Thessalonica

They both laughed, easy and happy with each other. Theodore and Sophia looked at them not quite as if they’d suddenly sprouted second heads, but certainly as if they were peculiar. Maybe they were. George thought about Dactylius and Claudia. He would have been astonished if they knew this camaraderie. But then, a lot of things about that marriage astonished him.

“Do you know,” Irene observed, “I think Dactylius and Claudia would have been happier together if one of her babies had lived.”

“You’re right--he’s said as much.” George let it go at that. Had his wife been watching Theodore and Sophia watching them, too? If she had, her thoughts had gone from there in exactly the same direction as had his. Coincidence? George didn’t believe it. It had happened too many times. Whatever it was, he liked it.

George and Sabbatius had the dawn-to-midmorning shift the next day. As was his habit, George reached the stretch of wall near the Litaean Gate a quarter-hour or so early. That gave him the chance to shoot the breeze with Rufus and Paul, who’d been up there to watch the Slavs and Avars through the late hours of the night, and to see for himself what the besiegers might be up to.

He also saw something new: one of the grappling hooks Bishop Eusebius and the congregation had blessed in the basilica of St. Demetrius. Attached to a good length of chain, it lay on the walkway above the gate. Rufus said, “They’ll try and break in where it’s easiest, same as we would. They won’t try knocking down stones if knocking down timbers will do the job for them.”

“That makes sense,” George agreed. He peered out toward the encampments of the Slavs and Avars. A light mist kept him from telling what they were doing. He turned his head back toward the east. Here came the sun, rising red through the ground fog. Before long, it would bum the fog away. George wondered whether he really wanted to see the full range of the barbarians’ armaments after all.

Paul yawned. “I’m for bed,” he said. Footsteps sounded on the stairs leading up to the wall. “And here comes Sabbatius. Since I’m not leaving us shorthanded--” The taverner started for the stairway.

“Wait,” Rufus said. He spoke rough army-Latin, which Paul, who used Greek by choice, didn’t follow at once. Rufus ran after him and grabbed him. “Wait, curse you!” he said, shouting now. He still spoke Latin. “Don’t you hear? They’re moving out there.”

They were, too, in a way they hadn’t done since the earliest days of the siege. Shouts and clankings and the sounds of heavy things being dragged along the ground came out of the thinning mist. All at once, George understood why Rufus seemed to have forgotten his Greek: Latin was the language he’d used when he was a soldier, and he thought he was about to be a soldier again.

The mist thinned a little more, and the people and things moving through it came closer to the city. As they did so, cries of alarm and horn calls rang out up and down the wall. This would not be another quiet day. Too bad, George thought; he’d grown fond of quiet days.

“Do you think they’re going to attack?” Sabbatius asked, staring out at the battering ram moving slowly toward the gate, and at the swarms of Slavic archers who ran along beside and in front of it. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than an arrow hummed past his head and shattered off the stone behind him.

Rufus clapped a hand to his forehead. “No, fool, I think they’ve come to get drunk with us and dance the kordax.” He kicked his legs high in a couple of steps from the obscene dance. Then, apparently deciding sarcasm was wasted on Sabbatius, he pointed to the grappling hook. “Let’s throw that over the side and show the sons of a thousand fathers they aren’t going to have everything their own way.”

“What if they try to run up ladders, too?” George asked.

“You sound like Dactylius,” Rufus said. “With the horns screaming like that, we’ll have more men on the walls soon enough. First things first.”

Since that was good advice-^-advice he’d given a good many times himself--George took it. He trotted with his fellow militiamen to the grappling hook. As soon as he grabbed the chain, he knew the prayers in the church of St. Demetrius had been effective. He felt strong and brave and able to overcome anything, as a man touched by the power of the military saint should have felt.

Rufus himself handled the hook. He said, “We’ll show it to ‘em, let ‘em know we have it ready and waiting.” He looked tough and confident, too. “If they come on anyhow, I’ll hook the shed like I was fishing for bream, and then we all pull hard as we can, and shout for help, too. God willing, we lift the shed up and twist it so the ugly lugs under it get what they deserve. Everybody ready?”

When no one said no, he tossed the grappling hook over onto the outer surface of the wall. The iron rang off the gray stone.