“I haven’t the faintest idea,” George answered. “Ithys thought coming to you was a good idea. All I can do is hope it was right.”

The carpenter didn’t say anything to that. He silently studied George for a while, then turned his gaze on Ithys. The satyr said, “You are Gorgonius. You know of what clan you spring, and why you have that name. I knew the man who founded your clan. You in the later days of your life look like him in the later days of his. I say this to you before.”

“Yes, and every time you’ve said it, I’ve told you what daft nonsense it is,” Gorgonius said. “He was a hero. I make tables. He killed monsters and rescued maidens. I got a cat out of a tree once, if that counts for anything, and I stepped on a cockroach the other day.”

“The satyr hath reason,” Nephele said. “Your foresire had wit and wisdom and knew both how to give and how to receive good counsel, than which few things are rarer among mankind.”

“Wait a minute,” George said. Everyone, aging carpenter and ageless immortal creatures alike, looked at him. “Wait just a minute.” Everyone did indeed seem willing enough to wait. Hesitantly, wondering whether he’d heard what he thought he’d heard and whether he ought to believe it if he had, he pointed to Gorgonius. He didn’t speak to the carpenter, though, but to Ithys and to Nephele. “You’re saying he’s from Perseus’ family.”

“Aye, in good sooth, we are,” Nephele said. “We knew Perseus. Perseus was our friend. Doth surprise you this, mayfly man?”

“A bit,” George said, trying not to show how much more than a bit it surprised him. He remembered thinking, when he’d first met Ampelus, how the satyr had been up in these hills when Paul was writing to the Thessalonicans, and for hundreds of years before that. He hadn’t realized how many hundreds of years, though. He didn’t know how long ago Perseus had lived, but it was back before the Trojan War, which was, by definition, antiquity immeasurable--except that Ithys and Nephele measured it.

“We have reckoned his descendants, even unto the hundred and fifteenth generation,” Nephele said, measuring antiquity most precisely indeed.

“That and a few folleis will get you some wine--well, not you, but the man here,” said Gorgonius, who seemed unimpressed with his illustrious ancestor. “But now I understand why Ithys brought you to me, George.”

George made the sort of intuitive leap that had given him a reputation for cleverness in Thessalonica--among those who cared whether a shoemaker was clever, at any rate. He stabbed out a finger at Gorgonius. “You’ve got Medusa’s head stowed away here somewhere, don’t you, so we can turn the Slavs and Avars to stone with it.”

“Are you out of your bloody mind?” Gorgonius exclaimed. “If the family had kept that horrible thing, they’d have been turned to stone themselves, some of ‘em, anyhow, and I wouldn’t be standing here talking with you. The whole village would be stone, too, and we could fortify it with our cousins and uncles. Daft!” He shook his head.

“Oh,” George said in a very small voice. When a clever man was stupid, he was stupid in a way a man who was stupid all the time could never hope to match, for the clever man’s stupidity, drawing as it did on so much more knowledge, had a breadth and depth to it the run-of-the-mill fool found impossible to duplicate.

Gorgonius took pity on him. ““What I do have, pal,” he said, “is the cap Perseus wore when he got up close to Medusa and her sisters.”

For a moment, that cap meant nothing more to George than that it was the pagan equivalent of, say, a saint’s shinbone in a reliquary in a church. But a saint’s shinbone might work miracles, and so might this cap. “The Gorgons couldn’t see Perseus when he came up to them,” George said.

“That’s right,” Gorgonius said encouragingly, as if George might not be an idiot after all. “Very good.”

“Does it still work?” the shoemaker asked. “Perseus wore it a long time ago.”

“It works.” Gorgonius’ leer rivaled anything Ampelus could produce. “I’ve seen more pretty girls, and more of ‘em, than you’ll ever dream about, pal, even if you live in that big city. Oh, it works, all right.”

Nephele let out a noise half giggle, half horsy snort. The satyrs’ interest in the conversation, which had been small, visibly swelled. George was all at once convinced Gorgonius was telling the truth. He didn’t know whether to be awed or appalled that Gorgonius had figured out a use for the cap so far removed from that originally intended for it.

After a moment, though, he doubted the old carpenter was the one who had only just begun that use. A lot of men’s lives lay between Perseus and Gorgonius. Surely one of the carpenter’s multiple great-grandsires had had that same inspiration. Probably a good many of them had had it.

Gorgonius walked out of the room in which they’d been talking. Instead of having his living quarters above his shop, as George did, Gorgonius lived behind his workroom: Lete was less crowded than Thessalonica and, so far as George could recall, had no buildings taller than one story.

When Gorgonius didn’t come back right away, Crotus rumbled, “Whither is the fellow gone, and for what purpose?”

“An I be not much mistaken, he hath not gone, or rather, he is returned among us,” Nephele answered.

Gorgonius said, “See what a clever lady you are.” His voice came from a point halfway between George and Nephele. His voice was there, but he wasn’t--not so far as the eye could tell, at any rate.

Then he lifted a nondescript leather cap from his head and abruptly became visible once more. “You see,” he said, and George did see. Then he put the cap on again, and George saw no more. He was tempted to cross himself, to learn whether the power of the holy sign was stronger than that of the cap which had befooled Medusa and her sisters in ancient days and, evidently, other, more attractive females since.

He held his hand still. The holy sign might destroy all the power the cap contained. It would surely rout the centaurs and satyrs, who had done so much to help him.

“Come back to our eyes, Gorgonius,” Nephele said. “Come back, that we may all take counsel together, each judging the probity of the others by examining their countenances.”

“All right.” Between speaking one word and the next, Gorgonius reappeared. “You’re saying you want me to let this fellow” --he pointed to George-- “borrow my cap here. Who’s to say I’ll ever see it again?”

“You can’t see it now, half the time,” George pointed out.

“That’s true,” the carpenter said. “Aye, that’s true.” He smiled at George, who thought he’d won a point. But even if he had, a point was not the game. Gorgonius said, “Why should I risk something that’s been in the family for so long, to help a stack of people who have no use for it, don’t believe it’s any good, and would destroy it if they could?”

He sent the question toward Nephele, but the female, Crotus, and the satyrs looked with one accord at George. “Why?” he said. “I can give you only one answer: whatever you think of the folk of Thessalonica, having the Slavs and Avars sack the city would be worse--for us and for you, too.”

“In the old days,” Gorgonius said meditatively, “I could have gone down into Thessalonica, and so could they.” He nodded toward the centaurs and satyrs. “Oh, Crotus and Nephele might not have wanted to, on account of the wine, but they could have. Now, though, one of those priests’d be on me like a fox on a rabbit. And my friends, they can’t go at all, not with all the saints and such who’ve been through there one time or another. Is that better than not having any Thessalonica at all? I wonder, George. I do wonder.”

“They think so,” George answered. Now he nodded at Ithys and Ampelus and Stusippus, at Crotus and Nephele. “They wouldn’t have brought me here if they didn’t. And they’ve seen more of the Slavs and Avars than you have.”