Thessalonica

Without another word, Crotus squatted down on all fours (or rather, on four out of six). George scrambled onto the centaur’s back. Crotus shouted for Elatus; the other male stood nearby. Elatus squatted, too. Father Luke hurried over and mounted his unorthodox--in both the literal and theological senses of the word-- steed.

“Thessalonica!” Crotus shouted in a huge voice. “Thessalonica! The foe awaiteth. Thessalonica!”

In a moment, the whole great band of centaurs had taken up the cry, baying like so many wolves: “Thessalonica!” Down the hillside they poured, a drunken mob of supernatural creatures. Beneath Georges fundament, Crotus’ musdes heaved and rippled. The shoemaker clung to the centaur’s human torso with one hand and to Perseus’ cap with the other. If he needed to draw his sword and fight he wouldn’t be able to hold on then. He hoped--how he hoped!--it wouldn’t matter.

He looked around to see where in the band Father Luke was. Riding behind Elatus’ torso as George rode behind Crotus’, the priest made his centaur look as if it boasted two upthrust human parts rather than the standard one. George and Crotus no doubt made the same absurd picture.

“Thessalonica!” the centaurs shouted, urging one another on and, George suspected, reminding themselves where they were going.

“Hurry!” Father Luke called to them. “In the name of whatever you hold dear, hurry! The foe ariseth in his might.” He imitated the old-fashioned Greek they spoke, which made them heed him almost as if he were one of their own. George, who could not have done the same, wished he had hands free with which to applaud.

Now, despite being in among the band of centaurs, he too could feel the gathering of power to the south. He’d known that sort of feeling in the churches of Thessalonica, but the power rising here had nothing to do with the God he worshiped. Whether it was--or could be, if fully manifested--more powerful than his God, he did not know. That frightened him worse than anything. “On the way home,” he murmured, trying to reassure himself. But the way home was, as it had been, blocked by the Slavs and Avars and by the powers that had already accompanied them into this part of the world.

A shout from the front-runners among the centaurs said they’d spotted one of those powers. Peering forward over Crotus’ shoulder, George spied a Slavic wolf-demon. The creature’s howl, this once, brought no terror with it; had it burst from a human throat, it would have been an exclamation of surprise and dismay.

The wolf turned and tried to flee, as if to take news of what it had just seen back to those with more power than it possessed. Since it was heading down toward Thessalonica, the drunken centaurs ran after it. In short order, they ran over it: the whole band, or at least as many of them as its battered body happened to pass beneath. George felt it go under Crotus’ trampling, pounding hooves. With four legs on which to stand, the centaur had no trouble keeping its balance and delivering a good stomping at the same time-Once the band had passed over the wolf, George turned and looked back over his shoulder at it. It didn’t look as if it had ever been alive; far from seeming immortal, it didn’t look as if it would ever be alive again, either. He might have been wrong: things from beyond the hills he knew were often next to impossible to slay. Not many of them, though, endured what the wolf-demon had just suffered.

Before long, the centaurs came upon more wolves. A few peeled off from the main band to chase them. The wolf-demons, more used to chasing centaurs, ran away from their numbers and their ferocity, baying as they went. But a lot of the centaurs went on yelling “Thessalonica!” at the top of their lungs. For whatever reason they did it, it helped keep most of them together.

George kept looking for Vucji Pastir. The shepherd of the wolves would be a more dangerous foe than the creatures he herded. But of Vucji Pastir there was no sign. George remembered the swordwork he had done while invisible. He still did not think he had slain the demigod; to think that, on the basis of what little he knew, would have made him both more stupid and more heroic than he actually was.

Disturbed by the centaurs’ thundering hooves and by their cries, bats rose in chittering swarms. Remembering that bats had spied on Thessalonica, George shouted a warning. The centaurs were already flinging volleys of stones and branches at the creatures. They brought down a good many, and trampled them as they had trampled that first wolf. Again, George wondered if any creature, supernatural or not, could survive such treatment.

“Close now,” Father Luke called through the din the centaurs made. “When will the Slavs and Avars notice what’s bearing down on them?”