George understood that--by his own nature, he understood it better than most (and he’d been right himself, once or twice). Understanding didn’t keep him from boasting afterwards when, less than an hour after he said, “Well, they’ve tried magic, and that hasn’t worked, and they’ve tried rams, and those haven’t worked, and they’ve tried tortoises, and those haven’t worked, either, so they’ll likely get around to using the catapults they made when they started the siege,” the Slavs and Avars did exactly as he’d foretold.
Someone out there beyond the wall blew a raucous horn. The noise, which bore no closer resemblance to music than a vulture to a peacock, spurred the barbarian soldiers into action. Avars rode around on horseback, screaming at the much more numerous Slavs. Some of the Slavs picked up their bows and started shooting at the militiamen on the wall. Others picked up chunks of stone and loaded them into the catapults, which, kicking like mules, flung them not only at the militiamen but also at the walls themselves.
One of those stones, lucidly or cleverly aimed, hit a man less than fifty feet from George. Red sprayed out of the fellow. He dropped to the walkway, dead, without a word, without a sound, without a twitch. Having seen how hard human beings were to kill, let alone to kill cleanly, George viewed that with no small astonishment.
More stones, of course, slammed into the wall than into the people on top of it. To George’s frightened eyes, a lot of them looked big as islands. Every time one struck, the wall shivered under his feet, as if in pain. The shiverings ran together into what felt like an earthquake that would not stop. “What can we do?” Paul shouted in between the smashing of stone missiles on stone fortifications.
“I don’t know,” George answered helplessly. “Those catapults are out past arrow range.”
Thessalonica’s walls bore catapults of their own. After a bit of hesitation, the militiamen began shooting back at the ones the Slavs and Avars had built. They did not fling rocks at the foe, but jars of pitch and naphtha the men lighted as they launched them. When one of those jars hit the ground, it smashed and spilled fire over ten or fifteen feet.
But few of the enemy’s catapults burned. They were covered in hides to keep flame from sticking to them. Not even the inflammable mix the Romans hurled was enough to make the hides catch fire. Only when the hellbrew splashed onto a wooden casting-arm would the engine of which it formed a part begin to blaze.
A big stone stuck about ten feet below where George was standing. The wall shuddered. He shuddered, too. How many impacts like that would it take till the wall no longer shuddered but collapsed?
Heaped here and there along the wall, along with stones for hurling down on the foe (not enough stones, not after the assault with the tortoises) and cauldrons for heating water, lay mats and horse blankets roughly basted together: padding to protect the gray stone fortifications from the worst the stones might do. George and Paul, along with many other militiamen on the works, began lowering the mats and blankets, draping them over the outside of the wall, and weighting them in place with some of the stones they would otherwise have dropped on the Slavs’ heads.
They quickly discovered there was more wall than matting with which to cover it. They also discovered that covering it did only so much good, as the cloth they were using could not absorb all the force from the rocks the enemy’s catapults threw. But, as George said, “Now we’ve done what we can do. The rest is up to God.”
“And to the Slavs and Avars,” Paul added, to which the shoemaker had to nod, feeling more helpless than he had before the taverner spoke.
The bombardment went on for what seemed like forever but could not have been more than a couple of hours. Men on the wall were hurt. Some of them were killed. The wall itself took a fearful pounding: certainly a pounding that made George fearful. Here and there, stones shattered.
But, in the end, the Roman engineers and masons who’d designed and built the wall were vindicated. It did not collapse, as had in his alarmed imagination seemed likely. That must have seemed likely to the Slavs, too, for their archers kept drawing ever nearer, to rush into the city if the catapults forced a breach.
When the crews manning those catapults stopped shooting--perhaps because they ran out of stones, perhaps merely because they saw they were doing no good-- George and Paul the tavern-keeper solemnly clasped hands. “First mug of wine is free if you come to my place tonight,” Paul said, which struck George as a fitting enough tribute to what they’d been through together.
