Thessalonica Read online

  The taverner, a long-faced, swarthy man named Paul, seemed gladder to see the rnilitiamen than was his wont. He filled their mugs up to the top and didn’t scrutinize the coppers they passed across the bar as if certain every other one was a counterfeit. “Are you feeling well, host of ours?” asked a plump fellow named Sabbatius.

  “As well as a forest when the birds fly south for the winter,” Paul answered in a gloomy croak. “Aye, the birds are flying, sure enough.”

  “Are you making riddles?” Sabbatius asked, swigging at his wine. He was liable to stay for more than a mug or two--or three or four.

  “I don’t think he is,” George said. He studied Paul. “I think he’s heard something. You have heard something, haven’t you?”

  “Good thing you make shoes instead of asking the questions when the torturer’s doing his job,” the taverner said. “Aye, I’ve heard something, and if it’s so, you militiamen are going to be all that’s in the way between us and trouble for a while.”

  “What do you mean? Four or five of the amateur soldiers asked the question at the same time.

  Paul shrugged. “My line of work, you do hear things. Some of the things you hear, you wish you hadn’t, if you know what I mean. This is one of them. If I did hear right, most of the regular garrison is heading out of town.”

  “Christ have mercy!” Sabbatius said, beating George and several others to the punch. “Why do they want to go and do a fool thing like that?”

  “Don’t know that they want to,” Paul answered. “When you’re a soldier, though, you don’t do what you want to. You do what they tell you to. Way I hear it is, Priscus the general is in trouble against the Avars and the Slavs somewhere off in the back of beyond”--he pointed vaguely toward the northeast--”and he needs soldiers, so off they’re going to go.”

  “That’s not so good,” George said. He looked around the tavern, then back to Paul. “Would you want Thessalonica defended by the likes of us?”

  “If I say no to that, you people will throw things at me,” Paul replied, a smile stretching his face in unfamiliar directions, “but if I say yes I’ll be lying. What am I supposed to do about that?”

  “I will have two mugs of wine after all,” Dactylius said, as if that were a matter more important than the regular garrison’s leaving Thessalonica.

  While the taverner filled his mug with a dipper, George pondered the question he’d asked. In due course, he told Paul, “Maybe you ought to join the militia, too. Then you’d have no one but yourself to blame for whatever might go wrong.”

  “Aye, maybe I ought to at that,” Paul said. “I don’t have forty years on me yet, and if I’m no Hercules, I’m no tun of suet, either, like some people I could name.” He looked pointedly toward Sabbatius.

  The chubby militiaman glared right back. “Step out into the street and we’ll talk some more about that,” he offered.

  Paul reached under the counter and pulled out a stout club studded with nails. He set it on the bar. “If I step out into the street, I do my talking with this,” he said. Sabbatius’ sword was a better weapon, but he didn’t push it, peering down into his mug of wine instead. Paul grunted and put the club away.

  “You do join the militia, join our company,” George said. “And bring your friend there.” He tapped the bar to show what he meant. “Rufus sees that club, he won’t just let you join, he’ll try to steal it from you.”

  “Maybe I will,” the taverner said again. Most of the time, that meant, Not on your life, but I’m polite about it. This time, George thought it meant he probably would.

  Dactylius gulped down that second mug of wine and hurried out of the tavern. George’s opinion was that he shouldn’t have poured it down so fast; he was walking at a slant. If he was working on anything delicate, it wouldn’t turn out so well as it might have. Claudia would notice, too--as far as George could tell, Claudia noticed everything, whether it was there or not--and make Dactylius regret it.

  Although Sabbatius liked to drink, he was next to sidle out the door. He’d been staring down where Paul had stowed the nasty club. He was bold enough shooting at targets in the field, and at practice with swords, too. George got the idea, though, that he’d found the notion of having nails pounded into his own personal, precious flesh distinctly unappealing.

