Thessalonica Read online

  His wife, his son, and his daughter, all made the sign of the cross then, to turn aside the evil omen. For good measure, Theodore also pulled at the neck opening to his tunic and spat down it, an apotropaic gesture older than Christianity, and one a priest might have frowned to see.

  “What are we going to do?” Sophia asked. “If these barbarians and their horrible demons come against Thessalonica, how shall we be saved?”

  “We have strong walls, we have soldiers, we have priests, we have faith in God,” George answered. “If all those aren’t enough, what will be?”

  Sophia nodded, reassured. Irene’s eyes met George’s. Neither of them said anything. He knew what his wife was thinking: that all the things he’d named might not be enough. And it was true. Not long before Sophia was born, Sirmium, a city perhaps as great as Thessalonica, had fallen to the Slavs and Avars. Life in the Roman Empire was hard these days, and no one could say it might not get harder.

  After supper, Irene and Sophia washed the dishes in a basin of water. By the time they were done, full darkness had fallen. Against its almost palpable presence, the flames from the lamps and the flickering light they cast seemed tiny and weak, the next thing to lost. George thought of the Slavs and Avars moving down toward the Aegean, and of Thessalonica, a Christian light in a sea of pagan darkness.

  He went to the window and looked out. Most of Thessalonica was dark now, with a glow of candles and of holiness coming from the churches, more lights up on the walls, and here and there one moving through the streets as prominent people undertook to travel through the night. Footpads traveled through the night, too, but did not advertise their presence.

  “Close the shutters, George,” his wife said, yawning. “Let’s go to bed.” Few people--mostly the rich, who could afford the lamps and candles they needed to turn night into day--stayed up long past sunset. Nor was darkness the only reason for that. When you rose with the sun and worked hard all day, you were ready to go to bed by the time night came.

  The room to the left of the hall as you walked up it had been shared by Sophia and Theodore. These days, since they’d come to puberty, it had a wooden partition down the middle that turned it into two cubicles. George kept telling himself--and anyone who would listen--he would enlarge the doorway one day soon. He’d been saying it for so long, he didn’t believe it himself anymore.

  He used a lamp from the kitchen to light one that rested on a stool by the bed in his own bedchamber, then, in orderly fashion, carried the first one back to where it belonged, blew it out, and used what glow came through the doorway from the second to guide him up the hall. By the time he returned, Irene was already in bed. He used the earthenware chamber pot, took off his shoes, undid his belt and took it off, and got in himself, still wearing the long tunic he’d had on all day. The straw of the mattress rustling under him, he leaned up on one elbow and blew out the lamp on the stool. The bedroom plunged into darkness.

  Despite that darkness, Irene did not want to go to sleep at once. “A satyr,” she said in a low voice, one that, with luck, the children would not overhear. “I know of them, of course--everyone knows of them--but I never heard of anybody meeting one before, not even in the stories my old grandmother told me when I was little.”

  “Neither did I,” George said, “not around a city that’s been Christian as long as Thessalonica. But up in the north it’s all helter-skelter; things are bubbling like porridge in a pot over a hot fire. The Roman soldiers and the Avars and Slavs keep going back and forth and round and round, but every year, in spite of what the soldiers do, there are more pagan Slavs settling on land that ought to be Roman.”

  “I know,” Irene answered. “From what I hear in the marketplace, the Roman generals spend more time quarreling among themselves than they do fighting the enemy.”

  “I’ve heard the same thing,” George said. “It worries me.” Irene caught her breath at that. Her husband was a man who worried a good deal, but hardly ever admitted it out loud. He went on, “And when the Slavs settle on land that ought to be Roman, their gods and demons settle on land that ought to be Christian.”

  “That wolf--what it did to the priest. . .” On top of a wool blanket she had woven herself, she shuddered.

  “Satyrs, now, and the other creatures from the old days,” George said musingly, “people believe in them, yes, but not the way they used to, so no wonder the true faith of Christ is stronger than they are. But the Slavs, they believe in their powers the same way we believe in the power of the Lord. That makes the wolf--and whatever other things they have like him--dangerous to us Christians.”

