The travellers accepted, and followed Guthfrith. In the course of the journey Belisarius had learned that the Germans had an honourable tradition of hospitality, even in a country not yet fully controlled by its kings, where people were wary of strangers. Of course it always helped to grease the axle of this old tradition of generosity with a couple of silver coins.
The hut's smoky interior was dark, although the skin doors were tied back on this bright summer day. The floor was dirt-strewn, and the planks laid over the storage pits underneath creaked softly as Belisarius stepped across them.
Remarkably, Guthfrith's home had been built around the trunk of a tree, a dark pillar at the centre of the floor. Some of the tree's branches, leafless and scorched over the hearth, showed beneath the thatched roof, and grimy tokens of cloth and hay strands dangled from its twigs.
Guthfrith sat the two of them in a dark corner and fetched them tankards of gritty ale, wooden bowls full of a kind of shellfish broth, and slabs of bread that felt harder than the wood of the bowls. This was the staple food of the farmers, and Belisarius knew the drill. You dipped your bread into your soup to soften it, and worked on it with your teeth until you could chew a little off. The soup, made with a little precious animal stock and laced with sea brine, was thick and salty, but flavoursome.
Guthfrith apologised for this fare. 'The hungry months are coming.'
Belisarius understood, and waved away his apologies. With the winter store long gone, and the first crops of the year needed for the animals, the villagers had to wait until late summer for the harvest – so summer, a time of nature's bounty, was paradoxically hard for the farmers. If things went wrong there could be famine.
But not today. His food heavy in his belly, and with Macson telling tall tales of their journey, Belisarius excused himself and wandered around the hut.
He came to a woman cutting dried meat. She used her teeth to anchor the meat as she cut away bits of fat. A dog sniffed at her feet, hoping for scraps. She smiled at Belisarius – her teeth were white and even, oddly beautiful in her grimy face – said something he didn't quite understand, and he smiled back and moved on.
In another corner an old man tended a girl, who lay ill in bed. Swathed in a woollen blanket, stick-thin, she might have been fourteen, or younger. Her eyes were closed, but she was coughing, and Belisarius discreetly stood back so he wasn't splashed by her spittle. At least it didn't look like the yellow plague, or worse leprosy, which was remarkably common in Britain. The old man wiped her brow with a moist cloth, prodding at the leeches which clung to her bare flesh, fat with blood.
'What's wrong with her?' Belisarius asked softly, in his best German.
The man cocked his hand behind one ear. Perhaps he was a little deaf. 'Elf-shot,' he said. 'Elf-shot.'
The old man showed Belisarius how he was trying to tend to the girl, with the leeches, murmured prayers, and a bit of oddly shaped wood which dangled from a rope above the old man's head. It was a wooden peg from a wagon-axle; it had come from a wagon which had once carted a venerable domnus from the monastery to his grave, and was said to have healing powers. Britain was studded with sacred sites and magic and miracles, and tokens like this.
'She is praying to God,' the old man managed to say. He grinned at Belisarius, and the Greek saw, to his astonishment, something moving, wriggling out of the corner of the man's own eye. It was the head of a maw worm. The Germans were so fantastically ignorant about medicine, their only remedies to most ailments a prayer or a charm, that it was a surprise to Belisarius that any of them survived at all.
Belisarius bowed, wished the girl well, and withdrew.
Outside the hut he wandered around the slumped wooden houses. The only sounds were the voices of the people, the songs of birds, and the hiss of a blacksmith's bellows. There only seemed to be one plough team in the village, but it would work for everybody, in return for other services rendered in turn. Nobody in this country was free, exactly, it seemed to him; everybody owed allegiance to somebody more powerful – in this case no doubt the abbot of the monastery. But the kings were remote enough not to interfere very often, and everybody was bound up in a web of obligations and mutual help. Sometimes Belisarius envied the sturdy certainty of this society, though he had no ambition to live his whole life with hunger held at bay only by a relentless cycle of work.
At length Belisarius met Guthfrith, who was cutting wood. In Belisarius's uncertain German they spoke of the weather and the prospects for the harvest, and Guthfrith showed Belisarius the wood he was working. Ash made the best firewood throughout the year: birch burned too quickly, and elm was too waterlogged to give much heat. Oak was kept piled up to dry out for the winter; its logs burned slowly and well. Hawthorn was best for oven fuel, and lime was a poor burner but useful for carving. Alder was good for making charcoal. In the olden days, Guthfrith said, you wouldn't burn elder indoors because it was infested by the Hag Goddess, and you wouldn't want her in your house…
To Belisarius, wood was wood. He was glimpsing the mind of a man whose ancestors had lived off forests, to whom the tree was sacred, the connection between earth and sky, and in its patient longevity the repository of all wisdom. The consciousness of this German, whose ancestors had had no contact with the Roman empire, was quite alien, he thought, unlike the Goths and Vandals who had occupied the continental provinces. It was fascinating, and Belisarius determined to remember as much as he could for his memoir.
Macson came up. 'I think I've found our guide to the monastery,' he said dryly. He raised his finger to his lips for silence, and led the way to one of the huts.
In the doorway a couple lay with their legs in the sun, their heads and shoulders in the shade. The man lay on top. He wore a black habit, hitched up over his waist, and his white arse bobbed up and down like a rabbit's tail. The woman lay back passively, her eyes unfocused. She had the look of a slave.
It wasn't the first time Belisarius had seen such behaviour among the Germans. Masters commonly copulated with their slave girls in the open, even when they were trying to sell them in the markets of Brycgstow. But as Macson murmured, 'This is not an approved monkish custom, I don't think. But I wouldn't be surprised if this village is full of little tonsured bastards.'
At last, with a shudder of his white thighs, the monk spent himself and rolled off. The girl lay for a moment, her legs splayed, her tunic stained with his sweat. Then she stood, straightened her clothes, and immediately trudged off to the fields.
Macson stepped forward. 'You must be deacon Elfgar.'
The monk opened his eyes, startled. He jumped up, pulling his habit down over his limp cock. 'God be with you,' he murmured in Latin, sweating.
XII
Boniface had a novice called Aelfric serve Belisarius and Macson a little wine. It was at the express permission of the abbot; otherwise the brothers only took wine with their noon meal, the prandium, on Sundays.
'We live according to the guidance of Saint Benedict,' said Dom Boniface in his heavily accented Latin. 'The rules are elaborate, but at their heart are simple principles. Our waking hours are devoted to the Work of God, the Work of the Body, and the Work of the Mind.' Opus Dei, Opus Manuum, Lectio Divina. 'And as far as possible we inhabit the Great Silence, listening only to the echo of our own souls, and the Thoughts of God…'
They sat in the monastery's small library, a nest of books, scrolls and bound parchments heaped up on shelving. The only light came from oil lamps. There was a smell of old leather and sour ink – although that was to be preferred to the seven varieties of shit that greeted the nose in the average German village.
The only other person in the room was this young novice who served the wine, Aelfric, a slight, oval-faced youth. Macson could hardly keep his eyes off Aelfric's smooth neck – but he was obviously confused by his own reaction. Belisarius understood what was going on, but decided mischievously he would let Macson suffer a little before putting him out of his misery.
And Aelfric, though the novice scarcely said two words, seemed fascinated in turn by Belisarius, a man of the Roman east. The Greek recognised a deep curiosity in her.
Deacon Elfgar had brought them to the monastery in the middle of the afternoon. They had been welcomed by the abbot, who promised to look over Belisarius's stock of books for sale – but not until the end of the monastery's day. While Macson retired to a cell and slept, the death of his father still weighing on him, Belisarius