  George left the tavern a few minutes after Sabbatius. He hurried back toward his shop--this was news more important than having seen a satyr. No one could know for certain what the latter portended, but anybody this side of an idiot was able to see the garrison’s leaving Thessalonica meant trouble.

  When Sophia saw him coming up the street, she ran out of the shop, exclaiming, “Father, guess what! You’ll never guess what!”

  “I don’t know,” George said agreeably. “What? Once you’ve told me, I have something to tell you, too.”

  “I was in the market square buying some parsnips for Mother,” Sophia said, her eyes snapping with excitement, “And people were saying the regular army is going to march out of town, to go help with the wars God knows where. Isn’t that important? Isn’t that worth hearing?”

  “Well, yes, it is,” he admitted.

  He was never a man who got very excited about anything. His stolidity this time, though, irked his daughter. “You must be angry at me for telling you my news and not waiting to hear yours,” she said. “What was your news, anyway?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He set a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve already heard it. What’s your mother going to do with the parsnips?”

  “Bake them with some snails she’s gathered over the last few days,” Sophia answered. “She finally has enough to cook.”

  “That sounds good,” George said. “Let’s go back to the shop. Don’t you have some work to do? I know I’ve got plenty, and I spent longer at practice than I thought I would.” He didn’t mention going into Paul’s tavern. What point, now? The rumor had to be all over Thessalonica by this time. He consoled himself by remembering rumors weren’t always true.

  The garrison marched out of the city three days later. They wore their mailshirts and helmets, which struck George, who stood watching as they headed out of Cassander’s Gate, east down the Via Egnatia and away from Thessalonica, as a bad sign, a sign they expected to have to fight at any time. Many of them had painted either the cross or the labarum--☧--on their shields to help ward off whatever gods or demons the Slavs and Avars might call up. The labarum replaced the old pagan eagle atop their standards, too.

  Bishop Eusebius stood just outside the gate, blessing the soldiers as they filed past him. “May you go with God, and may God go with you,” he said. His silk vestments, more splendid than the cloak of the general commanding the garrison, gleamed in the sunshine. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, go forth and defend the Roman Empire against its enemies, defend our Christian folk against all traps and tricks of the devil.”

  Eusebius put on a brave show. His long, lean face was lit by a pious certainty George sometimes wished he could match. The shoemakers broad shoulders went up and down in a shrug. He was as he was, as Eusebius was as he was.

  After Eusebius was done, the city prefect, a rotund fellow named Victor, came forward to make a speech of his own. He and the bishop eyed each other warily, neither altogether certain of his own power or trusting the other very far. Victor cleared his throat a couple of times, then began, “Glorious citizens of the equally glorious city of Thessalonica, we remain strong, we remain steadfast, we remain courageous, we--”

  We remain bored, George thought. Victor not only liked to talk, he liked to hear himself talk. Eventually, he might come to the point. Meanwhile, George could stop listening for a while. He admired a pretty girl not far away. The wind was blowing her tunic tight against her body, so that she might almost have been naked.

  Looking with lust in your heart at a woman not your wife was a sin. George knew as much. He also knew that, had Irene been standing there beside him and caught his ey
e straying toward that girl, she might have stuck an elbow in his ribs, but she would have been laughing while she did it. He sometimes thought she had more forgiveness for human frailty than the church did.

  He started listening again, on the off chance the prefect was getting around to anything important--assuming, as might or might not have been justified, that he ever did get around to anything important. At the moment, he was saying, “--our magnificent metropolis, guarded by God, certain of protection from our patron saint, warded by our walls--” Not being in the mood for alliteration, George daydreamed a little while longer.

  Victor began to shift from foot to foot. That either meant he was coming to the point or that he needed to break off and run for the jakes. Hoping it was the former, George began paying attention once more. His optimism was rewarded, for the prefect declared, “And so, citizens of Thessalonica, my delegation and I shall travel to the imperial city, there to petition his imperial majesty, the splendid Roman Emperor Maurice, to send from elsewhere in the Empire, from lands less threatened by barbaric inroads, a new contingent of soldiers to take the place of those who have gone to fight. In the meanwhile, of course, I am certain our militia will continue to offer complete security for Thessalonica.”

