned down.

A scrawny brown dog sprawled in the grass and watched the rnilitiamen at their exercises. The commander of the regular garrison, up in the citadel on the high ground at the northeastern comer of Thessalonica, would either have laughed or suffered a fit of apoplexy to see it. The amateur soldiers were indifferent archers, poor spearmen, swordsmen longer on ferocious spirit than skill.

George knew he’d never use his bow as well as a professional soldier, even if he did bring back game when he went out hunting. Dactylius shot straighter than he did, though his own bow had a stronger pull. After he missed a shot from a range where he should have hit, he yanked a new arrow out of his quiver and made as if to break it over his knee.

Another of his fellow rnilitiamen, a gangly, curly-haired man named John, not only had the gall to hit the canvas target but then said, “You might as well shoot that arrow, George. After it’s gone wild, someone who knows what he’s doing may find it. If you break it, it’s gone for good.”

“I’ll have you know I bagged two rabbits and two birds yesterday,” George said with dignity.

“Aye, and if the bunnies carried bows, they’d have bagged you first,” John retorted. You didn’t want to get into an argument with him; he made his living, such as it was, by going from tavern to tavern telling jokes. People said he’d come from Constantinople, that he’d been run out of town when some of his jokes there got too pointed to suit the men in power.

In the militia, though, your mouth would take you only so far. Rufus, the squadron commander, was a gray-haired veteran who’d fought the Ostrogoths in Italy under Narses the eunuch. He had one blue eye, one brown eye, and one nasty disposition. “Let’s see you hit it again, John, before you make like you’re the Second Coming.”

“You couldn’t have your second coming till a month after the first one,” John muttered. But he made sure Rufus didn’t hear him. George blamed him not at all for that. Rufus had to be nearing his threescore and ten, but George wouldn’t have wanted to fight him with any weapons or none.

John nocked his next arrow, drew the bow back to his ear, let fly--and missed, almost as badly as George had done. Rufus laughed raucously. John muttered again. This time, not even George could make out what he said. The shoemaker decided that was probably just as well.

Somebody shot an arrow at the dog. The shaft thumped into the ground six or eight feet away from the beast. The dog never moved. “He’s in the safest place he could be,” Rufus said, and laughed again.

“I would hate him, if only he weren’t right,” Dactylius said. “We have to get better.” His face was probably more intent than when he was setting a ruby into a golden necklace. He aimed, shot--and missed.

“You lugs are all hopeless.” Rufus rolled his eyes. “Come on--all together now.” A ragged volley followed. “By Jesus, the Virgin, and all of the saints, what will you do if the Slavs and Avars ever do come down on Thessalonica”

“Probably something like this,” John said, shivering as if he were about to freeze to death. “Or maybe this.” He gave an alarmingly realistic impression of a man suddenly seized by diarrhea. “Or this.” Now he mimed jumping onto a horse and galloping away as fast as he could go.

George was a sober, serious fellow most of the time. He found himself laughing helplessly at John’s antics. He would have felt worse about it, but everyone else was laughing, too. Rufus had a soul as flinty as any this side of a tax collector’s, but he guffawed with the militiamen he commanded. “You’re a funny fellow, all right,” he said to John. “I’d like you better, though, if your work with the bow weren’t so funny.”

John’s next arrow not only hit the target, it pierced the center of the bull’s-eye. “How about that?” he said triumphantly.

“That’s even funnier than when you were doing the fellow shitting himself,” Rufus said, leaving the comic, for once, altogether at a loss for words.

On their way back to their places in the workaday world, several of the rnilitiamen, George among them, stopped in a tavern for a mug of wine. “Maybe even for two mugs of wine,” George said, liking to spell things out as precisely as he could beforehand.

“Maybe.” Dactylius sounded nervous. He might have been a trooper in the militia, but his wife Claudia, whose gray eyes and fair skin spoke of Gothic blood, was larger and brawnier and of a sharper temper than he.

The taverner, a long-faced, swarthy man named Paul, seemed gladder to see the rnilitiamen than was his wont. He filled their mugs up to the top and didn’t scrutinize the coppers they passed across the bar as if certain every other one was a counterfeit. “Are you feeling well, host of ours?” asked a plump fellow named Sabbatius.

“As well as a forest when the birds fly south for the winter,” Paul answered in a gloomy croak. “Aye, the birds are flying, sure enough.”

