Thessalonica

And there in the sunshine stood the Avar priest. Now that George got a good look at him, he saw his bizarre costume was soaked and, with any luck at all, ruined. The wizard stared toward the wall and shook a fist at-- no, not at George; it had to be at Father Luke. And the priest nodded back toward the Avar, recognizing the other’s skill and potence.

“You ought to blast him with an anathema,” Dactylius said.

“I do not think he fears my anathemas,” Father Luke said. “I do not think he fears any Christian power. Only greater acquaintance with us will teach him the true strength of the Lord.”

That was as temperate an answer as George could have looked for from any priest. But the Avars and the Romans had struggled against each other now for most of a decade. The war remained unwon on either side, which, he presumed, also meant neither God nor the gods and spirits of the Slavs and Avars had prevailed.

He might have been able to say something to that effect to Father Luke, as he could not have to Bishop Eusebius. But when he opened his mouth to speak, his teeth chattered so loudly, he could not. He and the rest of the militiamen on the wall had stood in the driving rain longer than the Avar wizard had done, and were more drenched than he. The breeze was chilly, too.

Father Luke took off his cloak, which was thick even if soaked, and wrapped it around Georges shoulders. “That’s all right, Your Reverence,” the shoemaker said, trying to shrug it off. “Here, you keep it.”

“I may not be the Son of God, to give up my life for mankind, but I should be a poor sort of priest indeed if I did not give up my cloak for a friend,” Father Luke said.

Just then, Dactylius sneezed. That gave George the excuse he needed to shed the cloak: he passed it to Dactylius. The jeweler tried to protest, too, but kept on sneezing. That let George and Father Luke ignore him, and left them both warm in spirit if less so in body.

John and Sabbatius came up onto the wall to replace George and Dactylius. So far as George knew, nobody had told Sabbatius that John was in the habit of making jokes about him. One of these days, Sabbatius would find out, and there would be trouble. Not wishing either to borrow or to cause the latter, George kept his mouth shut and headed for home.

When the shoemaker got to his shop, Irene said, “Wasn’t that a dreadful storm a couple of hours ago? I see you’re still all wet, poor thing, and the roof has a new leak in it, too. I put a bowl down under it to catch the drips.”

“It was quite a storm,” George agreed. If it had seemed nothing more than that to his wife, he was as well pleased.

“Storm like that, I’m glad the Slavs didn’t attack,” Theodore said. “They could have caused all sorts of trouble, and you might not have noticed them in the rain till too late.”

“That’s true, too,” George said, and sneezed as vigorously as Dactylius had up on the wall.

“Come upstairs. Get out of that wet tunic.” Irene took charge of him with brisk efficiency. “Drink some warm wine with honey in it. That will make you feel better.”

“If I don’t feel better, I won’t notice after I drink enough of it,” George said.

Ignoring that, Irene maneuvered him much as Rufus might have done up on the wall. And, sure enough, in dry clothes and with hot wine in him, he did think the world a kindlier place than he had when he was all wet and shivery. He stretched the upper for a boot he was working on over the last and smoothed the leather with a round file.

“That’s good work, Father,” Theodore said, looking over his shoulder.

He paid more attention to it himself than he had been doing. “It is, isn’t it?” he said, surprised at how surprised he sounded. Looking down at his hands, he added, “They know what they’re up to, anyhow. Now if I could only leave them behind to work while the rest of me goes upstairs to supper or off to the tavern, that would be pretty fine.”

Theodore snorted. “While you’re at it, why not wish for a bronze man, like the one the Poet says Hephaestus made to help him with his work?”

“Why not indeed?” George said mildly--too mildly to suit his son, who might have been hoping for an argument, as he often did these days. He went back to work himself.

George let his hands guide the file over the leather once more, since they’d proved they could tend to that by themselves. When Theodore had learned to read Greek, the teacher taught him Homer, from whose poems boys had been learning to read for more than a thousand years. Even now, in these Christian times, the Iliad and the Odyssey gave the old gods a shadowy life they would not have had without them.

Was that good or bad? Homer wrote so well that, while you were reading him, you couldn’t help believing in his gods and heroes--George remembered as much from his own days in school. No wonder some bishops would sooner have had students taught from the Holy Scriptures alone, thereby interring the memory of the pagan gods for good.