More and more, as power built in the air around him, he got the feeling they had very little time. Whatever the Slavs and Avars were going to do, it was on the point of being done. “So that we slay them, what boots it an we slay them individually or collectively?” Crorus shouted back.
That was, George realized, the wine raging in the centaur. Sober, Crotus liked nothing better than to deliberate, to choose with great care the best possible course. Drunk, none of that mattered. All the male wanted to do was kick and stamp and tear and kill. Hows and whys and wherefores concerned it not at all.
“We have to get down to the city and break up the magic they’re working,” George said desperately. “Can’t you feel it? Can’t you sense it? If their gods fully come through into the hills we know--” He broke off. If that happened, God would have to intervene, perhaps through St. Demetrius, to save Thessalonica--if He chose to save it if He was strong enough to save it. But Crotus cared nothing about God and little about Thessalonica. George tried a different explanation: “If they manifest themselves in these hills, they’ll be too strong for you.”
Crotus bounded along, seemingly tireless. But after a few more strides, the male let out a great rambling bellow: “Thessalonica! To Thessalonica! Straight on to Thessalonica!”
The centaur sprang out ahead of the rest of the band, leading not just by shouts but by example. Straight on they went. They did not turn aside for holy ground of any sort. Maybe, in their drunken madness, the power in patches of holy ground had less effect on them than had been so while they were sober. Maybe, too, they simply happened not to run across any. George was too busy trying to stay on Crotus’ back to be sure.
The woods thinned. Followed close by the other centaurs, Crotus burst into the open ground around Thessalonica. The male shouted once more when he came out into that open country, for the Slavs and a large troop of Avar cavalry were drawn up in battle array against the city. So intent on Thessalonica were they, they did not turn against the centaurs till the drumroll of hoofbeats bearing down on them drew them away from the attack they had been about to begin on the wall.
Indeed, it might not even have been the hoofbeats from behind, but rather the shouts from the defenders of Thessalonica, that made the Slavs and Avars realize the centaurs were there. The shouts were joy, not amazement: at that distance, the defenders must have taken the centaurs for regular cavalry coming to their rescue. The surprise--even the horror--on the faces of the barbarians, who knew better, was marvelous to behold. Till then, their powers not only held their own against the Christian God, but had routed the supernatural beings native to these hills and valleys.
Perhaps the centaurs were, in true terms of strength, still overmatched. If they were, they neither knew nor cared. Maddened with wine, all they wanted was to close with the folk whose demons and demigods had done so much to them up till then. Being afraid never crossed their minds.
It crossed George’s mind. It also crossed the minds of whole troops of Slavs, who turned and fled from the raging band. But not all the barbarians fled. Some of them began shooting arrows at the centaurs. They cried out in dismay when, even after they scored hits, their foes would not fall. Seeing that sent more of them running.
The Avars were made of sterner stuff. They shot arrows at the centaurs, too, arrows from their heavier bows. They also wheeled their armored horses around and rode into battle, some with swords, some with spears. They might never have seen these supernatural creatures before, but they showed hardly more alarm than the beings galloping at Crotus’ heels.
Here and there, one of those centaurs, shot through the chest or perhaps the eye, crashed to the ground and thrashed toward death. Not even their marvelous flesh was proof against an arrow lodged in the heart or in the brain.
George knew too well that his own flesh, marvelous only to him, was proof against very little. Not wanting the Avars to take any special notice of him, he clapped Perseus’ cap onto his head. He held it with his left hand. With a great many misgivings, he drew his sword with his right. That left no hands with which to hold on to Crotus’ human torso. Clenching the centaur’s equine barrel with legs inexperienced at horsemanship, he hoped he would not fall off and be trampled like a wolf-demon.
While a few centaurs went down, most of them, even those who were wounded, stormed on toward the Avars. As the Slavs had before them, the mounted men lost spirit when their most telling shots evaded them little. And the stones the centaurs flung smote as if they came from the hurling arms of the siege engines on the walls of Thessalonica. When one of those stones struck home, an Avar pitched from his saddle or, despite armor of iron, a horse staggered, limbs half unstrung.
And then it was no longer a fight of arrows and stones. The onrushing centaurs were in among the Avars, wrenching the spears from their hands, wrenching riders off the backs of their horses, and throwing them to the ground. The Avars remained brave. They also retained the arrogance that made them believe they had the right to rule everything they could reach. When confronted by immortal madmen who also could and did kick like mules, none of that did them much good.
George slashed away with his sword. Every so often, edge or point would find a gap in an Avar’s scalemail. The barbarian would howl with pain and look around wildly to see who had wounded him. He would discover that he, like Polyphemus in the Odyssey, had apparently been hurt by Nobody.
Remembering that Father Luke lacked the option of invisibility, George looked around to see how the priest fared. He was glad to find he had a lot of trouble picking Father Luke’s human torso out from those of the centaurs in whose midst the holy man rode. He would have had more trouble still had Father Luke divested himself of his robes, but, while the priest’s piety was more flexible than that of Bishop Eusebius, George was certain it would not bend so far as that.
An Avar in a gilded helmet shouted something that sounded incendiary even if George couldn’t understand a word of it. Crotus struck the man with a powerful fist. The Avar’s iron armor warded him against the blow. George hit him, too: in the face, with the edge of his blade. Blood spurted. The Avar screamed. He clutched at himself. George wished he’d served Menas the same way.
Losing the officer’s steadying hand helped unsettle the Avars. So did their foes’ furious, unyielding attack. The nomads found themselves moving back instead of forward. That unsettled them more. Now men began to break away from the fight instead of rushing toward it.
The centaurs seemed oblivious to the way their foes fought. They fought hard, no matter what. Some of the regular soldiers who had left Thessalonica for the wars to the north and east owned warhorses that would strike out with their hooves at a rider’s command. George had thought that marvelous till he saw the centaurs in action. At close quarters, one of them, unarmored and unarmed except for what nature had provided, was far more than a match for Avars trained to horsemanship and war since childhood.
And the centaurs did not stay unarmed long. Many of them--those, George thought, rather less maddened by wine than some of the others--not only wrested spears and swords from the men they were fighting, they used them and weapons picked up from the ground with wicked effect.
George reveled in his own invisible deadliness. Whenever the melee brought Crotus close enough to an Avar, the shoemaker on the centaur’s back struck and struck hard. The nomads did not know why Crotus was a particularly dangerous enemy, but soon figured out the male was such, and did their best to stay away from it. In the press of battle, that best was too often not nearly good enough.