“Are you making riddles?” Sabbatius asked, swigging at his wine. He was liable to stay for more than a mug or two--or three or four.

“I don’t think he is,” George said. He studied Paul. “I think he’s heard something. You have heard something, haven’t you?”

“Good thing you make shoes instead of asking the questions when the torturer’s doing his job,” the taverner said. “Aye, I’ve heard something, and if it’s so, you militiamen are going to be all that’s in the way between us and trouble for a while.”

“What do you mean? Four or five of the amateur soldiers asked the question at the same time.

Paul shrugged. “My line of work, you do hear things. Some of the things you hear, you wish you hadn’t, if you know what I mean. This is one of them. If I did hear right, most of the regular garrison is heading out of town.”

“Christ have mercy!” Sabbatius said, beating George and several others to the punch. “Why do they want to go and do a fool thing like that?”

“Don’t know that they want to,” Paul answered. “When you’re a soldier, though, you don’t do what you want to. You do what they tell you to. Way I hear it is, Priscus the general is in trouble against the Avars and the Slavs somewhere off in the back of beyond”--he pointed vaguely toward the northeast--”and he needs soldiers, so off they’re going to go.”

“That’s not so good,” George said. He looked around the tavern, then back to Paul. “Would you want Thessalonica defended by the likes of us?”

“If I say no to that, you people will throw things at me,” Paul replied, a smile stretching his face in unfamiliar directions, “but if I say yes I’ll be lying. What am I supposed to do about that?”

“I will have two mugs of wine after all,” Dactylius said, as if that were a matter more important than the regular garrison’s leaving Thessalonica.

While the taverner filled his mug with a dipper, George pondered the question he’d asked. In due course, he told Paul, “Maybe you ought to join the militia, too. Then you’d have no one but yourself to blame for whatever might go wrong.”

“Aye, maybe I ought to at that,” Paul said. “I don’t have forty years on me yet, and if I’m no Hercules, I’m no tun of suet, either, like some people I could name.” He looked pointedly toward Sabbatius.

The chubby militiaman glared right back. “Step out into the street and we’ll talk some more about that,” he offered.

Paul reached under the counter and pulled out a stout club studded with nails. He set it on the bar. “If I step out into the street, I do my talking with this,” he said. Sabbatius’ sword was a better weapon, but he didn’t push it, peering down into his mug of wine instead. Paul grunted and put the club away.

“You do join the militia, join our company,” George said. “And bring your friend there.” He tapped the bar to show what he meant. “Rufus sees that club, he won’t just let you join, he’ll try to steal it from you.”

“Maybe I will,” the taverner said again. Most of the time, that meant, Not on your life, but I’m polite about it. This time, George thought it meant he probably would.

Dactylius gulped down that second mug of wine and hurried out of the tavern. George’s opinion was that he shouldn’t have poured it down so fast; he was walking at a slant. If he was working on anything delicate, it wouldn’t turn out so well as it might have. Claudia would notice, too--as far as George could tell, Claudia noticed everything, whether it was there or not--and make Dactylius regret it.

Although Sabbatius liked to drink, he was next to sidle out the door. He’d been staring down where Paul had stowed the nasty club. He was bold enough shooting at targets in the field, and at practice with swords, too. George got the idea, though, that he’d found the notion of having nails pounded into his own personal, precious flesh distinctly unappealing.

George left the tavern a few minutes after Sabbatius. He hurried back toward his shop--this was news more important than having seen a satyr. No one could know for certain what the latter portended, but anybody this side of an idiot was able to see the garrison’s leaving Thessalonica meant trouble.

When Sophia saw him coming up the street, she ran out of the shop, exclaiming, “Father, guess what! You’ll never guess what!”

“I don’t know,” George said agreeably. “What? Once you’ve told me, I have something to tell you, too.”

“I was in the market square buying some parsnips for Mother,” Sophia said, her eyes snapping with excitement, “And people were saying the regular army is going to march out of town, to go help with the wars God knows where. Isn’t that important? Isn’t that worth hearing?”

“Well, yes, it is,” he admitted.

He was never a man who got very excited about anything. His stolidity this time, though, irked his daughter. “You must be angry at me for telling you my news and not waiting to hear yours,” she said. “What was your news, anyway?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He set a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve already heard it. What’s your mother going to do with the parsnips?”

