Thessalonica

George stood right behind the militia officer, ready to do whatever he ordered. The shoemaker stared out toward the shed advancing on the Litaean Gate. Against the massive construction of timber and hides, against the iron-headed log inside, the grappling hook seemed small and unreliable.

But, although the Slavic archers kept swarms of arrows in the air, the shed halted outside archery range from the wall. A couple of Slavs came out of it and pointed toward the gate. No, George realized joyously, they weren’t pointing to the gate, but to the hook hanging over it. If it worried them, it stopped worrying George.

An Avar rode up to the shed on his armored horse and shouted to the Slavs, gesticulating angrily. George didn’t need to know any of the barbarians’ languages to understand what he was saying: something like, Why don’t you pick that thing up and get it moving again?

The Slavs’ answering gestures were every bit as emphatic as those of their overlord. The Avar looked toward the gate himself. He made a sign with his left hand. When nothing happened, he jerked his horse’s head around hard and rode off at a gallop.

“We’ve beaten them!” Sabbatius exclaimed.

“Not yet,” George said.

Paul agreed: “That fellow on the horse is heading back for friends. The business I’m in, I’ve seen that kind of thing more times than I can count. One chap loses a fight, he goes off, he comes back with some friends, and they have another go at it.”

“Aye, that’s how it’ll be here, I think,” Rufus said. “They haven’t gone to all this trouble to quit before they use their toys.”

They weren’t going to use them right away, though. Rumor raced round the circuit of the wall, confirming what George had hoped: all the rams the Slavs and Avars had built were now halted. “What are they waiting for?” Paul asked, as if his comrades could see into the mind of the khagan of the Avars.

“I think we’re going to find out,” George said, pointing to the Avar who now walked up toward the ram stalled in front of the Litaean Gate. Instead of wearing scalemail like all the other Avars George had seen, this one was fantastically decked out in furs and feathers and fringes.

“He’s an ugly customer, isn’t he?” Sabbatius said with a scornful curl of the hp. “If that’s what the Avars wear when they aren’t in armor, no wonder they’re in armor so much.”

“He’s one of the people who treat with their gods,”

George said, wondering what kind of gods or powers the Avars had. Unpleasant ones, probably. The shoemaker went on, “You can see it in how he carries himself. You can feel it, too, the way you can with the bishop.”

“I still say he’s ugly,” Sabbatius said. Since George was a long way from finding the Avar attractive, he let that go. Sabbatius had a gift for fixing on the least important aspect of almost any matter and clinging to it as if it were at the core of the question.

The Avar studied the grappling hook. George watched him rub his chin in consideration, as a physician might have done while evaluating a patient with a fever whose nature he did not immediately recognize. Whatever the fellow saw did not satisfy him. He walked past the shed holding the ram and up toward the wall.

“Shoot the son of a whore!” Rufus shouted as soon as he came within arrow range. The command, while eminently sensible, was also to some degree wasted, for the archers on the wall--more of them now than had been there a little while before--were already sending arrows at the Avar.

None bit. George could not see any of them swerving aside or disappearing or bursting into flames. They all simply missed. The odds of that happening by itself struck him as somewhere between astonishingly poor and astonishing. Sure enough, the Avar had powers of his own.

“Christ with me!” John shouted, drawing an arrow back to the ear. When he thought he needed divine help, he called for it. George wondered what God thought about that.

Maybe God decided He wasn’t going to answer John’s prayer, considering some of the other things John said and did. Maybe the Avar’s own gods protected him. And maybe his arrow would have missed with or without invocations of God and gods--John’s archery, like that of most of the militiamen, was not all it might have been.

Whatever the truth there, the Avar remained uninjured on ground that had enough shafts sticking out of it to resemble a porcupine’s prickly back. He drew his sword and waved it at the gate. Through the chain attached to the grappling hook, George sensed the power in that sword at war with the one the prayers of Bishop Eusebius and the people of Thessalonica had imbued into the hook.

“He’s strong,” Paul whispered, feeling that same clash of forces, and then, “What’s he doing now?”

The Avar in the outlandish costume raised the sword high and then stabbed it deep into the dirt. The wall shivered, as if from a small earthquake. The Avar capered--angrily, if George was any judge. He must have expected more.