  “Do you think the Slavs will come down as far as Thessalonica?” Irene asked.

  “Farther west, bands of them have pushed deeper into Greece than we are,” he replied: Irene was not the sort of woman to be fobbed off with vague reassurances, especially when those were likely to be false. “So yes, they could come to Thessalonica. Taking the city is another question. God surely guards us here.”

  “Yes, surely,” Irene agreed, but less confidently than he would have expected from her. She was worried, too, then.

  She lay on her left side, facing him; he lay on his right. He set a hand on her hip, partly to reassure her, partly as a sort of silent question. He’d learned early in their marriage not to take her when she didn’t feel like being taken; the anger and arguments following that lasted for days, and were far more trouble than brief pleasure was worth. She, on the other hand, had learned not to deny him unless she was emphatically uninterested. For the most part, the compromise--about which they’d never said a word, not out loud--worked well.

  If she’d flopped down onto her belly, he would have rolled over, too, and gone to sleep. Instead, she moved toward him, sliding across the linen of the mattress cover. He held her for a while, then peeled her out of her tunic and took off his own. Her body was warm, familiar, friendly in his arms. They seldom surprised each other in bed these days, but they made each other happy. As far as George was concerned, that counted for more.

  Afterwards, he and Irene both used the chamber pot again, then redonned their tunics. The night was warm enough to sleep without those, but neither of them felt like startling their children in the morning. George fell asleep almost at once.

  Breakfast was leftover stew, along with more bread. Irene sighed, then said, “I wonder how many women have prayed for a way to keep food fresh longer than a day or two.”

  “God has bigger things than that to worry about,” George said.

  “Evidently,” his wife answered, leaving him with the feeling that he’d been punctured, even if he couldn’t quite tell how.

  He didn’t have time to worry about it long; with the rest of the family, he went downstairs and got to work. Whenever they didn’t have anything else to do, they worked on heavy-soled sandals in assorted sizes. Some farmers outside of town would make their own, but those were usually crude rawhide affairs, and didn’t last. George had spent years building up a reputation for solid craftsmanship. When you buy from George, you get your money’s worth, people said.

  Once, a couple of years before, Theodore had remarked, “You know, Father, if we made the leather thinner, it would wear out faster, and people would have to come back sooner to buy more.”

  He’d obviously thought he was being clever. Because of that, George had been gentle when he said, “The trouble is, son, if the leather wore out faster, people would have to come back sooner, yes, but they wouldn’t come back to us. They’d pick another shoemaker, one who gave them sandals that didn’t fall to pieces in a hurry.”

  And, sure enough, the first customer of the morning was a farmer named Felix. “Good to see you’re still here,” he said to George in backwoods Latin. “I’m not fixing a hole this size, I don’t think.”

  He held up a sandal. The sole was mostly hole. What wasn’t hole was bits of leather, some tanned, some not, that had been sewn on over the course of years. George wouldn’t have wanted to walk around
in a sandal like that even without the latest hole, but held his peace. What Felix did with--or to--shoes was his business. George did take the ruined one to remind himself how big a foot Felix had. “We made a pair about that size a few days ago, I think,” he said, and looked on the shelves set against the back wall. “Sure enough.” He held out the sandals. “Try these on--see how they feel.”

  Felix did. His gnarled hands had a little trouble with the small bronze buckles, but he managed. He walked back and forth inside the shop. A smile came over his weathered face. “That’s right nice,” he said. “I’d forgotten walking doesn’t have to feel like you’ve got a sack of bumpy beans under each foot.”

  “Glad you like them,” George said; starting off the day with a sale always struck him as a good omen.

  Felix, all at once, looked less happy than he had a moment before. “Guess I shouldn’t have said that. Now you’re going to charge me more on account of it.” He cast an apprehensive eye toward George. “What are you going to charge me?”

