One of them took out bread of his own, a lumpy looking, dark brown loaf nowhere near so fine as the one Irene had given George. The Slav tore off a chunk and handed it to the shoemaker. In return, George offered him some of his own loaf. The Slav took a bite and looked pleased.
George held out the little flask of olive oil. The Slav took it, sniffed, made a face, and passed the flask to his comrade. That fellow also looked disgusted. The two of them spoke emphatically in their own language. George didn’t understand a word of it, but odds were it meant something like, How can you stand to eat that stuff?
As far as he was concerned, bread by itself was boring. That went double for what the Slav had given him: it was dense and chewy and, he guessed, made from a mix of barley and wheat. It would, no doubt, keep a man alive for a long time, although after a while he might not want to go on living on such rations.
Then the Slav with the dark hair took out a flask of his own. It proved to hold not olive oil but honey. With honey, the bread definitely became more palatable. George shared out his cheese. The Slavs approved of that. They gave him some sun-dried pears and plums in return.
He untied the rawhide cord around the neck of the wineskin and handed the skin to the blue-eyed Slav. The fellow swigged, his larynx working. He passed the skin to his darker friend, who also drank. Courteously, though, he made sure he did not empty the skin before returning it to George.
After everyone had finished eating, the Slavs tried talking with him some more. The effort was vigorous but useless. They spoke their own guttural language and fragments of another that sounded even stranger--maybe it was the Avars’ tongue. Whatever it was, it made no sense to George. He gave them Latin and Greek, the only two languages he knew. As he’d already concluded, they didn’t understand those.
By signs, he showed them what he’d been doing out in the woods. They laughed at his impression of a hopping rabbit. He laughed, too, as he bounded about, but he was careful not to let them get between him and his bow. When he was done bounding, he did his best with gestures and questioning looks to ask why they were here.
They looked at each other and talked for a couple of minutes in their own incomprehensible language before trying to reply. When they did, their gestures were anything but clear. Maybe that was because they weren’t very good at sign language. On the other hand, maybe it was because they didn’t want him to understand why they had suddenly appeared only a few miles outside of Thessalonica.
Maybe they were hunting for animals; from the way they leapt and crept and shaded their eyes with their hands, that was possible. And maybe they were hunting for Thessalonica itself; that was as plausible an interpretation. They didn’t ask George where it was. Had they done so, he might have told them; it wasn’t as if a city that size was hard to find.
Face to face with two veritable Slavs, he decided to learn what he could from them, even if they had not a word in common. Pointing to them to get their attention, he threw back his head and imitated as best he could the howls he had heard from the woods, the howls he believed to have come from the throats of the Slavic wolf-demons the satyr had described.
He hadn’t known he owned such a gift for mimicry. The wailing cry that burst from his throat was almost as frightening as those he had heard on the walls of Thessalonica. He did not judge that merely by his own reaction to the noise he made. The woods around him grew suddenly still, as they might have at a real wolf s-- or a real wolf-demon’s--howl.
And the two Slavs, after starting when he first began that cry, nodded and grinned to show they recognized it and to show they understood he meant a spirit of their folk rather than a mere fleshly beast of prey. They spoke several incomprehensible sentences. Once more, though he followed not a single word, he assigned meaning to the whole: something like, Yes, those are ours. Pretty impressive, aren’t they?
He wished he really could have talked with the barbarians, so he might have learned more and brought it back to Thessalonica. That he was thinking of getting back to his home city again was a sign he didn’t believe the Slavs intended to try murdering him. But he still stayed wary enough to remember exactly where his bow was.
Then one of the Slavs clumsily made the sign of the cross. George didn’t think for a moment that meant the fellow was a Christian. And, indeed, the barbarian followed the gesture by pointing and saying something that was plainly a question. That’s the god you follow, isn’t it?
“Yes, I’m a Christian,” George said, first in Latin and then in Greek, the two sentences sounding very much alike. He crossed himself, slowly and reverently, showing the Slav how it should be done. Having done so, he looked up into the heavens but not at the sun, not wanting to give the barbarians the mistaken notion that it was his god.
They asked him something else. He couldn’t figure out what it was. The one with brown eyes pointed roughly in the direction of Thessalonica and made the sign of the cross once more. He crossed himself over and over again, then raised an interrogative eyebrow at George.
