John obviously did think of Rufus that way, for, like George, he did his best to project an air of martial ferocity. Like George’s, his best left something to be desired. Rufus surveyed diem with his brown eye, with his blue eye, and with both eyes together. He looked dissatisfied all three ways. “God must be watching over Thessalonica,” he said, “if it hasn’t fallen with the likes of you two holding off the Slavs and Avars.”

George didn’t argue with the veteran; on the whole, he agreed with him. And John surprised Rufus by putting an arm around him and kissing him on the bristly cheek. “Thank you, great captain,” he said in a voice gooey with counterfeit emotion. “You’ve made us what we are today.”

Rufus wiped his cheek with the back of one hand. “The good news about that is that it’s true,” he said. “And the bad news about it… is that it’s true.”

Another tree went over with a crash. The Slavs started trimming it as they had the oak they’d felled a few minutes before. “What are they doing out there?” George asked Rufus.

The veteran clapped to his forehead the hand he’d just used to wipe his cheek. “God help all of us if you’re as I made you,” he said. “Anyone with enough sense to rub his fingers on his tunic after he blows his nose can see that they’re cutting the timber they need for siege engines.”

“Siege engines?” George and John spoke together. John went on, “They’re barbarians. They don’t have any cities. What are they doing with siege engines?”

“They don’t have cities, no,” Rufus said. “That’s not the point. The point is, we have cities. If they want to take them away from us, they have to get inside. The way to get inside a walled town is with siege engines. They know that; they may be barbarians, but they aren’t stupid.”

By the way he said it, his opinion was that the two militiamen were stupid. George’s ears got hot. Righty or wrongly, he prided himself on his wits. Having Rufus scorn them was bitter as wormwood to him. He said, “All right, they know what they need to do to break into our cities. But how do they know? Siege engines can’t be easy to make.”

“Anything is easy--if you know how to do it,” Rufus said. “And they do.” His face darkened with anger. “The Avars were besieging some town up near the Danube, way I heard the story. I forget the name of the place; this was, oh, I don’t know, ten years ago, something like that. They caught a soldier outside the walls, fellow called . . , called . . . Bousas, that was it.”

“They learned to make siege engines from us Romans?” George said, appalled. “Did this Bousas tell them how?”

Rufus nodded. “That’s what he did, all right. They were going to kill him. He told them to take him back to this town, whatever its name was, and the people there would pay ransom to get him back.”

John’s chuckle was cold and cynical. “Didn’t happen, eh?”

“Sure didn’t,” Rufus agreed. “One of the nobles there was either screwing Bousas’ wife or else wanted to screw her, I misremember which, and he persuaded the people not to give the Avars even a follis for Bousas.”

“And Bousas paid them back?” George said.

“That’s what he did, all right,” Rufus repeated, with another nod. “Said he’d give ‘em the town if they let him live, and then went on to teach ‘em how to make stone-throwers.” He scowled. “That’s how they’ve taken so many towns since, and that’s how they know about engines.”

George was a man who liked to get to the bottom of things. “What happened to Bousas, and to his wife, and to the noble who kept the people from ransoming him?

“If Bousas isn’t dead, he’s still with the Avars,” Rufus answered. “I don’t know what happened to the woman or the other fellow. Whatever it was, my bet is that it wasn’t pretty. I’ve seen what happens to towns in a sack.” His lined face went very harsh for a moment. George wondered what pictures he was watching inside his head, and hoped Thessalonica wouldn’t find out.

John said, “If the Slavs do break in, nice to know it’s on account of our sins and not theirs, isn’t it?”

“Maybe we should sally and break those engines, or else burn them, before the barbarians can bring them up against the walls,” George said.

Rufus studied the ground outside the wall. After what must have been a couple of minutes, he regretfully shook his head. “I wish we could, but I don’t think we can. Too stinking many Slavs out there--Slavs here, there and everywhere. They can afford to waste whole great stacks of men holding us off, and we can’t afford the ones we’d have to spend. Anybody says the militia ought to try it, I’m going to say no as loud as I have to, to make people listen. If we had some regulars, now--”

Regulars would have armor to match the scalemail the Avars and their horses wore, and most of them would be mounted, too. If the militiamen fought the Slavs out in the open, they would lack the advantage in weapons and position and be outnumbered to boot. George decided Rufus was right.

Then the veteran looked thoughtful. “Wouldn’t want to send militiamen out against the Slavs in broad daylight, I sure wouldn’t, not unless things were different from the way they are now. Sliding a postern gate open at night, though, and going out and seeing what we could do then …” His eyes didn’t match, but they both saw clearly.

So George thought, at any rate. John hopped straight up in the air, a motion startling enough to make a couple of Slavs look up from their carpentry and point his way. “At night?” he said with anger that sounded genuine. “You’re going to try to take my audience away? I like that!”

“Don’t worry about it, pup.” Rufus set a hard, much-scarred hand on his shoulder. “Nobody’d be listening to you anyway.” He tramped on down the walkway atop the wall, leaving John, for once speechless, behind him.

More and more Slavs came down from the northeast. More and more Avars came with them, to make sure they stuck to their work. With alarming speed, a variety of siege engines took shape under the Avars’ direction. George, who knew plenty about shoes but had never been besieged before, needed help telling one sort from another. Rufus gave it.

“You see the ones on the broad bases?” he said. “The ones that taper up till they’re thinner on top? Those are the stone-throwers. They’ll try and knock the wall down so the barbarians can swarm through the breach.”

“That’s what all those things are for, isn’t it?” George said.

“Well, of course it is, but there are different ways of going about it,” the veteran answered, tossing his head in annoyance at the shoemaker’s naivete. “Those hide-covered sheds shaped like triangles, they’re going to hang battering rams from those. You see that log with the pointed iron beak? That’s going to be a ram. They’ll bring that little present up to the gate or try and fill in some of the ditch in front of the wall so they can come right up close and pound away.”

“And the shields all piled over there?” George looked out to the very edge of the forest. Even from that distance, the shields were obviously not of the ordinary sort. They were bigger than those either militiamen or regulars carried, and extravagantly faced with iron.

“Tortoises,” Rufus said. “The Slavs’ll stand under ‘em and try to dig out the stones at the bottom of the wall so the ones above ‘em fall down. Of course, life gets interesting under a tortoise. I’ve been under one a time or three, and it’s something I could do without.”

Interesting was not the word George would have used. The Thessalonicans already had piles of stones waiting along the walkway. They also had stacked firewood and collected a goodly number of iron pots in which to boil water. All of the stones and the boiling water would come down on the Slavs. Maybe the shields would hold off the rocks. Could they hold out scalding water?

“What we need,” John said, “is St. Demetrius coming down and working another miracle. I mean, a miracle besides talking through a homely old sinner like our captain here.”