  Had he been truly certain of that, what need would he have had to go to Constantinople to ask Maurice for replacement troopers? There were times when George thought he should have become a priest; his mind was made for logic-chopping. As usual at such times, he shook his head. He enjoyed the trade he’d learned from his father. A logical shoemaker might be an uncommon beast, but by no means an unnatural one.

  Such musings did not keep him from joining in the applause Victor got. Being a member of the militia himself, he recognized its shortcomings. Professional soldiers were bound to know their craft better than amateurs like himself. The sandals he turned out, after all, were better than the ones rustics made for themselves. Had that not been true, he wouldn’t have been able to feed his wife and children. The way Theodore ate these days, George needed to be good at his trade.

  Bishop Eusebius’ face was a study in mixed emotions. He took Victors getting applause almost as a personal affront; his model was his predecessor Ambrose, who had made the Emperor Theodosius do penance for a massacre his men had carried out in the hippodrome of Thessalonica. On the other hand, with Victor and other secular notables departing for Constantinople, Eusebius would be the most important man in Thessalonica for a while. That he liked fine.

  Victor said, “I am certain the holy bishop here will pray for the success of my mission and for my safe return.”

  “What?” The prefect had succeeded in startling Eusebius. Like George, the bishop must have figured out that much of what Victor said wasn’t worth listening to. Eusebius did recover quickly. “Yes, of course. I shall pray for your safe journey, your success, and your eventual safe return.” Did he place a little extra stress on that eventual? George wasn’t sure.

  The ceremony broke up after that. Some people went up onto the gray stone walls of Thessalonica to keep an eye on the departing city garrison for as long as they could. George would have reckoned that an insult to the militia if he hadn’t noticed that a fair number of those wistful spectators were militiamen. He wondered if he ought to go up himself. The militia would be keeping watch for the city now.

  In the end, he decided not to bother. He expected he’d have plenty of chances to do actual patrolling; why bother with rehearsals, in that case? On the way back to his shop, he passed under the triumphal arch of the Emperor Galerius, celebrating his victory over the Persians. Galerius was three hundred years dead, more or less. The Persians were still very much around; Maurice had finally won a long war against them five years before.

  George looked at the arch. Galerius, arrogant in stone, stared back at him. “It does make you wonder what the point of all that fighting was,” George murmured. Galerius didn’t answer.

  “Hello, Father,” Theodore said when George came through the front door. “How does it feel to be a leading defender of the city?”

  “Strange,” the shoemaker answered. “How does it feel to you that I’m a leading defender of the city?”

  His son grinned at him. “Is there any way I can get out of town, like the prefect is doing?”

  “Children have no respect for their elders these days,” George said. “If I’d told my father something like that--”

  He paused. He had told his father things like that, and a good many times, too. Most of the time, the old man had thrown back his head and laughed like a loon.

  “You started to say something?” asked Theodore, who was, if you resisted the temptation to strangle him, a fairly good specimen.

  “Maybe I did,” George said. “But what’s the use? You wouldn’t listen, anyway.” In a different tone of voice, that would have been wounding. But George sounded somewhere between resigned and amused. Theodore grinned again and went back to the boot he’d been mending.

  The shoemaker went back to work, too. Those fancy tooled boots wouldn’t get done by themselves, and he’d never heard of a spirit or fairy that would make shoes for you while you lay in bed.

  He went back to the boots, tapping the awl one careful stroke at a time with his light hammer. He had to bend close to the last to see what he was doing. A day spent at uninterrupted fine work like that left him with a pounding headache. One of these years before too long, if God let him live, his sight would lengthen, and then the fine work would be beyond his power. Then Theodore would have to take over the lead in the shop, and George would do whatever his sight let him do, and would probably take a hand in training up his grandsons in the trade.