The aftermath put him in mind of nothing so much as what happened after a bad storm: he and his comrades on the wall looked around exclaiming at the damage that had been done and sharing one common refrain: “It could have been worse.” The disappointed bearing of the Slavs out beyond the wall gave mute testimony to how bad it could have been. They kept right on shooting arrows after the catapults left off trying to smash down the fortifications.
Paul shot back at the Slavs. “As long as they’re just sending arrows our way, I’m not going to worry,” he said.
“Neither will I,” George agreed. “They won’t get anywhere that way.”
They looked at each other. “We never would have talked like this before the siege started,” Paul said.
“I sure wouldn’t,” George replied, “never in my life. I remember what it felt like the first time a Slav shot at me. No one had ever done that before. But now--you’re right, arrows aren’t worth getting excited about.”
Rufus, for once, had not been up on the wall when trouble started. He got there a little while after the catapults had stopped flinging stones at the city. “Busy time you had, looks like,” he said, with which George could hardly disagree. The veteran peered down at the stones at the base of the wall. He let out a loud whistle. “Looks like they cut the tips off some mountains and tossed ‘em this way,” he remarked.
“That’s what it felt like,” George said, and Paul nodded.
“I believe it,” Rufus said. “I’ve been bombarded. It’s not what I’d care to do for fun, thank you very much.” He raised his voice so the militiamen along a big stretch of Thessalonica’s wall could hear him: “Let’s get this matting pulled up and stacked again. We may need it again, you know.”
As George hauled the lengths of thick cloth back over the wall, he said, “I didn’t see it helped very much.”
“It doesn’t help very much,” Rufus agreed. “But it does help some. You can’t know beforehand whether putting it down or not putting it down will make the difference between a wall that stays up and one that doesn’t, for no one hit makes a wall fall down. Since you can’t say beforehand, you don’t take the chance. You didn’t take the chance, and you were right.”
George knew Rufus wasn’t praising him personally, but praise from the veteran, even if aimed at all the defenders, felt good. Raising an eyebrow, the shoemaker asked, “Where were you, anyway? Hardly seemed like a proper fight without you running around up here screaming at us.”
“You’ll pay for that,” Rufus said, though he didn’t sound angry. “Where was I?” He peered this way and that. “I’ll tell you and Paul, but I don’t want it all over the city. I was closeted with Bishop Eusebius, is where I was. We’re trying to figure out how we’re doing.”
“All right, that makes sense,” George said, and then, as Rufus didn’t say anything more, “Well, how are we doing?”
“Fair,” the veteran answered. “I’d say fair would be a . . . fair way to put it.” Ignoring George’s groan and Paul’s sour look, he went on, “We’re low on a lot of things. We don’t have as much food or firewood as we ought to, and we aren’t as good with what we do have as we might be. Food and firewood and other things, I mean.” He pointed to the heaps of stones on the walkway. “We haven’t replenished those the way we should, for instance. The Slavs and Avars might try tortoises again, but nobody’s worrying about it. We have so many things to worry about; we can’t keep track of all of them at once, even if that’s what we need to do most. And it is.”
“We need a real general,” Paul observed. “You’ve worked wonders, Rufus, don’t take me wrong, but you never tried keeping track of a whole city before. Eusebius is used to doing that, but he doesn’t know what all soldiers need to keep track of.”
“You’re not as foolish as you look,” Rufus said, to which Paul, one of the least foolish looking men in Thessalonica, responded with a dry chuckle. Rufus continued, “A lot of what we talked about was just that: what all needed doing and who would take charge of doing it.”
“What was the rest?” George asked. Again, Rufus did not appear forthcoming. George said, “Come on, you just told us not to gossip. Now out with it.”
Rufus let out a long sigh. Then he said, “Well, it’s not anything you haven’t seen for yourselves, and it’s not anything you couldn’t figure out for yourselves, either. The bishop’s not happy about how strong the powers of the Slavs and Avars have turned out to be.”