“Bake them with some snails she’s gathered over the last few days,” Sophia answered. “She finally has enough to cook.”

“That sounds good,” George said. “Let’s go back to the shop. Don’t you have some work to do? I know I’ve got plenty, and I spent longer at practice than I thought I would.” He didn’t mention going into Paul’s tavern. What point, now? The rumor had to be all over Thessalonica by this time. He consoled himself by remembering rumors weren’t always true.

The garrison marched out of the city three days later. They wore their mailshirts and helmets, which struck George, who stood watching as they headed out of Cassander’s Gate, east down the Via Egnatia and away from Thessalonica, as a bad sign, a sign they expected to have to fight at any time. Many of them had painted either the cross or the labarum--?--on their shields to help ward off whatever gods or demons the Slavs and Avars might call up. The labarum replaced the old pagan eagle atop their standards, too.

Bishop Eusebius stood just outside the gate, blessing the soldiers as they filed past him. “May you go with God, and may God go with you,” he said. His silk vestments, more splendid than the cloak of the general commanding the garrison, gleamed in the sunshine. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, go forth and defend the Roman Empire against its enemies, defend our Christian folk against all traps and tricks of the devil.”

Eusebius put on a brave show. His long, lean face was lit by a pious certainty George sometimes wished he could match. The shoemakers broad shoulders went up and down in a shrug. He was as he was, as Eusebius was as he was.

After Eusebius was done, the city prefect, a rotund fellow named Victor, came forward to make a speech of his own. He and the bishop eyed each other warily, neither altogether certain of his own power or trusting the other very far. Victor cleared his throat a couple of times, then began, “Glorious citizens of the equally glorious city of Thessalonica, we remain strong, we remain steadfast, we remain courageous, we--”

We remain bored, George thought. Victor not only liked to talk, he liked to hear himself talk. Eventually, he might come to the point. Meanwhile, George could stop listening for a while. He admired a pretty girl not far away. The wind was blowing her tunic tight against her body, so that she might almost have been naked.

Looking with lust in your heart at a woman not your wife was a sin. George knew as much. He also knew that, had Irene been standing there beside him and caught his eye straying toward that girl, she might have stuck an elbow in his ribs, but she would have been laughing while she did it. He sometimes thought she had more forgiveness for human frailty than the church did.

He started listening again, on the off chance the prefect was getting around to anything important--assuming, as might or might not have been justified, that he ever did get around to anything important. At the moment, he was saying, “--our magnificent metropolis, guarded by God, certain of protection from our patron saint, warded by our walls--” Not being in the mood for alliteration, George daydreamed a little while longer.

Victor began to shift from foot to foot. That either meant he was coming to the point or that he needed to break off and run for the jakes. Hoping it was the former, George began paying attention once more. His optimism was rewarded, for the prefect declared, “And so, citizens of Thessalonica, my delegation and I shall travel to the imperial city, there to petition his imperial majesty, the splendid Roman Emperor Maurice, to send from elsewhere in the Empire, from lands less threatened by barbaric inroads, a new contingent of soldiers to take the place of those who have gone to fight. In the meanwhile, of course, I am certain our militia will continue to offer complete security for Thessalonica.”

Had he been truly certain of that, what need would he have had to go to Constantinople to ask Maurice for replacement troopers? There were times when George thought he should have become a priest; his mind was made for logic-chopping. As usual at such times, he shook his head. He enjoyed the trade he’d learned from his father. A logical shoemaker might be an uncommon beast, but by no means an unnatural one.

Such musings did not keep him from joining in the applause Victor got. Being a member of the militia himself, he recognized its shortcomings. Professional soldiers were bound to know their craft better than amateurs like himself. The sandals he turned out, after all, were better than the ones rustics made for themselves. Had that not been true, he wouldn’t have been able to feed his wife and children. The way Theodore ate these days, George needed to be good at his trade.

Bishop Eusebius’ face was a study in mixed emotions. He took Victors getting applause almost as a personal affront; his model was his predecessor Ambrose, who had made the Emperor Theodosius do penance for a massacre his men had carried out in the hippodrome of Thessalonica. On the other hand, with Victor and other secular notables departing for Constantinople, Eusebius would be the most important man in Thessalonica for a while. That he liked fine.

Victor said, “I am certain the holy bishop here will pray for the success of my mission and for my safe return.”

