Thessalonica

“He does, doesn’t he?” George said. “Well, I’m sick of the whole business, too, but I’m sticking with it. I suppose he will, too, worse luck for us.” He described his conceit of a moment before for his friend, then added, “You take me by myself and I’m not what you’d call dangerous, either. But think of me as one part of the Roman Empire and I look different.”

Dactylius studied him carefully. “No, you don’t.”

“You’re not making this easy,” George said, clucking. “Now if you think of the whole massed weight of the Empire--” As he spoke, he waited for Dactylius, who seemed in a whimsical mood this morning, to crack a joke about the weight of the Empire’s making the wall fall down. But, since he didn’t complete his sentence, Dactylius never got the chance. Instead, George pointed out toward the wizard. “Hello. He’s got company.”

The other Slavic wizards were coming out of their tents, too, and studying Thessalonica with the same intent look the first one had given the city. And here came the Avar priest or wizard in his costume of furs and leather and fringes. As always, George shivered when he saw him. The Avar carried a lot of spiritual force. Had he been born a Christian and a Roman rather than a barbarous pagan, he might well have become a bishop.

Pointing again, this time toward the Avar, George said, “Can you imagine him in Eusebius’ vestments?”

Dactylius gaped, then made a noise half giggle, half squeak. “Easily,” he said.

And Eusebius, born a barbarian, might have been out there in furs and leather and fringes, trying to rouse his powers to break into Thessalonica and overcome the God Who held them at bay. He wondered what he himself would have been, had his life begun among the Slavs or Avars rather than the Romans. Probably not a shoemaker; from what he’d seen, the enemy had no one who made shoes for everyone else, each man being his own shoemaker and cobbler. George shrugged. He could have found something else to do.

“What are they doing?” Dactylius asked, a question of more immediate import.

“I don’t know,” George said. “If I had to guess, though, I’d say it’s nothing we’re going to like very much.”

The Slavs and the Avars had huddled together like small boys before a mime show they’d thought up. That George recognized: they wanted everything right. When they broke apart, the Avar priest shouted something that was, as usual, unintelligible from the wall. Also as usual, it got prompt results. Several Slavs with the harassed look of slaves began building a great fire from so much wood and brush that George, who’d often been chilly because Thessalonica lacked fuel, grew warm with angry jealousy.

One of the slaves thrust a torch into the brush. The fire caught swiftly. Flames leaped higher than a man. The Slavic wizards drew close to the blaze, whether for warmth or for the sake of ritual George could not tell. Staring out at the fire, Dactylius sighed longingly.

Another Slav led a billy goat up close to the fire, tethering the beast to a stake driven into the ground. The Avar priest walked all around the goat, raising his hands and chanting in a scale that had little to do with any sort of music George had heard before.

When the Avar got round behind the goat, he drew a knife from his belt; firelight flashed off the edge of the blade. With one swift motion, he reached down and castrated the goat. Blood spurted. The animal gave a bleat of startled agony. A moment later, the Slavic wizards took up the strange chant the Avar had been using.

He, after holding the goat’s testicles aloft as if in triumph, flung them into the heart of the fire. It flared up for a moment in a blaze more nearly white than honest red-gold. The Avar priest and his Slavic acolytes--for so they seemed to George to be--began a new and different chant, one the shoemaker thought might be a name: “Odkan Galakan Eke! Odkan Galakan Eke!” They called the name or phrase over and over again, till it echoed in George’s mind.

Dactylius crossed himself. “The goat!” he said. “Look at the goat.”

Watching the Avar and the Slavs, George had almost forgotten the poor unfortunate animal, whose role in the ceremony he had assumed to be over. Now he found he was mistaken. “Holy Virgin Mother of God,” he whispered, and also made the sign of the cross.

It had no effect. The woman now riding on the goat (she might have been Odkan Galakan Eke; George thought of her thus, rightly or wrongly he did not know), though plainly supernatural, was as plainly not the Virgin Mother of God. Half again the size of a man, she and her clothing seemed made all from fire.

Her tunic might at first glance have been woven of crimson silk, but was in fact flames. Her face was the color of melted butter, but glowed like the fire that would have melted it. Her eyes . . . George looked away from her eyes. Something more than mere fire blazed there, the mother substance from which all fire sprang. Men were not meant to see such directly.