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  Now that the action was safely over, the bishop in his tall hat and bright robes came over. 'Orosius! Are you all right?'

  'Yes, Ammanius. But I feel a fool, such a fool.'

  The bishop, Ammanius, set down his crook and helped the old man to sit up. 'I would never call you a fool, brave Orosius. But there are many books in Armorica, and there is only one of you, old fellow.'

  'But I could not bear to see those pagan brutes abuse the library so.'

  'They will never know what they were destroying,' Ammanius said. 'They are to be pitied, not despised.'

  Ammanius glanced now at Wuffa and Ulf. Wuffa saw how the bishop's gaze roamed over Ulf's muscular legs. Ammanius was perhaps forty. Clean-shaven like his British charges, he had a full, well-fed face, skin so smooth it looked oiled, and eyebrows that might have been plucked. His Latin was heavily accented. Perhaps he was a continental, then.

  'And it seems,' Ammanius said to Orosius, 'that you have another pair of "pagan brutes" to thank for your life.'

  'Yes, thank you both,' said the daughter breathlessly.

  Her eyes wide, she might have been twenty; she seemed careworn, but she was pretty in a dark British way, Wuffa thought.

  Ammanius said, 'Do you have Latin?'

  'We speak it,' Ulf said warily.

  'Then you understand what is being said to you. Old Orosius is grateful for your intervention-'

  The old man coughed and spoke. 'Don't put words in my mouth, Bishop.' He looked the young men up and down. 'You don't carry weapons within the walls. It's a city law.'

  Wuffa frowned. 'Not under King Aethelberht.'

  'I don't recognise any pagan king's authority.'

  The daughter sighed.

  'Don't take offence,' Ammanius said emolliently to Wuffa. 'It is a hard day for Orosius. These people are leaving their homes – the city their ancestors built centuries ago. But you care little for history, you Saxons, do you?'

  'I am a Saxon,' Wuffa said. 'He is Norse, a Dane. His name is Ulf. I am Wuffa.'

  The girl looked at him, her brown eyes clear. 'And I am Sulpicia.'

  'In my tongue, my name means "wolf".' Wuffa grinned, showing his teeth.

  She returned his gaze coolly. Then she bent over her father. 'Bishop Ammanius, these two, Ulf and Wuffa, saved my father. Even while we looked away. But they are pagans. Isn't this proof that all souls may be redeemed by Christ's light?'

  Ammanius looked into Wuffa's eyes. 'Is there really goodness in you, boy? And your Norse friend too?'

  Wuffa took a step back and raised his hands. 'I'm not seeking conversion to your dead god, bishop.'

  'No? But plenty of your sort are coming over to Christ. That's why Augustine led us here. You Saxons are easy to convert, you are such a gloomy lot! Your songs drone endlessly of loss. You don't know it, but your German soul longs for the glow of eternity, Wuffa.'

  Ulf laughed. 'Eternity can wait.'

  Sulpicia said now, 'Pagan or not, these two proved themselves a lot more use today than the mercenaries we hired to protect us.'

  'Well, that's true.' The bishop stroked his long nose. 'And that could be useful.'

  Ulf and Wuffa shared a glance. Perhaps there was an opportunity for them here. Ulf said, 'Tell us what you mean.'

  Ammanius gestured at his flock of pilgrims. 'Do you understand what is happening here? I am leading these people to river boats which will take them down the estuary to the port of Rutupiae – Reptacaestir you call it, perhaps you know it. From there they will travel across the ocean to Armorica. But I will not travel with them. I have another mission, from my archbishop. I have to go to the far north of this blighted island. And there I am to seek out a prophecy said to have been uttered centuries ago by one Isolde…'

  The Roman church was trying to assimilate its British counterpart. An element of its strategy was to acquire any British saints, relics and other divine material worth keeping. One such candidate was a strange prophecy of the distant future said to have been uttered by this 'Isolde', centuries before.

  'It is guarded by one they call "the last of the Romans",' Ammanius said. That phrase thrilled Wuffa. 'It will be a long and hazardous journey. I will need companions I can count on. You two have heathen souls, and yet today you stepped forward to save the life of an old man you had never seen before. Perhaps you have the qualities I seek. What do you say – will you come with me? I will pay you, of course.'

