“Don’t do that. I’ll pay you. I’ll pass it along to my customers, so they can grumble at me, the same way I’m grumbling at you.” George laid money on the counter in front of the bronzeworker. “If we run out of other copper, we can melt down folleis.”
“No profit in it--not yet,” Benjamin answered. George had meant it for a joke, but the Jew had plainly made the calculation.
The shoemaker took the buckles and started out of the shop. He almost ran into a youth coming in. The youngster showed clearly what Benjamin had looked like at about twelve. His dark stare wasn’t aimed at George for having almost collided with him, but at everyone not a Jew for everything that had happened to all the Jews for the past two thousand years.
Benjamin said, “It’s all right, Joseph. George is a very good . . customer.”
“All right, Father,” the youth said, and bobbed his head to George. Tm sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to bump you.” He sounded as if he meant it. His eyes, though--George did not fancy facing those eyes.
“No harm done, Joseph,” George said, speaking to him as if he -were a man. Joseph nodded, polite but distant. Suddenly, George wished with all his heart that Benjamin had called him a good man, not a good customer. No help for it. The Jews didn’t have it easy, and they saw no point in making it easy for anyone else. He didn’t suppose he could blame them. Buckles jingling in his belt pouch, he left the bronzeworker’s shop.
“The Lord keep you safe,” Benjamin called after him. He waved to show he’d heard, but feared he’d gone too far for the Jew to see the gesture.
He’d intended bringing the buckles straight back to his shop and getting to work, but found himself waylaid when he walked past Dactylius’ place. The little jeweler dashed out the door toward him as fast as if he’d had a swarm of Slavs on his tail. “Come on in, George,” he said, grabbing his friend’s arm. “Your wife and daughter deserve some pretties--Claudia told me you fixed her sandal.”
“I’d almost forgotten,” George said. “Listen, Dactylius, I really ought to--”
Dactylius wasn’t listening to him--or letting go of his arm, either. “Come, come, come,” he said. It was either come or pry him loose with a stick. George came.
As soon as he walked inside the jeweler’s shop, he sneezed. That happened about every other time he went into the shop, which smelled of hot metal and of the abrasive powders Dactylius used to shine it and to polish his precious stones.
“Here, let me give you these while I still can,” Dactylius said, presenting him with thin bracelets of bright bronze.
From the back room, Claudia asked in indignant tones, “What goes on? What are you giving away now, Dactylius? The whole shop, most likely.” But when she came out to see what was going on and found the shoemaker there, her manner changed. “Oh, it’s you, George. That’s all right, then.”
George hefted the bracelets. More ordinary ornaments he had never seen. “Why wouldn’t you be able to give me these later?” he asked.
“Why? Because they wouldn’t be here later, that’s why,” Dactylius said, as if that were self-explanatory. Seeing it wasn’t, he motioned George over to his worktable. “There. Now do you understand?”
“Oh. You’ve gone into the arrowhead business, too,” George said. “Well, yes, all right, that does make sense. Benjamin the bronzeworker is doing the same thing, for the same reason.”
Dactylius nodded. “Yes, I can see how he would be.”
Claudia, though, let out an indignant screech from the doorway to the back room. “They have my husband, my brilliant artist of a husband, doing the same thing as a no-account Jew? Darling, you have to tell the bishop you’re quitting, and right this minute. The insult!”
“I want to think about that before I do it,” Dactylius said.
What George wanted to say to Claudia was, Are you out of your mind? What he did say was, “An arrowhead doesn’t care who makes it.”
“That’s not true,” Claudia said, advancing on him so she could argue nose-to-nose with anyone presumptuous enough to disagree with her. “How is the holy Bishop Eusebius supposed to bless an arrowhead made by some nasty Jew instead of a good Christian man?”
It was a good question--a better question, in fact, than George had looked for from Claudia. After discarding two possible answers, he came up with one he hoped might satisfy her: “Since the bishop gave Benjamin the work, he doesn’t seem worried about it.”
Claudia sniffed. “That’s his foolishness.” A moment before, he’d been the holy bishop Eusebius; now he was a fool. Had she been born a man, Claudia might have had a fine career in the law courts. She went on, “I still say it’s a shame and a disgrace for Dactylius and a Jew to both be doing the same thing.”
“We’re all inside the city together, dear,” Dactylius said hesitantly.
