George started to chide him, because he thought the Avars were far out of range, especially for a small man like Dactylius, who couldn’t pull a strong bow. But the arrow kept going and going and going. . . . “Good shot!” George exclaimed. “Oh, good shot!”
Dactylius cried out in exultation when the shaft he’d launched struck one of the Avars in the side. He cried out again a moment later, this time in anguish, when it rebounded from the fellow’s scalemail shirt. The Avar looked down at the arrow, then up at the wall. He shook his fist and kept on riding.
“I had him,” Dactylius moaned. “By St. Demetrius, I had him--and he got away.” He sent another arrow at the troop of nomads. This one fell twenty cubits short, as George had expected the other to do. It was as if Thessalonica’s patron saint had helped that first arrow along--only to see it fail in the end. If that was an omen, it was one for which George did not care.
He set a hand on Dactylius’ shoulder. “You couldn’t have done any better,” he said. “You did better than I thought you could. If you shoot like that against the Slavs when they come to shoot at us, a lot of them won’t go back to their encampments.”
“I know,” the jeweler said. “I hope I can. But for a few seconds there, killing that Avar seemed like the most important thing in the world. I thought I’d done it, and then--” He shook his head. “It’s not fair.”
“No,” George agreed. “It’s not.” But for their part, the Avars would no doubt say it wasn’t fair that God and St. Demetrius had watched over Thessalonica and kept them from sacking the city. Fairness, like beauty, was in the eye of the beholder. When no two people could agree on what it meant, did it matter? George had trouble seeing how.
The Avar Dactylius had shot but not wounded made his horse pull up and looked over toward Thessalonica again, as if deciding he wouldn’t brook the insult after all. He shouted something. George wouldn’t have understood it had he heard it clearly, which he didn’t.
“Hello,” the shoemaker muttered under his breath. He might not have understood the shout, but he understood what sprang from it: out of one of the Avars’ tents near the woods came the priest or wizard who had tried to ruin the holy power in the grappling hooks on the walls of Thessalonica but had succeeded only in causing a minor earthquake.
“What’s he carrying with him?” Dactylius asked.
“Looks like a mirror,” George answered. “He’s in an even uglier getup than he was the last time we saw him, isn’t her” Instead of looking like some weird animal, half furry, half feathered, the Avar now resembled nothing so much as a tree all shaggy with moss. He even wore a great, untidy wreath of leaves on his head.
He came trotting up to the horseman who had called for him. They talked together for some little while. The mounted Avar kept pointing back toward the wall, and toward that portion of it where George and Dactylius stood. Dactylius let out what could only be described as a giggle. “I don’t think he’s happy I almost let the air out of him,” the jeweler said.
“I’d say you’re right,” George answered. “The next interesting question is, what can he do about it?” To turn any harm aside, George made the sign of the cross. The Avar wizard had shaken Thessalonica’s wall, even if he hadn’t toppled it. George didn’t want that kind of power aimed at him alone--or, come to that, at him and Dactylius together.
The mounted Avar, having said his piece, rode on to rejoin his comrades. The priest stood staring at the wall. Even across a couple of furlongs, he seemed to be staring straight into George’s face. George stared back, unable to take his eyes away. He felt the weight of the Avar’s persona pressing on him, and pressed back as strongly as he could.
That seemed to take the Avar by surprise. Abruptly, he turned away and went back into the tent from which the horseman had summoned him. Dactylius tapped George on the forearm. “Did you feel that?” The jeweler spoke in a whisper, though the wizard was far away.
“Yes, I did,” George said. “I didn’t know you did, too.” Some of his pride in resistance faded. If the Avar had set that mental grip on more than one Roman at once, he was stronger than any single foe of his.
“What do you suppose he’s doing in there?” Dactylius pointed to the tent into which the Avar had returned.
“I don’t know,” George answered, “but I think we’ll find out.”
He hardly thought himself worthy of being compared to Elijah or Jeremiah as a prophet, but that prediction was soon borne out. The Avar emerged from the tent carrying not only the mirror but what looked like a wooden pad of water. He set the mirror on the ground; as he did so, the sun angled off it for a moment, the flash proving to George what it was. He began to dance around it. Every so often, water splashed out of the pail onto the ground and onto the mirror.
Clouds crowded the sky, which moments before had been sunny though pale. What had been as good a day as any Thessalonica might expect in November quickly changed to one warning of storm. “Magic!” George exclaimed; nothing natural could make the weather turn so fast.
Cold rain began pelting down onto the wall almost as soon as the word passed his lips. Dactylius pointed. “Look!” he exclaimed. “It’s not falling on the Slavs out there.”
He was right. The rain seemed confined to Thessalonica alone. Past twenty or thirty cubits beyond the wall, the weather remained as it had been. George started to say something, but thunder crashed, deafeningly loud, right above his head. He staggered and almost dropped to one knee.
Another crash came, even louder than the first. George stared up into the sky. He’d never heard thunder like that. Were those just cloud shapes, or did they look like Avars thumping great drums? When the thunder rang out again, he was convinced of what he saw. Those shifting shapes, all thirteen of them, were real.
After yet another peal of thunder, rumblings continued for some time, like aftershocks from an earthquake. The rumblers were cloud shapes, too: little men or gnomes with enormous feet, all made of mist.
“Avar rain and thunder spirits!” George shouted, pointing up into the heavens. He hoped Dactylius would perceive them, too.
