Dactylius cried out in exultation when the shaft he’d launched struck one of the Avars in the side. He cried out again a moment later, this time in anguish, when it rebounded from the fellow’s scalemail shirt. The Avar looked down at the arrow, then up at the wall. He shook his fist and kept on riding.
“I had him,” Dactylius moaned. “By St. Demetrius, I had him--and he got away.” He sent another arrow at the troop of nomads. This one fell twenty cubits short, as George had expected the other to do. It was as if Thessalonica’s patron saint had helped that first arrow along--only to see it fail in the end. If that was an omen, it was one for which George did not care.
He set a hand on Dactylius’ shoulder. “You couldn’t have done any better,” he said. “You did better than I thought you could. If you shoot like that against the Slavs when they come to shoot at us, a lot of them won’t go back to their encampments.”
“I know,” the jeweler said. “I hope I can. But for a few seconds there, killing that Avar seemed like the most important thing in the world. I thought I’d done it, and then--” He shook his head. “It’s not fair.”
“No,” George agreed. “It’s not.” But for their part, the Avars would no doubt say it wasn’t fair that God and St. Demetrius had watched over Thessalonica and kept them from sacking the city. Fairness, like beauty, was in the eye of the beholder. When no two people could agree on what it meant, did it matter? George had trouble seeing how.
The Avar Dactylius had shot but not wounded made his horse pull up and looked over toward Thessalonica again, as if deciding he wouldn’t brook the insult after all. He shouted something. George wouldn’t have understood it had he heard it clearly, which he didn’t.
“Hello,” the shoemaker muttered under his breath. He might not have understood the shout, but he understood what sprang from it: out of one of the Avars’ tents near the woods came the priest or wizard who had tried to ruin the holy power in the grappling hooks on the walls of Thessalonica but had succeeded only in causing a minor earthquake.
“What’s he carrying with him?” Dactylius asked.
“Looks like a mirror,” George answered. “He’s in an even uglier getup than he was the last time we saw him, isn’t her” Instead of looking like some weird animal, half furry, half feathered, the Avar now resembled nothing so much as a tree all shaggy with moss. He even wore a great, untidy wreath of leaves on his head.
He came trotting up to the horseman who had called for him. They talked together for some little while. The mounted Avar kept pointing back toward the wall, and toward that portion of it where George and Dactylius stood. Dactylius let out what could only be described as a giggle. “I don’t think he’s happy I almost let the air out of him,” the jeweler said.
“I’d say you’re right,” George answered. “The next interesting question is, what can he do about it?” To turn any harm aside, George made the sign of the cross. The Avar wizard had shaken Thessalonica’s wall, even if he hadn’t toppled it. George didn’t want that kind of power aimed at him alone--or, come to that, at him and Dactylius together.
The mounted Avar, having said his piece, rode on to rejoin his comrades. The priest stood staring at the wall. Even across a couple of furlongs, he seemed to be staring straight into George’s face. George stared back, unable to take his eyes away. He felt the weight of the Avar’s persona pressing on him, and pressed back as strongly as he could.
That seemed to take the Avar by surprise. Abruptly, he turned away and went back into the tent from which the horseman had summoned him. Dactylius tapped George on the forearm. “Did you feel that?” The jeweler spoke in a whisper, though the wizard was far away.
“Yes, I did,” George said. “I didn’t know you did, too.” Some of his pride in resistance faded. If the Avar had set that mental grip on more than one Roman at once, he was stronger than any single foe of his.
“What do you suppose he’s doing in there?” Dactylius pointed to the tent into which the Avar had returned.
“I don’t know,” George answered, “but I think we’ll find out.”
He hardly thought himself worthy of being compared to Elijah or Jeremiah as a prophet, but that prediction was soon borne out. The Avar emerged from the tent carrying not only the mirror but what looked like a wooden pad of water. He set the mirror on the ground; as he did so, the sun angled off it for a moment, the flash proving to George what it was. He began to dance around it. Every so often, water splashed out of the pail onto the ground and onto the mirror.
Clouds crowded the sky, which moments before had been sunny though pale. What had been as good a day as any Thessalonica might expect in November quickly changed to one warning of storm. “Magic!” George exclaimed; nothing natural could make the weather turn so fast.
Cold rain began pelting down onto the wall almost as soon as the word passed his lips. Dactylius pointed. “Look!” he exclaimed. “It’s not falling on the Slavs out there.”
He was right. The rain seemed confined to Thessalonica alone. Past twenty or thirty cubits beyond the wall, the weather remained as it had been. George started to say something, but thunder crashed, deafeningly loud, right above his head. He staggered and almost dropped to one knee.
Another crash came, even louder than the first. George stared up into the sky. He’d never heard thunder like that. Were those just cloud shapes, or did they look like Avars thumping great drums? When the thunder rang out again, he was convinced of what he saw. Those shifting shapes, all thirteen of them, were real.
After yet another peal of thunder, rumblings continued for some time, like aftershocks from an earthquake. The rumblers were cloud shapes, too: little men or gnomes with enormous feet, all made of mist.
“Avar rain and thunder spirits!” George shouted, pointing up into the heavens. He hoped Dactylius would perceive them, too.
Before he could find out whether his friend did, an utterly mundane arrow hissed past his face. He reached for his bow to shoot back at the Slavs, then cursed the Avar wizard as foully as he knew how. No rain fell on the Slavs; their bowstrings were dry. Those of the men on the walls of Thessalonica, though, were soaked and useless.
The thunder spirits thundered. The smaller, less fearsome rumblers rumbled. The Slavs out beyond the walls kept on shooting. George and the other defenders were powerless to reply.
“Where’s Bishop Eusebius?” Dactylius shouted. “He could put a stop to this.”
Wherever Bishop Eusebius was, he was nowhere close by. Peering through the curtain of rain all around Thessalonica as if through a glass, darkly, George saw more Avars come out to confer with their priest. “I don’t know why they’re wasting time talking,” he said. “They’ll never have a better chance to attack the walls than now.”
“Look!” Dactylius pointed not to the cloud creatures in the sky, not to the Slavs and Avars beyond the rain, but to the head of the stairway leading up to the wall. “It’s Father Luke!”
That made George feel as good as seeing the bishop might have done. Father Luke was of lower rank, but George and Dactylius had already seen what his holiness could do. George said, “You beat the one water demon, Father. Can you beat these new ones as well?” He pointed at the thunderers and rumblers up in the sky.
“I don’t know,” the priest replied, putting a hand up over his eyes so he could see the Avar powers without raindrops continually blowing in his face.
“You don’t know?” Dactylius sounded horrified. “Are we just going to stand here and drown, the way people did in the great Flood?” He looked about ready to drown. The drumming rain made his hair run down over his face like so many wet snakes and plastered his tunic to him so tightly, George could count his ribs.