‘I never heard of a prophecy so, so, what’s the word? Specific. Did you, Tull? Usually it’s a business of poking around with leaves and entrails and getting a few portents of doom that could mean anything. This is different. It’s not like the gods are setting us their usual puzzles. It’s more like a man is speaking to us. It’s as if somebody in the future knew what was going to happen, wrote it down and sent it back into the past.’

Lepidina said, ‘My mother calls him “the Weaver” - or her - the author of the Prophecy.’

‘Ah,’ Xander said, intrigued. ‘But is that possible in any of our philosophies? Do we allow even the gods to know the future - or to change the past?’

Karus said dryly, ‘If the legionaries hadn’t nailed them all to their sacred trees on Mona it would be interesting to ask a druidh such a question. I know they spoke of a continual exchange of spirits between our world and the Other, but each of our spirits is embedded in time. So I think questions of the existence of the future, or meddling with the past, would be meaningless to them.’

‘But in Greece,’ said Xander loftily, ‘rather more sophisticated notions have been developed.’

‘Here we go,’ Tullio growled. ‘More “sophisticated” horse crap.’ He snapped his fingers to have the boy refill their cups.

Xander went on, unperturbed, ‘For instance there is the notion of the Eternal Return, in which time is cyclic, and every event is doomed to recur over and again, without limit. This troubled Aristotle, who wondered about causality in a universe in which he existed as much after the fall of Troy as before it. But I suppose you could indeed influence the “past” by ensuring a message about it lasted long enough to reach its recurrence in the “future” ...’

‘And what about eternity?’ Karus cried, sounding a little drunk. ‘I thought you Greeks had plenty to say about that, Xander.’

‘And some Romans,’ Xander said mildly. ‘Eternity: a mode of existence in which all events, past and future, coexist. Lucretius argued that duration is a mere product of the mind, for eternity is the higher reality through which we move, you see, and motion gives the impression of change. But of course Lucretius was merely developing older ideas of the Epicureans. And Plato long ago said that our perception of time is a “moving image of eternity”, again foreshadowing Lucretius—’

Brigonius struggled to understand this. ‘So eternity is like - like what?’