Thessalonica

“We have strong walls, we have soldiers, we have priests, we have faith in God,” George answered. “If all those aren’t enough, what will be?”

Sophia nodded, reassured. Irene’s eyes met George’s. Neither of them said anything. He knew what his wife was thinking: that all the things he’d named might not be enough. And it was true. Not long before Sophia was born, Sirmium, a city perhaps as great as Thessalonica, had fallen to the Slavs and Avars. Life in the Roman Empire was hard these days, and no one could say it might not get harder.

After supper, Irene and Sophia washed the dishes in a basin of water. By the time they were done, full darkness had fallen. Against its almost palpable presence, the flames from the lamps and the flickering light they cast seemed tiny and weak, the next thing to lost. George thought of the Slavs and Avars moving down toward the Aegean, and of Thessalonica, a Christian light in a sea of pagan darkness.

He went to the window and looked out. Most of Thessalonica was dark now, with a glow of candles and of holiness coming from the churches, more lights up on the walls, and here and there one moving through the streets as prominent people undertook to travel through the night. Footpads traveled through the night, too, but did not advertise their presence.

“Close the shutters, George,” his wife said, yawning. “Let’s go to bed.” Few people--mostly the rich, who could afford the lamps and candles they needed to turn night into day--stayed up long past sunset. Nor was darkness the only reason for that. When you rose with the sun and worked hard all day, you were ready to go to bed by the time night came.

The room to the left of the hall as you walked up it had been shared by Sophia and Theodore. These days, since they’d come to puberty, it had a wooden partition down the middle that turned it into two cubicles. George kept telling himself--and anyone who would listen--he would enlarge the doorway one day soon. He’d been saying it for so long, he didn’t believe it himself anymore.

He used a lamp from the kitchen to light one that rested on a stool by the bed in his own bedchamber, then, in orderly fashion, carried the first one back to where it belonged, blew it out, and used what glow came through the doorway from the second to guide him up the hall. By the time he returned, Irene was already in bed. He used the earthenware chamber pot, took off his shoes, undid his belt and took it off, and got in himself, still wearing the long tunic he’d had on all day. The straw of the mattress rustling under him, he leaned up on one elbow and blew out the lamp on the stool. The bedroom plunged into darkness.

Despite that darkness, Irene did not want to go to sleep at once. “A satyr,” she said in a low voice, one that, with luck, the children would not overhear. “I know of them, of course--everyone knows of them--but I never heard of anybody meeting one before, not even in the stories my old grandmother told me when I was little.”

“Neither did I,” George said, “not around a city that’s been Christian as long as Thessalonica. But up in the north it’s all helter-skelter; things are bubbling like porridge in a pot over a hot fire. The Roman soldiers and the Avars and Slavs keep going back and forth and round and round, but every year, in spite of what the soldiers do, there are more pagan Slavs settling on land that ought to be Roman.”

“I know,” Irene answered. “From what I hear in the marketplace, the Roman generals spend more time quarreling among themselves than they do fighting the enemy.”

“I’ve heard the same thing,” George said. “It worries me.” Irene caught her breath at that. Her husband was a man who worried a good deal, but hardly ever admitted it out loud. He went on, “And when the Slavs settle on land that ought to be Roman, their gods and demons settle on land that ought to be Christian.”

“That wolf--what it did to the priest. . .” On top of a wool blanket she had woven herself, she shuddered.

“Satyrs, now, and the other creatures from the old days,” George said musingly, “people believe in them, yes, but not the way they used to, so no wonder the true faith of Christ is stronger than they are. But the Slavs, they believe in their powers the same way we believe in the power of the Lord. That makes the wolf--and whatever other things they have like him--dangerous to us Christians.”

“Do you think the Slavs will come down as far as Thessalonica?” Irene asked.

“Farther west, bands of them have pushed deeper into Greece than we are,” he replied: Irene was not the sort of woman to be fobbed off with vague reassurances, especially when those were likely to be false. “So yes, they could come to Thessalonica. Taking the city is another question. God surely guards us here.”

“Yes, surely,” Irene agreed, but less confidently than he would have expected from her. She was worried, too, then.