Amid this cheerful gaggle, a man came striding out to greet them. He was tall but spare, with a streak of grey in his dirty blond hair; he was perhaps in his mid-thirties. He wore a luxuriant moustache, and a necklace of shell and stone. Further away Belisarius saw other men and women watching them with a cautious curiosity. Belisarius, like Macson, made sure his hands were visible at all times.

‘My name is Guthfrith,’ the man said. ‘You’ve travelled far, I can see that. Are you here for the monks?’

‘We are.’

Guthfrith said that one of the monks was here in the village this morning - a ‘deacon’ called Elfgar, here to collect shellfish for the monastery. Though he shouted for this Elfgar, he wasn’t to be seen, and Guthfrith gruffly invited the travellers to rest in his own home.

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 comer 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.