Thessalonica

XI

The first thing George did was sleep till the sun, which had been low in the east, was low in the west. He was relieved to find some stew in the pot. “Aye,” Nephele said, “the world waggeth on, seek to stay it as we may.”

George ate and yawned, realizing he would have no trouble going back to sleep not long after nightfall. He set a hand on Perseus’ cap, which lay beside him on the boulder on which he was sitting. “I want to go into Lete,” he said, “and give this back to Gorgonius. I don’t want him to think I’m a thief.”

“We cannot do’t today,” Nephele answered, “the sun’s chariot, as you see, having drawn too near the western horizon to permit the journey.”

“Tomorrow, then,” George said.

“It could be,” Nephele said, “but then again, perhaps not. Surely we shall be undertaking many matters most urgent on that day, conferring with your priest, and--”

“Someone mention me?” Father Luke came up.

“They want to talk with you instead of taking me to Lete to give Gorgonius back his cap,” George said, his voice a little sour. “If I understand right, all the centaurs want to talk with you, and none wants to go to Lete.”

“That is good sooth,” Nephele said.

“But why?” Father Luke asked.

“Why? Because we but seldom venture among the habitations of mankind for any reason, and have held to this rule for a time that seemeth long even to ourselves,” Nephele replied. “If George be fain to return the cap, doubtless a satyr will guide him, they being eager to have as much to do with mankind, or rather womankind, as we are needful of holding to our sylvan fastness.”

“You went with me before.” George would not have argued so with the immortal had he not failed so completely of understanding. “Why not now?”

“We went, aye, but with greatest reluctance, as you must have seen. Gaining the cap of Perseus held an urgency returning it lacketh,” Nephele said, an answer that was not an answer. The female centaur saw George and Father Luke recognize that it was not an answer. A very human-sounding sigh came forth. “Are the two of you blind and deaf? What, as is proved by experience bitter, must my kind avoid at all costs?”

Father Luke, with only a day’s acquaintance with the centaurs, looked blank. George thought the answer was on the tip of his tongue and, thinking that, found it: “Wine!” he exclaimed.

Gravely, Nephele nodded. “Even so,” the female centaur said. “Even so. Being of the mortal land that prepareth and drinketh the blood of the grape with no further ado than that it should be a vintage you favor, you have no notion of the longing for it we know, a longing we also know we dare not sate.”

“All right,” George said. He had seen the hunger on Crotus’ face when they went into Lete: seen it but evidently underestimated its power. “If it’s as bad as that, I’ll let Ampelus or Ithys or Stusippus take me to the village.”

“For which you have my thanks.” Nephele looked at him from under heavy-lidded, long-lashed eyes. No, even that disconcerting baritone wasn’t always disconcerting enough to keep the female’s almost human and more than human beauty from stirring him and making him think how he might want to have those thanks shown.

“Wait.” Father Luke spoke only the one word, but with such authority that both George and Nephele turned their heads toward him. He paid no attention to George, for which the shoemaker could hardly blame him: had he had to choose between Nephele and himself, he would have chosen the centaur, too. The priest said, “Perhaps it would be for the best, Nephele, if, this once, you and all your kind drink yourselves full of wine to the very point of bursting.”

Those splendid eyes were heavy-lidded no more, but wide and staring. “Priest of the new, you know not what you say. Wine looseth in us a blazing madness oft satisfied only by blood. It is the curse of my folk, against which we have no power of resistance.”

“I don’t want you to resist,” Father Luke said. “I want you to yield to it, to revel in it.”

With each shake of the female centaur’s head, black, curly hair flew around its face. “You know not what you say. Even to suggest such a thing is madness, nothing less. Aye, madness: akin to that madness we knew in the far-off days when the world was young and nothing had stolen from us the greatest part of the land that is ours. Not since the disaster of the supper with the Lapiths have we taken wine, for fear of what it will do to us. Nay. I say again, nay.” The last word was almost a horse’s ringing neigh.

“But don’t you understand?” Father Luke, by contrast, sounded calm and rational: so calm and rational that George, who aspired to those conditions, wondered if the priest had lost his wits, or perhaps did not fully appreciate even yet the depth of the centaurs’ revulsion. Unperturbed, Father Luke went on, “You should be mad with wine--you need to be mad with wine--if you are to stand against the Slavs and Avars and their powers. When you remain your sober selves, they have more strength than you, not so?”

“That is so,” Nephele admitted. “It is so, but it hath no significance, not set against our dire need to fight shy of the lovely, deadly stuff.”

“If you will not set the arrow in your bow, you’ll never know how well you might shoot,” Father Luke said. “And if you refuse to use the arrow, will you go down to defeat wondering till you perish whether it might have done you some good?”

Nephele studied him. “The satyrs are fain to seduce us,” the female centaur said slowly, “but they seek no more than the use of our bodies, which, while no small thing, also is not a matter of greatest consequence. Some have even yielded to them, for a romp. Not I, but some. You, now, you would seduce our minds to do as you will, not as custom ancient and long-established teacheth: in my view, a stronger seduction.”

Father Luke shrugged. “After George brought me here, I was asked how I could help rally the strength of your land and mine together. I didn’t know then. I still don’t know, but this is far and away the best idea I’ve had.”

Hearing George’s name reminded Nephele he was there. The centaur rounded on him, demanding, “What think you of this crackbrained scheme?”

“Me?” George said. “I think that, if you haven’t got any better ideas yourself, you’d be foolish not to pay attention when somebody else does.”

Nephele’s shoulders sagged, as if the answer he’d given was exactly the opposite of the one the female wanted to hear. “Even you, too?” The centaur sighed, a wintry sound. “Very well, then: I shall broach the matter to my fellows. What may come of it, I do not presume to say. This prohibition your friend is eager for us to break hath almost the status among us of a law of nature. But we shall see.” The centaur turned and trotted away.

“Isn’t this interesting?” Father Luke said with a broad smile.

“Very interesting,” George replied. “If it’s all the same to you, Your Reverence, I’d sooner be bored.”

After Nephele left, George expected the female or Crotus or one of the other centaurs would be back with an answer, yea or nay, in short order. That didn’t happen. George remembered what the satyrs had said about centaurs and discussion, and also his own experience with Crotus. He wondered if he and Father Luke would have a response before spring.

While he waited and the centaurs debated, he asked Ithys to take him to Lete. Father Luke stayed behind, operating under what George was convinced to be the delusion that the centaurs would decide anything soon. “I shall have to be ready to cooperate when the critical moment comes,” the priest insisted.

“I understand that,” George said. “You understand that. The centaurs don’t understand that, though. And they don’t understand that they don’t understand--they think they’re in a hurry. And you, Your Reverence, I don’t think you understand that they don’t understand they don’t understand.”

