He wasn’t the only one who got that feeling, either. Dactylius said, “They give you the chills just looking at them, don’t they? I’m glad they let the Slavs do so much of the dirty work for them.”
“Yes,” George said, warily watching the Avars shake themselves out from a column to a line paralleling the wall. They were, he thought, still out of arrow range of the militiamen on the wall. They did not share his opinion. Instead of quivers, they carried cases holding both bow and arrows. As if inspired by a single will, they took out the bows and started shooting.
Those bows must have been better than the ones the Slavs used--better than the ones the militiamen on the walls of Thessalonica used, too. The fellow who’d been mocking Theodore’s aggressive inexperience made a hideous gobbling noise and toppled over onto his side. His hands clutched at the arrow that had suddenly sprouted from his neck. Bright red blood streamed out between his fingers and puddled on the walkway. It steamed in the chill air of early morning. The militiaman’s feet drummed and were still.
Theodore stared, eyes wide. George set a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to get some fighting whether we want it or not,” he said. “The Avars aren’t going to care whether we and the Slavs spend the next week shooting at each other. You’ve got that bow. You’d better use it now.”
Before Theodore could, an arrow hissed between him and his father. He jumped, coming to the same horrible realization George had at the start of the siege: people out there were trying to kill him. Then he shouted several words George had never heard him use at home, yanked an arrow from his quiver, and let fly at the Avars.
George thought that a healthy reaction. But after Theodore had sent a couple of more arrows after the first, the shoemaker said, “Take it easy, son. They have better bows than we do, so they can reach the wall and we probably can’t hit them.”
Theodore stared at him as if he’d started speaking Slavic. George realized the youth hadn’t had the slightest idea where his arrows were going, except that he was shooting at the foe. He said, “You’re right, Father. I see that. But what keeps them from--?”
Before he could finish the question, an Avar arrow pierced another militiaman not far away. The fellow howled like a wolf, then started cursing in such a manner as to leave Theodore’s earlier bad language in the shade. “Christ’s stinking foreskin, I’m bleeding like a stuck hog!” he shouted. “Hold a bowl under me, and you can make blood sausage tomorrow.” He plainly wasn’t on the point of death, but as plainly wasn’t happy with what life had just given him, either.
Theodore tried again: “What keeps the Avars from doing what they’re doing: shooting at us from so far away we can’t shoot back?”
“Our bows can’t reach them,” George answered. “Our catapults can.”
Now the engines on top of the walls of Thessalonica were not engaging the stone-throwers the Avars had built. They were taking on the Avars themselves, and throwing stones themselves, not fire. Theodore cheered when a frying rock knocked a horse and rider flat. But he watched thoughtfully as the animal and the man writhed about, with neither one of them showing any sign of being able to get up.
The Avars’ scalemail turned ordinary arrows at long range (Dactylius told Theodore the story of the Avar he’d hit but hadn’t hurt, and then for good measure told it over again). No matter how far away the nomad horsemen were, though, when a dart hit them, it struck home. An Avar let out a shriek clearly audible from the wall when one of those darts pinned his leg to the horse he was riding. The horse shrieked, too, and galloped madly away, but soon went crashing down. Again, George didn’t think it or its rider would be of much use after that.
With the Romans’ catapults in the fight, the Avars moved even farther from the wall than they had been. Their arrows began falling short. Seeing that, they abandoned their effort as abruptly as they had started it, trotting back toward their encampment with hardly a backward glance.
“We did it, Father!” Theodore burst out. “We drove them away!”
“That’s true,” George said. “We did.” He didn’t say anything about the militiaman who had caught the arrow in the neck and who now lay dead only a few feet away. Nor did he look in the direction of the dead man. Somehow he contrived, by not saying and not looking, to allude to the man as loudly as if he’d shouted.
Loudly himself, at least at the outset, Theodore said, “That wouldn’t happen to me. There’s no way in the world that could . . .” His voice, which had been fading, traded away altogether as he obviously remembered the arrow that hadn’t missed him by much.
“He did well,” Dactylius said. “He did very well.” Without children of his own, Dactylius didn’t have to worry about raising them. He would, in fact, have made a splendid indulgent grandfather.
But he wasn’t altogether wrong, either, not here. George nodded. “Aye, he’ll do,” he said. “He kept shooting at the Avars--even if he wanted to start too bloody soon-- and he didn’t start puking when people got hurt around him.”
“You sound like Rufus.” Theodore laughed.
George didn’t. “Rufus may be old and crude, but I’ll tell you this, son: if there’s one thing in the world he knows, it’s what makes a soldier and what doesn’t. When I’m talking about soldiers, I don’t mind at dl if I sound like him.”
He waited for Theodore or Dactylius to argue with him. Neither of them did. Dactylius nodded. Theodore changed the subject: “Why do you suppose the Avars started shooting at us like that? You said the Slavs and we were happy enough to live and let live.”
“I don’t think the Avars are happy letting anything live that they don’t rule,” George answered. “Maybe they thought the Slavs have been getting too soft and they needed to make the fight livelier. Maybe some general of theirs came by and they were showing off for him. Maybe they just felt mean and wanted to kill themselves some Romans.”
