“May Fortune favor you,” Nephele said. She spoke of Fortune as a power in its own right. As a Christian, George knew he wasn’t supposed to think of it that way. As a man who sat down with some friends to roll dice every now and then, he couldn’t help thinking of it so.
He slept in the straw in Gorgonius’ bam that night; it made a better bed than the one of dry leaves he’d shared with Ampelus and Stusippus, and not only because he didn’t have a couple of satyrs in it with him. When he woke up, he didn’t look like a young forest anymore: he wasn’t covered with leaves. Being covered with straw instead, he looked like a young unmowed field instead.
Gorgonius gave him a slab of bread and a stoppered jug that almost surely contained wine. Nephele and Crotus both made an elaborate pretense of not looking at it. Though they turned their heads away, their eyes had minds of their own, and kept sliding back toward the jug. The satyrs, more than humanly fond of wine, made no bones about watching the jar.
As soon as George could see his feet and the path they would take, he left Lete. His breath smoked in the chilly air. He told himself firmly that he would presume no one but he could see it. Had the truth been otherwise, Gorgonius would have mentioned it. . . wouldn’t he?
George knew the direction in which he’d have to go. He’d traveled part of that road already. He wished he’d been able to travel all of it. Then he wouldn’t have had to involve himself with such potent pagan powers as Perseus’ cap. Even if he was less devout than many in Thessalonica, he did believe.
“Well,” he murmured, “if Eusebius wants to impose a penance on me after all this is over, I’ll observe it. I just want this to be all over.”
He hadn’t been walking for more than half an hour before he spotted Xanthippe and Demetrius out on a meadow. The female centaur and the young one (young enough, perhaps, not to have been in a position to know St. Paul when he’d traveled through this land more than five centuries before) both moved easily, showing no signs of the wounds they’d taken from the Slavic wolf-demons, wounds that would have laid George up for weeks or lolled him.
They also showed no sign of having any idea he was around. He did not call out to them. No telling who-- or what---might be listening. Good thing Ampelus didn’t rescue John, the shoemaker thought. He wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut long enough to get full good from this cap.
Even that uncharitable judgment of his friend reminded George how much he missed Thessalonica and all its people. He shook his head, revising that thought as soon as he had it. He didn’t miss Menas even a tittle.
He drank some wine. Between that and the steady exercise of tramping through the hill country, he felt warm enough, though the early-morning air still had a chilly edge to it. The right side of his mouth twisted up into an ironic smile. He’d had more exercise lately than he’d ever wanted.
The morning was still young when he saw his first wolf. It wasn’t far from the place where he and the centaurs and satyrs had fought the Slavic demons, and stood by the side of the path, as if waiting for him to come past so it could finish him for good instead of just driving him back into the hills.
He stopped in his tracks. Knowing he was invisible was one thing. Believing it when his life depended on its being so proved something else again. The wolf-demon’s tongue lolled out, impossibly red against its dark gray fur. Its eyes glittered with alertness. Its head turned this way and that. For a moment, it looked straight at him. Dared he believe it could not see him, could not sense him?
If he didn’t dare believe that, what point to going any farther? He walked past the wolf, close enough so that he could have kicked it in the ribs. As he moved past, the wolf-demon let out a puzzled whine, as if it had the feeling it should have been noticing something it was missing. George reached up and touched the leather cap. Now he believed.
He went almost jauntily after that. He caught himself just before he started whistling a happy little tune. That would have been stupid--odds were, fatally stupid.
More wolves than the first one guarded the trails down to Thessalonica. He passed them all. Some seemed to have no notion he was anywhere nearby. Others, like the first, looked and sounded discontented, but could not understand why they dimly suspected something was wrong.
And then George approached Vucji Pastir. The Slavic demigod who shepherded wolves had a couple of his charges close by; he was talking to them in a language made up of yips and growls. His glowing green beard, George saw, had grown out to its full magnificence once more: the barbering his own sword had done proved as impermanent as the wounds the centaurs had taken.
Vucji Pastir knew he was coming. That was the impression he got, anyhow, from the demigod’s demeanor. Vucji Pastir urged his wolves out onto the trail as a man hunting boar would have urged on his hounds. The wolf-demons whined and lashed their tails.
They were, George realized joyfully, trying to tell their master they could find no sign of any impertinent Christian shoemaker. Vucji Pastir peered this way and that. Once, as the wolves had done before, the demigod looked right at George--and, evidently, saw nothing.
Or perhaps, as the wolves had also done, Vucji Pastir saw next to nothing. He frowned, scratched at the roots of his green hair--and then looked in another direction. George let out a silent sigh of relief. He didn’t think Perseus’ cap would get a harder test till he drew far closer to Thessalonica.
He was soon proved wrong. He hadn’t gone more than another couple of furlongs before he encountered Vucji Pastir again, this time with a different pack of wolf-demons. Again the Slavic demigod almost spotted him. Again the demigod apparently could not believe his own eyes.
As George hurried on toward the city, he wondered how Vucji Pastir had been behind him and then in front of him without, so far as an impertinent Christian shoemaker could tell, crossing the intervening space. Had the shepherd of the wolves been first in one place and then in the other? Or had he manifested himself in both at once? “Would he show up again and again, on the lookout for George, all the way down to the city wall?
Sure enough, George saw him and he did not see George several more times, there in the hill country. Toward the end of the day--and also a good deal of the way toward Thessalonica--the shepherd of the wolves looked so upset at having faded to spot George that the shoemaker was tempted to go up to him, tap him on the shoulder, and say, “Excuse me there, friend, but can I help you find somebody?”
He convinced himself, after some silent argument, that that was not a good idea, no matter how he would have enjoyed watching a demigod jump.
Despite Vucji Pastir, despite the wolf-demons, George made better time down toward Thessalonica than he’d expected, approaching the city before the sun had sunk in the west. That was not what he wanted. If he went up to a postern gate in the dead of night, he could slip off Perseus’ cap and claim no one had noticed him till he got there. If he tried that in the afternoon, the guards would see him materialize out of thin air. So would the Slavs, with results liable to be unpleasant.
Waiting for nightfall proved harder than he’d expected. The woods near Thessalonica were full of Slavs, some hunting, others taking axes to trees and bushes to fuel their fires. They had no notion he was there but, like the fellow back in Lete, kept doing their best to blunder into his invisible but not incorporeal form. If one of them did chance to trip over his foot, he did not think a simple, friendly “Excuse me” would set matters right.
Carefully, he worked his way around the wall till he neared the Litaean Gate. The men on the wall there would be likeliest to know him and to recognize his voice when he came up to the gate. So would the men at the postern gate by the main gateway. If he presented himself and they wouldn’t let him into the city… he didn’t want to think about that.