The magistrianos had to admit that had a certain logic to it. Dealing as they did with drugs and potions, apothecaries like Hilda were the next thing to magicians. And who would suspect a slip of a girl of being a spy? He hadn’t himself.
Covering his stab of jealousy, he said, “To St. Gall, then?” The Anglelanders nodded. He went off to saddle his horse, resigning himself to weeks and probably months in the company of barbarians. The journey was as wearing as he had expected: up the ancient Via Domitia across Franco-Saxon territory to Araus, the northwesternmost town in the reclaimed Roman province of Narbonese Gaul; then by boat north on the Rhodan to Vienne, and east along another one-time legionary highway to Agosta; from there by a lesser road, good only in summer, through the Pennine Alps; and then northeast to Tune and, after it, to St. Gall itself.
Long as the trip was, though, his companions made it fascinating in a way he had not expected. He sometimes found them so strange as almost to be from another world. The northerners he had known in Constantinople had been touched by Roman customs, and most did their best to ape them. Hilda and Wighard had none of that veneer.
They had not even come to Araus, for instance, when black, roiling, anvil-topped clouds blew toward them, whipped by a harsh wind from the Inner Sea. “Storm coming,” Argyros said.
“Aye,” Wighard said, hauling a rain cape out of his kit, “those’re Thor’s whiskers, right enough. I reckon the Thunderer’ll be busy tonight.”
The magistrianos had only gaped at him, too startled for speech. In the Empire, peasants in the countryside still clung to the vestiges of their old pagan cults, in spite of priests’ fuming. But Wighard was one of King Oswy’s personal retainers, a man of higher rank in his country than Argyros held in Constantinople. Yet he plainly took Thor as seriously as he did Christ and the saints. But then, to the Anglelanders there were no sharp dividing lines between everyday reality, rank superstition, and faith. Still uncomfortable with the notion of demons loose in the world, Argyros had scoffed at the idea while the travelers sat around a fire one evening, waiting for a couple of hares to finish roasting.
Wighard’s counterargument was of the “well, everyone knows” sort. Hilda, however, had what was by Anglelander standards a good education, and undertook a more reasoned reply. When she cited the Gadarene swine, Argyros conceded the point, but asked, “Is that truly meaningful today? I don’t expect another flood to wash us away in the fashion of Noah’s, or the sun to stand still in the sky as it did for Joshua.”
“Maybe not,” she said, “but evil spirits are known much later than in scriptural times. What of the nun who forgot to cross herself in the monastery garden and so swallowed a demon along with her lettuce?”
“That’s a new one on me,” the magistrianos said, hiding a smile. “Where did you learn it?”
“It’s in the writings of Pope Gregory the Great,” Hilda answered proudly.
“Oh.” Argyros thought of the jest about Pompey: great as compared to what? Gregory had been pope some time after the reign of Justinian, and the heretical northerners still made much of his thunderings about the ecclesiastical privileges that were rightfully the see of Rome’s. In imperial eyes he was chiefly remarkable for having spent some years in Constantinople without bothering to learn Greek, and for fawning on the repulsive tyrant Phokas after he overthrew the emperor Maurice and murdered him and his five sons.
Yet despite the Anglelanders’ rudeness of manner, the magistrianos came to value their company. Wighard might not have known his letters, but he had no trouble reading tracks. The snares he rigged from vines and branches rarely went empty, and he always knew what fish were likely to be in a stream. And Hilda, for all her credulity about demons, was skilled at her chosen craft. When Argyros’s back tightened up after long days in the saddle, she concocted a lotion from oil and various plants she searched out near their campsite: wild cucumber, centaury, fleawort, a couple of kinds of mint, and licorice root. Well rubbed in, it eased him remarkably.
The lotion’s success and the praises he showered on her for it broke the slight wall of reserve that had existed between them. He began to treat her as he would a well-born imperial lady of similar attractiveness, casually flirting, quoting the poets, and praising her with the fulsomeness of a practiced courtier.
Wighard found it all very funny, chuckling at each new sally. And Argyros took Hilda’s blushes and lowered eyes to mean what they would have from a woman of Constantinople: an invitation to continue. He had stayed celibate for nearly two years after Helen’s death and even thought of retreating into a monastery, but, as sorrow eased over time, the demands of his body showed that was not the proper course for him. He was inalterably of the world, and had to make the best of it. One morning while Wighard was out checking his traps, Hilda came back to camp from a nearby stream where she had just bathed. Her clothes molded themselves magnificently to her still-damp body. Catching his breath, the magistrianos murmured the famous tag from the Iliad. It meant nothing to Hilda, who knew no Greek. Argyros translated: “ ‘Small blame to the Trojans and strong-greaved Achaeans for suffering for a long time over such a woman.’ Homer was speaking of Helen, of course, but then he was not lucky enough to have met you.”
She flushed and stopped in confusion. Argyros had been on the road long enough to cloud his usually keen judgment. He strode forward and started to draw her into his arms. She kicked him in the shin, or tried to, for he slid his leg aside with the unconscious ease of a veteran warrior. She sprang away, fumbling for the small knife at her belt. Her eyes blazed as she spat out, “Did you take me for one of your loose Roman baggages, who lies down with a man at a whim?”
Since the answer to that was at least “maybe” if not “yes,” the magistrianos prudently evaded a direct reply. Instead he apologized with as smooth a tongue as he had formerly used to compliment Hilda. All the while he was thinking that the strict morality that Tacitus had mentioned in the early Germans was still depressingly alive among their descendants.
Tacitus had also spoken of German women as sharing armed combat with their men. Seeing Hilda standing at the ready with her dagger, Argyros decided he believed that too. His ardor quite cooled, he went about the business of breaking camp in thoughtful silence.
That afternoon, when Hilda had gone off into the bushes by the side of the road for a few minutes, Wighard leaned toward Argyros and said quietly, “As well for you that you stopped when you did.” He touched his bow.
“I daresay,” Argyros agreed with a raised eyebrow: evidently the famed Germanic chastity had more backing it up than mere moral force. “Still,” the magistrianos added a moment later, “we could do worse than resting in a town tonight.”
Wighard nodded, clapped him on the shoulder. “Aye, why not? Go off and get yourself a lively wench. You’ll be better for it, and we’ll all have less to worry about.”
A practical people, these Anglelanders, Argyros thought.
En route to St. Gall were several daughter monasteries patterned after the original foundation. The travelers lodged at more than one, both because they offered safe, comfortable shelter and to get to know them: they were all as like as so many peas in a pod. And why not? The pattern was a splendid success. A space only 480 by 640 feet formed a self-contained community for 270 men. Argyros did not agree with the doctrines espoused within St. Gall and the other western abbeys, but he could only admire the genius of the architects who had laid them out.
He passed himself off as a trader of amber with the pagan Lithuanians, calling himself Petro of Narbomart. The port on the Inner Sea was in the hands of the Franco-Saxons; he did not want to be known for an imperial. Yet Narbomart’s Latin dialect was close to that of Ispania, and easy for him to mimic. He could never have pretended to hail from northern Gallia. He could hardly follow that braying, nasal dialect, let alone hope to imitate it.