  “That’s a good pair of sandals--you did say so yourself,” George answered. “I was thinking ... six miliaresia.”

  “Half a solidus?” Felix exclaimed. He made as if to throw the shoes at George. “I figured you’d say something more like two.”

  After an argument they both enjoyed, they split the difference. Felix also promised to bring a sack of raisins to the shop the next time he was in Thessalonica. Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. The four silver coins he did pay were enough for George to turn a profit on the deal.

  “How are things treating you these days?” the shoemaker asked, to make sure no bad feelings lingered after the haggle--and because life would have been boring if he let people out of his shop without finding out what they knew.

  “Not bad, not bad,” Felix answered. “Always a lot of fairies and such about, there away from town. It’s quiet here, God be praised: everybody inside the walls believes in Him, pretty much. Not like that out in the country, you know. Old ways hang on.”

  “That’s so,” George agreed. “I saw a satyr myself yesterday, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve seen them, too,” Felix said. “I chase my daughters into the house when they’re about, just on account of you never know--you know? But these I saw a few days ago, they weren’t like anything I seen before. Pretty women, they looked like, with long yellow hair and with wings on their backs. Not angel wings, with feathers and all--more like beetle wings, all clear and shimmery. I made the cross at them, like a good Christian ought to, but they stood there and smiled at me. It was like they never seen it before.”

  “Maybe they hadn’t,” George said, and told him about the wolf. “New people on the move, new gods and demons moving with them.”

  Felix clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Hard times, sure enough,” he said. “Well, God will protect us, I expect I hope He will, anyhow.” He headed out of the shop, then turned back. “The sandals feel good, George. I thank you for that.” With a wave, he was gone.

  George turned back to his son. “There, do you see, Theodore? Do a proper job and your customers come back to you.”

  “Yes, I see, Father.” Theodore grinned mischievously. “Make four miliaresia every five or six years from a farmer and you can use it to buy gold plates to eat off of.”

  The shoemaker didn’t know whether to smack the youth or start laughing. He let out a strangled snort, which satisfied neither of those impulses. If God did protect Thessalonica, he thought, it would be either because He ignored the younger generation or because He was even more merciful than the Holy Scriptures said. As George pondered those two choices, he realized one didn’t necessarily exclude the other.

  He was delicately tapping an awl to produce a tooled pattern on a boot for a prominent jurist when Dactylius stuck his head into the shop. “Archery practice this afternoon!” the little Greek jeweler exclaimed. He carried a bow and had a quiver on his back. “Have you forgotten? I’ll bet you have!”

  “You’re right, I did forget,” George admitted. “I start doing this fine work”--he pointed to the boot-- “and I don’t think about anything else.”

  “Go on, dear,” Irene told him. “Germanus won’t be expecting those boots for at least another week. You’ll have plenty of time to finish them.”

  “You’re right.” He didn’t know why he bothered saying that; Irene was generally right. To Dactylius, he said, “I’ll go get my bow and arrows--be right back.” He hurried upstairs, grabbed the bow off the pegs where he’d hung it, and picked up his own quiver. He slung it over his shoulder as he returned to the ground floor.

  Dactylius was hopping from foot to foot, as if he needed to visit the latrine. He seemed all the more excitable when paired with stolid George. “Come on!” he said. “Rufus will yell at us if we’re late.”

  One of George’s eyebrows quirked upward. “He’ll yell at us if we’re not late, too. You go to church to pray, You go to militia practice to get yelled at.”

  Taking no notice of that, Dactylius grabbed him by the sleeve of his tunic and dragged him out into the street. Behind him, he heard Irene laugh softly. He was never late enough to matter, and most of the time his punctuality had nothing to do with Dactylius. For that matter, he kept the jeweler out of trouble more often than the other way round.

  The practice field was just that: a field in the southeastern part of the city, not far from the hippodrome and fairly close to the sea. In the time of George s greatgrandfather, a grandee had had a mansion there, but no one had ever rebuilt the place after it burned down.

