“How can we fight demons that defeat even holy priests?” the shoemaker asked, wanting to keep Eusebius’ mind away from him and on the bigger picture. That’s only proper, George thought, remembering the mosaics that made the basilica of St. Demetrius so splendid. If you look at one tessera, you don’t see anything in particular. But if you look at what all the tiles do when they’re working together. . .
He’d also chosen the right question to ask Eusebius. The bishop said, “We can--we shall--we must--do two things. First, we must reconsecrate ourselves and bring our lives into closer accord with God’s will, so that other powers will be less able to get a grip on us. And, second, we must make certain the walls of Thessalonica remain strong and the militia alert. For have you not seen how such sorceries seek to weaken not just the spiritual but also the material defenses set against them and those who make them?”
“Yes, I have seen that, Your Excellency,” George answered, surprised now in his turn: he hadn’t figured Eusebius would reckon material defenses as important is he obviously did.
The bishop said, “What else have you learned of the powers the Slavs, in their ignorance, prefer to the holy truth of God?”
He did not ask where George had learned whatever else he’d learned. The shoemaker took that as a tacit promise not to raise the issue of satyrs anymore. He didn’t mention his source again, either, replying, “I hear they have other powers nearly as strong as the wolves. I cannot really speak about that because of what I’ve seen with my own eyes, though when I was on sentry-go one night, I did see a bat, or maybe two bats, that weren’t like any natural bats I’ve spied before.”
“Are you certain of this?” Eusebius asked.
“No, Your Excellency,” George said at once. “Plenty of people must know more about bats than I do, but I can’t think of anyone who knows less. Who pays attention to bats?”
“Who, indeed?” the bishop said. “Well, God willing, perhaps we shall yet be able to keep Thessalonica from being interred in a blood-filled, barbarous sarcophagus. If this be so, you, George, shall have played no small part in the preservation of the city, thanks to this information you have brought me. I am grateful, and no doubt God is grateful as well.” He started fiddling with his pen, a sure sign he’d given George all the time he’d intended.
George rose and, after bowing to Eusebius, made his way out of the prelate’s office. As he strode up its central aisle, he paid more attention to the basilica of St. Demetrius than he was in the habit of doing. Just being inside the church dedicated to the martial saint made him feel stronger and braver than he did anywhere else in the city: more like a real soldier than a militiaman.
After walking past the ciborium and then out of the basilica, he turned back toward it and sketched a salute of the same sort as he might have given to Rufus. If St. Demetrius could extend his influence over all of Thessalonica, if he could make everyone feel stronger than without his intercession . . . that might help, if the two Slavs George had encountered outside the city were, as he feared, the harbingers of more.
But, as George walked north and mostly west back toward his shop, his home, his family, and away from the shrine, the feeling faded, until he was only himself again, and oddly diminished on account of that. He forced his shoulders to straighten and his stride to lengthen. Even without the saint s beneficent influence close by, he remained himself.
“Blood-filled, barbarous sarcophagus,” he muttered under his breath, which made a woman walking in the other direction give him a strange look and move a little farther away from him. He didn’t blame her; he would have moved away from anyone mumbling about a blood-filled sarcophagus, too.
It s Eusebius’ fault, he thought. The bishop pulled out funereal images at any excuse or none. George glanced toward the walls of Thessalonica. Surely, they would not be the walls of a stone coffin to enclose the corpse of the city.
He shook his head. “He’s got me doing it,” he said, which made someone else give him a sidelong glance.
Irene rounded on him when he walked in the door. “I thought you weren’t coming back,” she said indignantly. “I thought Eusebius wouldn’t let you come back. You told him about the satyr, didn’t you?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “I knew you were going to tell him about the satyr. Why did you go and tell him about the satyr?”
“It was either that or tell him lies,” George answered. “Would you rather I told a holy man lies?”
“Of course I would,” Irene answered with the same certainty and lack of hesitation George used when imparting what was, with luck, wisdom to Theodore or, more rarely, Sophia. How could you be so foolish as to think otherwise? Her tone demanded.
George usually accepted such rebukes from her, because he knew he usually deserved them when he got them. Today, though, he balked. “I went to tell the bishop about the Slavs and about their demons,” he said. “It was only natural for him to ask how I knew what I knew. When he did ask me that, I didn’t see what choice I had but to tell him the truth, so he could know how seriously to take the news I was giving him.”
Irene muttered something under her breath. George thought it was “Men!” but felt disinclined to inquire more closely. As with theology, some of the more subtle points of marriage were better taken on faith than examined under the piercing lamp of reason. In any case, Irene had a good deal to say that wasn’t under her breath: “If he had taken you seriously, George, he might have felt he had to do something like ask questions about how you came to be talking with a satyr, not chasing it off with the sign of the cross.” The look in her eye said she still wondered the same thing; she was more pious than he. She went on, “Would you really have liked, say, a couple of years’ penance for doing that?”
“No, I wouldn’t have liked that,” he admitted. “But I didn’t think he would do anything to me, because the news was more important than how I got it.” Before she could interrupt, he held up a hand. “And I was right. Remember that--I was right.” He felt no small sense of pride; in an argument with Irene, he seldom got to say that.
As things turned out, it did him no good even when he did get to say it. “It was a foolish chance to take,” Irene retorted. “What you gained by doing it wasn’t worth the risk.”
“I thought it was,” George said, but that took the argument out of the realm of fact and back into opinion. He tried a slightly different tack: “It’s done now, and it worked out all right.” Irene thought that over, then grudgingly nodded. That meant the argument was over, too, which suited George fine.
III
More people began encountering Slavs in the woods. A couple of men who went out hunting didn’t come back. George was on a search party that went out after one of them. He found no trace of the missing hunter. He found no trace that the man had fallen foul of the Slavs, but nothing to prove the fellow hadn’t, either. Whatever had happened to him, he never showed his face in Thessalonica again. George, along with most other people, suspected the worst.
The roads from the north grew crowded with farmers fleeing the ever-growing presence of the Slavs--and, presumably, their Avar overlords, though the Slavs were the folk on everyone’s lips. Some of the peasants took refuge in the city. Others kept going, hoping to find lands he barbarians would not penetrate.
With the peasants came priests and monks, driven from churches and monasteries by the inroads of the barbarians. The monks, many of them, took refuge in the monasteries surrounding Thessalonica; the priests came into the city itself, to help serve its churches while theirs lay under the control of the Slavs and Avars. Suddenly the divine services had far more officiants than were needed, so that the holy men had to take turns performing them. When the refugee priests were not celebrating the liturgy, they gathered in the market square and told their harrowing tales to whoever would listen and perhaps toss a follis or two into the begging bowls they put out in front of them.