“He’s not happy?” Paul exclaimed. “I’m not happy, either. If they were mild little powers, the way everybody hoped, the Slavs and Avars would have given up on the siege a long time ago.”
“I tried to tell him,” George said. “Before we saw even a single Slav around the city, I tried to tell him. He was polite to me, and made as if he believed what I was saying, but it must not have sunk in till he saw it for himself.”
“Life is like that,” Rufus said. “If we really learned things from what other people told us, we’d all be smarter and richer than we are right now, and fathers wouldn’t want to clout their sons over the head with rocks about the time the brats started shaving.”
“Amen to that,” George said with a laugh. “And speaking of brats who haven’t been shaving long, I think I’m going to bring Theodore up onto the wall with me next time it’s my shift. He knows how to shoot a bow, so he won’t be altogether useless up here, and it’s about time he has a look at the way this particular part of the world works.”
“Aye, go ahead and do that,” Rufus told him. “First battle, first brothel--those are the memories that’ll stick with you, even when you get old. I ought to know about that, eh?”
“If I’m as hale as you are when I have your years, I won’t be doing too bad,” George said. He hoped he managed to pile on as many years as Rufus had, in whatever shape he might be at that time. The veteran had to be getting close to his threescore and ten, but George had seen again and again how much vitality he still had in him. George caught himself in a yawn. He didn’t have all that much vitality himself these days.
Theodore flew up the stairs to the top of the wall. George plodded after him. The shoemaker was still feeling anything but vital. Maybe Rufus should have taken Theodore up on the wall, not the youth’s tired old father.
When George got to the top and looked out toward the encampment of the Slavs and Avars, Theodore was already taking aim at the first Slav he saw who wasn’t impossibly far out of arrow range. George made him rum the bow aside before any of the other militiamen had to come rushing over and do it for him.
“But, Father!” Theodore exclaimed, aghast. “That’s the enemy!” By the way he spoke, the skinny, draggled-looking Slav at whom he wanted to shoot might have been the general commanding the barbarians, not a tired soldier who looked to want nothing so much as a mug of wine and a place close by the fire to sleep.
“When the Slavs shoot at us, we shoot at them,” George said patiently. “When they don’t shoot, we don’t do much shooting, either. For one thing, it wastes arrows. For another, if we start shooting at them, they’ll start shooting at us, and more of us are liable to get hurt. If they’re quiet, we’re happy enough to let ‘em stay that way.”
Everyone within earshot nodded. Theodore proved the point Rufus had made a couple of days before, saying, “But if they’re the enemy, we need to kill them. How can we kill them if we don’t shoot at them?”
“All we need to do is keep them out of Thessalonica,” George said. “We don’t have to kill them. If they can’t get in, sooner or later they’ll go away.”
Dactylius came up onto the wall then. He beamed at Theodore, and failed to notice Theodore wasn’t beaming back. “Young blood,” the little jeweler said. “Young blood. Makes me feel old and useless.”
“You know what young blood was going to do?” one of the nearby militiamen said. “He was going to start shooting at the first Slav he saw, and probably go right on shooting after that. Christe eleison, we’d have been ducking for days if George here hadn’t stopped him.”
Theodore looked and sounded ready to burst. “This isn’t fighting!” he said. “This is all make-believe and cowardice!”
A couple of militiamen laughed, which only made matters worse. But before Theodore could do or say anything irrevocable, George looked out from the wall. “Hello,” he said, and then, to Theodore, “Son, if you want fighting, I’m afraid you may get it.” He pointed toward the troop of Avars riding out of their encampment toward Thessalonica.
As they did whenever he saw them, the Avars alarmed him. Part of that was their gear: not only did they armor themselves in scalemail from head to foot, they armored their horses the same way. Part of it was their horsemanship: they might almost have been centaurs, attached to their mounts from birth. And part of it was the arrogance that flowed off them in waves, the feeling that they were convinced they were the toughest people in the world.