Thessalonica

“Who, indeed?” the bishop said. “Well, God willing, perhaps we shall yet be able to keep Thessalonica from being interred in a blood-filled, barbarous sarcophagus. If this be so, you, George, shall have played no small part in the preservation of the city, thanks to this information you have brought me. I am grateful, and no doubt God is grateful as well.” He started fiddling with his pen, a sure sign he’d given George all the time he’d intended.

George rose and, after bowing to Eusebius, made his way out of the prelate’s office. As he strode up its central aisle, he paid more attention to the basilica of St. Demetrius than he was in the habit of doing. Just being inside the church dedicated to the martial saint made him feel stronger and braver than he did anywhere else in the city: more like a real soldier than a militiaman.

After walking past the ciborium and then out of the basilica, he turned back toward it and sketched a salute of the same sort as he might have given to Rufus. If St. Demetrius could extend his influence over all of Thessalonica, if he could make everyone feel stronger than without his intercession . . . that might help, if the two Slavs George had encountered outside the city were, as he feared, the harbingers of more.

But, as George walked north and mostly west back toward his shop, his home, his family, and away from the shrine, the feeling faded, until he was only himself again, and oddly diminished on account of that. He forced his shoulders to straighten and his stride to lengthen. Even without the saint s beneficent influence close by, he remained himself.

“Blood-filled, barbarous sarcophagus,” he muttered under his breath, which made a woman walking in the other direction give him a strange look and move a little farther away from him. He didn’t blame her; he would have moved away from anyone mumbling about a blood-filled sarcophagus, too.

It s Eusebius’ fault, he thought. The bishop pulled out funereal images at any excuse or none. George glanced toward the walls of Thessalonica. Surely, they would not be the walls of a stone coffin to enclose the corpse of the city.

He shook his head. “He’s got me doing it,” he said, which made someone else give him a sidelong glance.

Irene rounded on him when he walked in the door. “I thought you weren’t coming back,” she said indignantly. “I thought Eusebius wouldn’t let you come back. You told him about the satyr, didn’t you?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “I knew you were going to tell him about the satyr. Why did you go and tell him about the satyr?”

“It was either that or tell him lies,” George answered. “Would you rather I told a holy man lies?”

“Of course I would,” Irene answered with the same certainty and lack of hesitation George used when imparting what was, with luck, wisdom to Theodore or, more rarely, Sophia. How could you be so foolish as to think otherwise? Her tone demanded.

George usually accepted such rebukes from her, because he knew he usually deserved them when he got them. Today, though, he balked. “I went to tell the bishop about the Slavs and about their demons,” he said. “It was only natural for him to ask how I knew what I knew. When he did ask me that, I didn’t see what choice I had but to tell him the truth, so he could know how seriously to take the news I was giving him.”

Irene muttered something under her breath. George thought it was “Men!” but felt disinclined to inquire more closely. As with theology, some of the more subtle points of marriage were better taken on faith than examined under the piercing lamp of reason. In any case, Irene had a good deal to say that wasn’t under her breath: “If he had taken you seriously, George, he might have felt he had to do something like ask questions about how you came to be talking with a satyr, not chasing it off with the sign of the cross.” The look in her eye said she still wondered the same thing; she was more pious than he. She went on, “Would you really have liked, say, a couple of years’ penance for doing that?”

“No, I wouldn’t have liked that,” he admitted. “But I didn’t think he would do anything to me, because the news was more important than how I got it.” Before she could interrupt, he held up a hand. “And I was right. Remember that--I was right.” He felt no small sense of pride; in an argument with Irene, he seldom got to say that.

As things turned out, it did him no good even when he did get to say it. “It was a foolish chance to take,” Irene retorted. “What you gained by doing it wasn’t worth the risk.”

“I thought it was,” George said, but that took the argument out of the realm of fact and back into opinion. He tried a slightly different tack: “It’s done now, and it worked out all right.” Irene thought that over, then grudgingly nodded. That meant the argument was over, too, which suited George fine.

III