She asked, 'Who is the Weaver?'
But he would not reply.
Aelfric's mind raced with implications. It made her feel odd, that long perspective – to think that she was a 'middle generation', her life dedicated to preserving relics produced by forefathers who were dust before she was born, for the benefit of children who would not see the light until long after her own death. But then wasn't that the Christian message, that each small life was dwarfed by the greater narrative of the universe?
And even if it were so, she thought now, was it possible that some of the Menologium's stanzas could refer to her own future?
'Dom, if the fourth stanza refers to Cuthbert, what does the fifth stanza mean?' She read it out from her smudged copy:
The Comet comes/in the month of May.
Great Year's midsummer/less nine of seven.
Old claw of dragon/pierces silence, steals words.
Nine hundred and twenty-one/the months of the fifth Year…
Fear brushed her mind, like the smoke of fire breath far away. 'A dragon's claw? Can this be a warning, Dom? A warning for us?'
'Ours is not to inquire,' he said.
'But the date – the midsummer of this fifth "Great Year" of nine hundred and twenty-one months, less nine sevens, which is sixty-three – you could work it out.'
'That is not for you,' he said firmly. 'The date is in God's mind, and mine. And there it must stay.'
IX
After three days Macson submitted himself to the judgement of his priest and his peers, and his wound was judged to have healed well enough to prove him innocent. So he was free, and Belisarius kept his word.
They made their journey to the north in a hired cart drawn by two patient geldings and laden with Belisarius's precious books. Aboard rode the three of them, Belisarius, Macson – and Caradwc, Macson's father.
If Macson was around thirty, Belisarius judged, Caradwc must have been at least fifty. He rarely spoke. When he breathed his lungs bubbled, and he coughed up a spray of bloody droplets which Belisarius was careful to avoid. The Greek, armed only with his traveller's rough-and-ready medical knowledge, had no idea what was broken deep inside the old man, still less how to fix it.
There seemed an unusually strong bond between father and son. But then in Macson's eyes, Caradwc was more than just his father; he was the man who had bought the family out of slavery, after generations of too-well-remembered servitude. The old man's dying was hard for the son.
The journey north was easier than Belisarius had expected. As Macson had promised they generally made good time along the old Roman roads. But the legionaries had been gone for centuries, and in long stretches the roads had been robbed of their pavement stones, making the going uncomfortable. At least they were not troubled by bandits. Just as Macson had promised, the reign of the ageing Offa of Mercia had brought something resembling a rule of law to the island.
And this was May. The weather on this northern island was warmer than Belisarius had expected, and the greenery of the farmers' fields and the leaves of the forests, if stunted compared to the richness of the Mediterranean, the heart of the world, was pleasing to the eye. Unexpected, too, was the length of the days, which faded only subtly to dark, such was the northern latitude of the island.
It was a peculiar countryside for a former province of Rome. The hovel-like settlements of the Germans were everywhere. They could be close to the road, but never near a crossroads, for Macson, with some contempt, said the Germans were superstitious of crossroads, junction places where demons could escape. Sheep ran all over the place, and pigs rooted in forest patches. The animals looked small to Belisarius's eye; the pigs were long-legged, sharp-snouted, wild-looking. The Germans did not husband their animals as one did in the east – or indeed as the Romans once had here in Britain. Rather they let them run more or less wild, and harvested the slow and old in the autumn.
Many of the fields and common spaces were studded by crosses of stone, carved with intricate vine-like designs. Macson said these had been left by Christian missionaries, working their way out across Britain from Augustine's first landing site in the east. Though with time parish churches were being built, the first missionaries had set up these crosses as a place for their raw new German Christians to worship.
But if the Germans' religion was evident, so was their brutal justice. From a gibbet hung a desiccated corpse, upside down, suspended by its ankles. Macson said that this method of execution was particularly favoured by King Offa, who had used it on many of his own unruly relatives. It must have been a slow and gruesome way to die.
And they passed abandoned Roman towns, where the fire-scorched ruins of offices and shops and bath-houses rose out of choked greenery. The British had sustained these towns long after the withdrawal of formal Roman rule, but the German immigrants had shunned them, preferring their own architectures of wood and earth. Indeed in some places the Germans had killed the towns, by stopping up their wells with rubble. To Belisarius, who had grown up among the enduring splendours of Constantinople, these bowls of rubble were a poignant sight. What a fragile barque was civilisation, battered by paganism, ignorance and plague.
Macson said, 'The Germans have a notion they call wyrd. Like fate – but vaguer, more entangling. They believe the Romans were brought low because they had desecrated the god-throttled landscape, because it was their time to go – because of wyrd. Now the Germans are building their own kingdoms. But they believe they must live well, or wyrd will do for them in their turn.'
'I thought the Germans were Christians now. What are they doing entertaining such pagan ideas?'
Macson snorted his contempt of all things German.
Fearful of wyrd or not, the Germans had a vision of their own, as Belisarius learned when they came upon Offa's Dyke. This was an earthwork wall, four or five times a man's height, topped by a wooden palisade or in places by stone breastwork. Some of its towers and gates were manned by tough-looking warriors in mail coats, and signal beacons flickered.
And this wall was a hundred Roman miles long, a mighty fortification that ran from the estuary of the Sabrina in the south to the coast in the north, terminating at a settlement of the wealisc called Prestatyn – although there were stretches, Macson said, where it incorporated a river and older fortifications. The Dyke was a north-south barrier erected at the orders of Offa to separate his German kingdoms from the lands of the wealisc, the expelled Britons, to the west, and thereby to stabilise a troublesome border. Only a few years old, the Dyke was fresh and raw, a wound slashed through the flesh of the green British countryside.
After some days on the road, the old man, Caradwc, seemed to brighten. Belisarius wondered if the clean air away from the muddy German towns was doing him good. He began to make conversation in passable Latin. He asked about holy sites Belisarius had visited, relics he had seen in the course of his travels. 'And tell me, when will the Emperor return to this province and sort out these heathen Germans?'
Long after the fall of the empire in the west, the emperors had nursed ambitions to regain the lost western provinces. Roman trading ships, bringing goods with which to court the British leaders, had been dispatched as part of a long-term strategy to woo back Britannia. But time had passed. New barbarian states sprouted in the ruins of the old western empire, which became an increasingly distant memory. And in the east the empire was battered by new pressures, notably a new enemy: the Saracens, the warriors of the new religion of Islam.