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 comer 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.