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The hawk in the air was free. So was Cerdic. Even if the question of the new god was not just an excuse for him to turn from her – and she was sure that this was all it was – it made no difference. Something had passed within him. He had taken the step away from her into freedom, and once that was done, nature, cruel but inevitable, would take over. Even if I give in now, she thought, in another year or two he’ll find some other excuse. Or he’ll keep me, but take younger wives as well. I shall be crushed, just like that bird in the falcon’s claws. Not because Cerdic is cruel, but because, like the falcon, he cannot help it.

That was
Wyrd
. She knew it with all the ancient, pagan wisdom of the Nordic gods.

What should she do then? Refuse to give in. After all, if she were cast off for her loyalty to the gods, at least there was dignity in it. As she looked up to the hawk descending from the clear blue sky, she inwardly uttered the cry of married women down the ages: If I cannot have love, at least leave me my dignity.

As they rode home that day, she contented herself with urging Wistan once more: “Whatever happens, promise me you will obey your father.” More she would not say.

Offa was still full of plans, but he too had met an obstacle – in his wife.

When he had been at Lundenwic ten days, Wistan and one of his brothers had taken a boat upstream to collect supplies from a farmstead a few miles away, and Offa had gone with them. He had been delighted with what he saw. Soon after leaving the bend by the ford, the left and right banks broke up into a system of marshy islands.

“That’s Chalk Island on the right,” Wistan had told him. Except that in Anglo-Saxon, in which “island” was rendered “eye”, the words “Chelch Eye” made a sound roughly like “Chelsea”. “Opposite is Badric’s Island.” This time “Badric’s Eye” came out roughly as “Battersea”. Everywhere along the marshy banks of the Thames, Offa discovered, there were more of these
eyes
and the even smaller islands, mud flats really, known as
eyots
.

There were already numerous tiny settlements, a farm here, a hamlet there. These, too, bore characteristic Saxon names with endings like -
ham
for a hamlet, -
ton
for a farm, and -
hythe
, meaning a harbour. Soon after passing Chalk Island, Wistan had again pointed to the north bank, where smoke was rising above the trees. “That’s Fulla’s-ham,” he explained. “And up there,” he pointed to a higher spot a couple of miles north, “there’s Kensing’s-ton.”

But what had impressed Offa most, as they progressed upstream, was the lush richness of the land. Behind marsh and mud flat he saw meadowland, pasture and, further off, gentle slopes. “Does the land continue far like this?” he cautiously asked Wistan.

“Yes,” came the reply. “Pretty much all the way to the river’s source, I believe.”

When they had returned that night, therefore, he had said to Ricola: “When you feel ready, I think we could run away. Upriver. The living is good there. If we go far enough I’m sure someone will take us in.”

But here, to his surprise, Ricola had flatly opposed him.

Though she was still very young, Offa had already noticed in his wife a cheery independence of spirit that he found attractive. She had established a light-hearted banter with the men. Once, to his horror, she had even made a disrespectful remark to the foreman, but with such good humour that he had just shaken his head and smiled. “She doesn’t put up with any nonsense, that one,” the men laughed.

He had assumed, therefore, that she would be as anxious as he was for freedom. But he was wrong.

“You must be mad,” she told him. “What do you want to go wandering through the forest for? So we can be eaten by the wolves?”

“It isn’t forest,” he countered. “Not like Essex.”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“But we’re just slaves here,” he protested.

“So what? We eat well.”

“But don’t you want to be free?” he demanded.

And now she truly surprised him. “Not much,” she said. Then, seeing his astonishment: “What does it mean? We were free in the village and they would have drowned me with that snake.” She shuddered at the memory. “Run away from here and we aren’t free anyway. We’re outlaws. Frankly,” she smiled, “being a slave here isn’t so bad. Is it?”

Of course, he could not deny that her earthy practicality was right. In a way. But though the young fellow could not have expressed himself in abstract terms, the notion of independence acted powerfully upon him. It was something as primordial as the need for a fish to swim about in the sea.

“I don’t want to be a slave,” he said simply, but for the time being they discussed the matter no more.

