Thessalonica

Dactylius stared at him. Pride leaked out of him like water from a squeezed sponge. Even with pride gone, though, integrity remained. “You’re right,” he said, a sentence he’d used twice lately but one many men would sooner have been tortured than utter. “That makes better sense than my notion.”

“It does only stand to reason,” George said, trying by his tone to imply that his friend would surely have seen the same thing had he but waited a moment longer before he spoke. He waved up and down the length of the wall. “See? We still don’t have as many stones up here as we did before the Slavs attacked the foundations with their tortoises, for instance. If they knew that, they might try again.”

“Good thing none of those little bat spirits was flying near you then,” Dactylius said. He and George both looked around anxiously to make sure that was so. George didn’t see any of the ugly little things, so he supposed it was.

The supposition cheered him less than it might have. “Sooner or later,” he said slowly, “those things are going to hear something important for no better reason than luck. If they come around often enough, they have to. And if the Slavs and Avars can figure out what to do with it--”

“We’re in trouble,” Dactylius finished for him.

“We’re in worse trouble,” George corrected him. “We’ve been in plain trouble for a while now.”

Dactylius looked out toward the enemy encampment. “Well, yes,” he said.

VIII

A barmaid sidled up to George, smiling a bright, professional smile. “More salted olives?” she asked. Partly, that was to help make him thirsty. Partly, it was pride that Paul’s tavern still had salted olives to sell. Whatever it was, George had already gone through one bowl of them, and a fresh mug of wine sat in front of him. He shook his head.

A kithara gently wept, accompanying the singer’s plaintive song of lost love. Across the table from George,

John made a face. “If I had to listen to this fellow all day long, I’d have left him, too,” the comic said.

“Practice for your act?” George asked: his friend wore the intent look he donned whenever he was about to perform.

But John shook his head. “Paul told me he’d throw me out on my ear if I ever badmouthed any of the other people he brought up onstage to make the customers forget how lousy his wine is.” His flexible features displayed great gobs of scorn. “As if anybody needs me to tell him what a bad mouth this singer has.” He wasn’t on the platform yet, but his quips drew blood even so.

Before long, the kithara player mercifully finished his last song. He got a tepid round of applause, half praise, half relief that he was done. Paul shouted, “And now-- here’s John!” The comic bounded up onto the little stage. The kithara player gave him a fanfare he looked as if he could have done without.

“I thought I was going to have good news for everybody tonight,” John said. “I thought the siege would be over by now. When I was out on the wall a couple of weeks ago, one of the Avars told me their women were getting pretty tired of how long this whole business is taking, and they said they wouldn’t sleep with their men unless they gave up and made peace with us Romans.”

“You’re stealing that from Aristophanes!” yelled a heckler with an education in the classics.

“The frogs are loud tonight,” observed John, who also had one. “Koax! Koaxl But that’s from the wrong play, and besides, anybody see the siege ending? Nope, the Avars are still here, all right, and what’s more, half their sheep are pregnant.”

Somebody threw an olive at him. He caught it out of the air and ate it. “It’s not a tough crowd if they don’t throw things from the swordsmith’s shop,” he remarked. Maybe that was supposed to be a joke. Maybe it was just how a tavern comic went about gauging his audience.

John said, “One thing this siege has done is make me glad I’m a Christian. I have enough trouble keeping one God happy. Try and keep all the gods the Slavs and Avars have happy and you end up as worn out as an old man trying to keep a young harem happy.” He pantomimed limp exhaustion--limp in every sense of the word.

After exactly the right pause, he recovered as if by magic and started counting on his fingers. “How many gods have we seen? Water god, thunder gods, fire god--I expect any minute now they’re going to sic the god of shrunken tunics on us.” Again, he let his body get his laughs for him, twisting and jerking as he tried to handle an imaginary bow in a tunic that was squeezing his arms like a serpent.

“And somebody,” he said, sitting down on his stool once more, “told the chief tax collector the Slavs have so many gods, they even have one who inflicts high interest on delinquent returns. From what I hear, the tax man jumped over the wall and converted day before yesterday.”