Thessalonica

“What?” The prefect had succeeded in startling Eusebius. Like George, the bishop must have figured out that much of what Victor said wasn’t worth listening to. Eusebius did recover quickly. “Yes, of course. I shall pray for your safe journey, your success, and your eventual safe return.” Did he place a little extra stress on that eventual? George wasn’t sure.

The ceremony broke up after that. Some people went up onto the gray stone walls of Thessalonica to keep an eye on the departing city garrison for as long as they could. George would have reckoned that an insult to the militia if he hadn’t noticed that a fair number of those wistful spectators were militiamen. He wondered if he ought to go up himself. The militia would be keeping watch for the city now.

In the end, he decided not to bother. He expected he’d have plenty of chances to do actual patrolling; why bother with rehearsals, in that case? On the way back to his shop, he passed under the triumphal arch of the Emperor Galerius, celebrating his victory over the Persians. Galerius was three hundred years dead, more or less. The Persians were still very much around; Maurice had finally won a long war against them five years before.

George looked at the arch. Galerius, arrogant in stone, stared back at him. “It does make you wonder what the point of all that fighting was,” George murmured. Galerius didn’t answer.

“Hello, Father,” Theodore said when George came through the front door. “How does it feel to be a leading defender of the city?”

“Strange,” the shoemaker answered. “How does it feel to you that I’m a leading defender of the city?”

His son grinned at him. “Is there any way I can get out of town, like the prefect is doing?”

“Children have no respect for their elders these days,” George said. “If I’d told my father something like that--”

He paused. He had told his father things like that, and a good many times, too. Most of the time, the old man had thrown back his head and laughed like a loon.

“You started to say something?” asked Theodore, who was, if you resisted the temptation to strangle him, a fairly good specimen.

“Maybe I did,” George said. “But what’s the use? You wouldn’t listen, anyway.” In a different tone of voice, that would have been wounding. But George sounded somewhere between resigned and amused. Theodore grinned again and went back to the boot he’d been mending.

The shoemaker went back to work, too. Those fancy tooled boots wouldn’t get done by themselves, and he’d never heard of a spirit or fairy that would make shoes for you while you lay in bed.

He went back to the boots, tapping the awl one careful stroke at a time with his light hammer. He had to bend close to the last to see what he was doing. A day spent at uninterrupted fine work like that left him with a pounding headache. One of these years before too long, if God let him live, his sight would lengthen, and then the fine work would be beyond his power. Then Theodore would have to take over the lead in the shop, and George would do whatever his sight let him do, and would probably take a hand in training up his grandsons in the trade.

When the sun went down and shadows filled the shop, the family ended their work and cleaned up. “I wish we had a slave,” Sophia said. “That would make life a lot easier.”

“Your mother and I have talked about buying one, now and again,” George said, setting the tools he’d used back onto the pegs he’d set in the wall to hold them. Each tool had its own set of pegs, on which it hung neatly.

“Have you really?” Sophia sounded surprised. “You’ve never done it when I was around.”

“Could we afford to buy a slave?” Theodore asked.

“Probably,” George said. Irene nodded. Now both their children looked surprised. George went on, “I don’t expect we’ll get one any time soon, though.” His wife nodded.

“Why not, if we can afford one?” Sophia said. “It would save us a lot of work, and besides--” She paused, uncertain how to go on. At last, she said, “If you’ve got a slave, if you don’t have to do all your own work, that means you’re better off than a lot of the people around you.”

Before George could answer, Irene spoke with great firmness: “I can’t think of a worse reason to buy a slave than social climbing.”

“That’s right,” George said, knowing he couldn’t have put it so well himself. Sophia and Theodore let out simultaneous, identical disbelieving snorts. They were at an age where social climbing mattered intensely. George remembered that. He’d got over it. He expected they would, too.

“Besides,” Irene said, “the work wouldn’t disappear as if a priest had exorcised it. The slave might do the housework so we didn’t have to, but we’d have to make more shoes and fix more shoes and sell more shoes to buy the food and clothes and medicines and whatnot we’d need to give the slave.”

“That’s right,” George said again. “It’s not what you pay to buy a slave that counts. It’s the upkeep. We could afford to buy one, but I don’t know how long we could afford to have him here.”