Thessalonica

“Of course they’re serious,” a newcomer said. “Have you ever seen anybody tell jokes while he was shooting a bow?”

“Hullo, John,” George said without looking up. Till you did it just now, no, I hadn’t seen anybody do that.”

“He did, didn’t he?” Dactylius said. “Is it time to change shifts already? I mean, would it be time? If I’m not there when I’m supposed to be, it will make Claudia very unhappy.”

“She’d be even more unhappy if the Slavs take the city,” Paul pointed out; the taverner had come up onto the wall with the comic. He shot at the Slavs. “Got one there, I think.”

“There are enough of them, I’ll say that,” Rufus said. “They haven’t brought the whole army forward like this since . . .” His brow, already wrinkled, furrowed still more as he thought. “Since that time they used those tortoises to try and undermine the walls.”

After George let fly with another arrow, he stayed upright longer than he had been doing. “I see more of them, getting ready to use those big shields they had then.”

“Let me have a look.” Rufus stood up beside him, ignoring the arrows humming by as if they were so many gnats. George pointed. The veteran let out a grunt. “Aye, that’s what they’re doing. Didn’t know whether they’d try the same stunt twice, but I always figured they might. And don’t the Scriptures talk about a dog coming back to its vomit?”

“That means coming back to a bad idea,” George said, loosing another shaft at the advancing Slavs. “For them, this is liable to be coming back to a good idea.” He shot again. The arrow ricocheted from one of the large, heavy shields. He cursed.

So did Rufus. “Aye, it’s liable to be,” he agreed. After he looked around at the piles of stones on the walkway, his curses put George’s to shame. “I’ve been screaming at everybody who might listen, but we still haven’t put back as many rocks as we dropped on the Slavs the last time they tried tortoises against us.” He raised his voice to a great bellow: “Water and fuel for the cauldrons!” In more conversational tones, he said to George, “We’ll never get stones up here quick enough to do much good. Dropping boiling water on the whoresons will still help, though.”

“It had better,” George said. The tortoise crews moved steadily forward. The shoemaker pointed to them. “They’ve learned from what went wrong the first time. Now they’ve got the shields up to make their shells right from the start.”

“Only way to do it,” Rufus said absently, and then, “I wish they were as stupid as those Goths and Franks and Lombards over in Italy. The German tribes didn’t know how to do anything except bash and slash, and they didn’t want to learn, either.”

Under George’s feet, the wall shivered. The first tortoise had reached it and, under cover of the iron-faced shields, the Slavs were using pry bars and hammers and chisels to try to pull stones out of the base and send the whole thing tumbling down. George set down his bow, picked up a stone, and dropped it down toward the attackers. It landed with a dull thud, not a clatter, telling him he’d missed.

Dactylius threw a stone down on the Slavs, too. He cheered when he heard a crash, but the barbarians kept chipping away at the wall, which meant the shields above them had turned the stone.

John said, “If this goes on much longer, it could get very boring.” After a moment, he added, “Running out of rocks up here could be boring, too.” Boring, as he used it, seemed to mean getting everyone on the wall killed.

Rufus lifted a stone. It was not one of the enormous boulders he’d picked up the first time the Slavs tried tortoises, but of more ordinary size and weight. Even so, it was enough to make him stagger. George decided God really had been helping him then. He also decided God wasn’t helping Rufus now. When the veteran dropped the stone, he missed the tortoise, as George had.

The vibration underfoot got worse as more and more

Slavic crews got to work at the base of the wall. “We aren’t going to have enough rocks to smash all of them,” Paul said. “I don’t know how else we’re going to stop them, either.” George had been thinking the same thing. He’d kept quiet, hoping it wouldn’t be true if he didn’t say it. Now Paul had said it. It was true.

Rufus’ face was haggard, for once showing every one of his years. “We’re in trouble,” he said, each word dragged from him.

“A sally?” George asked, as he had before.