“I don’t think I understand you,” Father Luke said, laughing. George listened again in his mind to what he’d just said, no longer sure he understood himself. But, after a little thought, he decided he’d--probably--said what he’d meant to say.

A little thought was all he got, because Ithys kept plucking at the sleeve of his tunic. “We go,” the satyr said. “Come. We go.” Having found a willing woman in the village, he was comically eager to get back there: not only to see if she was willing again, but also to learn whether he could find another one.

George carried Perseus’ cap. Now that he was out of Thessalonica, he wished he’d used it to pay a visit to Menas. He hadn’t thought of it while he was in the city, having been more worried about his family’s knowing he was alive and about getting Father Luke. He wondered if that single-minded concern for duty made him an exceptionally virtuous man or an exceptionally stupid one.

He and Ithys drew near Lete without seeing any women of any sort, lecherously inclined or otherwise. The satyr grumbled: “This bad time of year. Spring, summer-- women bathe in streams. Wintertime, no.”

“It’s cold in the winter,” George pointed out. “Do you go into a stream in the middle of winter?”

“Bad time of year,” Ithys repeated. Where centaurs seemed given to endless arguments, satyrs hardly argued at all. They knew what they knew (regardless of whether what they knew had anything to do with the truth), and had no interest in anyone else’s opinions.

Lete occupied only a small hole in the woods, even with fields all around the village. One moment, Ithys was leading George down a game track; the next, they were staring at the village across those fields. Crossing the open ground, Ithys nodded familiarly to the now bare grape vines. He had nothing against wine--on the contrary.

To his annoyance, he got nothing more than giggles from the few women walking through Lete’s narrow, twisting streets. “Not right.” He gave George a dirty look. “Must be your fault.”

George wondered how many times, over the centuries, Ithys had failed to find female companionship coming into Lete alone. Thousands, no doubt. Of course, he’d had only himself to blame then, which was sure to mean he’d blamed nobody.

Gorgonius was pounding a wooden peg into the end of a table leg when George came into his shop. “Good day,” the carpenter said, setting down his mallet. “I’m glad to see you back, and that’s the truth. You seemed a good fellow, but nobody can tell for certain till the deeds are done, if you know what I mean.” He suddenly looked anxious. “I don’t aim to offend, of course.”

“I’m not offended,” George said. “I understand what you mean. You did me a large favor that you didn’t have to do, and I’m grateful for it.”

“You looked to be a chap who needed a large favor,” Gorgonius answered. “Not even the oldest old wife in town remembers hearing from her granny about the last time centaurs came into Lete. Centaurs! If they think you’re important, do you suppose I’m going to argue very hard?”

“I do thank you,” George said, “and here’s your cap back.” He set it down on Gorgonius’ workbench.

“You’re sure you’ve done everything with it you wanted?” the carpenter asked.

“Everything I needed,” George answered. Again, a vision of the visit he hadn’t paid on Menas flashed through his mind.

Gorgonius was no fool. He caught the difference between his question and George’s answer. Walking over to the bench, he picked up the cap and thrust it at the shoemaker. “If you’re not done with it, friend, take it back. You’ve come up here once to return it to me. I expect you’ll come again.”

“Are you sure?” George said. “That thing is a temptation, and no mistake.”

“If you came once, you’ll come again,” Gorgonius repeated. “As long as you have come all this way, would you like some wine and olives before you go back? And you, too, Ithys, of course,” he added politely for the satyr’s benefit.

George nodded. Ithys said, “Yes, I take some ‘some wine and olives’. Just you leave out the olives.” Laughter set the satyr’s phallus bobbing up and down. The two men laughed, too. Gorgonius went off to get the food and drink. Ithys pointed to the cap. “He let you keep that longer, eh?”

“It seems so, yes,” George answered.

“Then we come all this way for nothing? No need to give back hat. No pretty women for me to take.” But Ithys could not quite manage a full-blown scowl, especially not after Gorgonius came back with a bowl of olives and three cups. “Wine,” the satyr said, as if reminding itself. “Wine. No, this walk not for nothing after all.”

On the way back to the encampment where the centaurs and satyrs dwelt, George stumbled several times. His feet did not want to go where he meant to put them. Ithys, normally as graceful as any of the supernatural kind, also had trouble. “Wine,” the satyr said, and giggled, a surprisingly high-pitched, squeaky sound to come from such a large, shaggy creature.

“Maybe.” But George, though he didn’t argue, wasn’t so sure. He’d had only a couple of cups in Lete, not nearly enough to make him too tiddly to walk straight. On the other hand, if the problem wasn’t wine, what was it?

When he reached the encampment, he found Father Luke looking worried. “I wish the centaurs would make up their minds,” the priest said. He pointed down toward Thessalonica. “Can’t you feel the trouble in the air-- and the power?”

Maybe there was a reason George had been so clumsy. “Is that what I’m feeling?” he said. “You deal with powers all the time, Your Reverence, so you’d know better than I do. Something’s wrong, I think, but I don’t know what.”

“Something enormous is building, down by the city,” Father Luke said. “I can’t tell what it is, only that it is-- and that I don’t like it.”

“I don’t think the Slavs and Avars ever really turned their strongest gods loose against Thessalonica,” George said. “They’ve tried to get into the city without doing that, unless I’m wrong. I don’t quite understand why, but that’s the way it’s looked to me.”

“You may have made a very good guess there,” Father Luke said. “I think the Slavs and Avars have been using their demigods and lesser deities for the same reason we often ask saints or the Virgin to intercede for us with God. Facing too much raw power, trying to turn that power to your own ends, can bum out a mere man.”

“That makes sense,” George agreed thoughtfully. “But if the Slavs and Avars are changing what they’re doing now…”

“I can think of only one reason why they would change,”

Father Luke said. “And that is that everything they’ve tried up till now has failed. If they’re going to take Thessalonica, they’ll need everything they can possibly bring to bear against it.” The priest nodded. “That fits well with what I’m feeling. Do you know what their great gods are like?”

George shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest notion, Your Reverence. We’re going to find out, though, aren’t we?”

“I wish I were back at St. Elias’,” Father Luke said, but then, immediately, he shook his head. “No, I’m wrong. Inside Thessalonica, with faith so strong all around me, I might not have noticed this till too late.”

“What can you do here that you wouldn’t be able to do there?” George asked.

“Pray, of course.” Father Luke looked surprised that he should need to put the question. Then the priest looked surprised again, in a different way. “And I can also pray that the centaurs will decide to do whatever they decide to do soon enough for them and us to draw some benefit from it, whatever it turns out to be.”