  Wuffa would have to speak to his father. But Ulf grinned at him. Such an exotic adventure was hardly to be missed.

  Ammanius gathered up his crook. 'If you are interested, meet me at Reptacaestir in seven days.'

  Sulpicia helped her grumbling father to his feet. 'What an adventure,' she said wistfully. 'I wish I could come with you!'

  Ulf grabbed the opportunity. 'Then come.'

  She looked flustered. 'I can't. My father-'

  'Do something for yourself, not for him,' Ulf said. 'You'll be able to find us.' And, without allowing her to argue, he turned to Wuffa.

  Wuffa said, 'It will be quite a trip. Bandits on the road, the bishop snatching at our souls-'

  'And the lovely Sulpicia grabbing your arse! I saw the way she looked at you, wolf-boy…'

  The old man, Orosius, called after them, 'Do you even know the name of the city your kind is despoiling, you barbarians? Do you even know where you are?'

  Wuffa looked back. 'This is Lunden. What of it? Who cares?'

  The old Briton they had saved continued to shout insults, but the young men walked away.

  IV

  On Wuffa's last day before he set off for Reptacaestir, a scop, a wandering poet, called at his home village. Coenred welcomed the ragged wanderer, fed him meat and ale, and assigned him the village's one precious slave for his comfort.

  The village itself was homely, a huddle of timber-framed houses with smoke streaming from their thatched roofs. To the wheeze of the smiths' bellows the people went about their chores, talking in grave rumbles about business, chasing children and chickens. The more substantial houses had doorposts carved with entwined decorations, brought over the sea from the old country, a reminder of home. Around the halls were rougher huts with sunken floors, workshops for weaving, iron-working and carpentry, and beyond that were pens for the chickens, sheep and pigs. There was no street planning, as Wuffa had seen in the ruins of Lunden; the houses grew where they would, like mushrooms.

  The village of Coenred and his kin was one of hundreds of such settlements spread in a great belt around the walls of Lunden. There was still enough wealth flowing, through the old docks and the new trading area called Lundenwic, to make Lunden valuable to Aethelberht and his underkings – that and the prestige of owning the huge carcass of what had been the most valuable city in Britannia. So people were drawn here, to live and work.

  As evening closed in, the village's largest hall filled up. A fire blazed in the hearth, and the people gathered on benches and patches of straw-covered floor, their faces shining in the firelight like Roman coins. Many had taken the opportunity of the scop's visit to dress in their best, in clean, brightly-dyed clothes adorned with brooches, with necklaces of amber and bits of old Roman glass, and silver finger rings. The men had their seaxes at their waists, the bone-handled knives that gave the people their name. Many of the older folk flexed fingers and joints riddled by arthritis. Coenred, at forty-four, was one of the oldest.

  Wuffa was related to almost everybody here; this was his family.

  As the ale circulated the mood mellowed, and the laughter began. At last the scop stood up, with his traditional command: 'Listen!' He looked a little unsteady on his feet, but when he spoke his voice was powerful and sonorous. 'Hear me, gods! I am crushed by longing and regret. I wake in mist-choked air, and labour the soil of a dismal island. For I have followed my lord across the sea, and my home lies far away. The fields of my fathers are drowned by the sea. My children grow stunted in murky dark. For I have followed my lord across the sea, and my home lies
far away…' As he warmed to his theme, a typical Saxon lament of loss and regret, the adults, swaying gently to the rhythms of his speech, joined in the line of the chorus.

  That bishop was right, Wuffa thought. The Saxons were a gloomy lot. Then the ale started to work on him, softening his thoughts. He drifted into the comforting, sombre mood of the hall, murmuring along with the other men to the scop's dismal chorus, and dreaming of the pale thighs of the British girl, Sulpicia.

  As night fell the eerie whiteness of the comet was exposed, as flesh falls away to reveal bone, its unearthly light penetrating the warmth of the hall.

  V

  Reptacaestir was a Roman fort, with immense walls and curving towers laid out according to a cold plan. It was like a tomb of stone. A greater contrast with the warm village of Coenred could hardly be imagined.

