They halted in front of us, barring our way. The priest was an old man, so bony and shrunken with age that his threadbare gown hung loose upon him. His face was deeply lined and only a few wisps of grey hair surrounded his tonsure. He regarded us with a mixture of curiosity and mild suspicion. He had lost most of his teeth so he mumbled as he spoke. It hardly mattered. I did not understand what he was saying, only that he was asking a question, and his tone was not hostile.
‘We would welcome your help,’ I said in Latin.
He looked at me in surprise, as I did not have the appearance of someone with an education.
‘The lad tells me that you came out of a small boat,’ he said, switching to the same language.
‘We’re travelling to the court of the Frankish king,’ I replied.
Again he looked surprised.
‘I supposed you are shipwrecked mariners or perhaps pilgrims. We sometimes see pilgrims from across the water, on their way to Rome.’
‘We had to abandon ship,’ I lied.
I was met with a puzzled look.
‘There has been no storm.’
‘A fire on board,’ I invented hastily. ‘The cook was careless. The other passengers and crew got away in another boat. If you could set us on our way, I would be grateful.’
The old priest hesitated, looking uncertain.
‘Carolus, our king, could be in any of a dozen places. He has no fixed residence.’
It was my turn to be taken aback. I had imagined the great ruler of the Franks to be living in a splendid palace in a settled capital, not wandering from place to place like a nomad. Life would be more difficult if Osric and I had to go searching his vast kingdom to catch up with him.
‘But most likely he is at Aachen in this season,’ said the priest. ‘He is engaged in building works there, an extraordinary project I understand.’
‘Then perhaps you could tell me the best way there, and how far we must travel,’ I said.
‘What about your boat? Will you be leaving it behind?’
I guessed that the priest considered a small boat to be an item of considerable value.
‘I will be glad if you accept the boat as a thankgift. I have no further use for it,’ I said magnanimously.
The priest glanced at Osric standing crookedly a pace behind me.
‘You will need the permission of my abbot if you and your companion are to go any further.’
He spoke a few words to the boy. Doubtless he was telling him to go to the beach and secure the boat before it drifted off for the lad scampered away over the dunes.
‘Come with me!’ he said, ‘There’s a village nearby where you can rest. Tomorrow we will go on to the monastery and meet the abbot.’
We squelched along the footpath which wound through the reed beds. The priest led the way, splashing through the puddles. The ragged hem of his gown was dark and sodden. We skirted several large ponds, their dark brown water still and silent. I shivered at the memory of my brother’s death.
‘My name is Lothar,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘You were fortunate that I was in the area when you arrived, or no one would have understood you – they speak their own local dialect. The village belongs to my monastery and is a very poor place. The families live by fishing and by collecting whatever is cast up along the shoreline.’
From his tone of voice I gathered that he was still not fully convinced that Osric and I were genuine castaways.
‘I didn’t see any fishing harbour,’ I said.
‘The coast here is too exposed to heavy winter storms. The villagers keep their boats in a river mouth nearby, and in bad weather they net the inland ponds.’ He could no longer restrain his curiosity. ‘Where did you learn to speak Latin so well?’
‘My father arranged for a priest to teach me.’ I did not say that the priest had been on the run. Bertwald was being pursued by the Church for theft and had arrived with his mistress in tow, a wild-looking slattern with a dramatic bush of wiry, auburn hair. My father, who believed in the Old Ways, took pleasure in giving shelter to a renegade from a religion for which he had no use. Bertwald had stayed with us for nearly ten years, with little to do except breed children and instruct me, his only pupil. Together he and Osric had been the two great influences of my growing up and I was only just beginning to appreciate how good a teacher Bertwald had been. Besides Latin, he had taught me how to read and write and even some grammar and logic. When he was drunk he would boast about the importance of the foundation to which he had once belonged. He’d claimed it had its own school and a library with fifty books. But in the end his loose talk undid him. One of our local Christians betrayed him to his former bishop and he had left as hastily as he had arrived.