“That would be good.” George peered in the direction of Thessalonica. He was no holy man, to feel subtle disturbances in the relationship of powers and the material world in which those powers--and he--dwelt. But what was coming up from out of the south wasn’t subtle. His shiver had nothing to do with the chilly day. “How long do you think we have?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Father Luke said. “It’s like a cloudburst hanging over us. The rain will come, but when? And when it does, will it wash us away? The one thing I will say is, I don’t think we have very long.”

“What do we do, then?” George turned to Ithys. The satyr had been ignoring him and Father Luke. “How do you go about making the centaurs move faster?” the shoemaker asked.

“Is no way,” Ithys answered.

Ampelus, who was sitting close by the fire, shook its shaggy head. “Is maybe a way.” The satyr got to its feet and silently vanished into the woods.

“What’s he going to do?” Father Luke asked.

Ithys shrugged, as if to say it couldn’t possibly make any difference, whatever it was. George answered, “If I knew, I’d try it myself.”

Not much later and not very far away, a loud baritone shout rose from the woods. George needed a little while to remember male centaurs all had bass voices. That wasn’t a shout, then. It was a scream.

Ampelus came back into the encampment laughing and staggering a little and rubbing at what George first took to be a bruise on the hairy flesh of the satyr’s chest. Then the shoemaker saw that it was a bruise, all right, a bruise in the shape of a hoofprint. Ampelus said, “Centaurs here soon. Minds made up. Not know which way, but made up.”

“How did you manage that?” George exclaimed.

Ampelus laughed some more, though the laughter looked as if it hurt. “Went up in back of filly Nephele, tried to screw. If I do it, I think I have good time. If I don’t do it, I make Nephele, all the centaurs so mad, they give over talk talk talk.”

“You get it in?” Ithys demanded.

By way of reply, Ampelus sadly rubbed at that hoof-shaped bruise. Though the satyr healed with the speed characteristic of immortals, George suspected it would wear that mark for a good long while.

Sure enough, though, Nephele burst out of the woods a few minutes later. The glance the female centaur aimed at Ampelus should have annihilated the satyr more thoroughly than any kick, no matter how ferocious. Ampelus, however, only leered back, which made Nephele more furious than ever.

Father Luke spoke quickly: “Have you decided, then, whether you will drink the wine to try to save Thessalonica?”

Distracted, Nephele turned away from Ampelus. “Oh,” the female centaur said. “That.” Anger cooled somewhat, it spoke now with more than a little hesitation. “Aye,” it said at last. “We are decided. Let it be as you say, priest of the new. We shall do this thing, and run wild upon the earth, and madness shall overtake us, and, if it be fated, we shall overfall the folk and powers that have come down into this land.”

“In the name of--” Father Luke checked himself before he named the Name the centaur could not bear to hear. “In my name, and in the name of Thessalonica my city, I thank you.”

“And while we run mad,” Nephele went on as if the priest had not spoken, “if it be fated, mayhap I shall run across a certain wretch with horse’s tail and billygoats nature, and mayhap tear the said wretch limb from limb beyond any hope of healing, even though that wretch belong to a race said to be undying. Mayhap this too shall come to pass.”

George would not have wanted to be on the receiving end of a threat like that, not when Nephele so obviously looked forward to the prospect. If it bothered Ampelus, the satyr didn’t show it. “Maybe you just get drunk and happy. Maybe we go someplace and--”

Nephele flung a stone. Ampelus’ dodge was, and needed to be, supernaturally quick. The satyr darted in among the trees. A volley of well-hurled stones followed. George didn’t think any of them hit.

Lete was overrun with centaurs. The townsfolk, pagan though they were, had stared when Crotus and Nephele accompanied George and the satyrs to Gorgonius’ shop. Now George would not have been surprised if the centaurs here outnumbered the human population of Lete.

From where had all the creatures come? How had they gathered here so quickly, when the shoemaker had seen but few signs of them up till now? He’d tried asking Nephele, but the female centaur gave him no answer he could understand. His own best guess was that her kin had traveled by way of the hills beyond those he knew, and that paths long in his own mundane world might prove shorter there. He did not know that for a fact. He did not know whether any humanly graspable facts were there to be known.

Lete might not have seen centaurs for a long time. Lete might never before have seen centaurs in profusion. But, when those centaurs began gathering around the couple of taverns in the town, the people of Lete, pagans as they were, knew what that was liable to mean. A lot of those people expressed their opinion of what was about to happen, or was liable to happen, by fleeing for their lives.

The proprietor of one of the taverns, a dour little man who looked better suited to be a gravedigger, came out of his establishment to look at the centaurs, who stared hungrily back at him. Seeing Father Luke in the front ranks of the creatures alongside Crotus and Nephele, the taverner called to him: “Do you know what will happen when these centaurs get themselves a bellyful of wine?”

“No,” the priest answered cheerfully, “not in any great detail. Do you?”

“Detail?” The fellow stared at him. “I don’t care anything about the details. You crazy--” He might have said, You crazy Christian, which would have routed the centaurs and ruined Father Luke’s plan on the spot. Instead, he backed up and tried again: “You crazy bugger, they get wine in ‘em, they’ll tear up everything they can get their hands on.”

“That’s the idea,” Father Luke said, cheerful still. “How would you like to be a Slav or an Avar and have a pack of drunken centaurs come thundering down on you when you didn’t expect it?”

“Oh.” The taverner started to say something else, but again checked himself. He very visibly did try to imagine himself a barbarian caught by surprise under such circumstances. The expression he donned after making that mental effort was merely dyspeptic, a considerable improvement on the way he’d looked before. They won’t be happy, will they?”

“We hope not,” George said. “That’s the idea: to make them unhappy, I mean. Why don’t you bring some wine jars and dippers out here? Your place looks crowded for centaurs, you don’t mind my saying so.”

Dour glowering returned to the taverner’s face. They’ll drink me dry. Who’s going to pay me for all this?”

“If you don’t bring out the jars and dippers, they’ll go into your tavern, drink you dry, and probably wreck the place, too,” George noted. “Wouldn’t you say keeping the building and furniture in one piece counts for something?”

The taverner’s lips moved. George could not make out what he was saying. That was liable to be just as well. The fellow went back into his shop. George worried. If no wine was forthcoming, the centaurs were liable to storm and sack the place.

But then the taverner reemerged, carrying a large jar. He stabbed the pointed end into the ground so it stood upright. By the look he gave George, he would sooner have stabbed him. George felt a certain amount of sympathy; he wouldn’t have wanted to give away all the shoes he’d made over several months, either. Nor was the taverner saving his own town; the Slavs and Avars had shown no interest in Lete. If, however, the other choices were worse . .

Out came the taverner again, with another jar of wine. Seeing him give up, his colleague also began bringing out jars of wine. Behind George, the centaurs leaned forward, like a forest with the wind blowing through it. They might not have tasted wine since the long-ago days, but they remembered--and they hungered.