“What?” The prefect had succeeded in startling Eusebius. Like George, the bishop must have figured out that much of what Victor said wasn’t worth listening to. Eusebius did recover quickly. “Yes, of course. I shall pray for your safe journey, your success, and your eventual safe return.” Did he place a little extra stress on that eventual? George wasn’t sure.

The ceremony broke up after that. Some people went up onto the gray stone walls of Thessalonica to keep an eye on the departing city garrison for as long as they could. George would have reckoned that an insult to the militia if he hadn’t noticed that a fair number of those wistful spectators were militiamen. He wondered if he ought to go up himself. The militia would be keeping watch for the city now.

In the end, he decided not to bother. He expected he’d have plenty of chances to do actual patrolling; why bother with rehearsals, in that case? On the way back to his shop, he passed under the triumphal arch of the Emperor Galerius, celebrating his victory over the Persians. Galerius was three hundred years dead, more or less. The Persians were still very much around; Maurice had finally won a long war against them five years before.

George looked at the arch. Galerius, arrogant in stone, stared back at him. “It does make you wonder what the point of all that fighting was,” George murmured. Galerius didn’t answer.

“Hello, Father,” Theodore said when George came through the front door. “How does it feel to be a leading defender of the city?”

“Strange,” the shoemaker answered. “How does it feel to you that I’m a leading defender of the city?”

His son grinned at him. “Is there any way I can get out of town, like the prefect is doing?”

“Children have no respect for their elders these days,” George said. “If I’d told my father something like that--”

He paused. He had told his father things like that, and a good many times, too. Most of the time, the old man had thrown back his head and laughed like a loon.

“You started to say something?” asked Theodore, who was, if you resisted the temptation to strangle him, a fairly good specimen.

“Maybe I did,” George said. “But what’s the use? You wouldn’t listen, anyway.” In a different tone of voice, that would have been wounding. But George sounded somewhere between resigned and amused. Theodore grinned again and went back to the boot he’d been mending.

The shoemaker went back to work, too. Those fancy tooled boots wouldn’t get done by themselves, and he’d never heard of a spirit or fairy that would make shoes for you while you lay in bed.

He went back to the boots, tapping the awl one careful stroke at a time with his light hammer. He had to bend close to the last to see what he was doing. A day spent at uninterrupted fine work like that left him with a pounding headache. One of these years before too long, if God let him live, his sight would lengthen, and then the fine work would be beyond his power. Then Theodore would have to take over the lead in the shop, and George would do whatever his sight let him do, and would probably take a hand in training up his grandsons in the trade.

When the sun went down and shadows filled the shop, the family ended their work and cleaned up. “I wish we had a slave,” Sophia said. “That would make life a lot easier.”

“Your mother and I have talked about buying one, now and again,” George said, setting the tools he’d used back onto the pegs he’d set in the wall to hold them. Each tool had its own set of pegs, on which it hung neatly.

“Have you really?” Sophia sounded surprised. “You’ve never done it when I was around.”

“Could we afford to buy a slave?” Theodore asked.

“Probably,” George said. Irene nodded. Now both their children looked surprised. George went on, “I don’t expect we’ll get one any time soon, though.” His wife nodded.

“Why not, if we can afford one?” Sophia said. “It would save us a lot of work, and besides--” She paused, uncertain how to go on. At last, she said, “If you’ve got a slave, if you don’t have to do all your own work, that means you’re better off than a lot of the people around you.”

Before George could answer, Irene spoke with great firmness: “I can’t think of a worse reason to buy a slave than social climbing.”

“That’s right,” George said, knowing he couldn’t have put it so well himself. Sophia and Theodore let out simultaneous, identical disbelieving snorts. They were at an age where social climbing mattered intensely. George remembered that. He’d got over it. He expected they would, too.

“Besides,” Irene said, “the work wouldn’t disappear as if a priest had exorcised it. The slave might do the housework so we didn’t have to, but we’d have to make more shoes and fix more shoes and sell more shoes to buy the food and clothes and medicines and whatnot we’d need to give the slave.”

“That’s right,” George said again. “It’s not what you pay to buy a slave that counts. It’s the upkeep. We could afford to buy one, but I don’t know how long we could afford to have him here.”

“We’d find a way,” Theodore said with the innocent confidence of youth.

