She clasped both hands to her bosom. It was a fine, well-rounded bosom; the gesture might have belonged in a pantomime show but for the inconvenient sandals. Sophia excused herself and hurried upstairs. Theodore coughed and coughed. Irene kept her face utterly expressionless. She worried about George, and made no secret of it, but made no production of it, either.
And George did not tell Claudia that the likeliest way for Dactylius’ untimely demise to occur at the moment was death by boredom. Instead, showing restraint he felt sure St. Demetrius would have praised, he said, “I think he’ll be all right. The wall is very strong.”
“So they say,” Claudia answered, as if they were notorious liars. “For myself, I wish Dactylius would just stay in the shop with me.”
Given a choice between closing himself up in a shop with Claudia all day and going out to fight the fierce barbarians, George would have taken on the Slavs even without a sword to hold them at bay. That was something else he couldn’t tell her; he was wider through the shoulders, but she overtopped him by two or three digits.
“What’s wrong with the sandals?” George asked, hoping to turn her away from morbid worries about her husband and toward something simple.
“I broke a strap on this one--see?” She showed him the problem.
“Yes, I can take care of that,” he told her, and then, to make conversation, added, “How did it happen?”
He realized that was a mistake the moment the words were out of his mouth. Claudia drew herself up to her full, formidable height. Her gray eyes flashed. It wasn’t quite so impressive a manifestation as when St. Demetrius had spoken through Rufus, but it wasn’t supernatural, either: it was only her temper coming out.
“That stupid slut next door kept throwing her garbage in front of my place, and so I hit her with the shoe,” she explained. “I don’t think you sewed the strap on very well.”
George examined it again. It hadn’t broken at a sewn seam. She’d hit so hard, she’d torn the leather. From under his eyebrows, he glanced up at her. No, getting on her bad side was not a good idea. She might well have been more dangerous to the Slavs than a good many militiamen on the wall, her husband included.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said again. With almost anyone else, he would have pointed out in no-uncertain terms that the problem was not of his making. But Claudia was his good friend’s wife … and, even if she hadn’t been, he suspected he’d have kept his mouth shut.
Instead of sewing the broken strap back together, he took it off the sandal and replaced it with a new one. That took a little longer, but meant the sandal wouldn’t rub Claudia’s ankle when she wore it again.
She tried it on after he gave it back to her. After a judicious pause, she nodded. “Yes, that will do. I hope it holds together, though.”
“It should,” George answered. “Of course, the next time you hit your neighbor, you might want to think about using something like a brick instead.”
Claudia considered the joke with such drilling seriousness that George once more wished he had the words back; he’d wanted to make her smile, not to make her murder the woman next door. But at last she said, “No, a brick would have hurt her more than I intended then. I would have to be truly angry to use a brick.” She took a couple more steps in the repaired sandal and nodded. “It does feel good, George. I’ll tell Dactylius I’ve been here. You know you can drop by the shop.” She wrapped her mantle around her and swept away.
“What will you get me at Dactylius’, Father?” Sophia asked, as eagerly as if she were a little girl rather than a young woman. The shoemaker and jeweler did not charge each other money for their services, but traded them back and forth.
“I don’t know,” George answered. “Some bit of polished brass--a ring, maybe, or a thin bracelet. Fixing a sandal strap isn’t enough for me to bring home gold inset with rubies and pearls, you know.” Nothing he was likely to do was enough for him to bring home gold inset with precious gems. He’d long since resigned himself to that.
“That woman.” Irene shook her head. “She reminds me of a jar with the stopper in too tight left in the fire too long. One day it will burst and hurt half a dozen people with flying potsherds. And yet Dactylius dotes on her.”
“Of course he does,” George said. “Do you think he’d dare not to?”
Theodore chuckled, Sophia giggled, and Irene wagged a severe finger at her husband. “You are a wicked man. All the time you’ve been spending in the company of the militia is making you sound like John.”
“I got the better of him the other day, up on the wall,” George boasted, and recounted the exchange he’d won.
“That’s funny, Papa,” Theodore said, clapping his hands together. “Now will you tell us all the ones where he bested you?”
“If you want to hear those, you can go ask John,” the shoemaker replied with dignity. Then he gave his son a cuff on the side of the head, not hard enough to hurt, not soft enough to be ignored, to remind the youth to preserve at least some vestige of respect for his parents.
“It’s all right, George,” Irene said.
“I know it is,” he answered. “I want to make sure it stays that way.”
As long as only Slavs were besieging Thessalonica, George didn’t worry much about the ultimate safety of the city: they hadn’t impressed him as being particularly dangerous fighters. That was as well; he and his fellow militiamen weren’t particularly dangerous fighters, either.
“The ones who bother me are those Avars,” he said to Dactylius as they waited for relief so they could return to their shops and homes after a morning stint on the wall. “We haven’t seen much of them since that handful the first night of the siege, but if they weren’t real soldiers, there’re no such animals.”