Before he could find out whether his friend did, an utterly mundane arrow hissed past his face. He reached for his bow to shoot back at the Slavs, then cursed the Avar wizard as foully as he knew how. No rain fell on the Slavs; their bowstrings were dry. Those of the men on the walls of Thessalonica, though, were soaked and useless.
The thunder spirits thundered. The smaller, less fearsome rumblers rumbled. The Slavs out beyond the walls kept on shooting. George and the other defenders were powerless to reply.
“Where’s Bishop Eusebius?” Dactylius shouted. “He could put a stop to this.”
Wherever Bishop Eusebius was, he was nowhere close by. Peering through the curtain of rain all around Thessalonica as if through a glass, darkly, George saw more Avars come out to confer with their priest. “I don’t know why they’re wasting time talking,” he said. “They’ll never have a better chance to attack the walls than now.”
“Look!” Dactylius pointed not to the cloud creatures in the sky, not to the Slavs and Avars beyond the rain, but to the head of the stairway leading up to the wall. “It’s Father Luke!”
That made George feel as good as seeing the bishop might have done. Father Luke was of lower rank, but George and Dactylius had already seen what his holiness could do. George said, “You beat the one water demon, Father. Can you beat these new ones as well?” He pointed at the thunderers and rumblers up in the sky.
“I don’t know,” the priest replied, putting a hand up over his eyes so he could see the Avar powers without raindrops continually blowing in his face.
“You don’t know?” Dactylius sounded horrified. “Are we just going to stand here and drown, the way people did in the great Flood?” He looked about ready to drown. The drumming rain made his hair run down over his face like so many wet snakes and plastered his tunic to him so tightly, George could count his ribs.
In a way, Father Luke’s answer horrified George, too. In another way, it pleased him. A more arrogant priest would have claimed abilities he lacked and tried to do more than he could, as Father Gregory--the late Father Gregory--had done by the cistern. If nothing else, Father Luke had humility, a virtue in any Christian man and all the more vital in a priest.
“God provided in the Flood, telling Noah to build his Ark,” Father Luke said. “I have faith God will provide for us now, if not through me, then surely through someone else.”
Again, George did not quite know what to make of the response. Admiring the depth of Father Luke’s faith, he had trouble sharing it. He knew he had not the temperament of a man like Job, to go on unceasingly praising God regardless of the misfortunes befalling him.
Instead of criticizing the priest, though, he tried to nudge him into action: “You routed one water demigod with water of your own from the baptismal font. Can you do the same with these--?” Before he could say things, the thirteen thunder spirits let loose with another crash, one so enormous he thought it would split his head open.
Father Luke’s shrug was not encouraging. “They are there” --he pointed up into the sky-- “while I remain down here. I see no way for the sanctified water to come in contact with them, as it did with the Slavic demon in the cistern.”
“All right, you can’t do that,” George said, following the logic without liking it. “What can you do? You have to be able to do something.”
“And you’d better do it soon, too,” Dactylius added. He sounded both insistent and frightened, neither of which George wanted. The shoemaker aimed to make Father Luke figure out what he could do and then to have him do it, not to alarm and rattle him.
Father Luke, fortunately, seemed neither alarmed nor rattled. “I can pray,” he answered.
It was, after all, what a priest was good for. Even so, George would have preferred a response somewhat more aggressive. He was beginning to feel as much like a drowned rat as Dactylius looked. “Well, if that’s what you can do, you’d better get to it,” he said roughly. “The Slavs out there aren’t going to be content with shooting at us up here on the wall, not for long they won’t. Pretty soon they’ll try knocking it down again.”
“You’re right, of course.” Father Luke looked up to the heavens again. Now he paid no attention to the thunder spirits or the smaller rumblers, nor to the rain beating into his face. “I take my text from the Book of Genesis: ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’”
Knowing the priest’s piety, and knowing also how he had beaten the Slavic water demigod, George expected the Avars’ sky powers to be routed and the sun to break through. That did not happen. The rain kept falling. More thunder boomed, as if those powers were laughing at Father Luke’s effort to disperse them.
Dactylius let out a cry of dismay that showed how much confidence he had placed in Father Luke. George glanced over toward the priest. Father Luke’s long face was set in thoughtful lines. Seeing George’s eyes upon him, he nodded slightly. “It is as you have said all along,” he remarked. “The powers of the Slavs are strong, and now I see that the powers of the Avars are stronger still. Since the Avars rule the Slavs, I suppose I should have expected as much.”
“What can you do about it?” George demanded. Another shattering roar from the heavens emphasized the thunder spirits’ strength more than the priest’s words could have. Somewhere not far down the wall, a militiaman screamed when an arrow pierced him. Caught in the tightly defined circle of rain, the defenders could offer no reply.
“What can I do?” Suddenly, despite building catastrophe, Father Luke smiled. For a moment, George thought he saw in that smile the sun he’d hoped the priest would be able to restore. Father Luke said, “I could not make those powers quit this place against their will: they were too strong for that. Suppose instead, though, I give them everything they want?”
Through drumming rain, through rumblings and thunderings above, Dactylius hissed to George: “He’s gone mad.”
“I don’t think so,” George answered, though he had not the slightest idea what the priest intended.
As Father Luke had before, he stared up into the sobbing sky. As he had before, he chose words from the Book of Genesis, but words of different import, perhaps inspired by Dactylius: “ ‘On the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. .. . And the waters prevailed, and increased greatly on the earth . . . And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered.’”