George turned to Father Luke. “Once they start drinking, how will we turn them toward Thessalonica? If they go mad or do whatever they do here, that doesn’t help us much.”

“I don’t quite know.” The priest’s face was drawn and worried. “One way or another, we’ll manage. We’ll have to manage. Can’t you feel how close the Slavs and Avars are to doing whatever they’re about to do?”

“I can’t feel anything but how close we are to getting trampled when the creatures decide they’re not going to wait anymore,” George said. Father Luke smiled at him, but wanly.

Crotus started shouting in a dialect even more archaic than the one the male and the other centaurs used when talking with mortals. George could catch a word here and there, but, while he was getting that one, three or four more would go by that had no meaning for him. They meant something to the centaurs, though. Several large, burly males pushed their way through the crowd and took up stations by the growing rows of wine jars.

To Father Luke and George, Crotus said, “They are pledged to resist the lure of the wine as best they can, to aid others in drinking whilst abstaining themselves. So far as it may be prevented, the madness shall not lay hold of all of us at once.”

George and the priest beamed at each other. The sober centaurs could send the rest of their kind in the required direction--if they stayed sober, and if the others, once drunk, paid any attention to them. George was glad they were there. Of one thing he was certain: drunk, the mob of centaurs would have paid no attention to him.

At last, everything was to Crotus’ satisfaction. “Let us taste the wine!” the male cried, a sentence that had not changed much over time. The rest of the centaurs did not cheer, as George had expected them to do at that welcome exhortation. Instead, a deep sigh ran through them, as when a lover spied his beloved after the two of them had spent a long time apart.

Crotus was the first to fill a dipper. Instead of also being the first to drink, the male centaur, oddly ceremonious, passed the dipper to Nephele. The female savored the bouquet of the wine for a moment, then poured the dipper down. A shudder ran through both the human and the equine halves of the centaur’s body. Its eyes slid almost shut. A low, soft sigh escaped its lips. If that wasn’t ecstasy, George had never seen ecstasy.

And, when Nephele’s eyes opened again, they had fire in them. The transformation was abrupt, and a little terrifying. All the planes and angles of the centaur’s face were different. Every one of them screamed danger! Something wild and terrible, something not seen in these hills for many long ages, had slipped its bonds and was running free.

Father Luke saw that, too. He did his brave best not to seem alarmed. In a conversational tone of voice, he asked, “Do you know the writer on magic named Philotechnus, George?” When George shook his head, the priest went on, “One of the bits of advice he gives is, Do not call up that which you cannot put down. I think that may have been good advice indeed.”

Nephele roughly flung the dipper back to Crotus. The male centaur refilled it and drank. George watched in astonishment: the change in Crotus was even greater than that in Nephele had been. The male centaur seemed large and more . . . predatory than had been true only a moment before. If it turned that fearsome gaze on George, he told himself he would make the sign of the cross at the creature--better to drive it off than be torn limb from limb.

And then George wondered if the sign of the cross would do any good against a centaur maddened by wine. He could see Father Luke wondering the same thing. All at once, he understood in his belly what Philotechnus’ maxim meant.

More and more centaurs drank. More and more centaurs underwent that transformation, awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time. Hoarse shouts rose into the sky. The more drunken centaurs there were, the more the horse shouts gained in volume and ferocity.

Even Demetrius, still the only centaur colt George had seen, took a dipper of wine and was remade in the savage image of its elders. Demetrius put the shoemaker in mind of a fox cub worrying at a bone too big for it, but that didn’t mean, or didn’t have to mean, the small centaur wasn’t dangerous in its own right.

“How do we go down toward Thessalonica?” Luke asked.

“I think we’d better have the males who aren’t drunk tell the rest to get going,” George said. He wasn’t anxious to draw to him the notice of the centaurs who had been drinking.

“That isn’t what I meant,” the priest said. “How do we go down to Thessalonica? I may be needed there, to bring the power of. . .” --he didn’t speak God’s name, not wanting to find out whether or not the centaurs could bear it in their present condition-- “to bear against the Slavs and Avars and their powers.”

“Oh,” George said, and then, “Well, how do you feel about being cavalry, Your Reverence?”

“Riding a centaur, do you mean?” Father Luke said. George nodded. The priest went on, “Riding a drunken centaur? Riding a maddened drunken centaur? Of all the things in the world, the only one I’d less rather do, I think, is stay up here in Lete.”

George nodded again. He started to go up to Nephele, to ask if the female centaur would bear him down the long and winding road that led back to Thessalonica. Then, remembering what Ampelus had tried to do to Nephele, he sheered off. He could think of only one way to hold on as he rode, and feared the female centaur would take it as an undue liberty.

He went up to Crotus instead. “Will you carry me to Thessalonica?” he asked. “Will one of your friends carry Father Luke?”

Crotus’ eyes were tracked with red. Slowly, slowly, they focused on George. “Thessalonica,” the centaur said, one thick syllable at a time, as if it had never heard the word before. Then its head went up and down. “Oh, aye, the new town.” George did not think of it as a new town, but George did not personally remember its founding, as Crotus no doubt did. The male went on, “And you, mortal, you are … ah, who you are returneth to me: the follower of the new.” The centaur looked ready to tear him to pieces for being a follower of the new. But then more memory seemed to make its way through the haze of wine. “And we are … we are in alliance. Alliance with bad against worse. A hard path, but the only one left to us.”

Without another word, Crotus squatted down on all fours (or rather, on four out of six). George scrambled onto the centaur’s back. Crotus shouted for Elatus; the other male stood nearby. Elatus squatted, too. Father Luke hurried over and mounted his unorthodox--in both the literal and theological senses of the word-- steed.

“Thessalonica!” Crotus shouted in a huge voice. “Thessalonica! The foe awaiteth. Thessalonica!”

In a moment, the whole great band of centaurs had taken up the cry, baying like so many wolves: “Thessalonica!” Down the hillside they poured, a drunken mob of supernatural creatures. Beneath Georges fundament, Crotus’ musdes heaved and rippled. The shoemaker clung to the centaur’s human torso with one hand and to Perseus’ cap with the other. If he needed to draw his sword and fight he wouldn’t be able to hold on then. He hoped--how he hoped!--it wouldn’t matter.

He looked around to see where in the band Father Luke was. Riding behind Elatus’ torso as George rode behind Crotus’, the priest made his centaur look as if it boasted two upthrust human parts rather than the standard one. George and Crotus no doubt made the same absurd picture.

“Thessalonica!” the centaurs shouted, urging one another on and, George suspected, reminding themselves where they were going.

