George looked around again, and saw he wasn’t the only one doing so. He didn’t spy Rufus in the audience, which meant nothing would happen to John right away. Sooner or later, though, the veteran would hear about the joke. That was the way life worked. Rufus had been around a long time. He might laugh it off. If he didn’t, being a shoemaker would have nothing to do with why George wouldn’t have cared to stand in John’s sandals.

If John knew he’d skirted trouble again, he didn’t let on, but then, he never did. He went on with another story: “Did you hear about the fellow who got an audience with the Roman Emperor by claiming he was God? The Emperor told him, “You’d better think about this, because last year a man came before me saying he was a prophet, and I ordered his head cut off.’ And the fellow looked at him and said, ‘Your Majesty, you did the right thing, because I did not send that man.’ “

More people groaned than laughed over that one, but John didn’t mind. If anything, he looked happy: the silly story let him slip away from the dangerous ground on which he’d been treading. Listening to him tell more tales, George fully realized for the first time that he wasn’t just spinning one story after another; they all fit together in a pattern as elaborate as any a mosaicist could make with colored tiles. And part--much--of the art here lay in concealing from the audience that a pattern existed. One more reason, George thought, I couldn’t match what John is doing.

“Do you know,” John said, “our friend Sabbatius there” --he pointed to Sabbatius, who seemed to have slept through his entire performance-- “has never seen a drunken man in his life?”

“Oh, come on now!” Several people said that, or words to that effect, at the same time. Nobody who came regularly to Paul’s tavern--or to any of a good many others in Thessalonica--could fail to know Sabbatius was a tosspot of epic proportion.

But John only grinned his lopsided grin. “It’s true,” he insisted. “He drinks himself to sleep before anybody else, and he doesn’t wake up till long after everybody else is sober again. Deny it if you can.” No one could; he got an appreciative hand instead. Raising his voice to a shout, he called, “Isn’t that right, Sabbatius?”

The plump militiaman thrashed and almost fell off his stool. “Wuzzat?” he said thickly, before sliding back into deeper slumber.

“Isn’t he wonderful?” John said, more quietly now. He looked out at the people packing the tavern. “And aren’t you all wonderful? And don’t you wish you could be sure your name would never, ever show up in one of my stories? Best way I can think of is to make me too rich and happy ever to think of you in an unkind way.” He nudged with his foot a plain earthenware bowl up there on the platform with him.

Quite a few people made their way over to him and tossed coins into the bowl. George watched their faces as they went back to their seats or to the bar. Some looked pleased: they’d rewarded a man who’d entertained them. More, though, wore a tight, intricate expression, almost as if they’d made up their minds to have a tooth pulled to end continuous pain. They were the ones who feared John would mock them next.

“How does it feel to be a blackmailer?” George asked when money stopped rattling into the bowl and John carried it back to the table.

“Don’t know yet,” the comic answered. “Let me count the take first.” He dumped the bowl out onto the tabletop. Shuffling coins into stacks, his fingers were as quick and deft as a money changer’s. He let out a little happy grunt at spotting silver among the bronze. “Ah, isn’t that nice? Somebody gave me a miliaresion. And here’s another. Good, good--one would be lonely by itself.” In a couple of minutes, the reckoning was done. “Tonight,” John declared, “being a blackmailer feels pretty good.”

“Don’t go away, folks,” Paul called. “In half an hour or so, the special duo of Lucius and Maria, who’ve sung in Sicily and Illyria, will give you old love songs and some new ones all their own. I’m sure you’ll want to stay and hear them--they’ll send you home in a happy mood.”

“Now I know when to leave,” John said, scooping his take into a leather pouch. “I’ve heard Lucius and Maria, by God. They’re funnier than I am. The only difference is, they don’t mean to be.”

George hadn’t heard them. He said, “If they’re that bad, how have they been able to perform in all those places?”

“Are you kidding?” John rolled his eyes. “They stink up a town once, they get ran out, and they bloody well have to go somewhere else--in a hurry. And so, before they come on, I’ll bloody well go somewhere else, too. Good night.”

But before he could escape, the barmaid whose intended insult he’d turned to his own purposes came up to the table. “That wasn’t very nice, what you did there,” she said, hands on hips.

John said, “The best stories come from what really happens. Anybody silly enough to tell me not to use one would probably marry a eunuch.”

She glared at him. “Is that all that matters? That I gave you a story you could use to make people laugh?”

“Of course not,” he answered, which, with John, was as likely as not to mean yes. He leered. “I told you beforehand, I had something else in mind.”

Confronted with a line like that, George would have poured, or maybe broken, a jar of wine over John’s head. Like anyone else, he judged other people by his own standard, and so was astonished when the barmaid said, “That’s right, you did,” in a purr that announced she suddenly had something else in mind, too. She and John left the tavern together.

Muttering to himself, George got another cup of wine from Paul (the barmaid having disappeared) and settled down to see whether Lucius and Maria were as bad as John had claimed. They weren’t. They were worse.

After a stint on the wall early the next morning, George went back to his shop to get some work done. He wasn’t working so much as he would have liked these days, not with the siege. People were still buying shoes; he’d sold several pairs to refugees who hadn’t bothered putting on any before fleeing the Slavs and Avars.

Having sewn the last strap onto a sandal, he looked into the box where he kept little bronze buckles. It was empty. When he made an exasperated noise, Theodore said, “I’m sorry, Father--I used the last ones in there a little while ago. Haven’t we got any more?”

“No, those were the last,” George answered. “I’ll have to walk down to Benjamin and buy some new ones.” He grumbled something inaudible even to himself: more time when he wouldn’t be able to get anything useful done.

Theodore must have figured out what that grumble meant. “You could send me, Father,” he said.

“I could… .” George considered. Not without a certain amount of regret, he shook his head. “No, I’d better not. He’d skin you alive on the price. He’ll skin me, too, but not so bad.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” Theodore said. “Just because he’s a Jew--”

“I’m not afraid of him because he’s a Jew,” George answered. “I’ve got the better of plenty of them. I’m afraid of him because he’s Benjamin.”

Like most of Thessalonica’s Jews, Benjamin lived and had his shop in the southwestern part of the city. The whole street echoed with the taps and clangs of hammers on metal: Jews dominated the bronze- and coppersmithing trades.

Benjamin looked up from his work when George walked into the shop. The bronzeworker was a few years older than George, lean and wiry and dark. “Ah, good morning, good morning,” he said in Greek. “I thought you would be one of the bishop’s men, and that order is not yet ready.”

George scratched his head. “If you don’t mind my asking, what would Bishop Eusebius want from you?”

“Arrowheads, of course,” the Jew answered, holding up a file with which he’d been sharpening one. “I’m supposed to deliver another five hundred day after tomorrow, but if they wanted them today, I couldn’t do it.”