“All we need to do is keep them out of Thessalonica,” George said. “We don’t have to kill them. If they can’t get in, sooner or later they’ll go away.”

Dactylius came up onto the wall then. He beamed at Theodore, and failed to notice Theodore wasn’t beaming back. “Young blood,” the little jeweler said. “Young blood. Makes me feel old and useless.”

“You know what young blood was going to do?” one of the nearby militiamen said. “He was going to start shooting at the first Slav he saw, and probably go right on shooting after that. Christe eleison, we’d have been ducking for days if George here hadn’t stopped him.”

Theodore looked and sounded ready to burst. “This isn’t fighting!” he said. “This is all make-believe and cowardice!”

A couple of militiamen laughed, which only made matters worse. But before Theodore could do or say anything irrevocable, George looked out from the wall. “Hello,” he said, and then, to Theodore, “Son, if you want fighting, I’m afraid you may get it.” He pointed toward the troop of Avars riding out of their encampment toward Thessalonica.

As they did whenever he saw them, the Avars alarmed him. Part of that was their gear: not only did they armor themselves in scalemail from head to foot, they armored their horses the same way. Part of it was their horsemanship: they might almost have been centaurs, attached to their mounts from birth. And part of it was the arrogance that flowed off them in waves, the feeling that they were convinced they were the toughest people in the world.

Their powers were convinced they were the toughest powers in the world, too. George also got that feeling from the Avars, and very strongly, as strongly as the churches of Christian saints reflected their special traits.

He wasn’t the only one who got that feeling, either. Dactylius said, “They give you the chills just looking at them, don’t they? I’m glad they let the Slavs do so much of the dirty work for them.”

“Yes,” George said, warily watching the Avars shake themselves out from a column to a line paralleling the wall. They were, he thought, still out of arrow range of the militiamen on the wall. They did not share his opinion. Instead of quivers, they carried cases holding both bow and arrows. As if inspired by a single will, they took out the bows and started shooting.

Those bows must have been better than the ones the Slavs used--better than the ones the militiamen on the walls of Thessalonica used, too. The fellow who’d been mocking Theodore’s aggressive inexperience made a hideous gobbling noise and toppled over onto his side. His hands clutched at the arrow that had suddenly sprouted from his neck. Bright red blood streamed out between his fingers and puddled on the walkway. It steamed in the chill air of early morning. The militiaman’s feet drummed and were still.

Theodore stared, eyes wide. George set a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to get some fighting whether we want it or not,” he said. “The Avars aren’t going to care whether we and the Slavs spend the next week shooting at each other. You’ve got that bow. You’d better use it now.”

Before Theodore could, an arrow hissed between him and his father. He jumped, coming to the same horrible realization George had at the start of the siege: people out there were trying to kill him. Then he shouted several words George had never heard him use at home, yanked an arrow from his quiver, and let fly at the Avars.

George thought that a healthy reaction. But after Theodore had sent a couple of more arrows after the first, the shoemaker said, “Take it easy, son. They have better bows than we do, so they can reach the wall and we probably can’t hit them.”

Theodore stared at him as if he’d started speaking Slavic. George realized the youth hadn’t had the slightest idea where his arrows were going, except that he was shooting at the foe. He said, “You’re right, Father. I see that. But what keeps them from--?”

Before he could finish the question, an Avar arrow pierced another militiaman not far away. The fellow howled like a wolf, then started cursing in such a manner as to leave Theodore’s earlier bad language in the shade. “Christ’s stinking foreskin, I’m bleeding like a stuck hog!” he shouted. “Hold a bowl under me, and you can make blood sausage tomorrow.” He plainly wasn’t on the point of death, but as plainly wasn’t happy with what life had just given him, either.

Theodore tried again: “What keeps the Avars from doing what they’re doing: shooting at us from so far away we can’t shoot back?”

“Our bows can’t reach them,” George answered. “Our catapults can.”

Now the engines on top of the walls of Thessalonica were not engaging the stone-throwers the Avars had built. They were taking on the Avars themselves, and throwing stones themselves, not fire. Theodore cheered when a frying rock knocked a horse and rider flat. But he watched thoughtfully as the animal and the man writhed about, with neither one of them showing any sign of being able to get up.

The Avars’ scalemail turned ordinary arrows at long range (Dactylius told Theodore the story of the Avar he’d hit but hadn’t hurt, and then for good measure told it over again). No matter how far away the nomad horsemen were, though, when a dart hit them, it struck home. An Avar let out a shriek clearly audible from the wall when one of those darts pinned his leg to the horse he was riding. The horse shrieked, too, and galloped madly away, but soon went crashing down. Again, George didn’t think it or its rider would be of much use after that.

With the Romans’ catapults in the fight, the Avars moved even farther from the wall than they had been. Their arrows began falling short. Seeing that, they abandoned their effort as abruptly as they had started it, trotting back toward their encampment with hardly a backward glance.

“We did it, Father!” Theodore burst out. “We drove them away!”

“That’s true,” George said. “We did.” He didn’t say anything about the militiaman who had caught the arrow in the neck and who now lay dead only a few feet away. Nor did he look in the direction of the dead man. Somehow he contrived, by not saying and not looking, to allude to the man as loudly as if he’d shouted.

Loudly himself, at least at the outset, Theodore said, “That wouldn’t happen to me. There’s no way in the world that could . . .” His voice, which had been fading, traded away altogether as he obviously remembered the arrow that hadn’t missed him by much.

“He did well,” Dactylius said. “He did very well.” Without children of his own, Dactylius didn’t have to worry about raising them. He would, in fact, have made a splendid indulgent grandfather.

But he wasn’t altogether wrong, either, not here. George nodded. “Aye, he’ll do,” he said. “He kept shooting at the Avars--even if he wanted to start too bloody soon-- and he didn’t start puking when people got hurt around him.”

“You sound like Rufus.” Theodore laughed.

George didn’t. “Rufus may be old and crude, but I’ll tell you this, son: if there’s one thing in the world he knows, it’s what makes a soldier and what doesn’t. When I’m talking about soldiers, I don’t mind at dl if I sound like him.”

He waited for Theodore or Dactylius to argue with him. Neither of them did. Dactylius nodded. Theodore changed the subject: “Why do you suppose the Avars started shooting at us like that? You said the Slavs and we were happy enough to live and let live.”

“I don’t think the Avars are happy letting anything live that they don’t rule,” George answered. “Maybe they thought the Slavs have been getting too soft and they needed to make the fight livelier. Maybe some general of theirs came by and they were showing off for him. Maybe they just felt mean and wanted to kill themselves some Romans.”

“Does it matter?” Dactylius added.

“It might,” Theodore said. “If we knew why they did what they do, we might be able to keep them from doing it.”