“I suppose not,” Dactylius said, “but if I didn’t see them at their sorceries, I wouldn’t worry about them so much.”

“Of course you would,” George said, having known his friend for many years. “You’d just be shying at shadows, not at anything real.”

Dactylius sighed. He wasn’t ignorant of his own faults; like most mortals, he had trouble doing anything about them. “You’re probably right,” he said.

“Besides” --George sent Dactylius a sidelong look-- “sometimes you cause the trouble you complain about afterwards. If you hadn’t bounced an arrow off that Avar’s corselet, that priest of theirs wouldn’t have tried to drown the city with a thunderstorm.”

“In the end, though, it showed the power of God,” Dactylius said, and George supposed that was true. But it had also shown the strength of the powers upon which the Avar had called. Dactylius continued in musing tones: “I wonder what they’ll try next.”

“No way to tell.” George didn’t want the jeweler working himself up into a swivet over the incalculable. But then, being who he was, the shoemaker tried to figure out what he’d just said could not be figured out. “The storm had spirits of the air in it, and maybe spirits of water, too. That water-demigod was certainly one of those. And when the Avar tried to take the bishop’s blessing off the grappling hooks, the earth shook, even if it didn’t shake very hard.”

“Earth and air,” Dactylius said, musing still. “Water and-- It’ll be something to do with fire, I’d bet.”

“I think you’re right,” George answered. “I hope you’re wrong.” He knew he was the one who would start worrying, start shying at shadows, now. Fire was a constant dread in every city, Thessalonica no less than others. Once it started spreading, you could do so little to put it out.

“What can we do?” Dactylius whispered, echoing his thoughts.

“I don’t know.” George pointed toward the Avar priest’s tent. “Keeping an eye on what he’s up to strikes me as a good idea.”

“Well, of course it does,” Dactylius exclaimed, and then had the good grace to turn red. “You have me this time, don’t you, George? A little while ago, I said I wished that tent was somewhere else.”

“That’s true.” George bowed to Dactylius, as he might have done before the city prefect. His friend looked puzzled. He explained: “You also just admitted you were wrong. That doesn’t happen every day, or every month, either.”

“Oh.” Dactylius looked abashed. He started to say something more, chewed on it, and shut his mouth tight instead. George thought he could guess what his friend hadn’t said: that, living with Claudia, he’d had practice confessing he was wrong, whether he was or not. George would not have chosen to live with Claudia. But then, Dactylius hadn’t exactly chosen to live with her, either. His parents had done it for him--or rather, to him.

One of the Slavic wizards came out of his tent and looked toward Thessalonica. His shoulders moved up and down: not a shrug, George thought, more likely a sigh. Seen by himself, the Slav, like the couple of his compatriots whom George had encountered in the woods, didn’t seem threatening. When you put him together with all his compatriots, though . ..

Dactylius said, “He looks like he’s sick of the whole business.”

“He does, doesn’t he?” George said. “Well, I’m sick of the whole business, too, but I’m sticking with it. I suppose he will, too, worse luck for us.” He described his conceit of a moment before for his friend, then added, “You take me by myself and I’m not what you’d call dangerous, either. But think of me as one part of the Roman Empire and I look different.”

Dactylius studied him carefully. “No, you don’t.”

“You’re not making this easy,” George said, clucking. “Now if you think of the whole massed weight of the Empire--” As he spoke, he waited for Dactylius, who seemed in a whimsical mood this morning, to crack a joke about the weight of the Empire’s making the wall fall down. But, since he didn’t complete his sentence, Dactylius never got the chance. Instead, George pointed out toward the wizard. “Hello. He’s got company.”

The other Slavic wizards were coming out of their tents, too, and studying Thessalonica with the same intent look the first one had given the city. And here came the Avar priest or wizard in his costume of furs and leather and fringes. As always, George shivered when he saw him. The Avar carried a lot of spiritual force. Had he been born a Christian and a Roman rather than a barbarous pagan, he might well have become a bishop.

Pointing again, this time toward the Avar, George said, “Can you imagine him in Eusebius’ vestments?”

Dactylius gaped, then made a noise half giggle, half squeak. “Easily,” he said.

And Eusebius, born a barbarian, might have been out there in furs and leather and fringes, trying to rouse his powers to break into Thessalonica and overcome the God Who held them at bay. He wondered what he himself would have been, had his life begun among the Slavs or Avars rather than the Romans. Probably not a shoemaker; from what he’d seen, the enemy had no one who made shoes for everyone else, each man being his own shoemaker and cobbler. George shrugged. He could have found something else to do.

“What are they doing?” Dactylius asked, a question of more immediate import.

“I don’t know,” George said. “If I had to guess, though, I’d say it’s nothing we’re going to like very much.”

The Slavs and the Avars had huddled together like small boys before a mime show they’d thought up. That George recognized: they wanted everything right. When they broke apart, the Avar priest shouted something that was, as usual, unintelligible from the wall. Also as usual, it got prompt results. Several Slavs with the harassed look of slaves began building a great fire from so much wood and brush that George, who’d often been chilly because Thessalonica lacked fuel, grew warm with angry jealousy.

One of the slaves thrust a torch into the brush. The fire caught swiftly. Flames leaped higher than a man. The Slavic wizards drew close to the blaze, whether for warmth or for the sake of ritual George could not tell. Staring out at the fire, Dactylius sighed longingly.

Another Slav led a billy goat up close to the fire, tethering the beast to a stake driven into the ground. The Avar priest walked all around the goat, raising his hands and chanting in a scale that had little to do with any sort of music George had heard before.

When the Avar got round behind the goat, he drew a knife from his belt; firelight flashed off the edge of the blade. With one swift motion, he reached down and castrated the goat. Blood spurted. The animal gave a bleat of startled agony. A moment later, the Slavic wizards took up the strange chant the Avar had been using.

He, after holding the goat’s testicles aloft as if in triumph, flung them into the heart of the fire. It flared up for a moment in a blaze more nearly white than honest red-gold. The Avar priest and his Slavic acolytes--for so they seemed to George to be--began a new and different chant, one the shoemaker thought might be a name: “Odkan Galakan Eke! Odkan Galakan Eke!” They called the name or phrase over and over again, till it echoed in George’s mind.

Dactylius crossed himself. “The goat!” he said. “Look at the goat.”

Watching the Avar and the Slavs, George had almost forgotten the poor unfortunate animal, whose role in the ceremony he had assumed to be over. Now he found he was mistaken. “Holy Virgin Mother of God,” he whispered, and also made the sign of the cross.

It had no effect. The woman now riding on the goat (she might have been Odkan Galakan Eke; George thought of her thus, rightly or wrongly he did not know), though plainly supernatural, was as plainly not the Virgin Mother of God. Half again the size of a man, she and her clothing seemed made all from fire.