“They were fierce-looking, all right,” Dactylius said, “but I don’t think you worry enough about the Slavs. There are so many of them. Look at the way their powers are coming in and doing things the ones that have been here forever wouldn’t even try in the face of Christian men.”
“That’s so,” George admitted unhappily. “I wish it weren’t, but it is. I hope that satyr I saw up there in the hills is all right. He’s not a Christian power, true enough, but he’d been here a long time, like you say.”
Dactylius made small disapproving noises. “As a good Christian man myself, I say we should have nothing to do with the old powers.” His voice was prim. “The sooner we forget all about them, the sooner they’ll vanish from the earth.”
In principle, George agreed with him. In practice, he found the supernatural powers still lingering in the land that had once been theirs interesting in the same way he found old inscriptions and old coins interesting--relics of what had once been of great import to people.
He said, “I wish the Slavic powers would vanish from the earth if I forgot about them. Trouble is, they’re too much in the minds of the Slavs for that to happen.”
“What we need to do is convert the Slavs and Avars to Christianity,” Dactylius said. “Then their powers will vanish away, as they deserve to do.”
“That would be wonderful.” George pointed out to a couple of Slavs sitting on the yellowing grass out beyond archery range. They were passing a wineskin back and forth. After a while, one of them rolled over and went to sleep. “They don’t look ready to convert right now, worse luck.”
“That’s so,” Dactylius said. “Maybe in the time of my children--if God blesses Claudia and me with children who live.”
George thought about making love to Claudia. She was a well-built woman, and far from homely. All the same, had she been his wife, divine intervention would almost surely have been necessary for them to start a family. On the other hand, she might simply seize little Dactylius and have her way with him when the mood took her. George turned a snort into a cough; he didn’t want his friend to know what kind of thoughts were running through his mind.
The Slavs did not try to break into Thessalonica during the rest of their watch. When the sun had swung through a third of its arc across the heavens, Paul and John ascended to the wall to take their places. John peered out at the Slavs, most of whom seemed utterly uninterested in the siege. “Another day of martial combat!” he cried. “And now to rush at the foe with a fearsome--” After a look of intense concentration, he broke wind.
“There you go,” George said. “If the breeze were blowing in the right direction, you’d save the city single-handed.”
“That wasn’t my hand, you blockhead,” John said. After a little more chaffing, he and the taverner began patrolling their stretch of wall while Dactylius and George went down into the city.
As usual, a crowd of women had gathered around the cistern in the neighborhood. Thessalonica’s water came from nearby streams and rivers through underground pipes the Slavs and Avars had not yet discovered or tried to destroy. It still filled all the cisterns and flowed unhindered from fountains not only on street comers but also in several churches.
Among the chattering women stood Irene. Spotting George, she lowered the water jug she carried from her shoulder and waved at him. He waved back, looking around to see if she had Sophia with her. Sometimes it was hard to tell them apart from a distance--and sometimes not from a distance, too. But no; Sophia wasn’t there this time.
Just then, the roof of the cistern flew off. Concrete chunks, some of them as big as a man, spun through the air. One of them smashed a house. More, by luck or providence, came down on empty ground. But some landed with horrible wet squashing noises.
The women near the cistern screamed and scattered. “Irene!” George cried, and ran toward them. He had almost reached his wife when the power that had hurled the roof off the cistern stood up inside and looked around.
It was roughly man-shaped, but five or six times as tall as a man. It looked old, old. Its hair, what there was of it, was moss-green, and its long, straggling beard was also made of moss. Its skin hardly seemed skin at all, but rather wet bark.
Maybe George’s shout, deep among shrill, had drawn its attention to him. Whatever the reason, it turned his way. Its eyes were red, like burning coals. When he looked into them, he felt his will dripping away like olive oil out of a cracked jar.
It reached out a hand--no, more a misshapen paw-- toward him. As a drowning man will reach for anything his fingers touch, so the shoemaker made the sign of the cross. A satyr would have fled in terror. This horrifying apparition kept right on groping for him.
But the holy sign had not been altogether without effect. He had his wits back, and his will. He snatched an arrow from his quiver, set it in his bow, and took aim at the gigantic . . . Slavic water-demon or -demigod, he supposed the thing was.
Irene, whose presence of mind he often admired, had not dropped the water jar she’d filled at the cistern. A smaller version of the green-bearded thing popped out of it and grabbed George’s arm, spoiling his aim. The touch of the power was clammy and piercingly cold.
Dactylius smote the smaller water-demon with his sword. What might have been mist or might have been ichor sprayed out from the wound. Irene did drop the jar then. Water splashed up and out from it. The small apparition of the demigod went from a single one to a multitude of tiny ones spread out in the bigger puddles among the cobblestones.