‘I try to follow the dietary laws of my faith,’ Abram replied. ‘Fortunately, Radhanites are allowed broad dispensation due to our wandering way of life.’
He turned in the saddle to check on our little pack train, and I stole a sideways glance at my companion. He rode well, his handsome face alert as he watched the passing traffic.
‘Alcuin told me about the constant wayfaring, but that’s almost all he knew about your people.’
The dragoman showed no sign of resentment of my probing. ‘We originated in Mesopotamia many centuries ago, according to one theory. Others say that we came out of Persia.’
‘What do you believe?’
‘Under the present circumstances I prefer Persia. In that country’s language “rah” means a path and “dan” is one who knows. So a Radhanite is “one who knows the way”.’
‘Then Persian is one of those dozen languages that Alcuin said you speak.’
He acknowledged the compliment with a graceful shrug. ‘Once you’ve acquired six or seven languages, the rest come easily.’
‘I’ve yet to reach that stage.’
‘So Frankish is not your mother tongue?’ He regarded me with polite interest.
I shook my head. ‘No, I grew up speaking Saxon. I learned Latin as a child, Frankish and Arabic later.’
‘Then, like me, you are a wanderer.’
‘Not by choice,’ I admitted, and found myself confiding to him how Offa had forced me into exile.
He heard me out, his expression turning to one of sympathy. When I finished I realized that instead of learning more about Abram, it was the reverse.
‘Is there anything about our mission that worries you?’ I asked him, hoping to divert the conversation back to what I had intended.
‘Getting the animals across the Alps before the first snowfall of winter,’ he said, guiding his horse around a deep rut in the road surface.
‘The ice bears would enjoy seeing some snow,’ I said cheerfully. I was relaxed and carefree, happy at the thought that I had a dragoman to recommend how far to travel each day, where to spend the night and find our food.
‘You might consider taking a different route, avoiding the mountains entirely.’ He made the suggestion diffidently.
‘The royal chancery decided we go by river barge along the Rhine as far as possible. At some stage we’ll shift the animals onto carts and haul them over the mountain passes.’
Abram sighed. ‘The Arabs have a saying: “Only a madman or a Christian sails against the wind.” It seems that a Christian also chooses to travel against the current.’
‘Is there an alternative?’
‘You could use the river Rhone instead . . . and have the current help you.’
I wondered if this was an excuse for Abram to be among his own people. Alcuin had said that the Radhanites in Frankia clustered along the Rhone. ‘Let’s see how far Osric and Walo have already taken the animals along the Rhine before we change our plans,’ I replied cautiously.
*
The sound alerted me three days later – a familiar yowling and yapping. The noise came from the direction of a low ridge that ran parallel to the highway, the width of a field away. We turned aside and when we topped the slope, found ourselves on the crest of an artificial earth embankment built to protect the neighbouring fields from flood. In front of us was the broad river, and we were looking down on a barge firmly stuck on a shoal a few yards out. The two ice bears were in their cage at one end of the vessel. The aurochs occupied a larger, heavier cage at the opposite end. The dogs were tethered between them, tied to a thick rope. They were jumping up and down, quarrelling and lunging at one another, tangling their leashes, and ignoring Osric’s shouts of exasperation. Walo was nowhere to be seen. Closer at hand, standing on the muddy foreshore, was a huddle of what I took to be the barge men. They looked disgruntled and mutinous.
Osric glanced up and saw me. With a final angry yell at the dogs, he clambered over the side of the barge and squelched his way across the ooze to come to speak with me.
‘Didn’t expect you back so soon,’ he said. His legs were slathered to the knees with grey sludge.
‘Where’s Walo?’ I asked, dismounting.
Osric gestured upriver. ‘He’s gone ahead with a cart. Took the gyrfalcons with him.’
A sudden apprehension gripped me. ‘You didn’t let him go off on his own? Anything might happen.’
My friend was calm. ‘He’s training the birds. He does that every day. Says that they need exercise or they will lose condition. He’s got them flying on a length of line, and coming back to a lure. Besides, one of the barge men went with him, to find some oxen.’
‘They’ll need at least twenty,’ said Abram. He too had got down from his horse and was standing beside me.
Osric had begun scraping the mud off his legs with a twig. ‘The barge men say that we can rely on the flood tide only for another fifty miles or so. After that, we’ll have to haul and row the barge,’ he said.
In a language I did not understand, Abram called back to his servants waiting at a discreet distance. One of them slid from the saddle, handed the reins of his horse to a companion, unlaced a bundle attached to a pack saddle, and hurried forward with a small folding table.
As the servant opened up the table and set it firmly on the ground, I caught Osric’s eye. ‘Abram has been appointed as dragoman to our embassy,’ I explained.
Abram removed a leather tube from his own saddlebag, and extracted a scroll wound around two slim batons of polished wood. When the servant had withdrawn, he rolled the parchment from one baton to the next – it must have been thirty feet long at least – until he came to the section he wanted, then placed the scroll face up on the table. The parchment was sprinkled with tiny symbols carefully drawn and coloured. The most frequent symbol was a double-fronted house, its twin roofs coloured red. A number of oddly elongated dark brown shapes resembled thin loaves, and a few drawings looked like large stylized barns. Many symbols were linked, one to the next, by thin straight lines ruled in vermilion ink. Near these lines were written numerals in Roman script.
‘We are here,’ Abram said, placing a finger beside a double-fronted house. Next to it in small, neat lettering was written ‘Dorestadum’.
It was an itinerarium, a road map, something I had heard of but never seen until this moment. An itinerarium was greatly prized, and I doubted if even the royal archive in Aachen possessed such a treasure.
‘How far does your itinerarium extend?’ I enquired. I noted that Abram had taken care to reveal only a small portion of the scroll.
The dragoman rewarded my knowledge of the map’s name with a slight smile. ‘My people would not thank me if I told you. They spent generations in assembling the information it contains.’
He turned his attention back to the map. ‘Here we are, still close to Dorestad. This red line -’ his finger slid across the surface of the map – ‘is the route that the chancery in Aachen would have us take. Here we would leave the Rhine and continue along this next red line up through these mountain ranges marked in brown, and down into Italy, and finally to Rome.’ His finger came to rest on a symbol, larger and grander than the others. It showed a crowned man seated on a throne holding a sceptre and an orb. Clearly the pope.
Osric was quick. ‘Those numbers marked beside the road are the distances between the towns, I presume.’
‘Or the number of days’ travel required for each sector,’ answered the dragoman. He shot me a mischievous grin. ‘In Persia the distances are stated in parasangs, not miles.’
‘What are you proposing? ‘I asked. From where I stood I could see that the short wavy blue-green lines represented the course of rivers. Areas painted a dark green were the sea. Every feature was distorted and out of shape, stretched in some places, compressed in others, so as to fit on the scroll. It was not so much a map as a stylized diagram that showed what mattered to a traveller – the important locations and the distances in between.