“Hurry!” Father Luke called to them. “In the name of whatever you hold dear, hurry! The foe ariseth in his might.” He imitated the old-fashioned Greek they spoke, which made them heed him almost as if he were one of their own. George, who could not have done the same, wished he had hands free with which to applaud.

Now, despite being in among the band of centaurs, he too could feel the gathering of power to the south. He’d known that sort of feeling in the churches of Thessalonica, but the power rising here had nothing to do with the God he worshiped. Whether it was--or could be, if fully manifested--more powerful than his God, he did not know. That frightened him worse than anything. “On the way home,” he murmured, trying to reassure himself. But the way home was, as it had been, blocked by the Slavs and Avars and by the powers that had already accompanied them into this part of the world.

A shout from the front-runners among the centaurs said they’d spotted one of those powers. Peering forward over Crotus’ shoulder, George spied a Slavic wolf-demon. The creature’s howl, this once, brought no terror with it; had it burst from a human throat, it would have been an exclamation of surprise and dismay.

The wolf turned and tried to flee, as if to take news of what it had just seen back to those with more power than it possessed. Since it was heading down toward Thessalonica, the drunken centaurs ran after it. In short order, they ran over it: the whole band, or at least as many of them as its battered body happened to pass beneath. George felt it go under Crotus’ trampling, pounding hooves. With four legs on which to stand, the centaur had no trouble keeping its balance and delivering a good stomping at the same time-Once the band had passed over the wolf, George turned and looked back over his shoulder at it. It didn’t look as if it had ever been alive; far from seeming immortal, it didn’t look as if it would ever be alive again, either. He might have been wrong: things from beyond the hills he knew were often next to impossible to slay. Not many of them, though, endured what the wolf-demon had just suffered.

Before long, the centaurs came upon more wolves. A few peeled off from the main band to chase them. The wolf-demons, more used to chasing centaurs, ran away from their numbers and their ferocity, baying as they went. But a lot of the centaurs went on yelling “Thessalonica!” at the top of their lungs. For whatever reason they did it, it helped keep most of them together.

George kept looking for Vucji Pastir. The shepherd of the wolves would be a more dangerous foe than the creatures he herded. But of Vucji Pastir there was no sign. George remembered the swordwork he had done while invisible. He still did not think he had slain the demigod; to think that, on the basis of what little he knew, would have made him both more stupid and more heroic than he actually was.

Disturbed by the centaurs’ thundering hooves and by their cries, bats rose in chittering swarms. Remembering that bats had spied on Thessalonica, George shouted a warning. The centaurs were already flinging volleys of stones and branches at the creatures. They brought down a good many, and trampled them as they had trampled that first wolf. Again, George wondered if any creature, supernatural or not, could survive such treatment.

“Close now,” Father Luke called through the din the centaurs made. “When will the Slavs and Avars notice what’s bearing down on them?”

“If we’re lucky, they’ll take one look at the centaurs and run screaming,” George answered, punctuating that with a sharp “oof!” as he came down awkwardly on Crotus’ back after the male took a particularly long bound. “Of course, if we were lucky, God wouldn’t have inflicted the Slavs and Avars on us in the first place, would He? I expect we’ll have a fight on our hands.”

Bishop Eusebius would sure have droned out some pious platitudes on the topic of all mankind’s being able to live together in peace and understanding and everyone’s worshiping God--in, of course, the orthodox fashion. That would have been wonderful, except that the Slavs and Avars had no interest in peace, understanding, or, for that matter, God.

And Father Luke, unlike most clergymen of George’s acquaintance, had little use for pious platitudes: not that he wasn’t pious--far from it--but he expressed his piety more through his life than through his talk. Now he nodded, and said, “That’s what I think, too.” He looked worried again. “I hope we aren’t too late.”

Off to one side of the main band of centaurs, a scream rose in the woods. It was not the sort of scream that might have come from the throat of one of the Slavic demons or demigods: it was a simple scream of human terror. The Slavs had had men hunting in the woods since before their assault on Thessalonica, as George knew full well. No doubt Slavs still roamed the woods, trying to keep their larders full. One of the small groups of centaurs that had peeled off from the main band in pursuit of a wolf-demon must have come upon a hunter instead. By the sounds the fellow had made, he wouldn’t be making any more sounds in the near future--or in the distant future, either.

A few minutes later, a centaur let out a screech filled with both fury and pain. An arrow sprouted from the creature’s right hindmost leg. Another centaur tore the shaft out, which caused the wounded male to screech again. Its bleeding slowed as quickly as George had seen to be commonplace among immortal beings. He hoped the Slav hadn’t poisoned the arrow, as his kind were known to do. If the Slav had poisoned it, he hoped the venom was not of a sort to harm supernatural creatures.

The male centaur ran on as if not badly hurt, so George supposed the arrow was either unpoisoned or harmless to the centaur regardless of poison. He did not have long to contemplate such things, for several centaurs, both males and females, galloped in the direction from which the arrow had come. Shouts rang out, some theirs, others from a man. When they rejoined the main band, blood dappled their human arms and torsos.

Before long, as they drew nearer to the encampments of the Slavs and Avars, more and more arrows began coming their way. “Keep on!” George shouted to Crotus. “If you waste your time chasing down a few archers, you won’t get to the main body of the foe till too late.”

More and more, as power built in the air around him, he got the feeling they had very little time. Whatever the Slavs and Avars were going to do, it was on the point of being done. “So that we slay them, what boots it an we slay them individually or collectively?” Crorus shouted back.

That was, George realized, the wine raging in the centaur. Sober, Crotus liked nothing better than to deliberate, to choose with great care the best possible course. Drunk, none of that mattered. All the male wanted to do was kick and stamp and tear and kill. Hows and whys and wherefores concerned it not at all.

“We have to get down to the city and break up the magic they’re working,” George said desperately. “Can’t you feel it? Can’t you sense it? If their gods fully come through into the hills we know--” He broke off. If that happened, God would have to intervene, perhaps through St. Demetrius, to save Thessalonica--if He chose to save it if He was strong enough to save it. But Crotus cared nothing about God and little about Thessalonica. George tried a different explanation: “If they manifest themselves in these hills, they’ll be too strong for you.”

Crotus bounded along, seemingly tireless. But after a few more strides, the male let out a great rambling bellow: “Thessalonica! To Thessalonica! Straight on to Thessalonica!”

The centaur sprang out ahead of the rest of the band, leading not just by shouts but by example. Straight on they went. They did not turn aside for holy ground of any sort. Maybe, in their drunken madness, the power in patches of holy ground had less effect on them than had been so while they were sober. Maybe, too, they simply happened not to run across any. George was too busy trying to stay on Crotus’ back to be sure.