  Alongside Ulf, Wuffa led his horse cautiously into the bustling port. The land here, close to the east coast, was dead flat under a huge, washed-out sky. Wuffa could smell the sea. They dismounted and stood uncertainly among crowds of Norse and German traders. Huddles of British refugees sat quietly on the ground, waiting for their ships.

  'Ah, here you are.' Bishop Ammanius approached, a calculated smile on his broad, well-fed face. He wore more practical clothes than in Lunden: a coarse tunic, leather trousers, sturdy boots, a cloak. He was accompanied by a couple of young monks, heavily laden with baggage, their tonsured scalps bright pink. Ammanius called them 'novices' and barely gave them a second glance.

  With him, too, was the British girl Sulpicia. Wuffa couldn't take his eyes off her. The sturdy, almost mannish clothes she wore today set off the delicate beauty of her face. She looked strong, he thought, strong and supple. She was British, she was Christian, she was different- and yet his body cared nothing about that.

  He approached her. 'So you came,' he said.

  She returned his stare. 'My father is safely dispatched to Armorica. I have some skills in writing and figuring; I will be of use to the bishop, I think.'

  'And you will be with us for fifty days, perhaps more. How lucky for me.'

  'We have a holy mission to fulfil,' she said, faintly mocking. 'That should be uppermost in our thoughts.'

  'Ah, but I'm no Christian.'

  'Then we have nothing more to say to each other.' She turned away. Her hair blew across her face in the soft breeze off the sea. She smiled.

  The game is on, he thought warmly.

  Ammanius insisted on walking them around the port. Within the walls of the old Roman fort, timber houses stood on the plans of ruined stone buildings. On a low mound at the centre of the fort he pointed out a complicated series of foundations and stumps. 'They built an arch here to celebrate the triumph of Claudius. This was the very first place the Romans landed.' He took a deep breath of sharp, salt-laden air. 'Why, Christ was barely down from His cross. Later the arch was demolished to help build the walls of the fort, to deter you hairy-arsed raiders and your bee-sting assaults on the coast. But you came even so. And then a king called the Vortigem fought and won a great battle against you, here on this very spot…'

  Britannia had been a Roman diocese, with its capital at Londinium. The British had thrown off the imperial yoke by their own will, through rebellion. The diocesan authority collapsed, but the four sub-provinces survived. The provincial states were successful. The old towns and villas continued to function; taxes continued to be collected. Literate and Christian, the British even exported their Roman culture to the peripheries of Britain, to the west and north and to Ireland, places where the eagle standard had never flown.

  But in an absence of power, strong men took their chances. Here in the south-east, a man called Vitalinus struggled to the top of a heap of town councillors and military commanders. With dynasty in mind he married the daughter of Magnus Maximus, one of many British pretenders to the imperial purple in the old days. Soon he was calling himself 'the Vortigern', a word that meant something like overking. He had been the Aethelberht of his day.

  But, lacking trained troops, Vitalinus hired Saxon mercenaries for protection. The Saxons beat off attacks from the Picts from the north. But when plague struck southern Britain and Vitalinus's tax revenues collapsed, the unpaid Saxons rebelled.

  Ammanius said, 'At first Vitalinus fought well. His son, Vortimer, won that great victory, here at Reptacaestir. This was, oh, about a hundred and fifty years ago. Your grandfather's grandfather might have fought in that battle, Wuffa! I doubt your poets sing songs of defeats. But the British triumph could not last…'

  Within five years the Saxons broke out of their island enclave. And new waves of immigrants arrived. In Wuffa's village the scops still sang of the great crossings from the drowning farms of the old country, tales told by grandfathers of grandfathers, just at the edge of memory. These were not bands of mercenaries; this was a people on the move.

  Ammanius said, 'The British lost their land, footstep by footstep. So here they are, refugees fleeing from the land of their ancestors. And in the last decade Reptacaestir has been trodden by the feet of a new wave of invaders.'

  'What do you mean?' Wuffa asked.

  The bishop brought them to a small church, constructed of bits of Roman stone. 'This is a chapel dedicated to Augustine. Just ten years ago the archbishop landed here, with a mission from the Pope to convert you heathen children to the one true faith. And this is one invasion of Britain which will know no ending.'

  Wuffa looked around at the battered walls, the swarming Norse and German traders, the huddles of British refugees. Standing amid these complicated, many-layered ruins, he sensed the past, as if the doors of a vast abandoned hall opened to him. It was thrilling, disturbing.

