Just then, Dactylius sneezed. That gave George the excuse he needed to shed the cloak: he passed it to Dactylius. The jeweler tried to protest, too, but kept on sneezing. That let George and Father Luke ignore him, and left them both warm in spirit if less so in body.

John and Sabbatius came up onto the wall to replace George and Dactylius. So far as George knew, nobody had told Sabbatius that John was in the habit of making jokes about him. One of these days, Sabbatius would find out, and there would be trouble. Not wishing either to borrow or to cause the latter, George kept his mouth shut and headed for home.

When the shoemaker got to his shop, Irene said, “Wasn’t that a dreadful storm a couple of hours ago? I see you’re still all wet, poor thing, and the roof has a new leak in it, too. I put a bowl down under it to catch the drips.”

“It was quite a storm,” George agreed. If it had seemed nothing more than that to his wife, he was as well pleased.

“Storm like that, I’m glad the Slavs didn’t attack,” Theodore said. “They could have caused all sorts of trouble, and you might not have noticed them in the rain till too late.”

“That’s true, too,” George said, and sneezed as vigorously as Dactylius had up on the wall.

“Come upstairs. Get out of that wet tunic.” Irene took charge of him with brisk efficiency. “Drink some warm wine with honey in it. That will make you feel better.”

“If I don’t feel better, I won’t notice after I drink enough of it,” George said.

Ignoring that, Irene maneuvered him much as Rufus might have done up on the wall. And, sure enough, in dry clothes and with hot wine in him, he did think the world a kindlier place than he had when he was all wet and shivery. He stretched the upper for a boot he was working on over the last and smoothed the leather with a round file.

“That’s good work, Father,” Theodore said, looking over his shoulder.

He paid more attention to it himself than he had been doing. “It is, isn’t it?” he said, surprised at how surprised he sounded. Looking down at his hands, he added, “They know what they’re up to, anyhow. Now if I could only leave them behind to work while the rest of me goes upstairs to supper or off to the tavern, that would be pretty fine.”

Theodore snorted. “While you’re at it, why not wish for a bronze man, like the one the Poet says Hephaestus made to help him with his work?”

“Why not indeed?” George said mildly--too mildly to suit his son, who might have been hoping for an argument, as he often did these days. He went back to work himself.

George let his hands guide the file over the leather once more, since they’d proved they could tend to that by themselves. When Theodore had learned to read Greek, the teacher taught him Homer, from whose poems boys had been learning to read for more than a thousand years. Even now, in these Christian times, the Iliad and the Odyssey gave the old gods a shadowy life they would not have had without them.

Was that good or bad? Homer wrote so well that, while you were reading him, you couldn’t help believing in his gods and heroes--George remembered as much from his own days in school. No wonder some bishops would sooner have had students taught from the Holy Scriptures alone, thereby interring the memory of the pagan gods for good.

“But the words are so fine,” George murmured. While he’d mused, his hands had smoothed out the whole toe of the boot. He opened and closed them, almost as if to make sure they were still willing to respond to his will. Maybe he’d come closer to imitating Hephaestus than either he or his son had thought.

That night, Irene said, “Something more happened today than you let on in front of the children--or in front of me, either, come to that. What was it?”

He didn’t bother asking how she knew. They’d slept side by side more than half their lives; he often wondered if she knew him better than he knew himself. “It wasn’t an ordinary storm,” he said, and went on to explain how the thirteen thunder spirits and however many little rumblers there had been had let the Slavs shoot at the Romans for a while without fear of reprisal, and how they’d nearly let the Slavs do worse than that, too.

Irene shivered, then took him in her arms, as much, he judged, to reassure herself he still lay beside her as because the night was chilly. “That is a terrible thing,” she said in the quiet dark: “That the power of the Lord could not rout these sky-things the Avars worship.”

“It is a terrible thing,” George answered, remembering how frightened he’d been when Father Luke’s first prayer faded to drive the thunder spirits and rumblers away from Thessalonica. “It’s what I’ve been saying: the powers feed off the belief the Slavs and Avars give them.”

“God doesn’t feed off our power. He gives us power, the way He did with Rufus in the church of St. Demetrius. The pagan powers from the old days that still lurk here fear Him. Why don’t these others?”

“Because they’re stronger,” George said patiently. “I think Father Luke did very well. When he saw he couldn’t force the Avar powers out of the sky, he went with them instead of against them. He used their own nature to get them to drench the barbarians along with us, and that ruined whatever plan the Avars had.”

“It worked, but was it right?” Irene asked. “Satan will give you what you want, too, if you ask it of him. Asking is the sin.”

“I don’t think Father Luke sinned. I think he did what he had to do. And I think he was clever to come up with it so quickly after the first prayer faded.”

Irene shivered again, and held him tighter. “I hope you’re right.”

“So do I,” George said. He didn’t want to think about what being wrong might mean. That his wife was holding him, and he her, gave him something else to think about. Since he was a man, what that something was soon became evident. Irene laughed a quiet laugh, deep down in her throat, and reached between them.

They made love with their tunics hiked up rather than naked; the night was cold. They were generally happy with each other in bed, one reason they got on well with each other outside the bedroom. Tonight, though, Irene responded to his caresses with more fervor than she’d shown in … he couldn’t remember how long. Her excitement drove his, too.

Only afterwards, his tunic down past his knees again to warm as much of him as it could, did he wonder whether Irene also had a good many things she was trying not to think about.

He yawned and snuggled closer to her. She was already nearly asleep. All the jokes said that was something men did, but it happened with her more often than with him. Not that he wasn’t sleepy himself, no indeed. Soon after her breathing grew deep and regular, his did, too. The last thought he remembered having was a vague hope that she would find herself worried more often.

“You! Shoemaker!”

The gruff growl made George look up from his work. There in the doorway stood Menas, looking large and well fed and unpleasant. One look at his proud, meaty face said he remembered and still resented Georges remark up on the wall: he was the sort of man who would remember for a long time anything diminishing his self-importance.

No help for it. “What can I do for you today, sir?” George asked.

“I hear you’ve been telling lies about me,” Menas said heavily.

“No, sir,” George said, surprised now. “So far as I know, sir, I haven’t said anything about you at all.”

“Lying again,” Menas said. “Well, you’ll pay for that, too. You’re going to tell me the stinking joke going through the taverns, the one that says God gave me my legs back so I could run away from the Slavs, that isn’t yours?”

“No, that’s not mine,” the shoemaker said. But he had heard it--where? At Paul’s tavern, coming out of John’s mouth, that was where. He’d worried it would land John in trouble with Menas. He’d never imagined it would land him in trouble with the noble instead.