Nor did the satyrs and centaurs flee George now. But the sign of the cross, though it made the wolf draw back a pace and turned that doglike smile into a snarl, did not rout it. George remembered that the wolf the priest had met had killed him in short order. He yanked out his sword. This wolf would not have such an easy time. He had more defenses than the spiritual alone.

The wolf snarled again, as if angry at itself for yielding even slightly to the strength of the Christian sign. Then it sprang for him. He raised his shield. If the wolf knocks me down, he thought, I have to keep the shield between those teeth and my throat. Maybe I’ll be able to stab it before it bites too many chunks out of me.

From behind him, a rock flew through the air and caught the wolf-demon on the tip of its nose. Its agonized yelp was sweet music in George s ears. It skidded to a stop and stared past him to the centaurs, as if it had never imagined they would do such a thing to it.

Another stone hit it, this one in the chest. It staggered, threw back its head, and loosed one of those horrifying howls George had heard corning out of the forest from the walls of Thessalonica.

The shoemaker crossed himself again. Growling deep in its throat, the wolf retreated a few paces. Perhaps because it was hurt, the sign of the cross had more power over it than had been true a moment before. It howled again, this time more in pain than to cause fear among its foes. George took a step toward it, and it drew back once more.

“Move aside, that we may pelt the creature according to its deserts,” Crotus called.

“I don’t care about its pelt,” George heard himself answer: his mouth ran wild and free, disconnected from such wits as he had. “Besides, this is my fight, too.” He advanced on the wolf, which backed away from him.

But now other howls rose in answer to those the creature had loosed. Other wolves came out of the woods to stand with the first, and still others made leaves rustle in the forest to either side of the path. Such creatures could surely have traveled silent as a thought, had they so chosen. But they must have wanted George and his companions to know they were there, so as to put them in fear. George stared now this way, now that. He and the satyrs and centaurs were outflanked.

“We have to go back!” George shouted.

Ampelus and Stusippus scampered away toward the encampment from which they’d set out that morning. All the centaurs, though, stared at George with blank incomprehension. That look told him more clearly than anything else could have why even the pagans of ancient Greece, without the power of God behind them, had been able to drive the powerful creatures deep into the hill country: the very notion of retreat seemed alien to them, however necessary it might be.

Only when wolves burst out at them from left and right at the same time did the centaurs suddenly seem to catch on to what George had meant. He hoped that wasn’t so late, it would get them all lolled--and him with them.

A wolf sprang at Xanthippe’s flank. The female centaur whirled, startlingly quick, and kicked out with its hind legs. The hooves slammed into the wolf s snout. It rolled away, yowling in pain. Blood spurting from its wounds. Any natural creature, any creature of flesh and blood, would have had its head caved in.

Demetrius let out a sound half-scream, half-whinny, as a wolf raked the young--but not so young--centaur’s side with its teeth. The wolf rammed the centaur, overbore it, and came darting back to tear out its throat.

Shouting, George ran to the--colt’s?--aid. The first swipe of his sword lopped off a couple of digits’ worth of the wolf s tail. That got its attention. It whirled away from Demetrius and toward George. The end with the teeth looked much more dangerous than the end with the tail.

The wolf-demon leaped straight for his face. He got his shield up--Rufus would have been proud of him--and cut at the creature. He felt his blade bite into its side, but it didn’t seem to mind in the least. It hit him like a boulder. Try as he would to keep his feet, he went over backwards.

He did all the things he’d reminded himself to do when the first wolf-demon had been about to attack him. He kept his shield up; the wolf s fangs scraped on the leather facing. He kept slashing with his sword. None of that would have mattered very long. The wolf was immensely stronger than he, and his sword seemed unable to do it much harm.

But then, just as it was scrabbling with paws unnaturally clever to pull down the shield so its teeth could do their deadly work, thud! thud!--two stones struck it blows hard enough to make it roll off him and away. If those stones hadn’t broken ribs, the wolf owned none.

George scrambled to his feet. Elatus grabbed the wolf with human arms and hands, lifted it off the ground in an amazing display of strength, and then threw it down, hard. The male centaur trampled the wolf-demon with both pairs of equine hooves.

The wolf howled and twisted and then clamped its jaws on Elatus’ left hindmost leg. The centaur cried out in anguish as George rushed to its aid. He stabbed the wolf-demon in the belly with his sword. It screamed; supernatural or not, it was sorely hurt. Its blood smelled hot and metallic and almost spicy: an odor much stronger and more distinctive than that of the blood of ordinary living things.

Elatus was bleeding, too. That did not keep the centaur from flailing away with its three good horse’s legs at the wolf-demon, which finally broke away and fled, not just from the male centaur but from the right as a whole.

“We can’t go forward,” George said. “There are still too many of them. We have to go back.”

“A truth may be bitter but a truth naytheless,” Elatus said. The male dipped its shaggy head to George. “And I own myself in your debt, mortal. That was bravely done.” It twisted so it could look at its wounded leg. Scabs were already forming over the bites. In a day or two, George supposed, Elatus would be altogether healed. And, in a day or two, the wolf-demon the shoemaker had stabbed would probably be well again, too. He sighed. Had he been a proper hero out of myth, he would have slain it.

Elatus shouted: a great sound without words George could discern, but one that must have had meaning to the other centaurs. They began to retreat down the path Ampelus and Stusippus had taken. George went with them. The wolves made as if to pursue, but gave up when the centaurs, having opened a little distance from them, bombarded them with showers of stones.

None of the centaurs had escaped without wounds, but all of them were well on the way toward healing by the time they got back to the encampment from which they’d set out. George counted himself lucky to have got away with nothing worse than cuts and scrapes and bruises; no sharp teeth had pierced his tender flesh. He ached and stung as things were. Being in the company of the supernatural beings did not make him so close to immune to hurt as they were.

“Manifest it is,” Crotus said, scratching what had been a bite and was now a rough red scar, “that these folk and their powers desire not your return to the city whenee you were abstracted.”

“I didn’t want to be abstracted from it,” George said. When he thought of Menas, his hands bunched into fists. “I didn’t get what I wanted. I don’t see any reason the Slavs and Avars should get what they want.”

“One reason doth suggest itself,” Nephele observed: “namely and to wit, that they have the power to enforce that which they desire.”

Ampelus came up to George. All the centaurs glared at the satyr, who had been of such little use in the fight against the wolf-demons. Sensitive to that scorn, Ampelus spoke with something like embarrassment: “Not good to go in day. Maybe good to go in night.”

George clapped a hand to his forehead. “When I wanted to do that, everyone said it would be worse than trying it in the daytime.”