“Bless you,” Father Luke said again as he and his wife left the square. Weary and worn as he was, he walked straighter. When a priest like Father Luke blessed you, you felt blessed.

He wondered what the priests of the Slavs and the Avars were doing, now that their effort to make it impossible to draw water inside Thessalonica had failed. Wading and gnashing their teeth, with any luck at all. But they probably wouldn’t go on wailing and gnashing their teeth for long. They’d probably bring more of their gods and demons to bear against the God-guarded city.

He shrugged. The Thessalonicans couldn’t do anything about that till it happened, if and when it did. Not only did they have God guarding them, they also had the militia. George had got almost to his own street before he wondered whether that counted for or against them.

Irene put her hand in his. “You were very brave,” she said.

“I was what?” George said. Father Luke had praised his courage, too. He had trouble following that. “If I hadn’t done what I did, I figured something worse would happen. If that’s courage, then I’m--”

“Someone who talks too much,” Irene said firmly He was about to make an indignant denial; she could truthfully have accused him of a good many things, but not that. After he opened his mouth, though, he shut it without saying anything. If his wife thought he was brave and he went around denying it, didn’t that count for talking too much?

When he and Irene walked into the shop, their children looked up from the shoes they’d been repairing. “Where’s the water jar, Mother?” Sophia asked.

Irene and George looked at each other and started to laugh. Sophia spluttered in annoyance; how dared her parents share what was obviously a joke when she had no idea why it was funny?

Theodore said, “What’s been going on out there, anyway? People have been running back and forth and shouting things that don’t make any sense. And a while ago it sounded like a budding fell down, or something like that. Are the Slavs throwing rocks--?” He paused, stood up, and set hands on hips. “I said, are the Slavs throwing rocks at us?”

His parents were laughing harder than ever, which irritated him and Sophia both. After a while, George stopped laughing. When he did, he felt as if he ought to start shaking instead. Laughing was better.

Little by little, he and Irene explained to their children what had in fact happened. By the time they were through, Theodore had turned very red and looked about ready to burst. “All that was going on not three stadia from here, and we didn’t know anything about it?” he exclaimed in what, to his credit, tried very hard not to be a shout but didn’t quite succeed. “If I’d been there, I’d have--” He made cut-and-thrust motions that merely betrayed how little he knew about handling a sword.

“Thank God you weren’t there,” George said, which only inflamed his son further. “The best adventures are the ones that happen to somebody else, believe you me. This isn’t a story, son. The priest and the women who are dead, they’re dead, and they won’t come back to life till Judgment Day. The woman with the broken leg, she may be crippled for as long as she lives. And any one of them could have been me or your mother as easy as not.” He saw he wasn’t reaching Theodore, who was at the age to believe nothing bad could ever happen to him. George turned to Irene for support, only to discover she wasn’t there to support him: she’d gone upstairs while he was talking, and he hadn’t noticed. He might as well have been Victor, the city prefect, who liked to hear himself talk.

Irene came down a moment later, carrying a cup of wine in each hand. She gave one to George, who gulped it down faster than was his usual habit. Instead of scolding him, she drained her cup, too. George took it from her and went upstairs himself. When he returned with both cups filled, she took one from him and drank it as fast as she had the first. As she had not been behind him on that first cup, he was not behind her on the second.

Her eyes were a trifle glassy as she looked toward Sophia and said, “You can fix supper tonight.” She spoke with unusual emphasis.

“All right, Mother.” Sophia had enough sense to know when not to argue. She went on, “That will be easy, anyhow, because we don’t have much besides bread and beans and oil and some prunes.”

“You can live a long time on bread and beans and oil,” George said. “People only a little poorer than we are live on them their whole lives through.” He spoke more loudly than was his usual wont, too; so much wine drunk so fast made the world seem a very certain place.

“That’s true,” Theodore said, “but the world would be a boring place without some meat every now and then.” He smacked his lips.

George was fond of meat, too. He sighed. “Can’t go out hunting. Can’t hardly keep cows or sheep inside the walls. Pigs, some pigs, and chickens. They eat anything. Ducks, maybe. And fish. The Slavs can’t keep us from fishing in the sea.” He sighed again. “Anything like that would cost plenty, even now. Pretty soon, oil will cost, too. After a while, beans and bread will cost.”

“Bishop Eusebius won’t let that happen. He won’t let the merchants make beggars of us all,” Irene said confidently. She had more faith in the bishop than George did. He didn’t want to do complicated thinking right now, but after a moment decided she might well be right. Eusebius was too good a Christian and too good a politician both to let a handful of men aggrandize themselves at the expense of the rest.

Theodore’s thoughts, meanwhile, had gone off on another tack. “Everything you said about how strong the Slavs’ powers are must be true, Father,” he said, a sentence to warm the cockles of the heart of any father of an adolescent male. “For that water-demon to show up in the middle of this city--”

“It’s a worry,” George agreed. He tried to imagine a satyr strolling into the marketplace of Thessalonica. He couldn’t. Such a thing might have happened when Galerius was Emperor, but three hundred years had gone by since then, and those powers overpowered by a greater power.

“This is the first time they’ve tried anything so horrid,” Irene said. “What will they do next?”

The question hung in the air. George looked out the door. All he could see was the shop across the narrow street. He couldn’t see the wall, let alone what lay beyond it, not with his fleshly eyes. His mind’s eye reached further. Somewhere out there, the chieftains of the Avars would be deciding what to do next. If they and the Slavs they led succeeded with it, whatever it was, the city would fall. That was very simple. For once, George wished things might be more complex.

IV

Axes rang in the woods around Thessalonica. George watched an oak tremble, sway, fall. A crew of Slavs began lopping off branches and cutting the trunk into lengths they found useful. Not far away, a mounted Avar watched his subjects.

“He’s working hard, isn’t he?” John said, pointing out from the wall to the horseman, who, but for occasionally pointing, wasn’t doing anything much.

“Not so you’d notice,” George answered, “but the Slavs are working harder because he’s there.”

“The noble comes round to see how his building is going up, you’d best believe the carpenters work harder,” John said. “Me, I’m funnier when I know the fellow behind the bar at the tavern is listening to me. If he doesn’t like what he’s hearing, I have to try to find someplace else to work the next night.”

“Carpenters build buildings,” George said. “What do Slavs build? They can’t be making a village out there, can they?”

“I know what they’re making,” John said: “they’re making trouble.”

“They’ve already done that.” George looked along the wall instead of out from it. No sooner had he done so than he stood more erect and gripped his bow more firmly. Out of the side of his mouth, he said, “Here comes Rufus. Think of him as the fellow behind the bar.”