“I don’t think the khagan would fling his wizards out the door,” George said. “He might see how well they do without their heads, though--barbarian princes are supposed to do things like that.” He paused to think for a moment. “Been a few Roman Emperors like that, too, haven’t there?”
“So they say.” Paul’s shrug expressed the limits of both his interest and his knowledge of the subject. “But he’ll do something new, because what he’s been trying hasn’t worked.”
Such conversations went on every hour of every day up on the wall, and in the taverns, and throughout Thessalonica--being besieged, the people of the city, and most of all the militiamen defending it, spent a lot of ingenuity wondering and arguing about what the besiegers would try next. Among so many speculations, some, by the nature of things, had to be correct.
George understood that--by his own nature, he understood it better than most (and he’d been right himself, once or twice). Understanding didn’t keep him from boasting afterwards when, less than an hour after he said, “Well, they’ve tried magic, and that hasn’t worked, and they’ve tried rams, and those haven’t worked, and they’ve tried tortoises, and those haven’t worked, either, so they’ll likely get around to using the catapults they made when they started the siege,” the Slavs and Avars did exactly as he’d foretold.
Someone out there beyond the wall blew a raucous horn. The noise, which bore no closer resemblance to music than a vulture to a peacock, spurred the barbarian soldiers into action. Avars rode around on horseback, screaming at the much more numerous Slavs. Some of the Slavs picked up their bows and started shooting at the militiamen on the wall. Others picked up chunks of stone and loaded them into the catapults, which, kicking like mules, flung them not only at the militiamen but also at the walls themselves.
One of those stones, lucidly or cleverly aimed, hit a man less than fifty feet from George. Red sprayed out of the fellow. He dropped to the walkway, dead, without a word, without a sound, without a twitch. Having seen how hard human beings were to kill, let alone to kill cleanly, George viewed that with no small astonishment.
More stones, of course, slammed into the wall than into the people on top of it. To George’s frightened eyes, a lot of them looked big as islands. Every time one struck, the wall shivered under his feet, as if in pain. The shiverings ran together into what felt like an earthquake that would not stop. “What can we do?” Paul shouted in between the smashing of stone missiles on stone fortifications.
“I don’t know,” George answered helplessly. “Those catapults are out past arrow range.”
Thessalonica’s walls bore catapults of their own. After a bit of hesitation, the militiamen began shooting back at the ones the Slavs and Avars had built. They did not fling rocks at the foe, but jars of pitch and naphtha the men lighted as they launched them. When one of those jars hit the ground, it smashed and spilled fire over ten or fifteen feet.
But few of the enemy’s catapults burned. They were covered in hides to keep flame from sticking to them. Not even the inflammable mix the Romans hurled was enough to make the hides catch fire. Only when the hellbrew splashed onto a wooden casting-arm would the engine of which it formed a part begin to blaze.
A big stone stuck about ten feet below where George was standing. The wall shuddered. He shuddered, too. How many impacts like that would it take till the wall no longer shuddered but collapsed?
Heaped here and there along the wall, along with stones for hurling down on the foe (not enough stones, not after the assault with the tortoises) and cauldrons for heating water, lay mats and horse blankets roughly basted together: padding to protect the gray stone fortifications from the worst the stones might do. George and Paul, along with many other militiamen on the works, began lowering the mats and blankets, draping them over the outside of the wall, and weighting them in place with some of the stones they would otherwise have dropped on the Slavs’ heads.
They quickly discovered there was more wall than matting with which to cover it. They also discovered that covering it did only so much good, as the cloth they were using could not absorb all the force from the rocks the enemy’s catapults threw. But, as George said, “Now we’ve done what we can do. The rest is up to God.”
“And to the Slavs and Avars,” Paul added, to which the shoemaker had to nod, feeling more helpless than he had before the taverner spoke.
The bombardment went on for what seemed like forever but could not have been more than a couple of hours. Men on the wall were hurt. Some of them were killed. The wall itself took a fearful pounding: certainly a pounding that made George fearful. Here and there, stones shattered.
But, in the end, the Roman engineers and masons who’d designed and built the wall were vindicated. It did not collapse, as had in his alarmed imagination seemed likely. That must have seemed likely to the Slavs, too, for their archers kept drawing ever nearer, to rush into the city if the catapults forced a breach.
When the crews manning those catapults stopped shooting--perhaps because they ran out of stones, perhaps merely because they saw they were doing no good-- George and Paul the tavern-keeper solemnly clasped hands. “First mug of wine is free if you come to my place tonight,” Paul said, which struck George as a fitting enough tribute to what they’d been through together.
The aftermath put him in mind of nothing so much as what happened after a bad storm: he and his comrades on the wall looked around exclaiming at the damage that had been done and sharing one common refrain: “It could have been worse.” The disappointed bearing of the Slavs out beyond the wall gave mute testimony to how bad it could have been. They kept right on shooting arrows after the catapults left off trying to smash down the fortifications.
Paul shot back at the Slavs. “As long as they’re just sending arrows our way, I’m not going to worry,” he said.
“Neither will I,” George agreed. “They won’t get anywhere that way.”
They looked at each other. “We never would have talked like this before the siege started,” Paul said.
“I sure wouldn’t,” George replied, “never in my life. I remember what it felt like the first time a Slav shot at me. No one had ever done that before. But now--you’re right, arrows aren’t worth getting excited about.”
Rufus, for once, had not been up on the wall when trouble started. He got there a little while after the catapults had stopped flinging stones at the city. “Busy time you had, looks like,” he said, with which George could hardly disagree. The veteran peered down at the stones at the base of the wall. He let out a loud whistle. “Looks like they cut the tips off some mountains and tossed ‘em this way,” he remarked.
“That’s what it felt like,” George said, and Paul nodded.
“I believe it,” Rufus said. “I’ve been bombarded. It’s not what I’d care to do for fun, thank you very much.” He raised his voice so the militiamen along a big stretch of Thessalonica’s wall could hear him: “Let’s get this matting pulled up and stacked again. We may need it again, you know.”
As George hauled the lengths of thick cloth back over the wall, he said, “I didn’t see it helped very much.”
“It doesn’t help very much,” Rufus agreed. “But it does help some. You can’t know beforehand whether putting it down or not putting it down will make the difference between a wall that stays up and one that doesn’t, for no one hit makes a wall fall down. Since you can’t say beforehand, you don’t take the chance. You didn’t take the chance, and you were right.”
George knew Rufus wasn’t praising him personally, but praise from the veteran, even if aimed at all the defenders, felt good. Raising an eyebrow, the shoemaker asked, “Where were you, anyway? Hardly seemed like a proper fight without you running around up here screaming at us.”