Thessalonica

Menas’ gaze looked burning enough to start a fire by itself. “Think yourself above me, do you? Think you’re too good for me, eh?” People were staring at him and George. He went on, “Don’t want your hands to touch my filthy money, is that it?” The diatribe, George noticed, did not keep him from lighting the candle he clutched from the lamp’s flame.

George said, “I haven’t taken money from anyone else, either.”

“Likely tell,” Menas said. “Well, you can vaunt and preen and strut now, but the day will come when you’ll wish you hadn’t.” Off he went, the hammer stuffed into his belt so he could shield from the wind with his hand the fire he’d got.

Looking after him, George let out a long sigh. “I could save his life, and he’d curse me for doing it.”

“A man like that, he means trouble,” Dactylius said, as a good many others had before him.

“Really? I never would have noticed,” George said. The hurt look in Dactylius’ large brown eyes made him feel as if he’d kicked a puppy. Sighing again, he said, “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault I’ve fallen foul of him. As far as I can see, it’s not my fault, either, but it takes only one to start a quarrel.”

When they got to the jeweler’s house and shop, Dactylius ran inside. He came back with a lamp, pursued by Claudia’s raucous questions. Ignoring those, he started the lamp at the one George was carrying. Once the flame caught, he carried it inside. Claudia, for a wonder, fell silent.

George carried Benjamin’s lamp into his own workshop. His wife and children were all wearing two or three tunics, with woolen mantles or blankets draped over their shoulders. Instead of falling silent as Claudia had done, they all started talking at once. George had to try several times before he could tell them the whole story.

“That Jew came in handy,” Theodore said, speaking of Benjamin as he might have of an awl or a punch.

“Twice now, magic from outside the city hasn’t bitten on the Jews when it hit everyone else,” George observed. “I wonder if God is trying to tell us something.”

“Are you going to stop eating pork and have them do” --Theodore glanced at his mother and sister and chose his words carefully-- “what they do to a man?”

The mere thought of being circumcised made George wince and want to cover himself with his hands. “Not likely,” he said, to his son’s evident relief. He went on, “But I don’t think I’m going to sneer at them the way I sometimes have, either.”

“Never mind the Jews now, for heaven’s sake,” Irene said with brisk feminine pragmatism. “Let’s get the braziers lighted and put a little heat back into this place. And while we’re at it, let’s thank God for not letting the Slavs and Avars freeze us out of our homes, no matter how He chose to do that.”

“Amen,” George said with no hesitation at all.

“If you were the khagan of the Avars,” Paul said in musing tones, “and your wizards kept promising that you’d be able to get into Thessalonica and then not delivering, what would you do?”

“I wouldn’t be very happy,” George admitted, looking out from the wall toward the camp of the Slavs and Avars. “But then, I don’t even know whether the khagan is here right now. There’s a lot of fighting south of the Danube these days.”

“That’s not the point,” the taverner said. “You don’t have anybody who works for you, do you? Besides your family, I mean?--that’s different. If you have somebody who’s not doing the job you pay him to do, you fling him out the door and you get somebody else.”

“I don’t think the khagan would fling his wizards out the door,” George said. “He might see how well they do without their heads, though--barbarian princes are supposed to do things like that.” He paused to think for a moment. “Been a few Roman Emperors like that, too, haven’t there?”

“So they say.” Paul’s shrug expressed the limits of both his interest and his knowledge of the subject. “But he’ll do something new, because what he’s been trying hasn’t worked.”

Such conversations went on every hour of every day up on the wall, and in the taverns, and throughout Thessalonica--being besieged, the people of the city, and most of all the militiamen defending it, spent a lot of ingenuity wondering and arguing about what the besiegers would try next. Among so many speculations, some, by the nature of things, had to be correct.

George understood that--by his own nature, he understood it better than most (and he’d been right himself, once or twice). Understanding didn’t keep him from boasting afterwards when, less than an hour after he said, “Well, they’ve tried magic, and that hasn’t worked, and they’ve tried rams, and those haven’t worked, and they’ve tried tortoises, and those haven’t worked, either, so they’ll likely get around to using the catapults they made when they started the siege,” the Slavs and Avars did exactly as he’d foretold.