“That’s not the only problem, you know,” George said. “Most of the slaves in the market these days are Gepids or Slavs. They don’t speak Latin, they don’t speak Greek, and God only knows if they understand anything about work. If they run away, you’re out everything you paid for them, with no chance of getting a copper back from the dealer.”

“Some people must manage in spite of all those troubles,” Sophia said, “or nobody would have slaves.” “Some people,” George said pointedly, “must raise up children who don’t talk back to them. Come to think of it, though, I’ve never heard of any. When you can afford a slave, Theodore, or when your husband can, Sophia, then we’ll see what you do. Meanwhile--”

“Meanwhile,” Irene broke in, “we still have a lot of work to do, and not much light left to do it in, mostly because a couple of people I could name have been grumbling instead of doing what they’re supposed to.” She picked up a sandal and made as if to clout Theodore in the ear with it. He got to work, but he didn’t stop grumbling. That satisfied George, who remembered doing a deal of grumbling in his own younger days.

Rufus lined up his charges and gave them their orders: “Walk your stretch of the wall. Try not to fall off and break your fool neck. The challenge is ‘St. Demetrius.’ The answer is ‘St. Nicholas.’ If somebody can’t give you the right answer, he’s got no business up on the wall at night.”

“What do we do then?” Dactylius asked nervously.

“It depends,” the militia officer answered. “If you can tell it’s just some cursed fool from inside the city, just send him down. If it’s anybody sneaking up onto the wall from outside, try and kill the bastard and yell for help like the devil’s about to drag your soul to hell. Anything else? No? All right, first shift, up onto the wall. Second shift will relieve you about the start of the fifth hour of the night.”

George had first-shift duty tonight, along with Dactylius. The two of them climbed to the battlements near the Litaean Gate. George peered west. In the deepening evening twilight, the Via Egnatia was a gray stone ribbon heading west toward the sea, some days’ journey away. Beyond the sea lay Italy. Past that, George’s knowledge of geography faded fast.

The moon, full or near enough, rose in the southeast, in Capricorn, with the bright silver lamp of Jupiter not far away. Even after night fell, there was enough fight to see where to put your feet, and to see shapes moving out beyond the wall. There was, in fact, enough light to see shapes moving out beyond the wall whether they were really there or not.

“I wish we could carry torches,” Dactylius said.

“That would be fine,” George said. “If there are any Slavs out there sneaking up on us, they’d know where to aim when they started shooting.”

“Urk,” Dactylius said: a sound that made no word in either Latin or Greek, but one full of meaning nonetheless. “I hadn’t thought so far. If to see I am more easily seen, I’ll do without the torch, and gladly.”

“Good fellow.” George liked Dactylius, though he wondered what had prompted the jeweler to join the militia: a less warlike man would have been hard to imagine.

Mosquitoes buzzed as the two militiamen patrolled their stretch of wall. One of the bugs bit George behind his left knee. He said something pungent he’d learned from Rufus. Dactylius laughed. Then a mosquito bit him, and he said something even more sulfurous. He laughed again, this time self-consciously. “You wouldn’t let Claudia know I talk like that among my fellow warriors, would you?”

“Perish the thought,” George said. Maybe Dactylius was a militiaman because Rufus left him feeling less henpecked than Claudia did.

Something moved, out beyond the ditch. George saw it. So did Dactylius. “What is it?” he hissed.

“It’s a man,” George said. That was better than naming it a demon or a pagan god, but not much. His hand closed over the hilt of his sword. The leather grip comforted him, even if it wasn’t shoe leather. Besidehim, Dactylius started to say something but stopped, perhaps because his tongue was cleaving to the roof of his mouth. George didn’t say anything. He knew better than to try. If he opened his mouth with his heart pounding the way it was, all of Thessalonica would hear the noise.

He went to the edge of the wall and peered down into the night. Sure enough, that was a man. What was he doing down there, away from the monastery to the west of the city? Spying out the land, was the first answer that leaped into the shoemaker’s agile mind.

Then the man came out from the shadows of some bushes into moonlight. That moonlight gleamed off his tonsure. He looked up toward the wall with complete uninterest and began to sing, loudly and off-key, in Greek.

“Christ have mercy!” George exclaimed, his voice an explosive whisper. “It’s a drunk monk, that’s all.”

“You’re--you’re right.” Dactylius spoke in tones of wonder, as if he’d seen a revelation straight out of the Apocalypse of St. John.

