“On that we do not disagree,” Eusebius said. “On a good many other matters, I suspect such a statement would be as false as any from Ananias’ lips.”
“Maybe,” George said, stolid still. “But I didn’t come here to tell you about anything else.”
Underneath that impassive shell, he was troubled. Once a bishop started worrying about--and worrying at--your theology, he generally didn’t let go till he’d made you sorry you ever crossed his path. And Eusebius, being more aggressively pious than a lot of his fellows, had a worse name for that than most.
The inspiration--if not divine, certainly convenient-- struck George. “Because you’re prefect now, Your Excellency, or pretty much prefect, anyway, I was sure you wouldn’t want any danger to come to Thessalonica.”
“Of course not,” Eusebius said at once. “Protecting the city is the most important thing I can do, the garrison being gone and the secular leaders away petitioning the Emperor Maurice.” Sure enough, George had managed to distract him, to make him think of Thessalonica rather than satyrs.
“How can we fight demons that defeat even holy priests?” the shoemaker asked, wanting to keep Eusebius’ mind away from him and on the bigger picture. That’s only proper, George thought, remembering the mosaics that made the basilica of St. Demetrius so splendid. If you look at one tessera, you don’t see anything in particular. But if you look at what all the tiles do when they’re working together. . .
He’d also chosen the right question to ask Eusebius. The bishop said, “We can--we shall--we must--do two things. First, we must reconsecrate ourselves and bring our lives into closer accord with God’s will, so that other powers will be less able to get a grip on us. And, second, we must make certain the walls of Thessalonica remain strong and the militia alert. For have you not seen how such sorceries seek to weaken not just the spiritual but also the material defenses set against them and those who make them?”
“Yes, I have seen that, Your Excellency,” George answered, surprised now in his turn: he hadn’t figured Eusebius would reckon material defenses as important is he obviously did.
The bishop said, “What else have you learned of the powers the Slavs, in their ignorance, prefer to the holy truth of God?”
He did not ask where George had learned whatever else he’d learned. The shoemaker took that as a tacit promise not to raise the issue of satyrs anymore. He didn’t mention his source again, either, replying, “I hear they have other powers nearly as strong as the wolves. I cannot really speak about that because of what I’ve seen with my own eyes, though when I was on sentry-go one night, I did see a bat, or maybe two bats, that weren’t like any natural bats I’ve spied before.”
“Are you certain of this?” Eusebius asked.
“No, Your Excellency,” George said at once. “Plenty of people must know more about bats than I do, but I can’t think of anyone who knows less. Who pays attention to bats?”
“Who, indeed?” the bishop said. “Well, God willing, perhaps we shall yet be able to keep Thessalonica from being interred in a blood-filled, barbarous sarcophagus. If this be so, you, George, shall have played no small part in the preservation of the city, thanks to this information you have brought me. I am grateful, and no doubt God is grateful as well.” He started fiddling with his pen, a sure sign he’d given George all the time he’d intended.
George rose and, after bowing to Eusebius, made his way out of the prelate’s office. As he strode up its central aisle, he paid more attention to the basilica of St. Demetrius than he was in the habit of doing. Just being inside the church dedicated to the martial saint made him feel stronger and braver than he did anywhere else in the city: more like a real soldier than a militiaman.
After walking past the ciborium and then out of the basilica, he turned back toward it and sketched a salute of the same sort as he might have given to Rufus. If St. Demetrius could extend his influence over all of Thessalonica, if he could make everyone feel stronger than without his intercession . . . that might help, if the two Slavs George had encountered outside the city were, as he feared, the harbingers of more.
But, as George walked north and mostly west back toward his shop, his home, his family, and away from the shrine, the feeling faded, until he was only himself again, and oddly diminished on account of that. He forced his shoulders to straighten and his stride to lengthen. Even without the saint s beneficent influence close by, he remained himself.
“Blood-filled, barbarous sarcophagus,” he muttered under his breath, which made a woman walking in the other direction give him a strange look and move a little farther away from him. He didn’t blame her; he would have moved away from anyone mumbling about a blood-filled sarcophagus, too.
It s Eusebius’ fault, he thought. The bishop pulled out funereal images at any excuse or none. George glanced toward the walls of Thessalonica. Surely, they would not be the walls of a stone coffin to enclose the corpse of the city.
