But it was not lightning, or not mere lightning. Rufus’ eyes were wide and staring. Whatever he saw had nothing to do with the burning ciborium or the thieves gathering around it. His mouth started to move. At first, no words came from it, as if the power about to speak through him had trouble matching its needs to those of his flesh and blood.

Then it did speak, in a voice that would have made George’s hair stand on end if it hadn’t been doing that already: “Men, citizens--barbarians around the wall!” After a moment, Rufus, or Whoever was using him as a channel, cried out again: “They’ve appeared unexpectedly, but all of you, all of us, we’ll hasten with arms for our homeland!”

Rufus repeated himself twice more, using, so far as George could tell, the identical words each time. By the time he fell silent, staggered, and almost fell as he came back to himself, the basilica was nearly empty. Almost everyone who had heard him had rushed to obey.

He turned toward George, who was having all he could do to keep from rushing to the walls at that very instant himself. “The saint…” Rufus began, and then tried again: “The martyr . . .” He shook his head. “Something happened,” he muttered, “but what?” He might have been the only person in the basilica of St. Demetrius who did not know what he’d said.

George started to explain, but a cry of wonder from behind him made him stop before he’d got out more than a couple of words. A priest was pointing at the wreckage of the ciborium. Wreckage it remained, but it was no longer burning. “We did not put out this fire,” he exclaimed, his eyes almost as round as Rufus’ had been. “God put out this fire.”

“Christ and God helped us, with the intercession of the glorious martyr,” Rufus said, again in a voice not quite his own. “The fire is quenched, and nothing here destroyed by it.” Where before he had given orders to the crowd, now he commanded the priests: “Shut the doors to the church and gather up the silver in peace and quiet. And remember that this place remains in good order because of what the martyred saint established.”

The veteran shivered like a man coming out of a warm house into an icy wind. Gently, cautiously, George touched him on the arm. “Come on,” the shoemaker said. “The Slavs are attacking the walls.”

“They are?” Rufus exclaimed. “What are we wasting time here in the church for, then?” Now he was himself again, and no one else. “Let’s get moving. We’ll teach the whoresons a lesson they’ll remember one cursed long time.”

He trotted out of the church at a ground-eating lope. George followed, along with the handful of other militiamen who had resisted the call that came through Rufus and stayed by the man himself. Behind them, the doors to the basilica slammed shut, with their bars thudding down to hold them so. Inside, the priests would be collecting the spilled silver … in peace and quiet.

People were running through the streets of Thessalonica, brandishing the spears and bows and swords and knives and occasional axes they had snatched up from their homes. “This is marvelous,” Rufus said. “I wouldn’t have thought even the barbarians at the gates would get everybody moving this way. I wonder what did it.”

“It was you,” George said, but Rufus, now, paid little attention to him when he tried to tell what had happened. Power had not only filled him, but filled him to overflowing, so that he had neither memory nor even great interest in what he had set in motion. So, at any rate, it appeared to George, who was viewing it from the outside. He wondered what being filled with the power of the saint felt like. He doubted he would ever know.

Many of the townsfolk, not being part of the militia, had no assigned place on the walls. They went up anyway, and shouted curses and abuse at whoever was on the far side. George supposed that would do Thessalonica no harm; if any of those curses stuck to the Slavs, it might even do some good.

His own place on the wall was on the western stretch where he and his comrades in the militia had taken their turns as watchmen, near the Litaean Gate. That meant traversing most of the city, as St. Demetrius’ church stood over in the northeastern part of town.

“Here we are,” Rufus said when they reached their proper section of the wall. The old veteran sounded winded. George did not blame him, and contented himself with a nod by way of reply. When you made shoes, you sat or stood in the same place all day, which did not do wonders for your endurance. George’s heart thudded like a drum.

Climbing the stairs up to the wall made it beat even harder and faster; he wondered if anyone had fallen over dead rushing to the defense of Thessalonica. They gained the walkway and looked out into the gathering dusk. His heart pounded harder still, now not from exertion but from astonishment and alarm.

Beside him, Rufus murmured, “Sweet Mother of God, it’s a whole swarm of them.”

The word was better than any George had found to apply to the Slavs. Thousands of men milled around outside the city, all of them carrying weapons of one kind or another. Some looked to be mounting attacks against the monastery of St. Matrona, leaning ladders against its walls and trying to climb up them. The monks overturned some of those ladders as George watched, and threw stones down onto the heads of the Slavs down below.

“Do you know,” he said, discovering he had breath enough to speak again, “I think they think they’re attacking the city wall.”

“They couldn’t be that stupid,” Rufus said, but then, after he’d watched them for a couple of minutes, he shook his head in wonder. “I take it back. Maybe they could be that stupid.”

“It’s getting dark,” George said. “There’s a little mist in the air. They must have taken the long way round to get at Thessalonica from the west, because everything we’ve heard about the fighting is that it’s been off to the east and north. So here they’ve come, they’ve never been anywhere near the city before, and what do they do? They see strong walls, so they think they’re doing the right thing by storming them.”

“You make sense,” Rufus said, a compliment that delighted the shoemaker. His superior went on, “Now how long will they take to figure out that a city’s bigger than a monastery?”

The Slavs did not take long. Some of them kept on assailing the monastery. More, though, drawn by the more distant walls and the people on them, came on and discovered Thessalonica. No sooner had they discovered it than they began to try to take it. They flung javelins and shot arrows at the militiamen and simple citizens on the wall.

An arrow slammed into the stonework not far from George’s head. He heard the shaft snap, much as he did when he broke one of his own arrows hunting rabbits. But the Slav who’d shot this arrow had not been out for game. He’d had killing George in mind, or if not George then Rufus or someone else nearby. He wanted to kill me. Once lodged in George’s mind, the thought would not leave. He did his best to kill me. This was not practice, shooting at a target. This was not chill. The Slav had meant it. This was war.

More arrows flew. One zipped past Georges head, hissing like a snake. The first realization he was a target had shocked him. The second .. . He pulled an arrow of his own from the quiver, nocked it, and shot it at one of the barbarians down below. He didn’t know whether he scored a hit or not--the Slav was running around among several others, and they were hard to tell apart: growing harder by the moment, too, as the light failed.

He also had other troubles. “We should have practiced shooting from the top of the wall,” he said to Rufus. “It’s a different business from shooting on the level.”

“Aye, you’re right--it is,” the veteran answered. “Have to talk to the city prefect about that, or maybe to the bishop.”