That, for once, hadn’t been pitched to carry to Verina’s ears, but she heard it and came storming back. “For one thing, you’re a liar,” she snapped. “For another, you’ve never had the chance to find out whether you’re a liar. And for one more, you’re never going to have the chance.” Off she went again.
John got more laughs than he had through his whole routine, all of them aimed at him. Had George been publicly humiliated like that, he wouldn’t have dared show his face on the street for weeks afterwards. John took it all in stride. By the calculating look on his face, he was figuring out the jokes he’d tell about it the next time he got up in front of a crowd.
Having gone to Paul’s tavern, George was glad he had an afternoon shift on the wall the next day. He was less glad about staring into the westering sun; the day was cold but brilliantly clear. The glare in his face made it hard for him to keep an eye on whatever the Slavs and Avars might be doing.
John didn’t worry about that, and had some reason not to worry: the barbarians’ encampment seemed as quiet as it ever had since the siege began. The comic said, “They’re probably all out with their sheep.”
“You told that one last night, John,” George said patiently.
“Go on, complain about every little thing,” John said. “I think--”
George didn’t find out what John thought. Up farther north along the wall, someone started shouting in a very loud, unpleasant voice: “Call yourself a fighting man, do you? A fighting man is supposed to be alert in the presence of danger. He is supposed to--”
Had Rufus been giving that dressing-down, neither George nor John would have thought anything of it. As it was, John’s face gave the impression that he’d smelled some meat several days later than it should have been smelled. George’s lip also curled. “Menas,” he said.
Menas it was, and he was, to George s dismay, heading in the direction of the Litaean Gate, spreading joy and good cheer in front of him. John glanced his way and said, “What’s that thing he’s carrying? Besides his big, ugly belly, I mean.”
“His war hammer--is that what you’re talking about?” George said. “I’ve seen him lugging that around before. It’s a rich man’s toy, if you ask me--something that makes him feel like a soldier even if he’s not.”
He wasn’t a soldier himself, as any member of Thessalonica’s regular garrison would have told him in as much detail as he could stand. But he’d done real fighting since the Slavs and Avars infested the city, which was more than Menas could have said. George checked himself. No: it was more than Menas could truthfully have said.
And here came the noble, twirling the hammer around by the leather strap attached to the end of the handle. He glared at George as if at a moldy spot on a chunk of bread. “Haven’t I told you to stop insulting me?” he growled. “Haven’t I warned you I’ll get my own back if it’s the last thing I do?”
“You’ve done all those things, sir,” George answered. “What I haven’t done is insult you.”
“Liar!” Menas shouted, loud enough to make militiamen within a bowshot of him turn their heads his way. “The latest is, you say God cured me so I could go around shouting at people.”
Whoever had reported John’s joke to him had got the words right, but Menas had got the source wrong, as George had known would happen. The shoemaker wondered if John would own up to having said it, and if Menas would believe him if he did. Since John kept quiet, the latter didn’t become an issue. George said, “I did not say that about you, sir.”
“Liar!” Menas shouted again.
“I did not say that,” George repeated. “If you keep doing the things that someone said about you, though, I will start saying them myself. I’ll have to start saying them myself, because you’ll have made them true.”
Menas stared at him. Being a rich and prominent man, being a man to whom God had granted a miracle (for what reason, George could not imagine, and he’d tried-- how he’d tried!), the noble was not accustomed to having anyone speak so pointedly to him. He raised the hammer, as if to strike George down.
George sprang backwards. He had an arrow on the string and the bow down almost as soon as his feet hit the walkway again. The point of the arrow--a bronze point, perhaps made by Benjamin--was aimed at a spot a palm’s breadth above Menas’ navel.
As nothing George said had ever managed to do, that made Menas thoughtful. He lowered the silver-chased hammer. George lowered the bow so the arrow pointed toward the walkway rather than Menas’ brisket. He held it at full draw, though, ready to bring it up in a hurry if the noble was only pretending to back away from a fight.
“How you’ll pay!” Menas snarled. “You’ll wish the Slavs and Avars had got hold of you by the time I’m done.” He stamped south along the walkway. George resisted the temptation to put the arrow in his bow straight through Menas’ left kidney. It wasn’t easy. He had to make himself replace the arrow in the quiver one motion at a time.
“Getting credit for my lines, are you?” John said when Menas started bellowing at some other luckless militiaman farther down the wall. “That’s a trouble you could probably do without.”
“Now that you mention it, yes,” George answered. John was bolder with his insults when the target wasn’t standing right there in front of him. George tried to get angry at that, but found he couldn’t. Most men were made the same way.
“That’s why you’ve been after me not to tell jokes about him anymore,” John said, with the air of a man for whom a dark corner of the world has suddenly become bright.
“In a manner of speaking,” George said.
“Well, I won’t,” John promised. And then, an instant later, he backtracked: “I don’t think I will, anyhow. But if something comes to me while I’m up there in front of a bunch of people, who knows what I’ll do?”
