Osric glanced up and saw me. With a final angry yell at the dogs, he clambered over the side of the barge and squelched his way across the ooze to come to speak with me.
‘Didn’t expect you back so soon,’ he said. His legs were slathered to the knees with grey sludge.
‘Where’s Walo?’ I asked, dismounting.
Osric gestured upriver. ‘He’s gone ahead with a cart. Took the gyrfalcons with him.’
A sudden apprehension gripped me. ‘You didn’t let him go off on his own? Anything might happen.’
My friend was calm. ‘He’s training the birds. He does that every day. Says that they need exercise or they will lose condition. He’s got them flying on a length of line, and coming back to a lure. Besides, one of the barge men went with him, to find some oxen.’
‘They’ll need at least twenty,’ said Abram. He too had got down from his horse and was standing beside me.
Osric had begun scraping the mud off his legs with a twig. ‘The barge men say that we can rely on the flood tide only for another fifty miles or so. After that, we’ll have to haul and row the barge,’ he said.
In a language I did not understand, Abram called back to his servants waiting at a discreet distance. One of them slid from the saddle, handed the reins of his horse to a companion, unlaced a bundle attached to a pack saddle, and hurried forward with a small folding table.
As the servant opened up the table and set it firmly on the ground, I caught Osric’s eye. ‘Abram has been appointed as dragoman to our embassy,’ I explained.
Abram removed a leather tube from his own saddlebag, and extracted a scroll wound around two slim batons of polished wood. When the servant had withdrawn, he rolled the parchment from one baton to the next – it must have been thirty feet long at least – until he came to the section he wanted, then placed the scroll face up on the table. The parchment was sprinkled with tiny symbols carefully drawn and coloured. The most frequent symbol was a double-fronted house, its twin roofs coloured red. A number of oddly elongated dark brown shapes resembled thin loaves, and a few drawings looked like large stylized barns. Many symbols were linked, one to the next, by thin straight lines ruled in vermilion ink. Near these lines were written numerals in Roman script.
‘We are here,’ Abram said, placing a finger beside a double-fronted house. Next to it in small, neat lettering was written ‘Dorestadum’.
It was an itinerarium, a road map, something I had heard of but never seen until this moment. An itinerarium was greatly prized, and I doubted if even the royal archive in Aachen possessed such a treasure.
‘How far does your itinerarium extend?’ I enquired. I noted that Abram had taken care to reveal only a small portion of the scroll.
The dragoman rewarded my knowledge of the map’s name with a slight smile. ‘My people would not thank me if I told you. They spent generations in assembling the information it contains.’
He turned his attention back to the map. ‘Here we are, still close to Dorestad. This red line –’ his finger slid across the surface of the map – ‘is the route that the chancery in Aachen would have us take. Here we would leave the Rhine and continue along this next red line up through these mountain ranges marked in brown, and down into Italy, and finally to Rome.’ His finger came to rest on a symbol, larger and grander than the others. It showed a crowned man seated on a throne holding a sceptre and an orb. Clearly the pope.
Osric was quick. ‘Those numbers marked beside the road are the distances between the towns, I presume.’
‘Or the number of days’ travel required for each sector,’ answered the dragoman. He shot me a mischievous grin. ‘In Persia the distances are stated in parasangs, not miles.’
‘What are you proposing? ‘I asked. From where I stood I could see that the short wavy blue-green lines represented the course of rivers. Areas painted a dark green were the sea. Every feature was distorted and out of shape, stretched in some places, compressed in others, so as to fit on the scroll. It was not so much a map as a stylized diagram that showed what mattered to a traveller – the important locations and the distances in between.
Abram looked down at the diagram. ‘The further we proceed up the Rhine, the stronger the current will run against us. We cover less distance each day and risk reaching the Alpine passes when they are closed by snow.’
He traced a thin red line that went south-eastward. ‘I recommend that we leave the Rhine at the tidal limit and go by waggon along this road to a different river, the Rhone. That river flows in our favour.’