The monk wandered away. He’d developed a list from the wine he’d taken on, as a ship would list after taking on water. Anger washed through George, sweeping away fear. After a moment, the anger flowed away, too, replaced by a more characteristic sour satisfaction. “I don’t even have to think up things I’d like to do to the bastard for giving me such a start,” he said to Dactylius.

“Why not?” the jeweler asked. “I was thinking of things like that.”

George’s smile was broad, almost beatific. “Because before long that fellow’s going to have to go back to his monastery, and the abbot there will take care of everything we could dream up, and more besides.”

“Oh, my,” Dactylius said, almost as if he’d had another vision, but this one of the pleasant sort.

They paced back and forth along the wall for most of another hour. Nothing happened. That suited George fine. He would have been delighted to go home after his turn was up, slide into bed next to Irene, and, if he woke her up, say Nothing happened. She would be happy and relieved. He was already happy and relieved, the monk having turned out to be a monk.

He wondered when he would be relieved in a different sense of the word. The moon was a good way up in the sky. Hours were hard enough to gauge during the day, let alone by night, but he thought the men who would replace him and Dactylius should be climbing to the top of the wall soon.

He promised himself he wouldn’t tell them about the monk.

A moment later, he too forgot about the poor sot From out of the blackness of the woods to the north and west of Thessalonica came a long, cold, fierce, hungry howl. All the adjectives formed in George’s mind as the howl echoed and reechoed in his ears. None of them described it He’d heard wolves before; when winter came down hard, they often drew near the city to see what--or whom--they could take. He did not believe for an instant that this sound had anything to do with any wolves he’d heard during hard winters, though.

Beside him, Dactylius jumped and crossed himself. George did not blame the excitable little jeweler in the least. “That’s not a wolf,” Dactylius said, as if someone had declared it was. He seemed to realize as much; after a brief pause, he went on, “But what else could it be?”

“It was a wolf--of sorts.” George spoke with an odd certainty, as if his mouth had adjusted to the horrid hunger of that sound faster than his wits had. After a moment, his wits caught up. “It must have been one of those wolf-demons the satyr was telling me about when I went hunting a few days ago.”

“Christ have mercy,” Dactylius exclaimed. Such an oath would have been plenty to drive away any of the old pagan Greek spirits who heard it. For a moment, George hoped it had had the same effect on the Slavic demon. But then the wolf howled again, and was joined a moment later by another. The two howling together were more than twice as bad as one howling alone. They made George feel as if he, up on the walls of Thessalonica, were on an island of faith and piety in the middle of a dark sea . . and that the sea was rising, threatening to wash over him and his little island as if they did not exist and were of no account.

“Devils!” Dactylius whispered.

George did not argue with him. George knew he could not argue with him. Those were devils out there. Instead, he said, “Devils don’t prevail against God. That’s what the Scriptures say.”

He did a better job of reassuring his friend than he did for himself. He believed he’d told the truth, but it was a long-term kind of truth. How many Christians had been martyred for the faith before it prevailed in the Roman Empire? If God chose for His own reasons to give Thessalonica over to the foe who knew Him not, He would do that. George could only hope that was not what He had in mind.

No, that wasn’t the only thing he could do. He could also do everything in his power to keep the barbarians out of the city. God might offer the way, but men had to provide the means.

“St. Demetrius!”

At first, George thought that was only in his own mind, seeking intercession with the divine. Then he realized the call had come from someone else. “St. Nicholas!” he answered.

“Thought you were asleep up here,” Sabbatius said, advancing to take his turn on sentry-go. “Did you hear the wolf a few minutes ago?”

George looked at the tubby newcomer. “I thought it was your stomach growling,” he said. But he could not stay jocular long. “Yes, we heard it.”

He and Dactylius descended from the wall and lighted torches at one burning down there by the base so they could find their way home. They carried their weapons home with them, too, which was enough to repel any thieves who might have skulked through the streets of Thessalonica in the darkness.

Irene had thoughtfully left a lamp burning downstairs. George carried it up to the bedroom. He tried to slide into bed as quietly as he could, but woke her. “Those horrible wolves,” she said drowsily. “I didn’t dream them, did I?”

“No,” he answered, truthful before he -wondered whether a lie might have served better. Irene nodded and went back to sleep. Some time later, George wished his own rest would have come so easily.