Thessalonica

At last, when he was wondering whether he ought to grab for the bow, they did approach him. Both of them held right hands up, palms out. Either they meant peace or they were trying to lull him into thinking so.

One of them took out bread of his own, a lumpy looking, dark brown loaf nowhere near so fine as the one Irene had given George. The Slav tore off a chunk and handed it to the shoemaker. In return, George offered him some of his own loaf. The Slav took a bite and looked pleased.

George held out the little flask of olive oil. The Slav took it, sniffed, made a face, and passed the flask to his comrade. That fellow also looked disgusted. The two of them spoke emphatically in their own language. George didn’t understand a word of it, but odds were it meant something like, How can you stand to eat that stuff?

As far as he was concerned, bread by itself was boring. That went double for what the Slav had given him: it was dense and chewy and, he guessed, made from a mix of barley and wheat. It would, no doubt, keep a man alive for a long time, although after a while he might not want to go on living on such rations.

Then the Slav with the dark hair took out a flask of his own. It proved to hold not olive oil but honey. With honey, the bread definitely became more palatable. George shared out his cheese. The Slavs approved of that. They gave him some sun-dried pears and plums in return.

He untied the rawhide cord around the neck of the wineskin and handed the skin to the blue-eyed Slav. The fellow swigged, his larynx working. He passed the skin to his darker friend, who also drank. Courteously, though, he made sure he did not empty the skin before returning it to George.

After everyone had finished eating, the Slavs tried talking with him some more. The effort was vigorous but useless. They spoke their own guttural language and fragments of another that sounded even stranger--maybe it was the Avars’ tongue. Whatever it was, it made no sense to George. He gave them Latin and Greek, the only two languages he knew. As he’d already concluded, they didn’t understand those.

By signs, he showed them what he’d been doing out in the woods. They laughed at his impression of a hopping rabbit. He laughed, too, as he bounded about, but he was careful not to let them get between him and his bow. When he was done bounding, he did his best with gestures and questioning looks to ask why they were here.

They looked at each other and talked for a couple of minutes in their own incomprehensible language before trying to reply. When they did, their gestures were anything but clear. Maybe that was because they weren’t very good at sign language. On the other hand, maybe it was because they didn’t want him to understand why they had suddenly appeared only a few miles outside of Thessalonica.

Maybe they were hunting for animals; from the way they leapt and crept and shaded their eyes with their hands, that was possible. And maybe they were hunting for Thessalonica itself; that was as plausible an interpretation. They didn’t ask George where it was. Had they done so, he might have told them; it wasn’t as if a city that size was hard to find.

Face to face with two veritable Slavs, he decided to learn what he could from them, even if they had not a word in common. Pointing to them to get their attention, he threw back his head and imitated as best he could the howls he had heard from the woods, the howls he believed to have come from the throats of the Slavic wolf-demons the satyr had described.

He hadn’t known he owned such a gift for mimicry. The wailing cry that burst from his throat was almost as frightening as those he had heard on the walls of Thessalonica. He did not judge that merely by his own reaction to the noise he made. The woods around him grew suddenly still, as they might have at a real wolf s-- or a real wolf-demon’s--howl.

And the two Slavs, after starting when he first began that cry, nodded and grinned to show they recognized it and to show they understood he meant a spirit of their folk rather than a mere fleshly beast of prey. They spoke several incomprehensible sentences. Once more, though he followed not a single word, he assigned meaning to the whole: something like, Yes, those are ours. Pretty impressive, aren’t they?

He wished he really could have talked with the barbarians, so he might have learned more and brought it back to Thessalonica. That he was thinking of getting back to his home city again was a sign he didn’t believe the Slavs intended to try murdering him. But he still stayed wary enough to remember exactly where his bow was.