Among the chattering women stood Irene. Spotting George, she lowered the water jug she carried from her shoulder and waved at him. He waved back, looking around to see if she had Sophia with her. Sometimes it was hard to tell them apart from a distance--and sometimes not from a distance, too. But no; Sophia wasn’t there this time.
Just then, the roof of the cistern flew off. Concrete chunks, some of them as big as a man, spun through the air. One of them smashed a house. More, by luck or providence, came down on empty ground. But some landed with horrible wet squashing noises.
The women near the cistern screamed and scattered. “Irene!” George cried, and ran toward them. He had almost reached his wife when the power that had hurled the roof off the cistern stood up inside and looked around.
It was roughly man-shaped, but five or six times as tall as a man. It looked old, old. Its hair, what there was of it, was moss-green, and its long, straggling beard was also made of moss. Its skin hardly seemed skin at all, but rather wet bark.
Maybe George’s shout, deep among shrill, had drawn its attention to him. Whatever the reason, it turned his way. Its eyes were red, like burning coals. When he looked into them, he felt his will dripping away like olive oil out of a cracked jar.
It reached out a hand--no, more a misshapen paw-- toward him. As a drowning man will reach for anything his fingers touch, so the shoemaker made the sign of the cross. A satyr would have fled in terror. This horrifying apparition kept right on groping for him.
But the holy sign had not been altogether without effect. He had his wits back, and his will. He snatched an arrow from his quiver, set it in his bow, and took aim at the gigantic . . . Slavic water-demon or -demigod, he supposed the thing was.
Irene, whose presence of mind he often admired, had not dropped the water jar she’d filled at the cistern. A smaller version of the green-bearded thing popped out of it and grabbed George’s arm, spoiling his aim. The touch of the power was clammy and piercingly cold.
Dactylius smote the smaller water-demon with his sword. What might have been mist or might have been ichor sprayed out from the wound. Irene did drop the jar then. Water splashed up and out from it. The small apparition of the demigod went from a single one to a multitude of tiny ones spread out in the bigger puddles among the cobblestones.
George started stamping the tiny ones, as if they were so many cockroaches. They crunched under his sandals like cockroaches. The great demigod in the cistern roared and bellowed as he crashed its smaller simulacra--or perhaps they were all part of the same entity, so that the big one felt the pain he inflicted on the others as if on itself.
More water-demons began springing out of the jars of other women who hadn’t dropped them. George and Dactylius shouted for the women to do just that. Crockery crashed on cobbles. And George and Dactylius and Irene fled away from the cistern as fast as they could run.
“Do you suppose,” Dactylius panted, “these horrible things--are in every--cistern in the city?”
“I hope not,” George answered, just as short of wind. “I hadn’t--thought of that. I wish--you hadn’t--either.”
Their flight carried them past the church of St. Elias, the church nearest their homes and shops. It was close enough to the cistern for a couple of priests to have come out to try to learn what the commotion was about. Irene stopped and gasped out an explanation. The priests exclaimed in dismay. “Heathen powers loose in our God-guarded city?” one of them, Father Luke, said. “We’ll exorcise them forthwith.”
“Have a care,” George told them, still trying to catch his breath. “These things are strong, Your Reverence. You didn’t see the roof go flying.”
“A roof is a material thing, a thing of this world,” the priest replied. “In matters of the spirit, the power of God shall overcome all others. Did not He, through the intercession of St. Demetrius our patron, vouchsafe a warning that our city was about to be attacked?”
“Yes, He did, no doubt about it. I was there, and I saw it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears,” George said. “But the Slavs are such raw pagans, their powers are strong in the world of the spirit, too.” As he had so many times by now, he warned them of the wolf-demon that had slain a priest.
One of the men who had come out of St. Elias’ church turned pale and made as if to go back inside. Father Luke remained unperturbed. “This means only that our own faith shall have to be stronger. Come, Father Gregory. If we fear the pagan spirits, we give them power over us.”
Father Gregory looked anything but delighted at the prospect of facing a water-demon of the might of this one. But facing a water-demon was liable to be as nothing when set against facing Father Luke--to say nothing of facing Bishop Eusebius. Muttering something that might have been a prayer or a curse, Gregory followed his colleague up the street toward the cistern.
“Go back to the shop,” George told Irene. “Let the children know you’re all right.”
“What are you going to do?” his wife demanded.
He pointed to the priests. “You never can tell what sort of help they might need, or who might be able to give it to them.” He still didn’t know what an arrow might do to the demigod or whatever it was. On the off chance he might have to find out, he started after Father Luke and Father Gregory.
Dactylius followed him. So did Irene. He wondered for a moment why she chose such inconvenient times not to listen to him. He had no time to argue, and the only way to force her to go back would be to drag her, which would mean he couldn’t help Father Luke. Resolving to take it up with her later (a wasted resolution if ever there was one, as he knew even at the time), he hurried to catch up with the priests.
Then Father Luke, confusing things further, spun around on his heel and ran back into the church. He emerged a moment later, leaving George mystified. “Let’s go!” he said, and go they did.
The open square by the cistern was almost bare of people: of living people, at any rate. A couple of women were down and not moving under shards of what had been the roof. Others writhed and wailed. The liquid puddled around them was red and sticky and of no interest to demons concerning themselves only with water.
“By She Who bore God!” Father Gregory gasped when he got his first glimpse of the water-demon looming out of the cistern. A few smaller copies--or parts--of the demigod still stood in puddles left by shattered water jars. They were hideous, too, but hardly worth noticing with the great one about.
Those red eyes swung toward the newcomers. The demigod made a strange, wet, bubbling noise, something that sounded as if it might be a question about what people were doing coming toward the cistern rather than running away from it. A good question, George thought. He wondered what he was doing, too. But he kept doing it. Each foot kept going in front of the other.
Father Gregory shouted, “In the holy name of God, go back to whatever accursed place spawned you!” He made the sign of the cross.
He must not have been listening when George warned of what the Slavic powers could do. Or, possibly, he hadn’t believed George, who was, after all, only a shoemaker.
A power from the days of the pagan Greeks would have been routed. A power from the days of the pagan Greeks, though, could never have made its way into Thessalonica in the first place, not when the city was warded by God through St. Demetrius.
Far from being routed, the water-demon roared angrily and reached out for Father Gregory. As it was several times longer than a man, it had a correspondingly longer reach. George shot an arrow into its arm. A slight mist sprinkled down onto him. Other than that, the shaft had no effect.