“Why is that funny?” Sabbatius demanded. He hadn’t fallen asleep yet, as he usually did sooner than this.
Patiently, George explained: “Because the rich fool thinks that what happens over at the Litaean Gate couldn’t matter to his part of the city.”
“Oh.” After a bit, Sabbatius let out that braying laugh again.
By explaining, George had missed some of John’s routine. The comic was saying, “--and the fellow’s son promised to come back from the sally with a Slav’s head. ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ the fellow answered. ‘I don’t care if you come back without a head.’”
Somebody threw a roll at him. He caught it and ate it. “That’s one way to get something to eat around this place,” he said pointedly, and stared over toward Paul.
After a moment, the taverner had a barmaid bring over a plate of olives. John made as if to grab the girl instead of the plate, and stared out at his audience in mock indignation after she escaped. “How did she know what I wanted to eat?” he said. The barmaid threw a roll at him. He caught that one, too.
“We all had a hard time,” he said. “No two ways around that. What I want to know is, why didn’t the barbarians have the decency to besiege us in the summertime, when we wouldn’t have had to stay up on the wall in such miserable weather? I know one fellow” --he pointed to Sabbatius, who had started to snore by then-- “who stood out in the rain so long, he jumped in the river to get dry.”
“Christ!” Rufus said. “They were telling that joke in Italy when I was a lad.”
“They were telling that joke in Italy when Caesar was a lad,” George said, and couldn’t resist adding, “and he’s only a little younger than you.”
“God will punish you for that,” Rufus growled, convincingly angry, “and if He doesn’t, I will.” They laughed together, as old friends will. Why not? The siege was over.
George laughed at John’s jokes, too: at some more than others, as is the way of such things. What pleased him best about the comic’s routine was that John did not mention Menas even once. Maybe, however late in life, he’d learned the beginnings of discretion. Or maybe, and perhaps more likely, events of the past few weeks had given him so much new material that, for the time being, he didn’t need to bait the rich noble.
John ran a hand through his hair and said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I don’t have so much up here these days.” His hair was cut a little shorter than it had been before George got locked out of Thessalonica, but only a little. He went on, “I have to tell you, it’s Rufus’ fault.”
“Just because you have to tell it, that doesn’t make it so,” Rufus exclaimed.
John ignored him. “There at the end of the siege, he was throwing us up onto the wall with anybody who was still healthy, not just with men from our own company.” Because George had been out of the city, he didn’t know whether that was so or not. John continued, “Me, one night I was up there doing a shift with old bald Basil and with Victor the barber. Sometimes, when nothing much is happening, you’ll doze up there instead of tramping back and forth all the damn time.”
“You’d better not!” Another exclamation from Rufus, this one in an altogether different tone of voice.
John kept right on ignoring him, saying, “So that’s what I did, and Basil, too. I told Victor to wake me in an hour’s time, and then I’d do the same for him. I fell asleep, good and hard. So did Basil. Well, Victor got bored while we were snoring away. He got out his little razor and shaved my head for a joke. When he finally shook me, I thought it was colder than it should have been, and I rubbed my head and found out I didn’t have any hair left. “What a fool you are,’ I told Victor. You’ve gone and woke Baldy there instead of me.’”
“Here,” somebody called. “I’ll give you a miliaresion not to tell that one again.”
John leered at him. “And how much will you give me not to tell the next one on you?” He looked over the crowd and held out his bowl. “Or on you? Or on you there, with the ugly tunic. Yes, you. You know who I mean.”
He was grinning when he came back to the table, the bowl nicely heavy with money. “Not a bad take,” he said. “Not a bad take at all.” He started separating the coins with his usual quick dexterity, then looked up from his work. “Where are you going, George?”
“Home,” the shoemaker answered with a yawn. “I’m not like Sabbatius” --who was still snoring away-- “I don’t sleep in taverns.”
“And besides,” Dactylius put in, “you don’t want to wake up bald, the way John says he did.”
“Everybody thinks he can do my job,” John muttered darkly. Then he brightened. “Ha! Justus really did give me silver. Now you can go home, George.”
“I don’t take orders from you,” George said. “I take orders from Rufus.”
“Go home, George,” Rufus said. laughing, George did.
George said, “Dear, I think we really have to dicker with Leo now.”
Irene let out a sigh. “I wish we didn’t. Constantine’s not a bad lad, mind you, but I think we can do better for Sophia.”
“I don’t think Sophia wants better. She wants Constantine, and I think she’s going to get him no matter what we say about it.” George told how the two of them had been kissing when he came back into Thessalonica after the Slavs and Avars gave up the siege.
“And what did you do about that?” his wife asked.
“I coughed. They jumped apart,” George answered. “They were embarrassed. But they’ll do it again whenever they find the chance. You don’t take one kiss like that without wanting another. If they find the chance, they’ll do more than kiss.”
He expected Irene to be affronted at the way he’d impugned Sophia’s care about guarding her virtue. Instead his wife sighed and laughed a laugh half wry, half genuinely amused. “All right, we’d better talk with Leo,” she said.
“You pick the oddest times to be sensible,” George remarked. Irene, luckily for him, was already intent on the dickering that lay ahead, and so paid less attention to him than she might have done.
Rain pattered down outside. Some of it turned to ice when it struck the ground. George didn’t mind. He was under a roof that didn’t leak too badly, a couple of braziers spread heat, and woodcutters could go out into the forest again, even if they did go with armed guards to make sure no lurking Slavs picked them off. Some of the woodcutters wanted armed guards against the centaurs and satyrs. George knew that was foolish for any number of reasons, but said nothing. He was not a man to whom people listened on such matters.
“The one thing we have to do,” Irene said, her mind running ahead on its own road, “is make certain Sophia doesn’t do anything out of the way”--a euphemism George hadn’t heard before, but clear enough-- “till the dickering is done. When I tell her it would hurt the bargain we’re striking, she’ll understand that.” She looked sidelong at her husband. “My mother told me the same thing about you.”
“Did she?” George said. “You never mentioned that before.”
“A time for everything, and everything in its season,” Irene answered: not quite the language of the Holy Scriptures, but close. She grew brisk again. “Now--how do we approach Leo without making it too obvious we’re approaching him?”
“Why don’t you go buy a pot from him?” George said. “If you like, you can break one over my head, so the story will get round that we need a new one.”
“I usually get them from old grouchy Antonius, but that will do, I think.” Irene gave him a kiss for coming up with a good idea. Musingly, she went on, “I don’t think I have to break one on you. Maybe I don’t even want people to think I did that. I’m not Claudia, after all.”