  When the sun went down and shadows filled the shop, the family ended their work and cleaned up. “I wish we had a slave,” Sophia said. “That would make life a lot easier.”

  “Your mother and I have talked about buying one, now and again,” George said, setting the tools he’d used back onto the pegs he’d set in the wall to hold them. Each tool had its own set of pegs, on which it hung neatly.

  “Have you really?” Sophia sounded surprised. “You’ve never done it when I was around.”

  “Could we afford to buy a slave?” Theodore asked.

  “Probably,” George said. Irene nodded. Now both their children looked surprised. George went on, “I don’t expect we’ll get one any time soon, though.” His wife nodded.

  “Why not, if we can afford one?” Sophia said. “It would save us a lot of work, and besides--” She paused, uncertain how to go on. At last, she said, “If you’ve got a slave, if you don’t have to do all your own work, that means you’re better off than a lot of the people around you.”

  Before George could answer, Irene spoke with great firmness: “I can’t think of a worse reason to buy a slave than social climbing.”

  “That’s right,” George said, knowing he couldn’t have put it so well himself. Sophia and Theodore let out simultaneous, identical disbelieving snorts. They were at an age where social climbing mattered intensely. George remembered that. He’d got over it. He expected they would, too.

  “Besides,” Irene said, “the work wouldn’t disappear as if a priest had exorcised it. The slave might do the housework so we didn’t have to, but we’d have to make more shoes and fix more shoes and sell more shoes to buy the food and clothes and medicines and whatnot we’d need to give the slave.”

  “That’s right,” George said again. “It’s not what you pay to buy a slave that counts. It’s the upkeep. We could afford to buy one, but I don’t know how long we could afford to have him here.”

  “We’d find a way,” Theodore said with the innocent confidence of youth.

  “That’s not the only problem, you know,” George said. “Most of the slaves in the market these days are Gepids or Slavs. They don’t speak Latin, they don’t speak Greek, and God only knows if they understand anything about work. If they run away, you’re out everything you paid for them, with no chance of
getting a copper back from the dealer.”

  “Some people must manage in spite of all those troubles,” Sophia said, “or nobody would have slaves.” “Some people,” George said pointedly, “must raise up children who don’t talk back to them. Come to think of it, though, I’ve never heard of any. When you can afford a slave, Theodore, or when your husband can, Sophia, then we’ll see what you do. Meanwhile--”

  “Meanwhile,” Irene broke in, “we still have a lot of work to do, and not much light left to do it in, mostly because a couple of people I could name have been grumbling instead of doing what they’re supposed to.” She picked up a sandal and made as if to clout Theodore in the ear with it. He got to work, but he didn’t stop grumbling. That satisfied George, who remembered doing a deal of grumbling in his own younger days.

  Rufus lined up his charges and gave them their orders: “Walk your stretch of the wall. Try not to fall off and break your fool neck. The challenge is ‘St. Demetrius.’ The answer is ‘St. Nicholas.’ If somebody can’t give you the right answer, he’s got no business up on the wall at night.”

  “What do we do then?” Dactylius asked nervously.

  “It depends,” the militia officer answered. “If you can tell it’s just some cursed fool from inside the city, just send him down. If it’s anybody sneaking up onto the wall from outside, try and kill the bastard and yell for help like the devil’s about to drag your soul to hell. Anything else? No? All right, first shift, up onto the wall. Second shift will relieve you about the start of the fifth hour of the night.”

  George had first-shift duty tonight, along with Dactylius. The two of them climbed to the battlements near the Litaean Gate. George peered west. In the deepening evening twilight, the Via Egnatia was a gray stone ribbon heading west toward the sea, some days’ journey away. Beyond the sea lay Italy. Past that, George’s knowledge of geography faded fast.