“Oh, I see what you mean,” the shoemaker said. “Yes, everyone in Thessalonica is a Christian.” He nodded vigorously. About then, he realized he wasn’t being fair to the Jews in the city, but people were hardly ever fair to the Jews, so he felt no great urgency about redressing the balance now.
The blue-eyed Slav crossed himself, then strutted around looking fierce and dangerous, then looked another question at George. What the question was supposed to be puzzled him. He scratched his head.
A moment later, he had the answer. “Yes, God is a strong god. God is the strongest god. God is the only true god.” The words meant nothing to the two Slavs. George crossed himself, then flexed his biceps, then nodded back at the barbarians.
He wished the Lord would give him a miracle like the one He had granted to Menas. No miracle came, though. Or perhaps one did: the Slavs understood him, not the least of concerns when he and the barbarians had no words in common. George glanced heavenward again. Art Thou so subtle, Lord? he asked silently, and got no answer.
He did get what was, if not miraculous, at the least a display of God’s loving kindness: having shared with him food and drink and such conversation as could be carried on with hands and bodies and faces, the two Slavs picked up their weapons and, instead of trying to use those weapons against him, waved, nodded, and went back into the woods.
“Hail and farewell,” George called after them in Latin. When they had disappeared among the oaks and beeches, he allowed himself the luxury of a long sigh of relief. Meeting them had been far more dangerous than encountering the satyr. As beasts, long hunted, grew leery of men, so the satyr rightly feared the superior power of the Christian God. But the wild Slavs were unfamiliar with His might, and so it held no terror for them.
George shook his head. “No time for philosophy now,” he said out loud. “Whatever else it’s good for, it doesn’t fill your belly.” He got to his feet, set an arrow in his bowstring, and went on looking for rabbits. He made sure he walked in a direction different from the one the Slavs had chosen, lest they think he was following them and decided they’d made a mistake by not picking a fight with him in the clearing.
Maybe God, having worked a small, subtle miracle (if He had worked a small, subtle miracle and it hadn’t been skill at pantomime or blind luck) for George, was keeping a closer eye on him than He had before. Or maybe George was keeping a closer eye on the terrain around him than he had before. Or maybe the shoemaker had simply wandered into a country more richly stocked with rabbits than that through which he’d been going during the morning.
Whatever the reason, in the space of a couple of hours he’d killed five, and would have had a couple more if he’d been a better archer. He recovered one of the shafts with which he’d missed; the other hit a rock and splintered, and he couldn’t find the iron point no matter how hard he looked.
He wondered if he ought to hunt more while his luck was so good, but decided against it: he was not the sort of man much given to pushing anything to extremes. Moderation was not the only thing that made him decide to head back to Thessalonica. Also in his mind--in quite a prominent place there--was that, having encountered two Slavs in these woods, he might come on more, and one happy outcome was no guarantee of a second.
Even the gate guards were militiamen these days, though not from his company. He showed them the rabbits. They congratulated him. He said not a word about the two easy kills he’d missed.
He didn’t say anything to Irene about the kills he’d missed, either. As best he could, he downplayed his confrontation with the two Slavs. He knew perfectly well his best was not good enough, and that he would hear about it later from her. For the moment, in front of the children, she matched his restraint.
Theodore was excited by the meeting. “You should have fought them, Father.” He made cut-and-thrust motions with an awl, as if it were a sword.
“Rufus would laugh at you,” George said. “I’d laugh at you myself, if I weren’t worn out. When one man goes out looking for two to take on, it’s most often because he’s drunk his wits away.”
His son let out a loud sniff. It was, George thought, no wonder they recruited soldiers from among lads of about his son’s age: they were strong, aggressive, and, most of all, stupid. If their superiors ordered them to rush out and get themselves killed, they’d do it, and thank the officers for the privilege.
Sophia said, “Somebody besides us should know the Slavs have come so close to the city.”
“Yes, I think you’re right,” George answered with a sigh. He touched the rabbits he’d set down on the counter. “I wanted to bring these home first of all, so your mother could start dealing with them. But as soon as I’d taken care of that, I figured the best thing I could do was pay a visit to Bishop Eusebius.”
