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

VI