“Happens in towns, too.” George remembered the outbreak of bubonic plague in Thessalonica not so long before. Hundreds, maybe thousands, had died.
After a while, Dactylius and John came up onto the wall. George hurried back to his shop; he was convinced his being away from it so regularly would make it founder. Irene was convinced he was out of his mind; Theodore, on the other hand, was convinced a soldier’s life was far more exciting than that of a shoemaker. One day, George intended to sit him down with Rufus, to see if anything resembling sense would penetrate his head.
George had just finished nailing a new heel onto a boot (not a boot he’d made, he was pleased to note) when Claudia came into the shop carrying a pair of sandals. “Hello,” George said, setting aside the newly repaired boot. “What can I do for you today?”
“Have you seen my husband?” Claudia’s voice throbbed with melodrama. She was one of those people who found day-to-day life too dull to be readily tolerable, and spiced it up with imaginary worries when no real ones were handy. And when real ones were handy-- “I live in dread of the day when the messenger will tell me my beloved Dactylius has died a hero’s death for his city.”
She clasped both hands to her bosom. It was a fine, well-rounded bosom; the gesture might have belonged in a pantomime show but for the inconvenient sandals. Sophia excused herself and hurried upstairs. Theodore coughed and coughed. Irene kept her face utterly expressionless. She worried about George, and made no secret of it, but made no production of it, either.
And George did not tell Claudia that the likeliest way for Dactylius’ untimely demise to occur at the moment was death by boredom. Instead, showing restraint he felt sure St. Demetrius would have praised, he said, “I think he’ll be all right. The wall is very strong.”
“So they say,” Claudia answered, as if they were notorious liars. “For myself, I wish Dactylius would just stay in the shop with me.”
Given a choice between closing himself up in a shop with Claudia all day and going out to fight the fierce barbarians, George would have taken on the Slavs even without a sword to hold them at bay. That was something else he couldn’t tell her; he was wider through the shoulders, but she overtopped him by two or three digits.
“What’s wrong with the sandals?” George asked, hoping to turn her away from morbid worries about her husband and toward something simple.
“I broke a strap on this one--see?” She showed him the problem.
“Yes, I can take care of that,” he told her, and then, to make conversation, added, “How did it happen?”
He realized that was a mistake the moment the words were out of his mouth. Claudia drew herself up to her full, formidable height. Her gray eyes flashed. It wasn’t quite so impressive a manifestation as when St. Demetrius had spoken through Rufus, but it wasn’t supernatural, either: it was only her temper coming out.
“That stupid slut next door kept throwing her garbage in front of my place, and so I hit her with the shoe,” she explained. “I don’t think you sewed the strap on very well.”
George examined it again. It hadn’t broken at a sewn seam. She’d hit so hard, she’d torn the leather. From under his eyebrows, he glanced up at her. No, getting on her bad side was not a good idea. She might well have been more dangerous to the Slavs than a good many militiamen on the wall, her husband included.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said again. With almost anyone else, he would have pointed out in no-uncertain terms that the problem was not of his making. But Claudia was his good friend’s wife … and, even if she hadn’t been, he suspected he’d have kept his mouth shut.
Instead of sewing the broken strap back together, he took it off the sandal and replaced it with a new one. That took a little longer, but meant the sandal wouldn’t rub Claudia’s ankle when she wore it again.
She tried it on after he gave it back to her. After a judicious pause, she nodded. “Yes, that will do. I hope it holds together, though.”
“It should,” George answered. “Of course, the next time you hit your neighbor, you might want to think about using something like a brick instead.”
Claudia considered the joke with such drilling seriousness that George once more wished he had the words back; he’d wanted to make her smile, not to make her murder the woman next door. But at last she said, “No, a brick would have hurt her more than I intended then. I would have to be truly angry to use a brick.” She took a couple more steps in the repaired sandal and nodded. “It does feel good, George. I’ll tell Dactylius I’ve been here. You know you can drop by the shop.” She wrapped her mantle around her and swept away.
“What will you get me at Dactylius’, Father?” Sophia asked, as eagerly as if she were a little girl rather than a young woman. The shoemaker and jeweler did not charge each other money for their services, but traded them back and forth.
“I don’t know,” George answered. “Some bit of polished brass--a ring, maybe, or a thin bracelet. Fixing a sandal strap isn’t enough for me to bring home gold inset with rubies and pearls, you know.” Nothing he was likely to do was enough for him to bring home gold inset with precious gems. He’d long since resigned himself to that.
“That woman.” Irene shook her head. “She reminds me of a jar with the stopper in too tight left in the fire too long. One day it will burst and hurt half a dozen people with flying potsherds. And yet Dactylius dotes on her.”
“Of course he does,” George said. “Do you think he’d dare not to?”
Theodore chuckled, Sophia giggled, and Irene wagged a severe finger at her husband. “You are a wicked man. All the time you’ve been spending in the company of the militia is making you sound like John.”
“I got the better of him the other day, up on the wall,” George boasted, and recounted the exchange he’d won.
“That’s funny, Papa,” Theodore said, clapping his hands together. “Now will you tell us all the ones where he bested you?”
“If you want to hear those, you can go ask John,” the shoemaker replied with dignity. Then he gave his son a cuff on the side of the head, not hard enough to hurt, not soft enough to be ignored, to remind the youth to preserve at least some vestige of respect for his parents.
“It’s all right, George,” Irene said.
“I know it is,” he answered. “I want to make sure it stays that way.”
As long as only Slavs were besieging Thessalonica, George didn’t worry much about the ultimate safety of the city: they hadn’t impressed him as being particularly dangerous fighters. That was as well; he and his fellow militiamen weren’t particularly dangerous fighters, either.
“The ones who bother me are those Avars,” he said to Dactylius as they waited for relief so they could return to their shops and homes after a morning stint on the wall. “We haven’t seen much of them since that handful the first night of the siege, but if they weren’t real soldiers, there’re no such animals.”
“They were fierce-looking, all right,” Dactylius said, “but I don’t think you worry enough about the Slavs. There are so many of them. Look at the way their powers are coming in and doing things the ones that have been here forever wouldn’t even try in the face of Christian men.”
“That’s so,” George admitted unhappily. “I wish it weren’t, but it is. I hope that satyr I saw up there in the hills is all right. He’s not a Christian power, true enough, but he’d been here a long time, like you say.”
Dactylius made small disapproving noises. “As a good Christian man myself, I say we should have nothing to do with the old powers.” His voice was prim. “The sooner we forget all about them, the sooner they’ll vanish from the earth.”