George turned his head. “Here come Sabbatius and Bishop Eusebius,” he said.

“Good,” Rufus said. “Now I don’t have to kill Sabbatius.” Again, he sounded as if he would have done it without a second thought.

Robes swirling around him, Bishop Eusebius came out onto the walkway. Sabbatius followed. The bishop did not look out from the wall. Instead, rounding on Rufus, he said, “This man you sent tells me the barbarians have the power to defeat the curse of the Lord. Can such a thing be true?” He did not sound as if he believed it.

Rufus was a man who said what he thought. In his rough Latin, he answered, “No, of course not, Your Excellency. I lied just to get you up here and to get you angry at me. I like having important people angry at me.”

Eusebius’ eyes flashed. George, who already had an important person angry at him, feared the militia captain s pungent sarcasm had achieved its announced purpose. Before Eusebius vented the anger he plainly felt, George said, “See for yourself, Your Excellency.”

Turned from the personal toward the real, Eusebius watched as the Slavic wizards cured thirty-two warriors of the disease with which the bishop’s curse had tormented them. When the small, dark clouds of vapor had sprung from the mouths of the sick Slavs, and when the warriors walked away no longer sick, Eusebius made the sign of the cross, as if to say no spiritual power but his own had any business being effective.

“Can you stop them, Your Excellency?” George asked. “Can you bring the curse back to its full strength?”

“I can try. I will try.” Eusebius drew himself up to his full height--which would have been more impressive had he been taller. He began to pray: “Lord God, I beseech Thee: do not abandon the folk of Thessalonica to the Slavs and Avars. Punish the barbarians, smite them as they deserve for taking no thought of Thee or of Thy truths, and--”

He went on in that vein. He seemed prepared to go on in that vein for some time. He had, however, attracted the notice of the Slavs and Avars. George thought they would try to disrupt his petition to the Lord with a storm of arrows, such as they had sent his way the last time he’d come up onto the city wall and into their presence.

Instead, the Slavs went on curing their fellow tribesmen while the Avar priest or wizard began what was plainly a petition to his own powers. And, as plainly, those powers were heeding him, as God had heeded Bishop Eusebius. “I am hindered,” the bishop said indignantly. “I can sense I am hindered. In the name of Christ, Who cast forth demons, I command this hindrance to cease!”

The Avar priest staggered. He glared toward the wall. Evidently he was no more used to having his power thwarted than was Eusebius. As the bishop had done, he redoubled his efforts, dancing harder than he had before and shouting to his gods so loudly that George had no trouble hearing him across more than a bowshot of ground. Were noise the only criterion for piety, he would have defeated Eusebius.

He did not. The bishop’s quiet prayer discomfited him, and also discomfited the Slavic wizards with whom he’d been working. Rather than curing their warriors thirty-two at a time, they had to drop down to batches of eight, sometimes four. But they did keep curing them.

Eusebius groaned. “Who would have expected the pagans to be so strong?” he said, and shook his fist out toward the Avar who was keeping him from keeping the Slavic wizards from curing the Slavic warriors. “Almighty God, invincible God, a plague is but a small thing next to what Thou canst do. I pray Thee, smite them now with thunder and lightning!”

George hoped for a levinbolt from the clear blue sky to crisp the Slavs and Avar. He hoped for one, but did not expect it. Nor was his hope granted. The Avar priest, after all, was the one who controlled the thirteen thunder spirits and the rumblers. Going straight against the Avars’ powers, from all he’d seen, did not work.

“Your Excellency,” he said, “sometimes it’s better to work with what the powers out there can do than to ignore them.” He explained how Father Luke had turned the sorcerous storm against the Avar who had created it.

“I have heard this sordid tale already,” Eusebius replied in a voice chillier than the weather. “Father Luke is serving a penance for undue familiarity with these demonic powers.”

“He saved us all,” Rufus exclaimed. “Doesn’t that count for more than how he did it?”

“ ‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ “ Eusebius answered, smug as any theologian with a quotation from Scripture handy.

“He didn’t do it for gain,” George said stubbornly. “He did it to save the city and save the people.”

It was useless. He knew it was useless. A layman arguing theology with a theologian was like a militiaman taking on a fully armored regular soldier: a gifted amateur might prevail, but that wasn’t the way to bet. Eusebius, fortunately, kept his temper. Indeed, the look he gave George was pitying. That made the shoemaker angry, which was also useless: as well have a gnat angry at a horse.

Out beyond the wall, hampered but not stopped, the Slavic wizards went on curing their countrymen. Bishop Eusebius tried again to break their power to do so, tried again and faded again. That did anger him, as if someone had changed the rules to a game without telling him first. He stomped off in high dudgeon.

“We’re not going to win all of them, looks like,” Rufus said.

“No,” George agreed. “And now it’s their turn.”

VII

When George went into the church of St. Elias, he found Father Luke alone there, praying in front of the altar. The priest turned and greeted him with a smile. “Welcome, George,” he said. “God is always glad to see you here.”

“I didn’t come here for myself,” George answered. “I came here for you, Your Reverence. You’ve done more than anyone else to keep the Slavs and Avars out of Thessalonica, and what have you got for it? Penance, I hear. It’s not right.”

Father Luke’s smile did not shrink, nor did it seem grudging. “So my superior has ordered: so shall it be. Disobedience is not a sin I want on my conscience. I have too many others.”

Men who talked about their many sins commonly had very few: that was George’s experience, at any rate. “Nonsense,” he said roughly. “You’re the holiest man I know.”

The priest made a deprecating gesture. “You do not know me so well as you think you do, my friend. And I tell you again, what Bishop Eusebius did, what he commanded me to do, he had every right to do and to command. I speak truly: did I not believe it, I have means of recourse.”

George frowned. Within Thessalonica, Eusebius was ecclesiastically supreme along with being de facto city prefect. If Father Luke didn’t care for anything he did, the priest had no one to whom to appeal--no one in the city, at any rate. The shoemaker’s eyes widened. “You would--?”

“Of course I would,” Father Luke said. “If I believed the holy Bishop Eusebius had trampled on my rights as a priest, I would not hesitate for an instant before writing to Cyriacus in Constantinople. The patriarch has the authority to bring back under rein any cleric who outrages propriety.”

He obviously meant what he said. From that, George concluded he also meant he didn’t believe Eusebius’ infliction of penance on him was wrong. Maybe that was part of holiness, too. If it was, it was a part George didn’t fully understand. “If it hadn’t been for what you did,” he said, “you wouldn’t be arguing with the bishop; you’d be arguing with that Avar out there, the one who brought the storm down on the city.”

“That is possible,” Father Luke admitted. “And yet--” He quoted the same verse from the Book of Matthew that Bishop Eusebius had used.

“What does it profit you to die,” George returned, “when you have a weapon in your hand that might let you live?” He would have given up against Bishop Eusebius. The priest, though, took argument as a sport, not a personal affront.