“She’d be even more unhappy if the Slavs take the city,” Paul pointed out; the taverner had come up onto the wall with the comic. He shot at the Slavs. “Got one there, I think.”
“There are enough of them, I’ll say that,” Rufus said. “They haven’t brought the whole army forward like this since . . .” His brow, already wrinkled, furrowed still more as he thought. “Since that time they used those tortoises to try and undermine the walls.”
After George let fly with another arrow, he stayed upright longer than he had been doing. “I see more of them, getting ready to use those big shields they had then.”
“Let me have a look.” Rufus stood up beside him, ignoring the arrows humming by as if they were so many gnats. George pointed. The veteran let out a grunt. “Aye, that’s what they’re doing. Didn’t know whether they’d try the same stunt twice, but I always figured they might. And don’t the Scriptures talk about a dog coming back to its vomit?”
“That means coming back to a bad idea,” George said, loosing another shaft at the advancing Slavs. “For them, this is liable to be coming back to a good idea.” He shot again. The arrow ricocheted from one of the large, heavy shields. He cursed.
So did Rufus. “Aye, it’s liable to be,” he agreed. After he looked around at the piles of stones on the walkway, his curses put George’s to shame. “I’ve been screaming at everybody who might listen, but we still haven’t put back as many rocks as we dropped on the Slavs the last time they tried tortoises against us.” He raised his voice to a great bellow: “Water and fuel for the cauldrons!” In more conversational tones, he said to George, “We’ll never get stones up here quick enough to do much good. Dropping boiling water on the whoresons will still help, though.”
“It had better,” George said. The tortoise crews moved steadily forward. The shoemaker pointed to them. “They’ve learned from what went wrong the first time. Now they’ve got the shields up to make their shells right from the start.”
“Only way to do it,” Rufus said absently, and then, “I wish they were as stupid as those Goths and Franks and Lombards over in Italy. The German tribes didn’t know how to do anything except bash and slash, and they didn’t want to learn, either.”
Under George’s feet, the wall shivered. The first tortoise had reached it and, under cover of the iron-faced shields, the Slavs were using pry bars and hammers and chisels to try to pull stones out of the base and send the whole thing tumbling down. George set down his bow, picked up a stone, and dropped it down toward the attackers. It landed with a dull thud, not a clatter, telling him he’d missed.
Dactylius threw a stone down on the Slavs, too. He cheered when he heard a crash, but the barbarians kept chipping away at the wall, which meant the shields above them had turned the stone.
John said, “If this goes on much longer, it could get very boring.” After a moment, he added, “Running out of rocks up here could be boring, too.” Boring, as he used it, seemed to mean getting everyone on the wall killed.
Rufus lifted a stone. It was not one of the enormous boulders he’d picked up the first time the Slavs tried tortoises, but of more ordinary size and weight. Even so, it was enough to make him stagger. George decided God really had been helping him then. He also decided God wasn’t helping Rufus now. When the veteran dropped the stone, he missed the tortoise, as George had.
The vibration underfoot got worse as more and more
Slavic crews got to work at the base of the wall. “We aren’t going to have enough rocks to smash all of them,” Paul said. “I don’t know how else we’re going to stop them, either.” George had been thinking the same thing. He’d kept quiet, hoping it wouldn’t be true if he didn’t say it. Now Paul had said it. It was true.
Rufus’ face was haggard, for once showing every one of his years. “We’re in trouble,” he said, each word dragged from him.
“A sally?” George asked, as he had before.
He saw how much Rufus wanted to say no, to keep fighting from the top of Thessalonica’s wall, the wall that had for so long warded the Romans within from the barbarians outside. But the wall trembled beneath their feet, and might crumble beneath those feet at any moment. Looking as if every word tasted bad, Rufus said, “Aye, a sally.” The decision made, he wasted no time wondering whether he should change his mind. Instead, he shouted, “Come on, you lugs! Grab your swords and shields and get down to the gate. If we can’t make the Slavs leave the wall alone any other way, we’ll have to chase ‘em off!”
Having set down all his arms but his bow and arrow when he got up to the walkway, George had to snatch them up in a hurry now. Several of his comrades were doing the same thing. Rufus had already started down the stairway toward the Litaean Gate. John, Paul, George, and Dactylius hurried after him, along with a couple of dozen other militiamen from farther away.
Down on the ground, Rufus was shoving every able-bodied man he could find in the direction of the gate. “Here, what are you doing?” Menas shouted in anger and alarm. “Do you know who I am?”
Rufus kept shoving. “You’re not much more than half my age, and you’ve got that big, fancy hammer in your hand,” he answered. “Past that, pal, I don’t care who you are.”
This time, the soldier at the postern gate gave Rufus no argument when he ordered it open. “Doesn’t this look like fun!” John exclaimed. But the tavern comic was the first one through the gate, out into the hostile world beyond the wall.
George followed a moment later. He let out the loudest shout he could, both to frighten the Slavs and to try to make himself believe he wasn’t frightened. He didn’t know how he did on the first count. On the second, he faded miserably.
He ran toward the tortoise closest to the Litaean Gate. Arrows hissed past, bouncing back from the wall or shattering against it. To his relief, the Slavic archers didn’t come rushing forward to engage his comrades and him in hand-to-hand combat. There were enough of them that they might have overwhelmed the militiamen by force of numbers alone.
Behind their shields, the Slavs in the tortoise saw the Romans running at them and shouted in alarm. John pulled one of the shields aside and slashed at the men it sheltered. Suddenly, the tortoise broke up as the warriors inside realized they had to fight for their lives. Their pry bars and hammers were better weapons against stone than against soldiers. The big, heavy shields were more suited to warding off rocks cast from above than attackers at close quarters, too.
One of the Slavs swung at George with the iron bar he held in lieu of a sword. George got his shield in front of the blow. Pain shot up his arm, all the way to the shoulder. He cut at the Slav, then circled rapidly to his left, away from that part of the barbarian the shield protected. The Slav grunted in alarm and tried to turn with him, but the iron-faced shield weighed so much, it made him slow. And, in his desperate urgency, he tripped over his own feet and sprawled on the ground.
Bang! Bang! Menas’ silvered hammer came down upon his head. Had George dropped a pumpkin from the wall to the ground below, it would have made a sound like that when it hit. Blood sprayed. The Slav writhed, then lay still. Menas hit him again, to make sure that he was dead.
“Er--thank you,” George said, feeling such awkwardness as he’d never known at having to be grateful to the noble.
Menas exploded that gratitude as thoroughly as he’d ruined the Slav’s head. Swinging the hammer, he said, “I wish it had been you.”
George wondered if he could make Menas suffer an unfortunate accident out here beyond the wall. It would make the noble’s wife a widow, true, but, after being married to Menas, widowhood might look good to her.
Though such thoughts ran through the shoemaker’s mind, he had not the slightest chance to do anything about them. Nor did Menas do anything to him that would have given him an excuse to make the noble suffer that unfortunate accident. Both of them, along with the rest of the militiamen who had sallied from several gates, were and stayed busy battling the Slavs who had been assaulting the wall of Thessalonica.