  And yet when he glanced at Sulpicia it was only the bright present that filled his mind, like the diffuse light off the sea which banished the shadows of the fort's rotting walls.

  VI

  Wuffa and Ulf spent some days escorting Ammanius to other south-east ports, where the bishop had to supervise more bands of refugees fleeing to the continent. Many of the ports had massive old Roman fortifications like Reptacaestir's. The only one Wuffa had heard of was Pefensae, which the bishop called Anderida. Here, after the Romans, a British town had grown up within the walls, but a century ago the Saxons had landed here and slaughtered every last Briton, a bold strike of which the scops still sang.

  With Ammanius's obligations fulfilled, the six of them set off for the far north, in search of the legend of Isolde.

  Their journey mostly followed the roads left behind by the Romans, some of which were well maintained, some not. Ulf and Wuffa travelled by horseback, while the bishop, Sulpicia and the novices rode in a sturdy Saxon cart. Britain was full of petty kingdoms, but Ammanius was able to transfer them from the protection of one polity to the next through letters he carried from his archbishop – and, Wuffa thought, by his own sheer force of personality.

  By night they stayed in old Roman towns, or in forts on top of hills, or in villas in the countryside. Ringed by hastily built walls the towns were more like shabby fortresses, where amid thatched houses of mud and straw a few mighty stone structures loomed. In the Roman-British domains the towns were protection in bad times, markets in good times, and places where kings or other petty rulers collected their taxes.

  The forts on the hills were more interesting to Wuffa, because they were so different from anything he had seen before. They were fortified not by stone walls like the towns but by earthen ramparts and wooden palisades. Ammanius, aware of Wuffa's growing curiosity, told him these forts had brooded on their hills long before the Caesars ever came. 'And later the British drifted back to the fortresses of their ancestors. It was as if the Romans had never been here at all…'

  Ammanius preferred to stay in the villas. Grand old farmhouses, once owned by rich Roman British, they had been either abandoned when the Roman system broke down, or occupied as much-reduced farms. And later, as Britain's Christianity spread, they became monasteries.

&
nbsp; Here, surrounded by the calm toil of monks, Bishop Ammanius evidently felt at ease. And as he relaxed he drank. Holy man he might be, but Ammanius was fond of his wine.

  And the drunker he got, the more fascinated he seemed by Ulf and Wuffa. Ammanius spoke more often to Wuffa. He said he saw the 'empty minds of two pagan boys' as vessels to be filled up with his God's truth. But when the big Norse moved the bishop's stare always followed, as if Ulf were some fascinating animal.

  One long evening the four of them sat in a firelit room deep within a windswept monastery-villa. They were alone save for a novice who brought them food and drink. Tapestries hung on the walls and there was a thick carpet on the floor. This had been the triclinium of the Roman villa, the bishop said, a word that meant nothing to Wuffa; evidently it meant some kind of living room. The monks said that the carpets and tapestries were there to keep the pagan symbols on the walls and floor from pious gazes, and also to warm a room whose system of under-floor heating had long since broken down.

  Ulf and Sulpicia played a complicated game of dice and counters, worn with use, left behind by the villa's original owners and now popular with the novices. Sulpicia sat on her couch close to Wuffa, her loose tunic falling around the soft flesh of her neck. Wuffa was aware of every soft laugh she and Ulf shared, the way Ulf's tousled golden hair touched her dark British brow, the way their fingers touched over the grimy surface of the wooden game board.

  Since that pivotal day in Lunden when they had met, Wuffa had believed he had had an agreement with Ulf, that Sulpicia was, if not Wuffa's, at least his to try for first. But was Ulf to be trusted? Was he more subtle than Wuffa, was he quietly working to take the advantage? Wuffa felt baffled, out-thought.

  And if Wuffa watched Sulpicia, so Ammanius watched Ulf.

  Ammanius leaned close to Wuffa, and the Saxon could smell the stale wine on his breath. 'You Germans fascinate me,' he said. 'You don't build empires. You have no values save loyalty to your chieftain's hall, where your warlords sit around and get drunk. You have no laws, save the most brutal. You actually put a cost on a man's life, don't you? A penalty to be paid if one takes it?'