“Oh!” Dactylius blinked. “I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right, aren’t you?”
“Unless you know more about the secrets of the city than I do, I am,” George said. He looked out toward the wizards’ tents once more. “They are strong: the Slavs, I mean. They aren’t very bright, though, or they’re not very good at using the power they do have. Otherwise, one of those little bat things would have been listening to Rufus and Eusebius, not to us.”
“How do you know one wasn’t?” Dactylius asked.
He stood there small and smug and proud of his own cleverness. And George demolished it, not taking malicious glee in the doing as John would have but doing it anyhow, hardly noticing he was doing it, not thinking of anything but going after the truth wherever it happened to be hiding this particular day: “If the Slavs and Avars were listening to what our leaders said to one another, they’ve have a better idea of where we’re weak than they really do, and they’d do a better job of hurting us in those places.”
Dactylius stared at him. Pride leaked out of him like water from a squeezed sponge. Even with pride gone, though, integrity remained. “You’re right,” he said, a sentence he’d used twice lately but one many men would sooner have been tortured than utter. “That makes better sense than my notion.”
“It does only stand to reason,” George said, trying by his tone to imply that his friend would surely have seen the same thing had he but waited a moment longer before he spoke. He waved up and down the length of the wall. “See? We still don’t have as many stones up here as we did before the Slavs attacked the foundations with their tortoises, for instance. If they knew that, they might try again.”
“Good thing none of those little bat spirits was flying near you then,” Dactylius said. He and George both looked around anxiously to make sure that was so. George didn’t see any of the ugly little things, so he supposed it was.
The supposition cheered him less than it might have. “Sooner or later,” he said slowly, “those things are going to hear something important for no better reason than luck. If they come around often enough, they have to. And if the Slavs and Avars can figure out what to do with it--”
“We’re in trouble,” Dactylius finished for him.
“We’re in worse trouble,” George corrected him. “We’ve been in plain trouble for a while now.”
Dactylius looked out toward the enemy encampment. “Well, yes,” he said.
VIII
A barmaid sidled up to George, smiling a bright, professional smile. “More salted olives?” she asked. Partly, that was to help make him thirsty. Partly, it was pride that Paul’s tavern still had salted olives to sell. Whatever it was, George had already gone through one bowl of them, and a fresh mug of wine sat in front of him. He shook his head.
A kithara gently wept, accompanying the singer’s plaintive song of lost love. Across the table from George,
John made a face. “If I had to listen to this fellow all day long, I’d have left him, too,” the comic said.
“Practice for your act?” George asked: his friend wore the intent look he donned whenever he was about to perform.
But John shook his head. “Paul told me he’d throw me out on my ear if I ever badmouthed any of the other people he brought up onstage to make the customers forget how lousy his wine is.” His flexible features displayed great gobs of scorn. “As if anybody needs me to tell him what a bad mouth this singer has.” He wasn’t on the platform yet, but his quips drew blood even so.
Before long, the kithara player mercifully finished his last song. He got a tepid round of applause, half praise, half relief that he was done. Paul shouted, “And now-- here’s John!” The comic bounded up onto the little stage. The kithara player gave him a fanfare he looked as if he could have done without.
“I thought I was going to have good news for everybody tonight,” John said. “I thought the siege would be over by now. When I was out on the wall a couple of weeks ago, one of the Avars told me their women were getting pretty tired of how long this whole business is taking, and they said they wouldn’t sleep with their men unless they gave up and made peace with us Romans.”
“You’re stealing that from Aristophanes!” yelled a heckler with an education in the classics.
“The frogs are loud tonight,” observed John, who also had one. “Koax! Koaxl But that’s from the wrong play, and besides, anybody see the siege ending? Nope, the Avars are still here, all right, and what’s more, half their sheep are pregnant.”
Somebody threw an olive at him. He caught it out of the air and ate it. “It’s not a tough crowd if they don’t throw things from the swordsmith’s shop,” he remarked. Maybe that was supposed to be a joke. Maybe it was just how a tavern comic went about gauging his audience.
John said, “One thing this siege has done is make me glad I’m a Christian. I have enough trouble keeping one God happy. Try and keep all the gods the Slavs and Avars have happy and you end up as worn out as an old man trying to keep a young harem happy.” He pantomimed limp exhaustion--limp in every sense of the word.
After exactly the right pause, he recovered as if by magic and started counting on his fingers. “How many gods have we seen? Water god, thunder gods, fire god--I expect any minute now they’re going to sic the god of shrunken tunics on us.” Again, he let his body get his laughs for him, twisting and jerking as he tried to handle an imaginary bow in a tunic that was squeezing his arms like a serpent.
“And somebody,” he said, sitting down on his stool once more, “told the chief tax collector the Slavs have so many gods, they even have one who inflicts high interest on delinquent returns. From what I hear, the tax man jumped over the wall and converted day before yesterday.”
That got a loud laugh. Every tax collector George had ever known would have worshiped a god like that. He watched the men in the taverns looking around at one another. Half of them would have worshiped a god like that, too. Enough people owed George money that he might have been tempted into a brief bit of fiscal paganism himself.
“That same god went down into the Jews’ quarter,” John added. “They told him to come back once he had some experience.” No one was safe from John. That was a lot of what made him funny. It was also what made the people whose vanity he flicked hate him.
A barmaid carrying a wooden tray filled with empty mugs stumbled over somebody’s outstretched foot. She squealed and managed to stay upright, but several of the mugs flew off the tray. Being the cheapest of cheap crockery, they shattered.
“Pick up the pieces, Verina,” Paul said wearily when the noise stopped. “That’ll come out of your pay, you know.”
“What a kind and generous host we have,” John exclaimed--not sarcasm, as George first thought, but the lead-in to a joke, for the comic continued, “Puts me in mind of the two fellows who owned a slave in common. One day one of them came into their shop and found the other one whacking the slave with a stick. “What are you doing? he asked his partner. And the other fellow told him, ‘I’m beating my half.’ “
As Verina swept up the shards of the broken mugs, John said, “Like I told you, Paul’s a good fellow. Instead of taking it out of Verina s pay, he could have taken it out some other way.” He leered at the barmaid. The largely male crowd whooped. Verina looked ready to throw the pieces of crockery at him. Again, though, he’d only used the situation to help set up a story: “I remember the poor fool who was talking with a good-looking woman, and he said to her, ‘I wonder whether you or my wife tastes better.’” He leered again, and ran his tongue lewdly over his lips. “And the woman said, “Why don’t you ask my husband? He’s tasted us both.’”