And then it was no longer a fight of arrows and stones. The onrushing centaurs were in among the Avars, wrenching the spears from their hands, wrenching riders off the backs of their horses, and throwing them to the ground. The Avars remained brave. They also retained the arrogance that made them believe they had the right to rule everything they could reach. When confronted by immortal madmen who also could and did kick like mules, none of that did them much good.
George slashed away with his sword. Every so often, edge or point would find a gap in an Avar’s scalemail. The barbarian would howl with pain and look around wildly to see who had wounded him. He would discover that he, like Polyphemus in the Odyssey, had apparently been hurt by Nobody.
Remembering that Father Luke lacked the option of invisibility, George looked around to see how the priest fared. He was glad to find he had a lot of trouble picking Father Luke’s human torso out from those of the centaurs in whose midst the holy man rode. He would have had more trouble still had Father Luke divested himself of his robes, but, while the priest’s piety was more flexible than that of Bishop Eusebius, George was certain it would not bend so far as that.
An Avar in a gilded helmet shouted something that sounded incendiary even if George couldn’t understand a word of it. Crotus struck the man with a powerful fist. The Avar’s iron armor warded him against the blow. George hit him, too: in the face, with the edge of his blade. Blood spurted. The Avar screamed. He clutched at himself. George wished he’d served Menas the same way.
Losing the officer’s steadying hand helped unsettle the Avars. So did their foes’ furious, unyielding attack. The nomads found themselves moving back instead of forward. That unsettled them more. Now men began to break away from the fight instead of rushing toward it.
The centaurs seemed oblivious to the way their foes fought. They fought hard, no matter what. Some of the regular soldiers who had left Thessalonica for the wars to the north and east owned warhorses that would strike out with their hooves at a rider’s command. George had thought that marvelous till he saw the centaurs in action. At close quarters, one of them, unarmored and unarmed except for what nature had provided, was far more than a match for Avars trained to horsemanship and war since childhood.
And the centaurs did not stay unarmed long. Many of them--those, George thought, rather less maddened by wine than some of the others--not only wrested spears and swords from the men they were fighting, they used them and weapons picked up from the ground with wicked effect.
George reveled in his own invisible deadliness. Whenever the melee brought Crotus close enough to an Avar, the shoemaker on the centaur’s back struck and struck hard. The nomads did not know why Crotus was a particularly dangerous enemy, but soon figured out the male was such, and did their best to stay away from it. In the press of battle, that best was too often not nearly good enough.
Quite suddenly, the press loosened. With a small shock, George saw that the centaurs had fought their way through the entire troop of Avars. Some of the nomads rode away from them, urging their horses to the best turn of speed they could. More were down on the ground behind Crotus, dead or wounded. More than a few riderless horses were mixed among the centaurs. Seeing the horses in that company, George thought they looked oddly incomplete, which only proved how used to centaurs he had grown over the past few days.
Only a few warriors--some stubborn Avars, some Slavs rushing up to try to plug the gap in the line their overlords’ overthrow had created--remained between the centaurs and… what? Though seeing it from an unfamiliar angle, George recognized the tent of the Avar priest or wizard, and the satellite tents of the Slavic sorcerers nearby. The sorcerers were not in their tents, but capered around an immense bonfire not far from them.
At first, George thought it was waves of heat that were beating against him from the bonfire. Then he realized that, large as it was, it wasn’t large enough for that. It wasn’t heat--or rather wasn’t heat exclusively--coming from the fire. It was sorcerous power.
“That way!” He leaned forward to shout in Crotus’ ear. He pointed toward the great blaze, forgetting he was as invisible to the centaur as to the Avars and to everyone else. But his words did what his outflung arm could not: “We have to get rid of those wizards before--” He didn’t know just what they would or could do, but, from what Father Luke had said… “I’ve already asked you once-- do you want their great gods fully in this world with you?”
That did the trick. Drunk as the centaur was, super-naturally wild with wine as it was, Crotus somehow kept some semblance of sense far down at the bottom of its mind. “Thither!” the male roared to the rest of the centaurs, and pointed toward the bonfire. Its arm, unlike George’s, was perfectly visible.
Had George got an order like “thither,” he would have spent the next half hour trying to figure out whether it meant this way or that way, regardless of any gestures accompanying it. He was sure the same held true for all his comrades in the militia, and for Thessalonica’s regular garrison as well. The centaurs, though, had no trouble with it.
Now that they had broken free of the Avar cavalry, they were in plain sight from the wall. Distantly, George heard the cries of astonishment that rang out from the militiamen there. He hoped none of those shouts had God’s name, or Christ’s, in them, or that, like arrows, such names had only a limited range. Otherwise, some of Thessalonica’s defenders were liable to rout the rest before the latter had done all they could do.
What would he have done, had he been up on the wall instead of up on Crotus’ back? What would his friends up there do, seeing a horde of centaurs? Sabbatius, now, Sabbatius would think he was drunk and seeing things that weren’t there. But the rest? What would they do? One answer that crossed George’s mind was, holler for Bishop Eusebius.
And what would Eusebius do when he saw centaurs? Being who and what he was, he would start praying them away. Since he was a holy man, his prayers would have more power behind them than those of ordinary militiamen. George murmured a small prayer of his own, to keep Eusebius off the wall as long as possible.
An arrow hummed past George’s head. The Slav who shot it had no idea he was riding Crotus. That mattered only a little. The arrow might have pierced him only accidentally, but would have caused every bit as much anguish as if aimed by a clever archer.
A thrown stone caught the Slav in the ribs. He dropped his bow and folded double, clutching at himself. Another Slav nearby threw down his spear and fled the field. That struck George as an eminently sensible thing to do. He might have done it himself, had he been in a position where it was practical, or even possible. Atop Crotus, he had no choice.
As if recalled from other business he had thought more urgent, the Avar priest suddenly seemed to spy the centaurs. Moving with obvious reluctance, he pulled several Slavic sorcerers away from their wild dance. He and they stared at the onrushing supernatural creatures hardly more than a bowshot away.
Crotus’ hooves came down in thick ooze. The male centaur had to yank each foot from the ground to go forward. Angry cries said other centaurs were similarly mired. The shouts from the walls of Thessalonica, loud before, suddenly seemed weak, distant. George glanced toward the city--and stared. All at once, it looked very faraway.
“We’re not in the hills we know.” he called to Crotus. They weren’t in hills at all, but rather in a muddy marsh. The Slavic wizards acted perfectly at home in the new environment. The Slavs were people of forests and marshlands. The Avar who led them had got them to make their foes try to fight on terrain unsuited for any kind of quick movement.