Looking after him, George let out a long sigh. “I could save his life, and he’d curse me for doing it.”

“A man like that, he means trouble,” Dactylius said, as a good many others had before him.

“Really? I never would have noticed,” George said. The hurt look in Dactylius’ large brown eyes made him feel as if he’d kicked a puppy. Sighing again, he said, “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault I’ve fallen foul of him. As far as I can see, it’s not my fault, either, but it takes only one to start a quarrel.”

When they got to the jeweler’s house and shop, Dactylius ran inside. He came back with a lamp, pursued by Claudia’s raucous questions. Ignoring those, he started the lamp at the one George was carrying. Once the flame caught, he carried it inside. Claudia, for a wonder, fell silent.

George carried Benjamin’s lamp into his own workshop. His wife and children were all wearing two or three tunics, with woolen mantles or blankets draped over their shoulders. Instead of falling silent as Claudia had done, they all started talking at once. George had to try several times before he could tell them the whole story.

“That Jew came in handy,” Theodore said, speaking of Benjamin as he might have of an awl or a punch.

“Twice now, magic from outside the city hasn’t bitten on the Jews when it hit everyone else,” George observed. “I wonder if God is trying to tell us something.”

“Are you going to stop eating pork and have them do” --Theodore glanced at his mother and sister and chose his words carefully-- “what they do to a man?”

The mere thought of being circumcised made George wince and want to cover himself with his hands. “Not likely,” he said, to his son’s evident relief. He went on, “But I don’t think I’m going to sneer at them the way I sometimes have, either.”

“Never mind the Jews now, for heaven’s sake,” Irene said with brisk feminine pragmatism. “Let’s get the braziers lighted and put a little heat back into this place. And while we’re at it, let’s thank God for not letting the Slavs and Avars freeze us out of our homes, no matter how He chose to do that.”

“Amen,” George said with no hesitation at all.

“If you were the khagan of the Avars,” Paul said in musing tones, “and your wizards kept promising that you’d be able to get into Thessalonica and then not delivering, what would you do?”

“I wouldn’t be very happy,” George admitted, looking out from the wall toward the camp of the Slavs and Avars. “But then, I don’t even know whether the khagan is here right now. There’s a lot of fighting south of the Danube these days.”

“That’s not the point,” the taverner said. “You don’t have anybody who works for you, do you? Besides your family, I mean?--that’s different. If you have somebody who’s not doing the job you pay him to do, you fling him out the door and you get somebody else.”

“I don’t think the khagan would fling his wizards out the door,” George said. “He might see how well they do without their heads, though--barbarian princes are supposed to do things like that.” He paused to think for a moment. “Been a few Roman Emperors like that, too, haven’t there?”

“So they say.” Paul’s shrug expressed the limits of both his interest and his knowledge of the subject. “But he’ll do something new, because what he’s been trying hasn’t worked.”

Such conversations went on every hour of every day up on the wall, and in the taverns, and throughout Thessalonica--being besieged, the people of the city, and most of all the militiamen defending it, spent a lot of ingenuity wondering and arguing about what the besiegers would try next. Among so many speculations, some, by the nature of things, had to be correct.

George understood that--by his own nature, he understood it better than most (and he’d been right himself, once or twice). Understanding didn’t keep him from boasting afterwards when, less than an hour after he said, “Well, they’ve tried magic, and that hasn’t worked, and they’ve tried rams, and those haven’t worked, and they’ve tried tortoises, and those haven’t worked, either, so they’ll likely get around to using the catapults they made when they started the siege,” the Slavs and Avars did exactly as he’d foretold.

Someone out there beyond the wall blew a raucous horn. The noise, which bore no closer resemblance to music than a vulture to a peacock, spurred the barbarian soldiers into action. Avars rode around on horseback, screaming at the much more numerous Slavs. Some of the Slavs picked up their bows and started shooting at the militiamen on the wall. Others picked up chunks of stone and loaded them into the catapults, which, kicking like mules, flung them not only at the militiamen but also at the walls themselves.

One of those stones, lucidly or cleverly aimed, hit a man less than fifty feet from George. Red sprayed out of the fellow. He dropped to the walkway, dead, without a word, without a sound, without a twitch. Having seen how hard human beings were to kill, let alone to kill cleanly, George viewed that with no small astonishment.

More stones, of course, slammed into the wall than into the people on top of it. To George’s frightened eyes, a lot of them looked big as islands. Every time one struck, the wall shivered under his feet, as if in pain. The shiverings ran together into what felt like an earthquake that would not stop. “What can we do?” Paul shouted in between the smashing of stone missiles on stone fortifications.

“I don’t know,” George answered helplessly. “Those catapults are out past arrow range.”

Thessalonica’s walls bore catapults of their own. After a bit of hesitation, the militiamen began shooting back at the ones the Slavs and Avars had built. They did not fling rocks at the foe, but jars of pitch and naphtha the men lighted as they launched them. When one of those jars hit the ground, it smashed and spilled fire over ten or fifteen feet.

But few of the enemy’s catapults burned. They were covered in hides to keep flame from sticking to them. Not even the inflammable mix the Romans hurled was enough to make the hides catch fire. Only when the hellbrew splashed onto a wooden casting-arm would the engine of which it formed a part begin to blaze.

A big stone stuck about ten feet below where George was standing. The wall shuddered. He shuddered, too. How many impacts like that would it take till the wall no longer shuddered but collapsed?

Heaped here and there along the wall, along with stones for hurling down on the foe (not enough stones, not after the assault with the tortoises) and cauldrons for heating water, lay mats and horse blankets roughly basted together: padding to protect the gray stone fortifications from the worst the stones might do. George and Paul, along with many other militiamen on the works, began lowering the mats and blankets, draping them over the outside of the wall, and weighting them in place with some of the stones they would otherwise have dropped on the Slavs’ heads.

They quickly discovered there was more wall than matting with which to cover it. They also discovered that covering it did only so much good, as the cloth they were using could not absorb all the force from the rocks the enemy’s catapults threw. But, as George said, “Now we’ve done what we can do. The rest is up to God.”

“And to the Slavs and Avars,” Paul added, to which the shoemaker had to nod, feeling more helpless than he had before the taverner spoke.

The bombardment went on for what seemed like forever but could not have been more than a couple of hours. Men on the wall were hurt. Some of them were killed. The wall itself took a fearful pounding: certainly a pounding that made George fearful. Here and there, stones shattered.

But, in the end, the Roman engineers and masons who’d designed and built the wall were vindicated. It did not collapse, as had in his alarmed imagination seemed likely. That must have seemed likely to the Slavs, too, for their archers kept drawing ever nearer, to rush into the city if the catapults forced a breach.