Thessalonica

And then George approached Vucji Pastir. The Slavic demigod who shepherded wolves had a couple of his charges close by; he was talking to them in a language made up of yips and growls. His glowing green beard, George saw, had grown out to its full magnificence once more: the barbering his own sword had done proved as impermanent as the wounds the centaurs had taken.

Vucji Pastir knew he was coming. That was the impression he got, anyhow, from the demigod’s demeanor. Vucji Pastir urged his wolves out onto the trail as a man hunting boar would have urged on his hounds. The wolf-demons whined and lashed their tails.

They were, George realized joyfully, trying to tell their master they could find no sign of any impertinent Christian shoemaker. Vucji Pastir peered this way and that. Once, as the wolves had done before, the demigod looked right at George--and, evidently, saw nothing.

Or perhaps, as the wolves had also done, Vucji Pastir saw next to nothing. He frowned, scratched at the roots of his green hair--and then looked in another direction. George let out a silent sigh of relief. He didn’t think Perseus’ cap would get a harder test till he drew far closer to Thessalonica.

He was soon proved wrong. He hadn’t gone more than another couple of furlongs before he encountered Vucji Pastir again, this time with a different pack of wolf-demons. Again the Slavic demigod almost spotted him. Again the demigod apparently could not believe his own eyes.

As George hurried on toward the city, he wondered how Vucji Pastir had been behind him and then in front of him without, so far as an impertinent Christian shoemaker could tell, crossing the intervening space. Had the shepherd of the wolves been first in one place and then in the other? Or had he manifested himself in both at once? “Would he show up again and again, on the lookout for George, all the way down to the city wall?

Sure enough, George saw him and he did not see George several more times, there in the hill country. Toward the end of the day--and also a good deal of the way toward Thessalonica--the shepherd of the wolves looked so upset at having faded to spot George that the shoemaker was tempted to go up to him, tap him on the shoulder, and say, “Excuse me there, friend, but can I help you find somebody?”

He convinced himself, after some silent argument, that that was not a good idea, no matter how he would have enjoyed watching a demigod jump.

Despite Vucji Pastir, despite the wolf-demons, George made better time down toward Thessalonica than he’d expected, approaching the city before the sun had sunk in the west. That was not what he wanted. If he went up to a postern gate in the dead of night, he could slip off Perseus’ cap and claim no one had noticed him till he got there. If he tried that in the afternoon, the guards would see him materialize out of thin air. So would the Slavs, with results liable to be unpleasant.

Waiting for nightfall proved harder than he’d expected. The woods near Thessalonica were full of Slavs, some hunting, others taking axes to trees and bushes to fuel their fires. They had no notion he was there but, like the fellow back in Lete, kept doing their best to blunder into his invisible but not incorporeal form. If one of them did chance to trip over his foot, he did not think a simple, friendly “Excuse me” would set matters right.

Carefully, he worked his way around the wall till he neared the Litaean Gate. The men on the wall there would be likeliest to know him and to recognize his voice when he came up to the gate. So would the men at the postern gate by the main gateway. If he presented himself and they wouldn’t let him into the city… he didn’t want to think about that.

By the time he’d found a position from which he could keep an eye on the gate, twilight was falling. The Slavs built up the fires in their encampments and started cooking their supper. The odors of roasted meat and bubbling porridge made George’s stomach growl. He’d long since finished the bread and wine Gorgonius had given him.

Night quickly swallowed twilight. George waited for the campfires to the back to embers, and for most of the Slavs to shelter under blankets and furs and whatever else they used to ward off the cold of night. George wasn’t using anything to ward off the cold of night. His teeth chattered. If he froze to death out here in the woods, would his corpse stay invisible till a storm knocked the cap off his head?

“One more thing I don’t want to find out,” he muttered.

By what he judged to be the fourth hour of the night, the encampments were about as quiet as they ever got. He started picking his way between a couple of disorderly clumps of huts and tents. One hand held the cap tight on his head, the other was on his swordhilt. If by some mischance he did run into a Slav, he thought his best bet was to kill the fellow quickly, giving him no chance to cry out.

Instead of a Slav, he almost ran into the Avar wizard.