The woods thinned. Followed close by the other centaurs, Crotus burst into the open ground around Thessalonica. The male shouted once more when he came out into that open country, for the Slavs and a large troop of Avar cavalry were drawn up in battle array against the city. So intent on Thessalonica were they, they did not turn against the centaurs till the drumroll of hoofbeats bearing down on them drew them away from the attack they had been about to begin on the wall.

Indeed, it might not even have been the hoofbeats from behind, but rather the shouts from the defenders of Thessalonica, that made the Slavs and Avars realize the centaurs were there. The shouts were joy, not amazement: at that distance, the defenders must have taken the centaurs for regular cavalry coming to their rescue. The surprise--even the horror--on the faces of the barbarians, who knew better, was marvelous to behold. Till then, their powers not only held their own against the Christian God, but had routed the supernatural beings native to these hills and valleys.

Perhaps the centaurs were, in true terms of strength, still overmatched. If they were, they neither knew nor cared. Maddened with wine, all they wanted was to close with the folk whose demons and demigods had done so much to them up till then. Being afraid never crossed their minds.

It crossed George’s mind. It also crossed the minds of whole troops of Slavs, who turned and fled from the raging band. But not all the barbarians fled. Some of them began shooting arrows at the centaurs. They cried out in dismay when, even after they scored hits, their foes would not fall. Seeing that sent more of them running.

The Avars were made of sterner stuff. They shot arrows at the centaurs, too, arrows from their heavier bows. They also wheeled their armored horses around and rode into battle, some with swords, some with spears. They might never have seen these supernatural creatures before, but they showed hardly more alarm than the beings galloping at Crotus’ heels.

Here and there, one of those centaurs, shot through the chest or perhaps the eye, crashed to the ground and thrashed toward death. Not even their marvelous flesh was proof against an arrow lodged in the heart or in the brain.

George knew too well that his own flesh, marvelous only to him, was proof against very little. Not wanting the Avars to take any special notice of him, he clapped Perseus’ cap onto his head. He held it with his left hand. With a great many misgivings, he drew his sword with his right. That left no hands with which to hold on to Crotus’ human torso. Clenching the centaur’s equine barrel with legs inexperienced at horsemanship, he hoped he would not fall off and be trampled like a wolf-demon.

While a few centaurs went down, most of them, even those who were wounded, stormed on toward the Avars. As the Slavs had before them, the mounted men lost spirit when their most telling shots evaded them little. And the stones the centaurs flung smote as if they came from the hurling arms of the siege engines on the walls of Thessalonica. When one of those stones struck home, an Avar pitched from his saddle or, despite armor of iron, a horse staggered, limbs half unstrung.

And then it was no longer a fight of arrows and stones. The onrushing centaurs were in among the Avars, wrenching the spears from their hands, wrenching riders off the backs of their horses, and throwing them to the ground. The Avars remained brave. They also retained the arrogance that made them believe they had the right to rule everything they could reach. When confronted by immortal madmen who also could and did kick like mules, none of that did them much good.

George slashed away with his sword. Every so often, edge or point would find a gap in an Avar’s scalemail. The barbarian would howl with pain and look around wildly to see who had wounded him. He would discover that he, like Polyphemus in the Odyssey, had apparently been hurt by Nobody.

Remembering that Father Luke lacked the option of invisibility, George looked around to see how the priest fared. He was glad to find he had a lot of trouble picking Father Luke’s human torso out from those of the centaurs in whose midst the holy man rode. He would have had more trouble still had Father Luke divested himself of his robes, but, while the priest’s piety was more flexible than that of Bishop Eusebius, George was certain it would not bend so far as that.

An Avar in a gilded helmet shouted something that sounded incendiary even if George couldn’t understand a word of it. Crotus struck the man with a powerful fist. The Avar’s iron armor warded him against the blow. George hit him, too: in the face, with the edge of his blade. Blood spurted. The Avar screamed. He clutched at himself. George wished he’d served Menas the same way.

Losing the officer’s steadying hand helped unsettle the Avars. So did their foes’ furious, unyielding attack. The nomads found themselves moving back instead of forward. That unsettled them more. Now men began to break away from the fight instead of rushing toward it.

The centaurs seemed oblivious to the way their foes fought. They fought hard, no matter what. Some of the regular soldiers who had left Thessalonica for the wars to the north and east owned warhorses that would strike out with their hooves at a rider’s command. George had thought that marvelous till he saw the centaurs in action. At close quarters, one of them, unarmored and unarmed except for what nature had provided, was far more than a match for Avars trained to horsemanship and war since childhood.

And the centaurs did not stay unarmed long. Many of them--those, George thought, rather less maddened by wine than some of the others--not only wrested spears and swords from the men they were fighting, they used them and weapons picked up from the ground with wicked effect.

George reveled in his own invisible deadliness. Whenever the melee brought Crotus close enough to an Avar, the shoemaker on the centaur’s back struck and struck hard. The nomads did not know why Crotus was a particularly dangerous enemy, but soon figured out the male was such, and did their best to stay away from it. In the press of battle, that best was too often not nearly good enough.

Quite suddenly, the press loosened. With a small shock, George saw that the centaurs had fought their way through the entire troop of Avars. Some of the nomads rode away from them, urging their horses to the best turn of speed they could. More were down on the ground behind Crotus, dead or wounded. More than a few riderless horses were mixed among the centaurs. Seeing the horses in that company, George thought they looked oddly incomplete, which only proved how used to centaurs he had grown over the past few days.

Only a few warriors--some stubborn Avars, some Slavs rushing up to try to plug the gap in the line their overlords’ overthrow had created--remained between the centaurs and… what? Though seeing it from an unfamiliar angle, George recognized the tent of the Avar priest or wizard, and the satellite tents of the Slavic sorcerers nearby. The sorcerers were not in their tents, but capered around an immense bonfire not far from them.

At first, George thought it was waves of heat that were beating against him from the bonfire. Then he realized that, large as it was, it wasn’t large enough for that. It wasn’t heat--or rather wasn’t heat exclusively--coming from the fire. It was sorcerous power.

“That way!” He leaned forward to shout in Crotus’ ear. He pointed toward the great blaze, forgetting he was as invisible to the centaur as to the Avars and to everyone else. But his words did what his outflung arm could not: “We have to get rid of those wizards before--” He didn’t know just what they would or could do, but, from what Father Luke had said… “I’ve already asked you once-- do you want their great gods fully in this world with you?”

That did the trick. Drunk as the centaur was, super-naturally wild with wine as it was, Crotus somehow kept some semblance of sense far down at the bottom of its mind. “Thither!” the male roared to the rest of the centaurs, and pointed toward the bonfire. Its arm, unlike George’s, was perfectly visible.

