'When I was a young man the emperor was Constantine the Fifth,' Belisarius said. 'What a warrior! He scored victories against the Saracens and the Bulgars alike. My own father served with him. It was a golden age. In the end Constantine was succeeded by a sixth Constantine, then a boy of ten, who is run as a puppet by his mother the regent. Even now people gather at the tomb of Constantine, I mean the fifth, calling on him to return and lead us. But we will never see his like again…'
'But,' Caradwc pressed, gripping his arm, 'do the emperors not still dream of Britain?'
Belisarius gently extracted his arm, disturbed by Caradwc's anachronistic longing. 'I'm afraid most of us don't even know where Britain is, old man.'
Caradwc seemed unreasonably disappointed by his answer.
Perhaps what really distressed these British, who still thought of themselves as Roman, was that Offa's Dyke was a frontier barrier just as the Romans had once built, but now intended to exclude them, the new barbarians.
In the north, the character of the country changed. The chalky fields and rounded hills of the south gave way to a harsher landscape of mountains and valleys that looked as if they had been gouged out by some vast, vanished force, and on some of the higher moorland Belisarius saw huge boulders, obviously out of place. How had they got there? Perhaps this was the legacy of the Flood, the country a vast wreck through which humans crawled like crabs in the hull of a beached ship. It was no wonder that the imperial Romans had always failed to tame this rugged landscape.
They reached the grand old Roman fortification which everybody simply called 'the Wall'.
Even in a ruinous state the Wall ran like a stone seam across the countryside. Caradwc fitfully told him of what the Britons remembered of the Wall's construction: it had been built, he said, by Romans at the request of the British after the collapse of the imperial province. That seemed unlikely to Belisarius, but the truth was, four centuries after Britannia, nobody knew any more. It was a remarkable relic, even to a man from Constantinople – but somehow Belisarius found it less impressive than Offa's Dyke, perhaps because that cruder construction was of the new age, whereas this mighty ruin was of the past.
Heading for the coast, they turned east and followed a road that ran along the line of the Wall on its south side. In this hilly northern country it was unseasonably cold and damp, and after a few days Caradwc, never strong, sickened again.
For some days they were forced to make a rough camp in the shelter of the stone walls of an abandoned fort called Banna. While Caradwc was sleeping Belisarius explored the ruins, which were perched on a crest high over a valley cut by a winding river.
Macson joined him, and they talked beside a desultory fire. Macson seemed nervous now that their goal, the isle of Lindisfarena, was only a few days away. He sat upright, his muscles hard, one foot tapping restlessly at the ground. 'I apologise for the delay,' he said.
'You can't help your father's illness. But that isn't the reason you're so tense, is it? I'm well aware that there is much you haven't told me, Macson. You're after more than just helping me sell a few books to the monks. You have an ambition of your own, something you want to achieve at Lindisfarena. Isn't that true? And in your meeting with me you saw a chance of achieving it.'
Macson grunted. 'Chance? If a man keeps pushing at a locked door until it falls open, would you call that chance? Yes, there is something I want at Lindisfarena. But perhaps there is a way you can profit too, Belisarius.'
He told Belisarius the story of Sulpicia, his ancestress, of how she had come to the north – 'somewhere along the line of the Wall, nobody remembers where, perhaps it was here' – and found herself caught up in a dispute between a Northman and a German over a strange document called 'the Menologium of Isolde'.
'You must remember that I am recounting family legends preserved by slaves – illiterate slaves at that. This Menologium was a prophecy of some kind. It belonged to an aged Briton. And it had already begun to prove itself, already come true. That's the crucial thing. Now, the Northman and the German fought. The Northman killed the old man, or it may have been the German, and the German raped Sulpicia, leaving her pregnant, or it may have been the Northman. Between them they stole the prophecy, and Sulpicia, abandoned and pregnant, left ruined, was forced to sell herself and her unborn child into slavery.'
Belisarius nodded. 'But this prophecy was not stolen from your ancestress. The wretched old man was the victim of this crime.'
'He was British, as was Sulpicia. Did she have no rights?'
It seemed to Belisarius a slight grudge to have been nursed over two centuries. But even slaves needed hope, it seemed.
Macson told him that the Menologium had been burnt, and its words had only survived at all by being committed to memory by the Northman and the German. After some generations a descendant of the German had been taken into the monastery at Lindisfarena with the Menologium in his head, and it was written down. And, with time, news of its preservation there had seeped back to the family of slaves who believed they had a right to it.
'So now you hope to reclaim it,' Belisarius said.
'There's every chance those chanting monks won't realise the value of what they have.' Macson glanced at Belisarius, calculating. 'And of course there may be profit to be made from it. For both of us.'
Such a curiosity, Belisarius conceded, would be of great value to the collectors of Constantinople, perhaps even in the emperor's court itself. The latter Romans, all good Christians, were just as fond of superstitions and oracles, omens and augers as their pagan ancestors.
Of course when they got their hands on this Menologium, if it existed at all, the manipulative Macson would think nothing of betraying Belisarius in order to keep any profit to himself. But Belisarius also had no doubt of his own ability to cope with such a situation when it arose.
That night Caradwc weakened. Macson came and said that the old man was asking for Belisarius. He longed to hear Belisarius talk of the holy sites he had visited.
So, in the light of a fire built in the ruins of Banna's headquarters building, Belisarius spoke of Bethlehem, where he had seen a grotto faced with marble, known to be the site of Jesus' birth. And he spoke of Jerusalem, where he had seen the hill of Golgotha, and the rock where the cross of Jesus had been raised, where now stood an immense silver cross and a bronze lamp-bearing wheel. And he spoke of a mighty church erected by the first Emperor Constantine, at the site where his mother Helena had discovered the True Cross.
'Helena, yes,' Caradwc whispered. 'The British always loved Helena…'
Those were the last words he spoke, and by the morning he was dead. With help from Belisarius his son buried him on the ridge that overlooked the river, his grave marked by a simple wooden cross.
X
Some days after her talk with Rhodri, as the whale-blubber candles burned smokily in the hall and the conversation rumbled contentedly, Gudrid approached her father with her suggestion that he should go back to Lindisfarena.
She wasn't surprised when he was sceptical.
'It might be fun to split open a few monkish heads,' Bjarni said. 'But it's not what we're going there for.'
'Then what?'
'Land. We need more land, Gudrid.'
Bjarni was a hefty man, with greying blond hair tied back from a high forehead, and a nose sharp as an axe blade. In his forty-five years he had done his share of fighting, but Gudrid knew that he had earned his muscles in building up his farms. He was not a natural raider, not bloodthirsty; he was embarking on this course of action for a wider purpose.
Bjarni was following in the footsteps of many of his elders. Like bees venturing from a hive, the ships of the Vikings were probing out of the overcrowded fjords. This was not directed by any king, for kings were weak in a land so divided by nature, but by the ambition of independent, wilful men. That probing was aimed not just at Britain and its islands but at the warmer lands further south, and even to the east, where huge rivers drained the heart of Asia, just as navigable by Viking ships as were the seas.