Irene carried the hares and partridges upstairs; like a lot of artisan families, George’s lived over their shop. Before too long, a delicious smell floated down into the work area. No customers had come in since George showed up with the game, and it was getting dark outside, so he felt no hesitation about shutting the front door and letting down the bar. He didn’t expect anyone would need new boots or to have a sandal repaired so badly as to come to the shop with a torchbearer--and, in the unlikely event somebody did do that, he could always open the door again. He and the children went upstairs after his wife.

It was lighter up there than down below: safer to put windows in the second story of a building, because they were harder to break into there. Even so, Irene had lighted a couple of lamps. The smell of burning olive oil was part of” the characteristic odor of Thessalonica, along with woodsmoke, garbage, and manure. George paid no attention to the smell when he stayed in town, but it forcefully brought itself to his attention when he came back after some time away, as with his day of hunting.

Irene ladled the stew into earthenware bowls; Sophia carried them and horn spoons to the table. Irene brought in bread and honey to go with the stew. Before the family began to eat, they bowed their heads. George said grace, thanking Christ that they had enough to fill their bellies. When he was done, he glanced toward the heavens. Though all he saw were the beams of the roof, he knew God watched over him.

The blessing reminded him of what had gone on in the woods earlier that day. “I saw a satyr this afternoon,” he remarked after he’d taken his first bite, and then, in much the same tone of voice, “Good stew.”

Theodore gaped at him; Sophia made the sign of the cross. They and their mother all exclaimed--they knew George too well to let that calm, casual tone lull them. Irene, not surprisingly, was the first one to put words to her thoughts: “I hope it was from far away, and that the creature didn’t bother you.”

“It didn’t bother me.” George took another bite. Deliberately, he chewed. Deliberately, he swallowed. “I gave it some of my wine--not too much. I didn’t want it drunk.”

“You should have driven it away, Father.” Now Theodore crossed himself, to show what he meant. “Those nasty demons can’t stand against the sign of the true faith.”

“I know that.” George hid his smile. In going against what his father had done, Theodore had--no doubt altogether without intending to--become perfectly conventional. George ate some more stew, then went on, “As things worked out, I’m glad I didn’t.” He told of what the satyr had said about the Slavic wolf-demon and what that demon had done to the priest.

His wife, his son, and his daughter, all made the sign of the cross then, to turn aside the evil omen. For good measure, Theodore also pulled at the neck opening to his tunic and spat down it, an apotropaic gesture older than Christianity, and one a priest might have frowned to see.

“What are we going to do?” Sophia asked. “If these barbarians and their horrible demons come against Thessalonica, how shall we be saved?”

“We have strong walls, we have soldiers, we have priests, we have faith in God,” George answered. “If all those aren’t enough, what will be?”

Sophia nodded, reassured. Irene’s eyes met George’s. Neither of them said anything. He knew what his wife was thinking: that all the things he’d named might not be enough. And it was true. Not long before Sophia was born, Sirmium, a city perhaps as great as Thessalonica, had fallen to the Slavs and Avars. Life in the Roman Empire was hard these days, and no one could say it might not get harder.

After supper, Irene and Sophia washed the dishes in a basin of water. By the time they were done, full darkness had fallen. Against its almost palpable presence, the flames from the lamps and the flickering light they cast seemed tiny and weak, the next thing to lost. George thought of the Slavs and Avars moving down toward the Aegean, and of Thessalonica, a Christian light in a sea of pagan darkness.

He went to the window and looked out. Most of Thessalonica was dark now, with a glow of candles and of holiness coming from the churches, more lights up on the walls, and here and there one moving through the streets as prominent people undertook to travel through the night. Footpads traveled through the night, too, but did not advertise their presence.

“Close the shutters, George,” his wife said, yawning. “Let’s go to bed.” Few people--mostly the rich, who could afford the lamps and candles they needed to turn night into day--stayed up long past sunset. Nor was darkness the only reason for that. When you rose with the sun and worked hard all day, you were ready to go to bed by the time night came.

The room to the left of the hall as you walked up it had been shared by Sophia and Theodore. These days, since they’d come to puberty, it had a wooden partition down the middle that turned it into two cubicles. George kept telling himself--and anyone who would listen--he would enlarge the doorway one day soon. He’d been saying it for so long, he didn’t believe it himself anymore.

He used a lamp from the kitchen to light one that rested on a stool by the bed in his own bedchamber, then, in orderly fashion, carried the first one back to where it belonged, blew it out, and used what glow came through the doorway from the second to guide him up the hall. By the time he returned, Irene was already in bed. He used the earthenware chamber pot, took off his shoes, undid his belt and took it off, and got in himself, still wearing the long tunic he’d had on all day. The straw of the mattress rustling under him, he leaned up on one elbow and blew out the lamp on the stool. The bedroom plunged into darkness.

Despite that darkness, Irene did not want to go to sleep at once. “A satyr,” she said in a low voice, one that, with luck, the children would not overhear. “I know of them, of course--everyone knows of them--but I never heard of anybody meeting one before, not even in the stories my old grandmother told me when I was little.”

“Neither did I,” George said, “not around a city that’s been Christian as long as Thessalonica. But up in the north it’s all helter-skelter; things are bubbling like porridge in a pot over a hot fire. The Roman soldiers and the Avars and Slavs keep going back and forth and round and round, but every year, in spite of what the soldiers do, there are more pagan Slavs settling on land that ought to be Roman.”

“I know,” Irene answered. “From what I hear in the marketplace, the Roman generals spend more time quarreling among themselves than they do fighting the enemy.”

“I’ve heard the same thing,” George said. “It worries me.” Irene caught her breath at that. Her husband was a man who worried a good deal, but hardly ever admitted it out loud. He went on, “And when the Slavs settle on land that ought to be Roman, their gods and demons settle on land that ought to be Christian.”

“That wolf--what it did to the priest. . .” On top of a wool blanket she had woven herself, she shuddered.

“Satyrs, now, and the other creatures from the old days,” George said musingly, “people believe in them, yes, but not the way they used to, so no wonder the true faith of Christ is stronger than they are. But the Slavs, they believe in their powers the same way we believe in the power of the Lord. That makes the wolf--and whatever other things they have like him--dangerous to us Christians.”

“Do you think the Slavs will come down as far as Thessalonica?” Irene asked.

“Farther west, bands of them have pushed deeper into Greece than we are,” he replied: Irene was not the sort of woman to be fobbed off with vague reassurances, especially when those were likely to be false. “So yes, they could come to Thessalonica. Taking the city is another question. God surely guards us here.”