  A scrawny brown dog sprawled in the grass and watched the rnilitiamen at their exercises. The commander of the regular garrison, up in the citadel on the high ground at the northeastern comer of Thessalonica, would either have laughed or suffered a fit of apoplexy to see it. The amateur soldiers were indifferent archers, poor spearmen, swordsmen longer on ferocious spirit than skill.

  George knew he’d never use his bow as well as a professional soldier, even if he did bring back game when he went out hunting. Dactylius shot straighter than he did, though his own bow had a stronger pull. After he missed a shot from a range where he should have hit, he yanked a new arrow out of his quiver and made as if to break it over his knee.

  Another of his fellow rnilitiamen, a gangly, curly-haired man named John, not only had the gall to hit the canvas target but then said, “You might as well shoot that arrow, George. After it’s gone wild, someone who knows what he’s doing may find it. If you break it, it’s gone for good.”

  “I’ll have you know I bagged two rabbits and two birds yesterday,” George said with dignity.

  “Aye, and if the bunnies carried bows, they’d have bagged you first,” John retorted. You didn’t want to get into an argument with him; he made his living, such as it was, by going from tavern to tavern telling jokes. People said he’d come from Constantinople, that he’d been run out of town when some of his jokes there got too pointed to suit the men in power.

  In the militia, though, your mouth would take you only so far. Rufus, the squadron commander, was a gray-haired veteran who’d fought the Ostrogoths in Italy under Narses the eunuch. He had one blue eye, one brown eye, and one nasty disposition. “Let’s see you hit it again, John, before you make like you’re the Second Coming.”

  “You couldn’t have your second coming till a month after the first one,” John muttered. But he made sure Rufus didn’t hear him. George blamed him not at all for that. Rufus had to be nearing his threescore and ten, but George wouldn’t have wanted to fight him with any weapons or none.

  John nocked his next arrow, drew the bow back to his ear, let fly--and missed, almost as badly as George had done. Rufus laughed raucously. John muttered again. This time, not even George could make out what he said. The shoemaker decided that was probably just as well.

  Somebody shot an arrow at the dog. The shaft thumped into the ground six or eight feet away from the beast. The dog never moved.
“He’s in the safest place he could be,” Rufus said, and laughed again.

  “I would hate him, if only he weren’t right,” Dactylius said. “We have to get better.” His face was probably more intent than when he was setting a ruby into a golden necklace. He aimed, shot--and missed.

  “You lugs are all hopeless.” Rufus rolled his eyes. “Come on--all together now.” A ragged volley followed. “By Jesus, the Virgin, and all of the saints, what will you do if the Slavs and Avars ever do come down on Thessalonica”

  “Probably something like this,” John said, shivering as if he were about to freeze to death. “Or maybe this.” He gave an alarmingly realistic impression of a man suddenly seized by diarrhea. “Or this.” Now he mimed jumping onto a horse and galloping away as fast as he could go.

  George was a sober, serious fellow most of the time. He found himself laughing helplessly at John’s antics. He would have felt worse about it, but everyone else was laughing, too. Rufus had a soul as flinty as any this side of a tax collector’s, but he guffawed with the militiamen he commanded. “You’re a funny fellow, all right,” he said to John. “I’d like you better, though, if your work with the bow weren’t so funny.”

  John’s next arrow not only hit the target, it pierced the center of the bull’s-eye. “How about that?” he said triumphantly.

  “That’s even funnier than when you were doing the fellow shitting himself,” Rufus said, leaving the comic, for once, altogether at a loss for words.

  On their way back to their places in the workaday world, several of the rnilitiamen, George among them, stopped in a tavern for a mug of wine. “Maybe even for two mugs of wine,” George said, liking to spell things out as precisely as he could beforehand.

  “Maybe.” Dactylius sounded nervous. He might have been a trooper in the militia, but his wife Claudia, whose gray eyes and fair skin spoke of Gothic blood, was larger and brawnier and of a sharper temper than he.