Karus said, ‘Brigonius, think of a tapestry. Woven into it are pictures of trees, say, all in their different stages of growth: seeds, saplings, young, mature, old, fallen, decayed away. They are all there all at the same time in the weave, you see. Now, you are an ant running along one thread in the tapestry. And as you run you let your eyes slide over the pictures of the young trees and the old, and you connect them up in your head - and instead of seeing many trees of different ages, you imagine you see only one tree, growing and dying and rotting away. You see? A moving image derived from stasis, passing time derived from eternity.’

Brigonius frowned. ‘I think I follow.’

Annius asked, ‘So does all this mean that the future can speak to the past?’

Karus laughed. ‘If you ask the right question of the right god, perhaps it can! Perhaps time really is a tapestry, its threads all our lives. And somewhere there really is a Weaver, god or man, who sees all, past and future in a glance - and who can, with a few deft plucks, change the pattern of the weave, adjust history, and alter all our lives. But there is always the question of purpose. If the Weaver seeks to perturb history - why, and to what end?’

None of them had an answer to this.

Tullio made an obvious and kindly effort to include Lepidina. ‘What of your Christian god, lady? What does He have to say about time and destiny?’

Lepidina said mildly, ‘Jesus was God made human. What He had to say to us concerns the way we live our lives. The way we think about each other. He had nothing to say about philosophies of time.’

Karus said, ‘Ah, but if I understand your mythology right, Jesus’s own life was time-bound, unlike the gods of the past, and it marked a great disjunction in history. He was the God made man, and in His life and His murder He redeemed mankind.’

Xander raised his eyebrows. ‘So Jesus is an intervening god, like the gods of Olympus of old. I thought we were done with them! And He was murdered? How?’

‘By the Romans,’ Lepidina said. ‘The governor of Judea had Him put down as a rebel.’

Tullio said gruffly, ‘I knew a man, who knew a man, who knew your Christ.’

Lepidina’s eyes widened. ‘You did?’