Dactylius aimed for the thing’s torso. In what might have been the shot of his life, he sank an arrow that should have pierced the demigod’s heart. It seemed, however, not to have a heart: at any rate, his arrow did no more good than George’s had.
“Run!” George shouted. He didn’t know whether he meant it more for Father Gregory, on whom the water-demons hand was closing, or for Irene. No, that wasn’t true: he did know. He wanted his wife away from the power. The first denial must have sprung from embarrassment at putting her safety above that of the holy man.
It didn’t matter. Neither his wife nor the priest listened to him. The huge hand closed on Father Gregory. He screamed like a lost soul. Considering his circumstances, that seemed fitting enough. He called on God and the Virgin and on Christ, using the holy names as if they were curses. They did no good against the Slavic demigod. George, in the midst of his own terror, was saddened but not surprised. Revenge and reverence were not the same.
Father Luke ran toward the cistern. The water-demon reached out its other hand toward him. George and Dactylius both sent arrows into that arm. The shoemaker never knew for certain whether that did any good. What he did know was that, when the demigod snatched at the priest, it missed.
Instead of grabbing again at once, it chose to pay attention to Father Gregory, whom it had already seized. It raised him high, then threw him down onto the cobbles of the square. Blood splashed out from his body when it struck, as if he too were a shattered jar. He screamed no more.
That brief hesitation, though, had let Father Luke reach the side of the big concrete basin with the wrecked roof. He pulled a small jar out from inside his robe, yanked off the stopper, made the sign of the cross over the jar, and tossed it up into the cistern. The demigod reached down to treat him as it had his colleague. Father Luke waited, unafraid. A moment before those great hands grabbed him, George heard a small splash: the jar had gone into the water.
The demon disappeared.
Silence slammed down in the square, silence punctuated by distant screams. George realized he’d been hearing those with the back of his mind for some time, which was a good argument in favor of the notion that the water demigod had appeared in every cistern in Thessalonica. As he stood there still half-stunned by his escape, those screams changed in tone from terror to amazement, which was a good argument in favor of the notion that, whatever Father Luke had done, whatever force he had called upon, had rid every cistern in Thessalonica of the demigod in the same instant.
On legs still wobbly with fright, George walked up to him, taking a few steps around the smashed horror that had been Father Gregory. “Bless you, Your Reverence,” he said, most sincerely.
“Bless you for your courage,” the priest answered, sounding as shaken as the shoemaker felt. “Without courage and faith, I fear, we shall be lost in the dark days that He ahead.”
George nodded. He looked back toward what was left of Father Gregory. The other priest had proved not to have quite enough of either, there when the ultimate test came. George suspected Father Luke would have found a way to prevail even without… whatever he’d thrown into the cistern. George’s bump of curiosity, always easy to excite, began itching furiously now. “What was in that jar, Your Reverence?” he asked.
“Water from the baptismal font,” Father Luke answered. “Fighting fire with fire is as ancient a proverb as I know. Here I thought it better to--”
“--Fight water with water,” George interrupted, an enormous smile stretching itself across his face. The priest showed himself a man of enormous charity as well as piety: he did not get angry with George for stepping on his line.
Dactylius and Irene came up then. George put an arm around his wife. She shivered against him for a moment, but then said, “I’ll have to buy a new jug to replace the one I broke here.”
More than jugs had been broken in the square. Along with Father Gregory, several women lay there. Some might be helped. One was groaning and shrieking and clutching her leg, which streamed blood out onto the cobbles. A big chunk of concrete from the roof the demigod had destroyed lay by her.
George used his sword to cut a strip from the bottom of her tunic to bandage the leg. She screamed abuse at him all the while, as if the tunic were more important than anything else. He took no notice of that; the lower part of the leg was out of true with the rest. “A bandage isn’t all she needs,” he said, pointing. “That leg is broken.”
“I’ll fetch a physician,” Dactylius said. “This could have been Claudia, as easily as not.” George might not have bet on the water-demon against Claudia, but he knew the little man was right. Dactylius hurried away.
Father Luke came up to the woman and prayed over her. His entreaties might have eased her pain a little, but no more than that. Routing the Slavic demigod was a matter of power against power. Something as mundane as a broken leg wasn’t, barring a miracle. Barring--
“Pity we can’t take her to the healing spring outside the city,” George said. “But the Slavs have to be prowling there nowadays.”
“It is the will of God,” Father Luke said. “We are in His hands.”
He believed that with every fiber of his being. Not least because of his strong faith, he’d been able to vanquish the water-demon. But had he not had the wit to bring with him water from the baptismal font, all his faith would have done him no good. George, shorter on faith, tried to be sharp of wit. He had trouble understanding how God’s purpose included things like a broken leg inflicted, so far as any man could tell, at random.
Father Luke would have called him presumptuous for wanting God’s purpose to make sense to a mere man. He supposed the priest would have had a point, too. Some of his own purposes didn’t make sense to Theodore and Sophia, who were in essence his equals, not inferiors, as he was an inferior to God. Even so . . .
He waited by the woman till Dactylius brought back the doctor, who took one look at the leg, nodded, and began the business of setting it. “I told him it was broken,” Dactylius said, “so he brought the boards for splints.”
“Good,” George said. He turned to Irene. “Do I remember rightly? Wasn’t I on my way home from a stretch on the wall?” He glanced at the sun to gauge the time. “Not very long ago, either.” He shook himself, like a dog coming out of a pond. “Only seems a year’s gone by since then, I guess.”
“Bless you,” Father Luke said again as he and his wife left the square. Weary and worn as he was, he walked straighter. When a priest like Father Luke blessed you, you felt blessed.
He wondered what the priests of the Slavs and the Avars were doing, now that their effort to make it impossible to draw water inside Thessalonica had failed. Wading and gnashing their teeth, with any luck at all. But they probably wouldn’t go on wailing and gnashing their teeth for long. They’d probably bring more of their gods and demons to bear against the God-guarded city.
He shrugged. The Thessalonicans couldn’t do anything about that till it happened, if and when it did. Not only did they have God guarding them, they also had the militia. George had got almost to his own street before he wondered whether that counted for or against them.
Irene put her hand in his. “You were very brave,” she said.
“I was what?” George said. Father Luke had praised his courage, too. He had trouble following that. “If I hadn’t done what I did, I figured something worse would happen. If that’s courage, then I’m--”
“Someone who talks too much,” Irene said firmly He was about to make an indignant denial; she could truthfully have accused him of a good many things, but not that. After he opened his mouth, though, he shut it without saying anything. If his wife thought he was brave and he went around denying it, didn’t that count for talking too much?
When he and Irene walked into the shop, their children looked up from the shoes they’d been repairing. “Where’s the water jar, Mother?” Sophia asked.