And this was May. The weather on this northern island was warmer than Belisarius had expected, and the greenery of the farmers’ fields and the leaves of the forests, if stunted compared to the richness of the Mediterranean, the heart of the world, was pleasing to the eye. Unexpected, too, was the length of the days, which faded only subtly to dark, such was the northern latitude of the island.

It was a peculiar countryside for a former province of Rome. The hovel-like settlements of the Germans were everywhere. They could be close to the road, but never near a crossroads, for Macson, with some contempt, said the Germans were superstitious of crossroads, junction places where demons could escape. Sheep ran all over the place, and pigs rooted in forest patches. The animals looked small to Belisarius’s eye; the pigs were long-legged, sharp-snouted, wild-looking. The Germans did not husband their animals as one did in the east - or indeed as the Romans once had here in Britain. Rather they let them run more or less wild, and harvested the slow and old in the autumn.

Many of the fields and common spaces were studded by crosses of stone, carved with intricate vine-like designs. Macson said these had been left by Christian missionaries, working their way out across Britain from Augustine’s first landing site in the east. Though with time parish churches were being built, the first missionaries had set up these crosses as a place for their raw new German Christians to worship.

But if the Germans’ religion was evident, so was their brutal justice. From a gibbet hung a desiccated corpse, upside down, suspended by its ankles. Macson said that this method of execution was particularly favoured by King Offa, who had used it on many of his own unruly relatives. It must have been a slow and gruesome way to die.

And they passed abandoned Roman towns, where the fire-scorched ruins of offices and shops and bath-houses rose out of choked greenery. The British had sustained these towns long after the withdrawal of formal Roman rule, but the German immigrants had shunned them, preferring their own architectures of wood and earth. Indeed in some places the Germans had killed the towns, by stopping up their wells with rubble. To Belisarius, who had grown up among the enduring splendours of Constantinople, these bowls of rubble were a poignant sight. What a fragile barque was civilisation, battered by paganism, ignorance and plague.

Macson said, ‘The Germans have a notion they call wyrd. Like fate - but vaguer, more entangling. They believe the Romans were brought low because they had desecrated the god-throttled landscape, because it was their time to go - because of wyrd. Now the Germans are building their own kingdoms. But they believe they must live well, or wyrd will do for them in their turn.’ ‘I thought the Germans were Christians now. What are they doing entertaining such pagan ideas?’