Had George got an order like “thither,” he would have spent the next half hour trying to figure out whether it meant this way or that way, regardless of any gestures accompanying it. He was sure the same held true for all his comrades in the militia, and for Thessalonica’s regular garrison as well. The centaurs, though, had no trouble with it.

Now that they had broken free of the Avar cavalry, they were in plain sight from the wall. Distantly, George heard the cries of astonishment that rang out from the militiamen there. He hoped none of those shouts had God’s name, or Christ’s, in them, or that, like arrows, such names had only a limited range. Otherwise, some of Thessalonica’s defenders were liable to rout the rest before the latter had done all they could do.

What would he have done, had he been up on the wall instead of up on Crotus’ back? What would his friends up there do, seeing a horde of centaurs? Sabbatius, now, Sabbatius would think he was drunk and seeing things that weren’t there. But the rest? What would they do? One answer that crossed George’s mind was, holler for Bishop Eusebius.

And what would Eusebius do when he saw centaurs? Being who and what he was, he would start praying them away. Since he was a holy man, his prayers would have more power behind them than those of ordinary militiamen. George murmured a small prayer of his own, to keep Eusebius off the wall as long as possible.

An arrow hummed past George’s head. The Slav who shot it had no idea he was riding Crotus. That mattered only a little. The arrow might have pierced him only accidentally, but would have caused every bit as much anguish as if aimed by a clever archer.

A thrown stone caught the Slav in the ribs. He dropped his bow and folded double, clutching at himself. Another Slav nearby threw down his spear and fled the field. That struck George as an eminently sensible thing to do. He might have done it himself, had he been in a position where it was practical, or even possible. Atop Crotus, he had no choice.

As if recalled from other business he had thought more urgent, the Avar priest suddenly seemed to spy the centaurs. Moving with obvious reluctance, he pulled several Slavic sorcerers away from their wild dance. He and they stared at the onrushing supernatural creatures hardly more than a bowshot away.

Crotus’ hooves came down in thick ooze. The male centaur had to yank each foot from the ground to go forward. Angry cries said other centaurs were similarly mired. The shouts from the walls of Thessalonica, loud before, suddenly seemed weak, distant. George glanced toward the city--and stared. All at once, it looked very faraway.

“We’re not in the hills we know.” he called to Crotus. They weren’t in hills at all, but rather in a muddy marsh. The Slavic wizards acted perfectly at home in the new environment. The Slavs were people of forests and marshlands. The Avar who led them had got them to make their foes try to fight on terrain unsuited for any kind of quick movement.

“Natheless, we go on,” Crotus answered. The centaur no longer sounded so fierce nor so sure of what it was about as had been true a little while before--the wine, George guessed, was beginning to wear off. But, step by slow, frustrating step, the advance did go on.

The Slavic wizards’ magic went on, too. Seeming satisfied the centaurs would not be able to interrupt till too late, the Avar released the sorcerers he had called on to help him slow them. The wizards went back to their dance. He held the smaller magic by himself, while they built the greater. The hair stood straight up on George’s arms, as if lightning was about to strike.

And so perhaps it was. Clouds boded into being out of nothingness, though somehow they avoided covering both the sun and the nearby crescent moon. A harsh chant rose from the wizards. George ground his teeth. This was the moment. He and the centaurs had come so far, dared so much . . and fallen just short.

As clouds will, these formed vast shapes in the sky-- or rather, one vast shape, the shape of a middle-aged man of bull-like power, his arms and the cloak draped over them flung out wide. “Perun!” the Slavic wizards cried, and thunder and lightning roared. The Avar priest had called up thunder gods, too, but they were playful little things next to this brooding majesty.

After a moment, as if they had paused to make sure their first summons was a success, the sorcerers called out another name: “Svarozhits!” More motion in the sky drew George’s glance. Suddenly the moon was not only the moon, but also the blade of an axe borne by a heavenly warrior taller than the treetops. If the moon god brought down that shiny-bladed axe, surely it would cleave the whole world.

Along with their Avar overlord, the Slavic wizards capered in delight. They cried out yet again: “Svarog!” Where the moon had become Svarozhits’ axe, now the sun was also the blazing eye of a god enough like the other to be brother or father. George bowed his head against Crotus’ back. If that burning gaze fell on him, he would be nothing but ash blowing in the breeze.

And the Slavic wizards summoned yet another god to their aid bellowing out his name: “Triglav! Triglav! Triglav!” Unlike his comrades, Triglav was rooted to the earth, and seemed strong with a boulder’s great strength. He had three conjoined heads on a single neck, which perhaps accounted for the wizards’ summoning him three times. He looked in all directions at the same time, and carried a great sword.

Had the great gods of the Slavs fallen on the centaurs, the fight, such as it was, would have been over in moments. But the wizards had not summoned them into the world to deal with a minor annoyance, but rather to crush the great city that had resisted the Slavs and Avars for so long. And so Perun and Triglav, Svarog and Svarozhits swung their ponderous attention toward Thessalonica.

Not only did the walls of the city seem distant to George, but also tiny. The advancing gods would crush those walls underfoot, as a careless man might crush a child’s toy. “God, help Thy city!” George groaned.

He forgot all about the centaurs. Since the holy name was not aimed against them, it did them no harm. As a man will, George had sent up a great many prayers in his life, some to get this or that, some to avoid that or the other thing. As is God’s will, some were answered, some not. He had never had a prayer answered so spectacularly as this one.

From the walls of Thessalonica--and also, at the same time, from Father Luke on Elatus’ back, among the band of centaurs--shone a dear, white light, dispelling the gloom the clouds that were Perun had cast over the landscape. Having seen the Slavic gods manifest themselves on earth, the shoemaker expected he would also see God the Father, probably in the guise of an angry old man, appear to stand against them. Bishop Eusebius, Father Luke, and every other priest to whom he’d ever listened insisted God was uncircumscribable in that fashion, but, to George, uncircumscribable had been nothing but a big word. Now he began to understand.

In that glorious light, Svarozhits and Svarog all at once seemed pale, attenuated, like men stricken with consumption. Perun drew back his cloak of clouds, as if to protect himself from the divine radiance. Triglav paused, seeming frozen in his tracks.

But neither the gods nor the wizards of the Slavs were to be despised, nor, for that matter, was the Avar priest who led them as Bishop Eusebius led the Christian hierarchs of Thessalonica. The Avar shouted angrily to the wizards. The wizards screamed at their gods. And the gods regained a measure of the strength and purpose they had lost in the first fierce glow of God’s power.

Triglav stumped forward once more, sword held high. Perun unveiled his features, to show his furious face. Lightnings rippled round the edges of his cloud-cloak. Svarog’s solar eye cast a fierce light of its own. Svarozhits swung his axe, and the heavens seemed to tremble as the moon moved.

