The other Slavic wizards were coming out of their tents, too, and studying Thessalonica with the same intent look the first one had given the city. And here came the Avar priest or wizard in his costume of furs and leather and fringes. As always, George shivered when he saw him. The Avar carried a lot of spiritual force. Had he been born a Christian and a Roman rather than a barbarous pagan, he might well have become a bishop.
Pointing again, this time toward the Avar, George said, “Can you imagine him in Eusebius’ vestments?”
Dactylius gaped, then made a noise half giggle, half squeak. “Easily,” he said.
And Eusebius, born a barbarian, might have been out there in furs and leather and fringes, trying to rouse his powers to break into Thessalonica and overcome the God Who held them at bay. He wondered what he himself would have been, had his life begun among the Slavs or Avars rather than the Romans. Probably not a shoemaker; from what he’d seen, the enemy had no one who made shoes for everyone else, each man being his own shoemaker and cobbler. George shrugged. He could have found something else to do.
“What are they doing?” Dactylius asked, a question of more immediate import.
“I don’t know,” George said. “If I had to guess, though, I’d say it’s nothing we’re going to like very much.”
The Slavs and the Avars had huddled together like small boys before a mime show they’d thought up. That George recognized: they wanted everything right. When they broke apart, the Avar priest shouted something that was, as usual, unintelligible from the wall. Also as usual, it got prompt results. Several Slavs with the harassed look of slaves began building a great fire from so much wood and brush that George, who’d often been chilly because Thessalonica lacked fuel, grew warm with angry jealousy.
One of the slaves thrust a torch into the brush. The fire caught swiftly. Flames leaped higher than a man. The Slavic wizards drew close to the blaze, whether for warmth or for the sake of ritual George could not tell. Staring out at the fire, Dactylius sighed longingly.
Another Slav led a billy goat up close to the fire, tethering the beast to a stake driven into the ground. The Avar priest walked all around the goat, raising his hands and chanting in a scale that had little to do with any sort of music George had heard before.
When the Avar got round behind the goat, he drew a knife from his belt; firelight flashed off the edge of the blade. With one swift motion, he reached down and castrated the goat. Blood spurted. The animal gave a bleat of startled agony. A moment later, the Slavic wizards took up the strange chant the Avar had been using.
He, after holding the goat’s testicles aloft as if in triumph, flung them into the heart of the fire. It flared up for a moment in a blaze more nearly white than honest red-gold. The Avar priest and his Slavic acolytes--for so they seemed to George to be--began a new and different chant, one the shoemaker thought might be a name: “Odkan Galakan Eke! Odkan Galakan Eke!” They called the name or phrase over and over again, till it echoed in George’s mind.
Dactylius crossed himself. “The goat!” he said. “Look at the goat.”
Watching the Avar and the Slavs, George had almost forgotten the poor unfortunate animal, whose role in the ceremony he had assumed to be over. Now he found he was mistaken. “Holy Virgin Mother of God,” he whispered, and also made the sign of the cross.
It had no effect. The woman now riding on the goat (she might have been Odkan Galakan Eke; George thought of her thus, rightly or wrongly he did not know), though plainly supernatural, was as plainly not the Virgin Mother of God. Half again the size of a man, she and her clothing seemed made all from fire.
Her tunic might at first glance have been woven of crimson silk, but was in fact flames. Her face was the color of melted butter, but glowed like the fire that would have melted it. Her eyes . . . George looked away from her eyes. Something more than mere fire blazed there, the mother substance from which all fire sprang. Men were not meant to see such directly.
“What are they going to do?” Dactylius said, staring at the beautiful and terrible being who rode the goat without consuming it.
“I don’t know,” George answered with a small shudder. Talking about the Slavs’ and Avars’ using fire against Thessalonica was one thing. Having them actually go and do it was something else, something daunting. “I wish Father Luke were up here with us.”
“I was thinking of Bishop Eusebius, but you’re right,” Dactylius said.
When the fire goddess appeared atop the castrated goat, the Slavic wizards drew back from her in what looked to George like awe and wonder. That made the shoemaker think they’d never seen her before, and that, even though they’d helped evoke her, she was likelier to be an Avar power than one of their own. The way the Avar priest shouted at them, as if drawing them back to a task they’d forgotten, but still needed to finish, strengthened that impression.
They began a new chant, this one low and rambling, altogether different from that which had summoned Odkan Galakan Eke. On her bleeding mount, the fire goddess stirred restlessly. Dactylius whispered, “I don’t think she likes what they’re doing.”
“I don’t think so, either.” George whispered, too, not wanting to draw the notice of that beautiful, flaming, unearthly creature in any way. He added, “Question is, will we like it any better?”
Chanting still, the Slavic wizards picked up swords and spears and thrust them into the fire that had summoned Odkan Galakan Eke. Despite the fierce blaze, the wooden spearshafts did not catch. The fire goddess writhed again. “She doesn’t like that,” Dactylius insisted.
Had George been a fire goddess, he wouldn’t have liked it, either. The Slavic wizards seemed to be trying to wound the bonfire, not to sustain it. One of them took a spear out of the flames, another a sword. Each pointed his weapon at Thessalonica. All the wizards, and the Avar who led them, cried out together.
The outcry looked to have mollified Odkan Galakan Eke. She stretched out a long, shining arm toward Thessalonica, as if she too were holding a weapon in it. But the fire goddess did not hold a weapon; she was a weapon. For a moment, her voice joined with those of the Avar and the Slavs. All the hair on the back of George’s neck rose in alarm. The Avar had power, wielded power: George had been forced to acknowledge as much. But Odkan Galakan Eke was power, power raw and terrifying.
And then, suddenly, she was gone. The bonfire, suddenly, was but a bonfire. The billy goat, which had been awed into silence while the fire goddess rode him, began to bawl once more, though his bawling would never restore what the Avar had taken from him.
Dactylius and George looked at each other. “Did they fail?” Dactylius asked. “Did they offend her so she fled?”
“Not to look at them, they didn’t,” George answered, pointing out at the Avar and the Slavs, who did indeed look pleased at what they had wrought. Why they were pleased, George did not understand. As far as he could see, they hadn’t changed anything, as they had done with the water-demigod and, more subtly, with the magic aimed against the blessed grappling hooks.
From further north along the wall, one of the Romans called to another: “Say, Bonosus, let me light a torch at your fire, will you? Ours went out some way. Don’t know how, but. ..” The voice traded away. George would have bet the speaker was shrugging a hapless shrug.
After a brief silence, another militiaman, presumably Bonosus, answered, “I would if I could, Julius, but ours is out, too. Funny, ain’t it?”
“They were careless,” George said with more than a hint of smugness. “It’s a good thing we’ve kept our fire-- “ He glanced toward the fire at which he and Dactylius had been in the habit of warming their hands. He did not say going, as he’d intended, for the fire wasn’t going anymore.