Harry Turtledove - Thessalonica

Climbing the stairs up to the wall made it beat even harder and faster; he wondered if anyone had fallen over dead rushing to the defense of Thessalonica. They gained the walkway and looked out into the gathering dusk. His heart pounded harder still, now not from exertion but from astonishment and alarm.

Beside him, Rufus murmured, “Sweet Mother of God, it’s a whole swarm of them.”

The word was better than any George had found to apply to the Slavs. Thousands of men milled around outside the city, all of them carrying weapons of one kind or another. Some looked to be mounting attacks against the monastery of St. Matrona, leaning ladders against its walls and trying to climb up them. The monks overturned some of those ladders as George watched, and threw stones down onto the heads of the Slavs down below.

“Do you know,” he said, discovering he had breath enough to speak again, “I think they think they’re attacking the city wall.”

“They couldn’t be that stupid,” Rufus said, but then, after he’d watched them for a couple of minutes, he shook his head in wonder. “I take it back. Maybe they could be that stupid.”

“It’s getting dark,” George said. “There’s a little mist in the air. They must have taken the long way round to get at Thessalonica from the west, because everything we’ve heard about the fighting is that it’s been off to the east and north. So here they’ve come, they’ve never been anywhere near the city before, and what do they do? They see strong walls, so they think they’re doing the right thing by storming them.”

“You make sense,” Rufus said, a compliment that delighted the shoemaker. His superior went on, “Now how long will they take to figure out that a city’s bigger than a monastery?”

The Slavs did not take long. Some of them kept on assailing the monastery. More, though, drawn by the more distant walls and the people on them, came on and discovered Thessalonica. No sooner had they discovered it than they began to try to take it. They flung javelins and shot arrows at the militiamen and simple citizens on the wall.

An arrow slammed into the stonework not far from George’s head. He heard the shaft snap, much as he did when he broke one of his own arrows hunting rabbits. But the Slav who’d shot this arrow had not been out for game. He’d had killing George in mind, or if not George then Rufus or someone else nearby. He wanted to kill me. Once lodged in George’s mind, the thought would not leave. He did his best to kill me. This was not practice, shooting at a target. This was not chill. The Slav had meant it. This was war.

More arrows flew. One zipped past Georges head, hissing like a snake. The first realization he was a target had shocked him. The second .. . He pulled an arrow of his own from the quiver, nocked it, and shot it at one of the barbarians down below. He didn’t know whether he scored a hit or not--the Slav was running around among several others, and they were hard to tell apart: growing harder by the moment, too, as the light failed.

He also had other troubles. “We should have practiced shooting from the top of the wall,” he said to Rufus. “It’s a different business from shooting on the level.”

“Aye, you’re right--it is,” the veteran answered. “Have to talk to the city prefect about that, or maybe to the bishop.”

“You should talk to the bishop,” George said. “If he won’t listen to the man the saint spoke through, whom will he hear?”

“Nobody, maybe,” Rufus said. Having dealt with Eusebius not long before, George thought that had a chance of being true. Eusebius, he suspected, listened to himself first and everyone else afterwards. But with Thessalonica being in his hands more than anyone else’s this side of St. Demetrius, he might well pay attention to anything that would help him defend the city.

Sabbatius and Paul came up onto the wall then. Paul was somber and self-contained; Sabbatius reeked of wine. The contrast did not particularly surprise George. A taverner who got too fond of the goods he sold would not stay a taverner long: his business would fail, and he’d end up drinking at someone else’s.

Sabbatius stared down at the Slavs. “Mother of God!” he muttered. “How many of ‘em are out there? Must be ten or twenty myriads, easy.”

“Even if you’re seeing double, there aren’t that many-- not anywhere close,” Rufus said. He scratched his chin. “I don’t know if there’re ten myriads of people inside

Thessalonica, let alone twenty. Three, four thousand Slavs out there, five at the most.”

“There have to be more than that,” Sabbatius said. Rufus gave a single scornful shake of his head. If George had to choose between a guess by a drunken militiaman and another by a soldier who’d been gauging the size of armies most of his life, he knew which one he preferred.

“Anyway,” Rufus said, “the point isn’t how many of ‘em there are, the point is how to make there be fewer of ‘em. Why don’t you stop jawing and start using that cursed bow--or don’t you remember you have it along?”

Sabbatius did start shooting at the Slavs. George could not tell what effect his arrows had; a lot of missiles were flying out from the wall. Somebody said, “If the jawbone of an ass was good enough for Solomon to fight with, why not for Sabbatius, too?”

“Hullo, John,” George said without turning around. He loosed another arrow himself, then went on, “I thought I’d see you up here.”

“It’s the place to be right now,” John said in affected, upper-class Greek.

George snorted. “Pity the Slavs don’t speak any civilized language--you could slay them with laughter.”

“Me? John said. “Considering the way you shoot, making them laugh themselves to death would be your best chance.” He let fly, then grunted in satisfaction. “There, you see? I got one. I’m funnier than you are, and I’m a better man with the bow, too.”

“To say nothing of more modest,” George murmured.

“That’s ri--” John began, and then stopped, sending a chilly glance toward the shoemaker. George felt a moment’s pride; not everyone could trade words with John and come off the winner. He knew he couldn’t do it himself very often.

But then his small satisfaction was swept away, for out of the woods rode four or five men who sat their horses as if they were the centaurs that might still linger in the remotest valleys of the most rugged upcountry. But centaurs wore no armor, neither the man half nor the beast, and these men and their horses were both clad in scalemail that would ward them against anything but a direct and lucky hit.

They rode up to and through the Slavs, who parted before them as the citizens of Thessalonica might have parted before the Roman Emperor, had he come to worship at the church of St. Demetrius. They halted within bowshot of the walls. Under their iron helmets, their faces, as well as George could make them out in the fading light, were flat, strong, impassive.

“Avars,” Rufus muttered under his breath. As soon as he spoke the name, George knew he had to be right. No wonder the Slavs treated them like lords: they were the Slavs’ lords.

Calm as if they had come to visit rather than to attack, the Avars studied Thessalonica’s works for a minute or two, then turned their horses away from the walls and rode back into the gathering darkness. Once more, the Slavs stood aside to let them pass. Shadows reached out for them, and they were gone.

Neither side started up the fighting again for some little while after that. “Those men had a power in them, and not a small one,” George said quietly. “I wish Bishop Eusebius would have been here on the wall with us, to show them we have a power that can stand against theirs.”