Harry Turtledove - Thessalonica

“It’ll be where anyone can grab it, you mean,” Rufus said, and Dactylius nodded. Rufus transformed himself from a tired old man walking home with his companions back into a militia officer. “We’ll have to form a perimeter around it, then, and keep people who don’t have any business inside the church from getting too close till the priests can gather up the metal.”

He drew his sword and advanced on the ciborium. George, Dactylius, and the rest of the militiamen in the group followed him. Dactylius had known what he was talking about: already melted silver was dripping down from the dome of the ciborium; smoke rose from the marble on which it landed. How much silver had been in the dome? It had to be hundreds of pounds.

“God bless you!” the priests called as the militiamen took up their stations around the monument to St. Demetrius.

“I want to tell you, He’d better,” Rufus said grimly.

George would gladly have echoed the officer. The church was filling rapidly, and not all the people were those the shoemaker was delighted to see. The smoke and the outcry the fire had created combined to bring out gawkers of every sort, from the merely curious to those who appeared at disasters to see what profit they could make from them.

When this latter sort saw the silver melting and dripping down to where they might get their hands on the lumps and globules, their expression reminded George of the look dogs wore in front of a butcher’s shop. He’d never seen so many hungry, avid, hopeful faces all together.

“Why don’t you go home?” he suggested to some of them. “Nothing here belongs to any of you.”

“Not yet,” a skinny man said. His friends laughed.

Priests and militiamen together lacked the numbers to keep the swelling crowd from doing as it would. The priests were not even armed--no, some of them had makeshift bludgeons, not that those would amount to much. George did not want to draw his sword, for fear of turning crowd into mob. Many of the Thessalonicans staring at the silver had weapons no worse than his.

“When it gets a little darker, they’ll likely rush us,” Rufus said. “That way, nobody will be able to tell for certain who does what.”

“I think you’re right,” George said, “and it gets dark a lot faster this time of year than it did a couple of months ago, say.” When I get home, Irene will yell at me for being seven different kinds of fool for letting myself get caught in what’s likely to be a riot. That was his first thought. Only after it had gone through his mind did he think to wonder how and if he would get home once the riot got rolling.

Through smoke still thick enough to make him cough and force tears down cheeks no doubt sooty, the stretch of sky he could see got darker and darker. Color seemed to leach from the bricks of the basilica of St. Demetrius and the other nearby buildings.

In the gathering gloom, someone hissed, “Come on. Let’s get it. They can’t hardly spy us now.” The serpent’s voice must have sounded like that when it was tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Only a few feet away from George, Rufus suddenly jerked, as if he’d been hit by an arrow. For a moment, the shoemaker thought that was what had happened. Then he felt the power in the air, strong enough to make the hair stand straight up on his head. He looked around wildly, wondering if lightning was about to strike.

But it was not lightning, or not mere lightning. Rufus’ eyes were wide and staring. Whatever he saw had nothing to do with the burning ciborium or the thieves gathering around it. His mouth started to move. At first, no words came from it, as if the power about to speak through him had trouble matching its needs to those of his flesh and blood.

Then it did speak, in a voice that would have made George’s hair stand on end if it hadn’t been doing that already: “Men, citizens--barbarians around the wall!” After a moment, Rufus, or Whoever was using him as a channel, cried out again: “They’ve appeared unexpectedly, but all of you, all of us, we’ll hasten with arms for our homeland!”

Rufus repeated himself twice more, using, so far as George could tell, the identical words each time. By the time he fell silent, staggered, and almost fell as he came back to himself, the basilica was nearly empty. Almost everyone who had heard him had rushed to obey.

He turned toward George, who was having all he could do to keep from rushing to the walls at that very instant himself. “The saint…” Rufus began, and then tried again: “The martyr . . .” He shook his head. “Something happened,” he muttered, “but what?” He might have been the only person in the basilica of St. Demetrius who did not know what he’d said.

George started to explain, but a cry of wonder from behind him made him stop before he’d got out more than a couple of words. A priest was pointing at the wreckage of the ciborium. Wreckage it remained, but it was no longer burning. “We did not put out this fire,” he exclaimed, his eyes almost as round as Rufus’ had been. “God put out this fire.”

“Christ and God helped us, with the intercession of the glorious martyr,” Rufus said, again in a voice not quite his own. “The fire is quenched, and nothing here destroyed by it.” Where before he had given orders to the crowd, now he commanded the priests: “Shut the doors to the church and gather up the silver in peace and quiet. And remember that this place remains in good order because of what the martyred saint established.”

The veteran shivered like a man coming out of a warm house into an icy wind. Gently, cautiously, George touched him on the arm. “Come on,” the shoemaker said. “The Slavs are attacking the walls.”

“They are?” Rufus exclaimed. “What are we wasting time here in the church for, then?” Now he was himself again, and no one else. “Let’s get moving. We’ll teach the whoresons a lesson they’ll remember one cursed long time.”

He trotted out of the church at a ground-eating lope. George followed, along with the handful of other militiamen who had resisted the call that came through Rufus and stayed by the man himself. Behind them, the doors to the basilica slammed shut, with their bars thudding down to hold them so. Inside, the priests would be collecting the spilled silver … in peace and quiet.

People were running through the streets of Thessalonica, brandishing the spears and bows and swords and knives and occasional axes they had snatched up from their homes. “This is marvelous,” Rufus said. “I wouldn’t have thought even the barbarians at the gates would get everybody moving this way. I wonder what did it.”

“It was you,” George said, but Rufus, now, paid little attention to him when he tried to tell what had happened. Power had not only filled him, but filled him to overflowing, so that he had neither memory nor even great interest in what he had set in motion. So, at any rate, it appeared to George, who was viewing it from the outside. He wondered what being filled with the power of the saint felt like. He doubted he would ever know.

Many of the townsfolk, not being part of the militia, had no assigned place on the walls. They went up anyway, and shouted curses and abuse at whoever was on the far side. George supposed that would do Thessalonica no harm; if any of those curses stuck to the Slavs, it might even do some good.

His own place on the wall was on the western stretch where he and his comrades in the militia had taken their turns as watchmen, near the Litaean Gate. That meant traversing most of the city, as St. Demetrius’ church stood over in the northeastern part of town.

“Here we are,” Rufus said when they reached their proper section of the wall. The old veteran sounded winded. George did not blame him, and contented himself with a nod by way of reply. When you made shoes, you sat or stood in the same place all day, which did not do wonders for your endurance. George’s heart thudded like a drum.