He went almost jauntily after that. He caught himself just before he started whistling a happy little tune. That would have been stupid--odds were, fatally stupid.

More wolves than the first one guarded the trails down to Thessalonica. He passed them all. Some seemed to have no notion he was anywhere nearby. Others, like the first, looked and sounded discontented, but could not understand why they dimly suspected something was wrong.

And then George approached Vucji Pastir. The Slavic demigod who shepherded wolves had a couple of his charges close by; he was talking to them in a language made up of yips and growls. His glowing green beard, George saw, had grown out to its full magnificence once more: the barbering his own sword had done proved as impermanent as the wounds the centaurs had taken.

Vucji Pastir knew he was coming. That was the impression he got, anyhow, from the demigod’s demeanor. Vucji Pastir urged his wolves out onto the trail as a man hunting boar would have urged on his hounds. The wolf-demons whined and lashed their tails.

They were, George realized joyfully, trying to tell their master they could find no sign of any impertinent Christian shoemaker. Vucji Pastir peered this way and that. Once, as the wolves had done before, the demigod looked right at George--and, evidently, saw nothing.

Or perhaps, as the wolves had also done, Vucji Pastir saw next to nothing. He frowned, scratched at the roots of his green hair--and then looked in another direction. George let out a silent sigh of relief. He didn’t think Perseus’ cap would get a harder test till he drew far closer to Thessalonica.

He was soon proved wrong. He hadn’t gone more than another couple of furlongs before he encountered Vucji Pastir again, this time with a different pack of wolf-demons. Again the Slavic demigod almost spotted him. Again the demigod apparently could not believe his own eyes.

As George hurried on toward the city, he wondered how Vucji Pastir had been behind him and then in front of him without, so far as an impertinent Christian shoemaker could tell, crossing the intervening space. Had the shepherd of the wolves been first in one place and then in the other? Or had he manifested himself in both at once? “Would he show up again and again, on the lookout for George, all the way down to the city wall?

Sure enough, George saw him and he did not see George several more times, there in the hill country. Toward the end of the day--and also a good deal of the way toward Thessalonica--the shepherd of the wolves looked so upset at having faded to spot George that the shoemaker was tempted to go up to him, tap him on the shoulder, and say, “Excuse me there, friend, but can I help you find somebody?”

He convinced himself, after some silent argument, that that was not a good idea, no matter how he would have enjoyed watching a demigod jump.

Despite Vucji Pastir, despite the wolf-demons, George made better time down toward Thessalonica than he’d expected, approaching the city before the sun had sunk in the west. That was not what he wanted. If he went up to a postern gate in the dead of night, he could slip off Perseus’ cap and claim no one had noticed him till he got there. If he tried that in the afternoon, the guards would see him materialize out of thin air. So would the Slavs, with results liable to be unpleasant.

Waiting for nightfall proved harder than he’d expected. The woods near Thessalonica were full of Slavs, some hunting, others taking axes to trees and bushes to fuel their fires. They had no notion he was there but, like the fellow back in Lete, kept doing their best to blunder into his invisible but not incorporeal form. If one of them did chance to trip over his foot, he did not think a simple, friendly “Excuse me” would set matters right.

Carefully, he worked his way around the wall till he neared the Litaean Gate. The men on the wall there would be likeliest to know him and to recognize his voice when he came up to the gate. So would the men at the postern gate by the main gateway. If he presented himself and they wouldn’t let him into the city… he didn’t want to think about that.

By the time he’d found a position from which he could keep an eye on the gate, twilight was falling. The Slavs built up the fires in their encampments and started cooking their supper. The odors of roasted meat and bubbling porridge made George’s stomach growl. He’d long since finished the bread and wine Gorgonius had given him.

Night quickly swallowed twilight. George waited for the campfires to the back to embers, and for most of the Slavs to shelter under blankets and furs and whatever else they used to ward off the cold of night. George wasn’t using anything to ward off the cold of night. His teeth chattered. If he froze to death out here in the woods, would his corpse stay invisible till a storm knocked the cap off his head?

“One more thing I don’t want to find out,” he muttered.

By what he judged to be the fourth hour of the night, the encampments were about as quiet as they ever got. He started picking his way between a couple of disorderly clumps of huts and tents. One hand held the cap tight on his head, the other was on his swordhilt. If by some mischance he did run into a Slav, he thought his best bet was to kill the fellow quickly, giving him no chance to cry out.

Instead of a Slav, he almost ran into the Avar wizard.

The fellow loomed up before him, outline distorted by the fringes and furs of his costume. George froze: metaphorically, to go with the literal cold that had afflicted him. From everything Gorgonius had said, from everything George himself had seen, the Avar should have had no idea he was there.

But the wizard was as wary as the wolves and as Vucji Pastir. He murmured something in his incomprehensible language and stared right at--right through--George. He took a step forward, one hand outstretched, as if to seize the shoemaker.

Heart pounding, George jumped to one side. If the Avar priest had pursued him, he would have run for the gate with every bit of strength he had left. But the Avar kept on walking toward his own tent, which, George saw, lay not far away. Maybe he hadn’t sensed George at all. The shoemaker could not make himself believe it.

He looked up to the wall, wondering which of his friends were on it now. When Menas locked him out of Thessalonica and the Slavs bore down on him, he hadn’t thought such things would matter again. How glad he was to discover they did.

He was within bowshot of the wall now, in the empty area the Slavs and Avars entered only when they were attacking. There was the iron-plated bulk of the Litaean Gate ahead, and there, inset into the wall, the postern gate beside it. That postern gate drew him like a lodestone.

Once there, he found a new question: how hard to rap on it. Too softly, and the guards wouldn’t notice. Too hard, and the Slavs would. His first tap was too tentative. His second was so loud, it frightened him. He looked anxiously back toward the barbarians’ encampment. No shouts rose there. He knocked again.

A tiny grill in the center of the gate opened. “Who’s there?” a guard demanded. “Stand and be recognized.”

“It’s me--George,” George said. “For the love of--” He cut that off, not knowing what God’s name would do to the cap. “I managed to get away from the Slavs and Avars and make it back here. Let me in.”

Through the iron grill, he saw one of the guard’s eyes and part of his cheek. “Stand and be recognized,” the fellow repeated. “If you’re really a Slav who speaks Latin, you’re going to be a dead Slav who used to speak Latin.”

“But I’m in front of-- Oh.” Again, George broke off. He was glad the guard couldn’t see him blush. The guard couldn’t see him at all, because he was still wearing the cap he hadn’t wanted to test with God’s name. He’d remembered it in that context, but not in the context of making him invisible. Feeling a fool once more, he took it from his head.