He shook his head. “He’s got me doing it,” he said, which made someone else give him a sidelong glance.
Irene rounded on him when he walked in the door. “I thought you weren’t coming back,” she said indignantly. “I thought Eusebius wouldn’t let you come back. You told him about the satyr, didn’t you?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “I knew you were going to tell him about the satyr. Why did you go and tell him about the satyr?”
“It was either that or tell him lies,” George answered. “Would you rather I told a holy man lies?”
“Of course I would,” Irene answered with the same certainty and lack of hesitation George used when imparting what was, with luck, wisdom to Theodore or, more rarely, Sophia. How could you be so foolish as to think otherwise? Her tone demanded.
George usually accepted such rebukes from her, because he knew he usually deserved them when he got them. Today, though, he balked. “I went to tell the bishop about the Slavs and about their demons,” he said. “It was only natural for him to ask how I knew what I knew. When he did ask me that, I didn’t see what choice I had but to tell him the truth, so he could know how seriously to take the news I was giving him.”
Irene muttered something under her breath. George thought it was “Men!” but felt disinclined to inquire more closely. As with theology, some of the more subtle points of marriage were better taken on faith than examined under the piercing lamp of reason. In any case, Irene had a good deal to say that wasn’t under her breath: “If he had taken you seriously, George, he might have felt he had to do something like ask questions about how you came to be talking with a satyr, not chasing it off with the sign of the cross.” The look in her eye said she still wondered the same thing; she was more pious than he. She went on, “Would you really have liked, say, a couple of years’ penance for doing that?”
“No, I wouldn’t have liked that,” he admitted. “But I didn’t think he would do anything to me, because the news was more important than how I got it.” Before she could interrupt, he held up a hand. “And I was right. Remember that--I was right.” He felt no small sense of pride; in an argument with Irene, he seldom got to say that.
As things turned out, it did him no good even when he did get to say it. “It was a foolish chance to take,” Irene retorted. “What you gained by doing it wasn’t worth the risk.”
“I thought it was,” George said, but that took the argument out of the realm of fact and back into opinion. He tried a slightly different tack: “It’s done now, and it worked out all right.” Irene thought that over, then grudgingly nodded. That meant the argument was over, too, which suited George fine.
III
More people began encountering Slavs in the woods. A couple of men who went out hunting didn’t come back. George was on a search party that went out after one of them. He found no trace of the missing hunter. He found no trace that the man had fallen foul of the Slavs, but nothing to prove the fellow hadn’t, either. Whatever had happened to him, he never showed his face in Thessalonica again. George, along with most other people, suspected the worst.
The roads from the north grew crowded with farmers fleeing the ever-growing presence of the Slavs--and, presumably, their Avar overlords, though the Slavs were the folk on everyone’s lips. Some of the peasants took refuge in the city. Others kept going, hoping to find lands he barbarians would not penetrate.
With the peasants came priests and monks, driven from churches and monasteries by the inroads of the barbarians. The monks, many of them, took refuge in the monasteries surrounding Thessalonica; the priests came into the city itself, to help serve its churches while theirs lay under the control of the Slavs and Avars. Suddenly the divine services had far more officiants than were needed, so that the holy men had to take turns performing them. When the refugee priests were not celebrating the liturgy, they gathered in the market square and told their harrowing tales to whoever would listen and perhaps toss a follis or two into the begging bowls they put out in front of them.
George wondered whether the copper coins they collected would go to the ravaged churches from which they had fled, to the churches of Thessalonica in which they sheltered, or into their own pouches. He did not know whether others had that same doubt. People who were clever enough to have the question occur to them were also clever enough not to voice it.
The priests drew considerable crowds. George listened along with everyone else, but kept his money to himself as long as the priests talked about the merely human destruction they had experienced or seen. The world was a harsh place, and war unceasing: unfortunate, certainly, but also unsurprising.
But then one of the refugees, a man who, by his theatrical gestures and carefully balanced sentences, had had more than the usual share of rhetorical training, said, “Nor is the energy from this vicious and brutal plunder and rapine derived from this world alone. For the Slavs and Avars bring with them a new host of barbarous powers against whom the true God and His Son Jesus Christ shall have to contend and whom They shall have to overcome by virtue of their superior prowess.”