The Litaean Gate opened. Out rode a horseman, gorgeous in the parade armor of a bygone era. The Roman cavalrymen carved on the arch of pagan Galerius had gear rather like his. But he was no pagan: he glowed with the same light as had given the Slavic gods pause. “St. Demetrius!” George shouted joyfully.

As if naming the saint had given him fresh force, he lowered his lance and rode straight for Triglav. The Slavic god did not give back a step, but swung his savage sword and bellowed harsh defiance from three throats at once. Demetrius’ lance was aimed straight at his broad chest. The hooves of the saint’s horse thundered like--like those of a centaur, George thought. Though he rode one, he had almost forgotten the centaurs, transfixed as he was by the clash of greater powers.

But the centaurs were still very much in the fray. Crotus hurled a fist-sized stone at the Avar wizard’s head. It hit the sorcerer just above his left ear. He crumpled, limp as a sack of barley. The centaurs roared with delight. The Slavic wizards also cried out, in horror. Stones started fading among them--and striking home, too.

All at once, the marshy ground to which the fight had been transferred faded, returning it--and George, and the centaurs, and the wizards--to the lands the shoemaker knew. It was, he thought, at last a good day. Sunshine streamed down from a sky free of Slavic gods. No divine radiance shone forth from Thessalonica’s wall (where George could see Bishop Eusebius’ bright robes) or from Father Luke, but that was a fair trade. George looked around. No sign of St. Demetrius, but no sign of three-headed Triglav, either. That was a fair trade, too.

Now the centaurs were on solid ground once more. Where they had wallowed forward through mud to get close enough to the Avar priest and Slavic wizards to do them any harm, now they could gallop once more. They might have been an avalanche rolling down on the sorcerers. The Slavs fled from the fire, screaming. It did them no good. The centaurs thundered after them (trampling the unconscious Avar underfoot), flinging stones, seizing with hands, kicking out with hooves. From Crotus’ back, George slashed till his arm was sore.

The massacre took bare moments to finish. George looked around to see what the centaurs might do next. With some astonishment, he realized they didn’t have to do anything more. The wizards must have promised the Slavs and Avars that this last push, with their great gods brought forth to back them, would surely let them break into Thessalonica.

And now, with success promised, they and their warriors had faded. Having failed, and having faded so unexpectedly, the barbarians must have decided nothing could make their siege succeed. Avars in scalemail and Slavs in hides and linen began streaming away from Thessalonica. Here and there, a chieftain from one people or the other tried to persuade his men to hold fast. It did no good. Nothing did any good now, not in holding the siege together. George watched a band of Slavs mob a chief who tried once too often to hold them to the fighting.

“We did it!” the shoemaker shouted, and pounded on Crotus’ back with a hand he detached for a moment from Perseus’ cap. “We did it!” He let out a great ringing shout of joy.

Great ringing shouts of joy rose from the walls of Thessalonica, too, as the defenders of the city watched the siege break up before their eyes. Gates opened. militiamen came forth to harry the Slavs and Avars as they withdrew. A few of the militiamen stared in wonder at the still-rampaging centaurs and tried to approach them. More, though, paid them no attention whatever, as if doing their best to pretend, perhaps even to themselves, that the creatures from a bygone era did not, could not, exist in modern, Christian times.

From the wall, faint but unmistakable, came Bishop Eusebius’ voice: “In the name of God, in the name of Jesus Christ, in the name of the holy martyr St. Demetrius, let all pagan powers depart this land. May it henceforth be free of them forevermore!”

Beneath George, Crotus shuddered as if an arrow had pierced its vitals. Behind him, all the centaurs cried out. They began to move away from Thessalonica. Even mad with wine, they could not bear the power of holy names directed specifically against them. The last thing George wanted was to be taken away from Thessalonica when he’d gone through so much to get back there. As carefully as he could, he slid from Crotus’ back to the ground.

That turned out not to be carefully enough. He couldn’t keep his feet, but went down onto his backside. Perseus’ cap fell off his head. He grabbed it and started to put it back on, but then, when a centaur dodged around him, realized that might not be a good idea right away. If the centaurs saw him, they could avoid him. If they didn’t see him, they’d trample him without knowing he was there.

Impelled by the name of God, the band of centaurs fled back up into the hills with amazing speed. Not a bowshot away from George, Father Luke stood staring back at their retreating hindquarters. He waved to the shoemaker. George waved, too, and walked toward him.

Father Luke clapped him on the back when he came up. “Thank you,” the priest said. “I want to tell you, this has been, I think, the most astonishing day of my life, and I wouldn’t have had the chance to take part in these great events if not for you.”

“If that’s how you look at things, Your Reverence, you’re welcome,” said George, who would have been as happy-- happier--to have had no part whatever in these great events. “And will you thank me tomorrow? When you go back into the city, you’ll have to explain to Bishop Eusebius what you’ve been doing.”

“He will set me a penance, I will accept and perform it, and we’ll go on as we did before,” the priest answered. “With the siege broken and Thessalonica delivered from the Slavs and Avars, he may not be too harsh.”

“I hope you’re right,” George said.

Father Luke looked concerned. “But what of you, George? You still have troubles with Menas. I will do all I can for you, but I do not know how much that will be. Menas is a powerful man. He had a will of his own even before God gave him back the use of his legs, and now--”

By way of answer, George did put Perseus’ cap on again. He patted Father Luke on the back. Then, when the priest turned one way, he went around and tapped him on the other shoulder. Father Luke turned again. George patted him on the head. A moment later, he poked him in the ribs. A grin stretched across the shoemaker’s face. Father Luke could not see that grin, which was exactly the point.

“I think I can manage,” George said out of thin air.

“I think you may be right,” Father Luke admitted, fortunately not angry at the cavalier way the shoemaker had treated him. “Try not to be so ferocious in your rejoinder that you make a new martyr.”

“I’ll--try,” George said grudgingly. Menas hadn’t shown any such restraint toward him. Menas had done his level best to get him killed, and the rich noble’s best had almost been good enough.

“Good.” Father Luke started walking toward Thessalonica George followed invisibly. The gates remained open. Some militiamen were still corning out to pursue the Slavs and Avars. Others, many with light wounds, came back into the city. No one paid much attention to Father Luke as he walked toward the Litaean Gate. No one paid any attention to George at all. Invisibility had its advantages.

On the other hand, he might have painted himself orange with green stripes and got into Thessalonica unchallenged right then. So long as the men coming in didn’t look like Slavs or Avars, the guards who stayed at the gates weren’t bothering them. The guards were not in a bothering mood. They were passing a jar of wine back and forth. He wondered what Rufus would say about that. Give me some, most likely. George walked past the guards into the city.