Thessalonica

“From Claudia, of all people,” Irene answered. Before George could say anything worried, she went on, “It didn’t have anything to do with this match, either. I forget whether it was last year or the year before--last year, I guess, because it was after the plague--and Claudia was complaining about people who pretended they were finer than they really were, and she mentioned Helen and her dowry, and her sister-in-law, too. I thought it was in poor taste myself, poor Helen being dead and all, but I didn’t forget it, either. And when I turned out to need it, there it was.”

“Your mother,” George told Theodore, not joking at all, “never forgets anything.”

“Me?” Irene said. “Me? Who was it, about the time we got married, who could tell which team had won the chariot races at every running for the past fifty years before then, and which rider had the most wins for each team, and how this one bald driver hadn’t missed a running for fifteen years--”

George maintained a dignified silence. That was how he thought of it, at any rate. Its chief effect was making his wife and both his children laugh at him. Seeing that, he tried the opposite course: “That bald fellow had a brother who was a driver, too, and their father trained their horses, same as he’d been doing for twenty-three years before that, and …”

Such arcana proved every bit as risible as dignified silence. George gave up and started repairing a sandal. Sophia, having swung from sad to furious to eager and hopeful in the course of a couple of minutes, came over and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you, Papa,” she said.

“For what?” George asked, confused now.

“For a bald charioteer,” his daughter answered, which confused him worse than ever. But he’d just started talking about marrying her off, and she didn’t hate him for it. Confused or not, he didn’t suppose he was doing too badly there.

“Magic,” Rufus said decisively, peering out toward the encampment of the Slavs and Avars.

“I think you’re right.” George nodded. “That’s what they’ll hit us with next.” He sniffed. The wind was out of the west, and swept the savory odors of roasting mutton and beef from the enemy’s camp into the city. Sighing, he said, “They’re still eating well. I wish we were.”

“We’ve got enough to get us through,” Rufus answered, which lifted George’s spirits: if anyone knew how Thessalonica stood for food, the veteran was the man.

He went on, “What surprises me is that the barbarians are keeping their army so well fed. They must have dragged in all the livestock for miles around, the bastards. Even after they go, the countryside’ll be bare as a sheared sheep for years.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” George said, an admission that bothered him: he was the sort of man who tried to think as far ahead as he could. “Meat will be expensive for a long time to come.”

“We can always eat old Avars,” Rufus said, “except I think they’d be tougher than your shoeleather.”

“Shoeleather!” George exclaimed. “If they’re slaughtering all the cattle and sheep, what will I use for shoeleather?”

“Don’t know that one, either,” Rufus said, if not cheerfully than with a good deal less concern than George had for the question. “What we’ve got to do is, we’ve got to get the siege over with so we can worry about things like shoeleather again.”

Things like deciding whether I want to see Sophia marry Constantine, George thought. But the veteran was right. “What sort of magic do you think they’ll throw at us?” he asked.

“The bishop and I have been talking about that,” Rufus answered. George had a hard time gauging his tone: was he proud of having become part of the city’s inner circle or scornful of the man with whom he was conferring? A bit of both, the shoemaker judged. Rufus continued, “Eusebius thinks we’re going to come up against it before too long, that they’re going to throw all the magic they have at us to try and break in. If they don’t make it, they’ll likely give up and go away.”

“That sounds sensible,” George said.

“It may be true anyway.” Rufus’ smile was crooked. “The bishop kept giving me all sorts of reasons out of the Holy Scriptures why he thought it was so. After a while, I started to doze off.”

“You don’t think he’s right?” the shoemaker asked.

“Oh, I think he’s right, but not for any of the reasons he was going on about,” Rufus said. “You look at what’s left for the Slavs and Avars to eat out there, you look at the really bad weather that’s bound to come, and you can’t see them besieging us forever. The only thing about the cold I don’t like is that it makes pestilences spread slower--but their magic for that sort of thing is pretty good anyhow. We’ve found out about that.”

“We’ve found out their magic for a lot of different things is pretty good,” George said. “I tried telling that to Eusebius, but--”