Harry Turtledove - Thessalonica

John ran a hand through his hair and said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I don’t have so much up here these days.” His hair was cut a little shorter than it had been before George got locked out of Thessalonica, but only a little. He went on, “I have to tell you, it’s Rufus’ fault.”

“Just because you have to tell it, that doesn’t make it so,” Rufus exclaimed.

John ignored him. “There at the end of the siege, he was throwing us up onto the wall with anybody who was still healthy, not just with men from our own company.” Because George had been out of the city, he didn’t know whether that was so or not. John continued, “Me, one night I was up there doing a shift with old bald Basil and with Victor the barber. Sometimes, when nothing much is happening, you’ll doze up there instead of tramping back and forth all the damn time.”

“You’d better not!” Another exclamation from Rufus, this one in an altogether different tone of voice.

John kept right on ignoring him, saying, “So that’s what I did, and Basil, too. I told Victor to wake me in an hour’s time, and then I’d do the same for him. I fell asleep, good and hard. So did Basil. Well, Victor got bored while we were snoring away. He got out his little razor and shaved my head for a joke. When he finally shook me, I thought it was colder than it should have been, and I rubbed my head and found out I didn’t have any hair left. “What a fool you are,’ I told Victor. You’ve gone and woke Baldy there instead of me.’”

“Here,” somebody called. “I’ll give you a miliaresion not to tell that one again.”

John leered at him. “And how much will you give me not to tell the next one on you?” He looked over the crowd and held out his bowl. “Or on you? Or on you there, with the ugly tunic. Yes, you. You know who I mean.”

He was grinning when he came back to the table, the bowl nicely heavy with money. “Not a bad take,” he said. “Not a bad take at all.” He started separating the coins with his usual quick dexterity, then looked up from his work. “Where are you going, George?”

“Home,” the shoemaker answered with a yawn. “I’m not like Sabbatius” --who was still snoring away-- “I don’t sleep in taverns.”

“And besides,” Dactylius put in, “you don’t want to wake up bald, the way John says he did.”

“Everybody thinks he can do my job,” John muttered darkly. Then he brightened. “Ha! Justus really did give me silver. Now you can go home, George.”

“I don’t take orders from you,” George said. “I take orders from Rufus.”

“Go home, George,” Rufus said. laughing, George did.

George said, “Dear, I think we really have to dicker with Leo now.”

Irene let out a sigh. “I wish we didn’t. Constantine’s not a bad lad, mind you, but I think we can do better for Sophia.”

“I don’t think Sophia wants better. She wants Constantine, and I think she’s going to get him no matter what we say about it.” George told how the two of them had been kissing when he came back into Thessalonica after the Slavs and Avars gave up the siege.

“And what did you do about that?” his wife asked.

“I coughed. They jumped apart,” George answered. “They were embarrassed. But they’ll do it again whenever they find the chance. You don’t take one kiss like that without wanting another. If they find the chance, they’ll do more than kiss.”

He expected Irene to be affronted at the way he’d impugned Sophia’s care about guarding her virtue. Instead his wife sighed and laughed a laugh half wry, half genuinely amused. “All right, we’d better talk with Leo,” she said.

“You pick the oddest times to be sensible,” George remarked. Irene, luckily for him, was already intent on the dickering that lay ahead, and so paid less attention to him than she might have done.

Rain pattered down outside. Some of it turned to ice when it struck the ground. George didn’t mind. He was under a roof that didn’t leak too badly, a couple of braziers spread heat, and woodcutters could go out into the forest again, even if they did go with armed guards to make sure no lurking Slavs picked them off. Some of the woodcutters wanted armed guards against the centaurs and satyrs. George knew that was foolish for any number of reasons, but said nothing. He was not a man to whom people listened on such matters.

“The one thing we have to do,” Irene said, her mind running ahead on its own road, “is make certain Sophia doesn’t do anything out of the way”--a euphemism George hadn’t heard before, but clear enough-- “till the dickering is done. When I tell her it would hurt the bargain we’re striking, she’ll understand that.” She looked sidelong at her husband. “My mother told me the same thing about you.”

“Did she?” George said. “You never mentioned that before.”

“A time for everything, and everything in its season,” Irene answered: not quite the language of the Holy Scriptures, but close. She grew brisk again. “Now--how do we approach Leo without making it too obvious we’re approaching him?”

“Why don’t you go buy a pot from him?” George said. “If you like, you can break one over my head, so the story will get round that we need a new one.”

“I usually get them from old grouchy Antonius, but that will do, I think.” Irene gave him a kiss for coming up with a good idea. Musingly, she went on, “I don’t think I have to break one on you. Maybe I don’t even want people to think I did that. I’m not Claudia, after all.”

George kissed her this time. “And a good thing, too, says I.”

Irene came back with a fine new pot--George was ready to admit (though he never would have done so to Leo’s face) it was better than any they already had. She also came back with a triumphant smile lighting her features. “I didn’t even have to start the dickering,” she told her husband. “Leo did that, as soon as I walked through the door. Constantine must be giving him some heat.”

“That’s very good,” George said equably. “Do we have a bargain? Do we have a bride-price set? Do we have a day for the wedding?”

“Of course not,” Irene said. “There’s no hurry to these things--well, not too much of a hurry, anyhow, provided Sophia and Constantine don’t give us a reason for one. But we have a bargain that there will be a bargain, if you know what I mean.”

“All right. Nice to have that settled, or on the way to being settled.” George paused, then said, “Come to think of it, we may be doing some more bargaining one of these days before too long.” He told how, coming back into Thessalonica, he’d found not only Sophia kissing Constantine but also Theodore kissing Lucretia.

“Lucretia?” Irene said in some dismay. “She’s so heavy.” Her eyes glinted dangerously. “And why didn’t you see fit to mention this until now? I might have been caught unawares, you know.”

“It slipped my mind,” George answered with a shrug. “We have had rather a lot of things going on lately, you know. And I don’t have any idea how much she means to Theodore--if she means anything. He hasn’t talked about her, you’ll notice. Maybe that just means he’s shy about it, I admit. But maybe it means--”

Irene finished that for him: “Maybe it means the whole town was going crazy because the Slavs and Avars were leaving, and he decided to see what he could get. Yes. That sounds like a man.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” George said, not about to let his half of the human race be slandered so. “Who came out of this shop and kissed me a lot harder than either of our children was kissing right then?”

“Hmm,” Irene said, and George thought he’d won the exchange. But then she said “Ha!” and pointed at him, and he knew he hadn’t. She said, “I kissed you, my husband, not the first man I saw on the street.” She drew herself up in triumph.