Someone--not George--called out, “Doesn’t the Lord cast out all demons?” After a moment, the shoemaker recognized John’s voice. Not content with scoring points off people in the taverns he frequented and off his fellow militiamen, now he was trying to get a priest angry at him. If John lived to be old, George would be astonished.
The priest, however, took the question seriously, answering, “In the end, the triumph of the Lord is inevitable: so it has been written; so it shall be. But the path to that end is not known, and much misery surely lies along it until it be traveled to the fullest.” George waited to hear what John would make of that. The tavern comic made nothing whatever of it, falling silent instead. As silently, George wished his friend would show such good sense more often.
“For now, the spirits attending the Slavs and Avars, being puffed up with arrogance on account of the victories those folk have won over us Christians, vaunt themselves and exult in their strength, and are difficult even for pious folk to withstand successfully,” the priest said, which was not only true but explained to his audience why he and his fellows had had to retreat from the Slavic powers instead of easily beating them, as the old pagan Greek spirits were beaten these days. “We must do not what we want to do, but what God wants us to do.”
His audience murmured in approval. But then, unfortunately, John started up again, asking the priest, “What does that mean, what God wants us to do? Should we be more fierce, so we can beat the barbarians and make their powers weaken, or should we be more pious, so God will take better care of us?”
The priest gaped at him. If he’d just answered both, he would have done well and probably made John shut up, an act of virtue in itself. But John had asked whether it meant one or the other, and the priest (whose wits were, excusably, perhaps not at their swiftest then) took it that way and that way only. Any reply he gave, then, was but half a truth and, worse, contradicted the other half.
After tossing the priest a couple of coppers, George elbowed his way through the crowd and caught John by the arm. The tavern comic whirled. He started to grab for the knife on his belt before he saw who had hold of him. Just in case he didn’t feel like stopping--his temper could turn nasty--George squeezed a little harder. He had large, strong hands. “Come along with me,” he said in a pleasant tone of voice. “Suppose I don’t feel like it?” John said. He wasn’t going for his knife, but he wasn’t coming along, either.
George started walking. He did not let go of John. Since he was bigger and stronger than his fellow militiaman and sometimes friend, John got moving, too. He yelped. Then he cursed. If he did try to take out that knife, George figured he’d kick him where it would do the most good. If that didn’t distract John, he didn’t know what would.
“Turn me loose,” John said.
It was not an angry shout, and did not seem like a threat. George considered. “Will you come along if I do?” he asked. John did not say yes. But John did not say no, either. George chose to take that as assent, and let go of his arm. John did keep walking. Once they reached one of the little side streets that opened onto the market square, George stopped, turned to him, and said, “Do you want to know a secret? Getting a priest going in circles is cheap sport.”
“I liked it well enough,” John answered. “Priests always pretend they know everything. That makes them more fun to bait--same with drunks in taverns.”
“Baiting a drunk is one thing,” George said. “Nobody but him made him drunk. But it’s not that priest’s fault he’s here. All he did was keep from getting murdered by barbarians or eaten by wolf-demons. You can’t blame him for not knowing which end of the awl to hold right now.”
“Who says I can’t?” John demanded. “And if he’s not to blame for the way he acts, who is?” If John couldn’t play logic-chopping games with the priest, he’d play them with George.
The shoemaker, however, didn’t feel like playing. “Why don’t you ask the khagan of the Avars? I’ll bet he’d give you a better answer than that priest could.”
John glared at him. George looked back steadily. That look didn’t abash Theodore anymore, but John hadn’t been exposed to it so often. He shuffled his feet like a boy caught stealing grapes. “Sometimes you’re too serious for your own good,” he grumbled.
“Yes, that’s probably true,” George said, which only made John eye him with even more annoyance than he had before. George could make no sense of that. When he realized he could make no sense of it, he started laughing. He didn’t explain what he found funny. John got angrier still.
The next time George went out hunting, he saw neither satyrs nor Slavs. That suited him fine. He also saw one rabbit, and missed it, which pleased him and his wife not at all. “Look on the bright side,” he told her. “I don’t have to go tell anything to Bishop Eusebius.”