“No one,” George said sadly. “Not a single, solitary soul. Not even you. You’d be better off if you did.”
“Maybe,” John said. “But if I knew ahead of time everything I’d do when I got up on a platform, and if I did just what I’d thought beforehand I was going to do … I wouldn’t be me. Like you say, I might be better off. But I might not be able to perform at all.”
George thought about that. He’d made shoes all his life, learning the trade from his father. But if, for some reason, he couldn’t make shoes anymore, he was sure he’d be happy enough as a potter or a miller instead, once he’d learned one of those businesses. If, however, a man had in his makeup something that had to come out if he was to be happy, he couldn’t very well go through life denying it was there.
“I will try,” John said, which, as a pledge, left something to be desired.
“Do the best you can.” George sounded weary, even to himself. “The damage is probably done by now, any which way.”
A man whom George needed a moment to recognize was in the shop when he came back from the wall: a burly fellow of about his own age, with rather heavy features pitted by scars from either a light case of smallpox or a bad set of pimples as a youth. The latter, George thought, and that let him figure out who the visitor was a moment before Irene said, “Dear, of course you know Leo the potter.”
“Yes, of course,” George said, and clasped Leo’s hand. The potter had a firm grip, and very smooth skin on his palm from using it to shape clay: a great contrast to the scars and punctures that marked a shoemaker’s hands. “A pleasure to see you. Will you drink some wine with me?”
“Your lady already gave me a cup,” Leo answered, holding it up. “I got here myself not two minutes ago, matter of fact.” Irene poured a cup for her husband, who took it with a word of thanks. He looked around for Sophia and Theodore, both of whom seemed to have vanished. But no: shadows at the top of the stairway said they were lingering as discreetly as they could, no doubt with hands cupped to their ears to hear the better.
As much to annoy them as for any other reason, George stretched small talk longer than he might have done. But small talk was also a way of getting acquainted with Leo, whom he did not know well. After a while, casually, George said, “You’re Constantine’s father, aren’t you?” Had Leo still had his youthful pimples, he and Constantine might have been two brothers, not father and son. George stretched a point: “Fine-looking boy.”
Irene frowned at him. He nodded, very slightly, to let her know he’d seen. Had he been buying a donkey, he wouldn’t have praised anything about the animal till it was his. A marriage dicker, though, was a different sort of business--or so he thought.
“He’s a good lad, if I do say so my own self,” Leo answered, “and, since he’s not here, there’s nobody but me to say it for him. Helen--my wife, you know--she didn’t come through the plague a couple of years ago.” Absentmindedly, he scratched himself. “I hate fleas.”
“They are a nuisance,” George agreed. “Yes, the plague was a hard time for all of us. This siege is another hard time. I hadn’t intended speaking to you till it was over and done, and things were back to normal again.”
“Yes, I can see that,” Leo said. “But I drew a different lesson from the plague, and that is, don’t wait. Things may never be--what was that word you used?--normal, that’s it, normal again. No telling what’ll happen tomorrow, I say, so we’d better arrange today the best we can. And on account of that, I didn’t figure I ought to wait before I came to see you.”
George hesitated before replying. As far as he was concerned, Leo’s lesson was absolutely the wrong one. Festina lente ran through his mind: make haste slowly. But the fact that Leo did draw lessons, even mistaken lessons, from what went on around him bumped the potter up a notch in George’s estimation. Most people, he was convinced, went through life without a clue it might hold patterns they could use.
Irene said, “Your brother is a potter, too, isn’t he?”
“Zeno? That’s right, though his shop is over by the other side of St. Demetrius’ church.” Leo smiled at Irene. “Either you have a right fine memory, or you’ve been asking questions about me.”
“Everyone in this family has a very good memory,” Irene said primly. That was on the whole true, even if Theodore sometimes showed a maddening inability to remember what George had told him to do five minutes earlier.
“That’s nice,” Leo said, willing to pretend to believe Irene hadn’t been investigating his family. He’d also been doing some investigating, for he went on, “I’m sorry God didn’t give either of you sibs who lived.”
“I had an older brother,” George said. “I don’t even remember him; he died when I was a baby.”
“I had an older sister and a younger brother.” Irene’s eyes were sad as she looked into the past. “God’s will.” She grew brisk once more. “But you didn’t come here to talk about old sorrows, but the chance for new joys.”
“The chance, yes.” Leo scratched his nose. “You do keep a clean shop, George, I’ll say that for you. Hardly any stink of leather in the air.”
Though George bristled, he made a point of not letting Leo notice. Making and repairing shoes was a perfectly respectable trade, but not one of high class. By implying as much, Leo was making a bid for a bigger dowry to accompany Sophia if she married Constantine: it was astonishing how a fatter bride portion could balance social stigma in the scales.
But George in turn remarked, “You and your son are lucky fellows, not to be melted to tallow standing in front of your kilns day after day.” He had no intention of conceding that potters stood any higher on the social scale than did shoemakers.