“Does it matter?” Dactylius added.
“It might,” Theodore said. “If we knew why they did what they do, we might be able to keep them from doing it.”
Dactylius looked over toward George. “Anyone would think he was your son,” he said.
“I can’t imagine why,” the shoemaker answered, his voice dry but a sparkle in his eye. Theodore scowled at both of them. He didn’t think he sounded like his father. He didn’t think he thought like his father, either. All that proved, as far as George was concerned, was that he remained very young.
“Another blow with weapons,” Dactylius said musingly. “I suppose that means they’ll try something magical next.”
“They don’t seem willing or able to do both at once, do they?” George said. “I wouldn’t mind rattling them again with our own power. That sickness Eusebius called down on them left them this far” --he held thumb and forefinger close together-- “from having to up and go.”
“I thought the nature of the plague was that they had to up and go, Father,” Theodore said, so innocently that George had no more than a momentary temptation to pitch him off the wall onto his head.
“Anyone would think …” Dactylius repeated.
“My jokes aren’t that bad,” George said, his voice full of affronted dignity. “He couldn’t possibly be John’s son. John wasn’t anywhere near Thessalonica nine months before he was born.”
Theodore turned red. Soldiers chaffed one another harder than his friends did. And George, ever so slightly, was chaffing his mother, too. “Father!” he said, and his voice betrayed him, sliding up into a boyish treble for the second syllable of the word.
“Don’t worry about it, boy; I’m joking. Your mother would hit me if she heard me, but not very hard,” George said, adding, “If you’re worried about what she’s thinking, go home and show her you’re all right. She was convinced the only reason I’d taken you up here was to get you killed.” That was another joke, but less so than Theodore probably thought.
“Will it be all right?” the youth asked doubtfully.
“Go ahead,” George told him. “I let Rufus know I was going to bring you up here today, to see how you’d do. But you’re not on any official list. I expect you can be by this time tomorrow, though, if that’s what you’d like-- all I’ve got to do is ask him to put you there. You fought well enough; no one can say you don’t deserve it.”
“All right, Father. If that’s what you think, that’s what we should do,” Theodore answered, a more subdued response than the whoop of ecstatic glee George had expected. Maybe a firsthand look at war had sobered his son after all. With a nod, Theodore descended from the wall.
“He’s a good boy, George. You should be proud of him,” Dactylius said. Just outside the wall fluttered one of those batlike spirits that had startled George and Dactylius on their first night patrol together. Its ugly little face twisted into a nasty leer as it echoed Dactylius’ words in a high, squeaky voice: “He’s a good boy, George. You should be very proud of him.” Whether it was meant for mockery or not, it sounded scornful.
“Begone, foul flying sprite!” George exclaimed, and made the sign of the cross at it.
It bared its teeth and flapped a few feet farther away, but seemed unharmed by the gesture that would have sent one of the powers of the pagan days of Greece fleeing in abject terror. “You should be very proud,” it squeaked at the shoemaker. Was that an echo? A mocking warning? He couldn’t tell.
He drew his bow and let fly at the spirit. Maybe his arrow missed. Maybe it passed right through the thing without causing it undue harm. It did upset the spirit, which shrilled “Very proud!” and flew away, darting and dodging like a beast made of flesh and blood.
“That bat’s gone,” George said in some satisfaction.
“It was spying on us!” Dactylius said.
“Yes, I think you’re right,” George answered; that darting, dodging flight had taken the batlike spirit back toward the tents of the Slavic wizards who associated with the Avar priest. In spite of where it had gone, the shoemaker laughed. “If the Slavs think they’re going to learn how to take Thessalonica from the likes of you and me, they’ll be disappointed.”
“Oh!” Dactylius blinked. “I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right, aren’t you?”
“Unless you know more about the secrets of the city than I do, I am,” George said. He looked out toward the wizards’ tents once more. “They are strong: the Slavs, I mean. They aren’t very bright, though, or they’re not very good at using the power they do have. Otherwise, one of those little bat things would have been listening to Rufus and Eusebius, not to us.”
“How do you know one wasn’t?” Dactylius asked.
He stood there small and smug and proud of his own cleverness. And George demolished it, not taking malicious glee in the doing as John would have but doing it anyhow, hardly noticing he was doing it, not thinking of anything but going after the truth wherever it happened to be hiding this particular day: “If the Slavs and Avars were listening to what our leaders said to one another, they’ve have a better idea of where we’re weak than they really do, and they’d do a better job of hurting us in those places.”
Dactylius stared at him. Pride leaked out of him like water from a squeezed sponge. Even with pride gone, though, integrity remained. “You’re right,” he said, a sentence he’d used twice lately but one many men would sooner have been tortured than utter. “That makes better sense than my notion.”
“It does only stand to reason,” George said, trying by his tone to imply that his friend would surely have seen the same thing had he but waited a moment longer before he spoke. He waved up and down the length of the wall. “See? We still don’t have as many stones up here as we did before the Slavs attacked the foundations with their tortoises, for instance. If they knew that, they might try again.”