Despite that darkness, Irene did not want to go to sleep at once. “A satyr,” she said in a low voice, one that, with luck, the children would not overhear. “I know of them, of course--everyone knows of them--but I never heard of anybody meeting one before, not even in the stories my old grandmother told me when I was little.”
“Neither did I,” George said, “not around a city that’s been Christian as long as Thessalonica. But up in the north it’s all helter-skelter; things are bubbling like porridge in a pot over a hot fire. The Roman soldiers and the Avars and Slavs keep going back and forth and round and round, but every year, in spite of what the soldiers do, there are more pagan Slavs settling on land that ought to be Roman.”
“I know,” Irene answered. “From what I hear in the marketplace, the Roman generals spend more time quarreling among themselves than they do fighting the enemy.”
“I’ve heard the same thing,” George said. “It worries me.” Irene caught her breath at that. Her husband was a man who worried a good deal, but hardly ever admitted it out loud. He went on, “And when the Slavs settle on land that ought to be Roman, their gods and demons settle on land that ought to be Christian.”
“That wolf--what it did to the priest. . .” On top of a wool blanket she had woven herself, she shuddered.
“Satyrs, now, and the other creatures from the old days,” George said musingly, “people believe in them, yes, but not the way they used to, so no wonder the true faith of Christ is stronger than they are. But the Slavs, they believe in their powers the same way we believe in the power of the Lord. That makes the wolf--and whatever other things they have like him--dangerous to us Christians.”