“Maybe if we gave the Jews to the Slavs and Avars …” Claudia began.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” George said with what he thought of as commendable restraint.
“It probably wouldn’t satisfy them,” Claudia agreed mournfully. That wasn’t what George had meant, or, for that matter, anything close to what he’d meant. He supposed he should have been happy he’d got her to reconsider, whatever the reason. After thanking Dactylius again for the bracelets, he beat a hasty retreat.
Sophia smiled when he gave her the bangle, but said, “Couldn’t you have found something nicer?”
“Not the way things are now,” George answered, and explained what both Benjamin and Dactylius were busy doing. He added, “Claudia isn’t very happy that her husband has had to come down in the world so.”
“Claudia isn’t very happy,” Irene said with an air of finality. “I’m just glad you managed to get the buckles.”
“Some buckles,” George said. “Fewer than I would have liked.” He shrugged. “You do the best you can with what you have. When I’ve used all these, I’ll make boots for a while. If we haven’t got rid of the Slavs and Avars by then … well, we’re liable to be down to eating leather by then instead of turning it into shoes.”
Sophia made a face. “You’re making that up!” She looked at him. Real worry replaced playacted disgust. “No. You’re not.”
“You do the best you can with what you have,” George repeated. “If you don’t have much, you do the best you can with what little you do.”
“I hope it won’t come to that,” Irene said.
“So do I,” George said. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t. We all hoped the plague wouldn’t come to Thessalonica again--but it did.” He looked around the shop. “Well, if it comes down to eating boded leather, we’ll have a better supply than almost anyone else.”
“That’s true,” Irene said with a smile.
Sophia giggled. “I’d like to see Dactylius eat his stock in trade.”
“He couldn’t do it,” George agreed solemnly. “But do you know what? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Claudia could.”
Dactylius pointed out from the wall. “What are they doing out there?” he said. “They ought to be trying to get inside the city every moment of the day and night.” He sounded indignant, as if the Slavs and Avars were falling down on the job.
“You work all the time yourself,” George said, and Dactylius nodded vigorously. “I work all the time myself-- or I did, before this siege turned everything topsy-turvy.” Even if he was almost out of buckles again, with no great prospect of getting more, he still wished he were back in the shop. “But the Slavs and Avars don’t seem to do things the same way we do. They make a push and put everything they have into it. If it doesn’t work, they loll around for a while till they’re ready to try something else.”
Lolling around they certainly were, for the time being, anyhow. They sat around campfires (days were chilly now, nights frankly cold), passing wineskins back and forth. Some of them shot dice. Some sang songs whose music echoed in George’s head even if the words were unintelligible.
“If Rufus saw them like this, he’d scream for a sally right now,” Dactylius said. The thin little jeweler seemed to puff himself out into the shape and choleric aspect of the veteran. George clapped his hands; it was a fine bit of mimicry.
But applause or not, he shook his head. “He’s seen them this way, and he’s all for sitting quiet. They may be idle, but they haven’t forgotten what they’re supposed to be doing. See how they have sentries round all the engines, ready to protect them if we do stick our noses outside the gates? I wouldn’t be surprised if they were trying to lure us out.”
“Maybe so,” Dactylius said, not sounding as if he believed it. He hesitated, then went on, quite as if he wasn’t changing the subject, “I am still making arrowheads, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know,” George said, “but I thought you would, because you have too much sense to do anything else.” Then it was his turn to hesitate. “I hope your wife’s not too upset over what you’re doing.”
“I managed to persuade her it was necessary.” The jeweler’s smile was wry. “Every now and then, I do win an argument.”
“Good for you,” George said, wondering whether to believe it, wondering whether his friend fully believed it. “Nobody should win all the time, unless it’s us Romans over the barbarians, and that’s not the same thing.” Claudia, now, Claudia was as fierce as any Avar ever hatched, but Dactylius undoubtedly knew more on that score than he did.
A troop of Avars came by, armored men on surprisingly big armored horses. Just by the way they rode, they gave the impression of owning everything they surveyed, and owning it beyond hope of challenge. George hadn’t seen many of the nomads since the siege began. Compared to the numbers of their Slavic subjects, he didn’t think there were many Avars. But every time he did see a few, he understood why the Slavs obeyed them.
“I wouldn’t want to go up against those fellows in the open field,” he said, “not even if I were betting a copper follis to -win a gold solidus.”