Getting to see the prelate of Thessalonica would not have been easy for an ordinary shoemaker at any time. Getting in to see him when he was not only prelate but also de facto prefect of the city would have been doubly difficult. But when George went to the basilica of St. Demetrius, he knew the magic words that got him past the lesser priests and scribes. Those lesser worthies hustled him past the silver-domed ciborium topping the saint’s tomb, past the basilica’s brilliant wall and ceiling mosaics, and straight into the little office adjoining the church wherein the bishop labored when not performing the divine liturgy.
In that office, Eusebius looked more like a bureaucrat than a prelate. The desk behind which he sat was piled high with papyri; ink smudged the fingers of his right hand. He was scribbling a note when George came in, and set down his reed pen with every sign of relief.
“What’s this I hear?” he asked in a Greek so educated and archaic, George had trouble following it. “Is it accurately reported to me that you met two of the revolting barbarians in the woods earlier today?”
“Yes, Your Excellency, I did.” George stuck with his Latin, the tongue in which he felt most at home. Eusebius understood him and motioned for him to go on. The bishop probably thought him on the uncultured side. That didn’t bother him. By Eusebius’ standards, he was on the uncultured side. He described the meeting with the Slavs and his attempt to explain Christianity, or at least its potency, to them.
“Well done,” the bishop said, making the sign of the cross. “En touto nika.” As if making a great concession, he turned that Greek into Latin: “In hoc signo vinces.” Then he returned to his own preferred language. “Very well. You shared your food with the barbarians. What, beyond their mere presence, prompted you to report all this to me? You understand, their presence is of some concern in and of itself with the garrison gone, which is why I had you admitted to my presence, but--”
“I’ve come to bring this to your notice for two reasons, Your Excellency,” George said. “One is that the Slavs, as best they could without using words, made it plain to me that they were looking not just for supper but for Thessalonica.”
Bishop Eusebius’ attention had wandered. Now it snapped back to the shoemaker. “That is not good,” he said. “With the war that has gone on between us Romans on the one hand and the Slavs and Avars on the other, I do not want to hear reports that the barbarians are seeking our God-guarded city.” He held up a beringed, elegantly manicured hand. “Do not mistake me. By that I do not mean I am ungrateful for your having brought this word to me, only that I wish you had no need to do so.”
“I understand,” George assured him. He studied the bishop with an odd mixture of distaste and admiration. The word that came to mind for Eusebius was slick, slick as fine olive oil or an icy pavement. Slickness could be wonderfully useful or unexpectedly dangerous, depending on circumstances. George gave a mental shrug, thinking, As if I have the power to pass judgment on those placed over me. Aloud, he went on, “The other reason I thought I ought to bring them to your notice is because they admitted the wolf-demons that have been howling outside the walls belong to them.”
“Did they?” Eusebius said softly. Yes, George had his attention now. “What did they say of them? Tell me everything you remember.” George got the distinct impression that, if Eusebius was dissatisfied with his report, he would go after more detail with lash and rack and heated pincers.
“They didn’t say anything, Your Excellency, since we couldn’t talk with each other,” the shoemaker replied. He detailed the exchange, then added, “I’ve heard, Your Excellency, that these demons can attack a priest even after he’s made the sign of the cross. Is that so?”
Eusebius’ eyes went hooded, unfathomable. George knew what that meant: the bishop was figuring out whether to He to him and, if so, what sort of he to tell. But, at last,
Eusebius answered, “Yes it is, as a matter of fact, though I’ll thank you for not spreading it broadcast through the city. I also remind you that evil is no less evil for being powerful, only more deadly.”
“I understand that,” George said--did Eusebius take him for a lackwit? Well, maybe Eusebius did.
“You did not hear of the vicious power of these demons from the Slavs you encountered today?” Eusebius asked He answered his own question: “No, of course you did not, for by your own statement you and they had no words in common.” His gaze sharpened. “Where, then, did you hear this about them?”
George abruptly wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He didn’t know whether lying to the bishop or telling him the truth was the worse choice. Eusebius had told him the truth, or at least he thought the bishop had. He decided to return the favor: “A satyr told me, the last time I was out hunting in the woods.”
Eusebius hadn’t been looking for that. His eyebrows climbed up toward his hairline, and he let out a hiss that made George wonder if he were part viper on his mother’s side. Then he crossed himself, as if the shoemaker were himself a relic of a creed outworn. When George failed either to vanish or to turn into some loathsome demon, the bishop regained control of himself. “That is a--bold admission to make,” he said, picking his words with obvious care.