The dark man closed his hand around the rod. There was a gruesome sizzling sound, and a smell like burned pork. The men in the church, perhaps this victim’s accusers, flinched and turned away. But the dark man stood defiant, glaring at them, holding the bar aloft with his smoking hand. Admirably, he made no sound. Then he marked out paces, counting deliberately, walking between the two lines of men. After nine paces he opened his hand. The metal stuck to his burned flesh, pulling it away from his palm, before the rod dropped to the floor with a clatter.

The priest wrapped the wounded hand in a grubby cloth. The accusers, solemn, began to file out of the church. Belisarius understood little of the ragged tongues spoken by the Germans, but he picked out one phrase, intoned gravely by the priest: ‘Three days.’

And when the dark man walked out of the church, to Belisarius’s dismay, he approached the Greek directly. He looked perhaps thirty, and his small face was dominated by thick black eyebrows that underlined a low forehead. He was smaller than Belisarius, his clothes might once have been smart but were now much repaired and shabby, and he was pale and slick with sweat. He raised his bandaged hand, and said in accented Latin: ‘My name is Macson. I know you.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t—’

‘Help me.’ And he fainted dead away, crumpling at Belisarius’s feet.

IV

IV

Gudrid had always been fascinated by the old family legend of her ancestor Ulf the Wanderer and Sulpicia, the British girl he had loved and lost, and the strange prophecy of the Roman Christ-god which Ulf had remembered - and then forgot, and so, in a way, lost too. Perhaps it was because her own life was so drab that she was drawn to a tale of doomed love in the past.

But it was not until the chance arrival of a British slave that she had the opportunity to do anything about it.

She was working alone that day, in a patch of forest high above the fjord. The trees here had already been felled, and Gudrid’s job was to strip away branches from the trunks, which would then be hauled down the hill. She worked with a will, and the iron blade of her axe, coated with whale-oil, flashed as she drove it into the wood. She was twenty years old, tall and strong. This wasn’t a woman’s work - but then, as her husband Askold had once told her in his cruelly indifferent way, a wife who had failed to deliver a single son was barely a woman at all.

Anyhow she liked the slog. It was like rowing or running, hard work that made your sweat break out and your lungs pump, and dissolved your thoughts, your doubts and worries and fears.