In the meantime, he soon found something else to occupy his mind. A few days after the trip upriver, some of the men went across to the little promontory on the southern bank to do some fishing. As he had worked hard, Offa was allowed to go too.

It proved to be an excellent place for fishing. Jutting well out into the flow of the Thames, the spit had enough bushes and small trees to give the fishermen cover so that they could set nets in the water and throw out baited lines. Under the clear surface, Offa could see the silvery fish gliding about. However, the sight that really attracted his attention lay over the water. There before him, no longer masked by trees, lay the huge, ruined citadel that had been Londinium.

It was a remarkable sight. Although the riverside wall built by the city’s last inhabitants had badly crumbled, the original, landside wall was still standing, and within this great enclosure, across the twin hills, lay the ghostly ruins.

“A strange place,” one of the men remarked, following his gaze. “They say it was built by giants.”

Offa said nothing. He knew better.

That Offa should know more than these Saxons about the Roman city was not surprising. Only four generations had passed since his family had left the deserted city. And though neither he nor his father had had more than the vaguest conception of what such a city might look like, he had always known that it was huge and contained splendid buildings of stone. He also knew something else. True, it was only a family legend, and like most oral folklore it was a tantalizing mixture of the vague and the precise. But for three centuries, this simple and fascinating piece of information had been passed down from father to son.

“My grandfather always said,” Offa’s father had told him, “that there are two hills in the great city. And on the western hill, there’s buried gold. A huge treasure.”

“Where on the hill?” Offa had asked.

“Near the top,” he said. “But no one could ever find it.”

Now, directly before him, lay the city, with its two hills.

While the men were fishing, he took the boat and slipped across.

Londinium had been empty for more than a century, but its crumbling walls, with their red, horizontal stripes, were still huge and impressive. The two western gateways remained intact. Between them, at various points along the wall, mighty bastions jutted out. Behind, looming over the summit of the nearer hill, the great stone circle of the amphitheatre, which now had a jagged breach in its side, stood against the sky like a surly sentinel, as though to say: Rome has departed only for a day. She will return. The stream on the western side now bore a Saxon name – the Fleet – though further up they called it the Holebourne. Walking up the slope, he passed through the gateway.

Into a ghost city. Before him stretched the broad Roman thoroughfare, now covered with grass and moss, so that his footfalls fell silently. The Saxons, having no understanding of Londinium, had left the place alone. But they passed across it from time to time, and even drove cattle through, and as a result, upon the ancient pattern of the two great east–west thoroughfares and the grid of streets and alleys between, a new and more rustic pattern had been imposed. As far as possible, this series of cattle tracks and pathways led directly across the ruined city from one gateway to another, but because they frequently encountered obstacles, such as the huge circle of the amphitheatre, they had come to form a winding pattern, full of bends and curious turns that would seem strange and illogical once their Roman causes had vanished.

He had the whole place to himself. He briefly visited the high ground by the city’s south-eastern corner, but, encountering the ravens, quickly withdrew. For no special reason, he followed the rivulet that ran between the twin hills to where it passed under the city’s northern wall, and, climbing the parapet, observed that due to the Roman ducts under the wall having silted up, a great marsh had formed on the wasteland along the city’s northern side.

Climbing down to the quay again, one thing puzzled him. The silent waters of the river came over the edge of the ruined quays which seemed meant to have been set higher. Could the city, over time, have sunk or the river grown higher?

His observation in fact was perfectly correct. Two dynamics had been at work to produce this phenomenon. The first was that even now the Arctic ice-cap, extended by the last Ice Age, was continuing to melt, causing the sea, and hence all water levels, to rise gently. The second was that in the huge march of the Earth’s geological plates, the south-eastern side of the island of Britain was being tilted very gradually downward into the sea. The combined effect of these factors meant that the level of the Thames near its estuary was rising approximately nine inches each century. Since his ancestor Julius had forged his coins in the year 250, the river had risen some two and a half feet.

“But where’s that gold?” he demanded aloud, as though the empty city might tell him.

He had investigated the puzzling remains of the Temple of Mithras, returned to the forum, and then taken the upper of the two great thoroughfares across the city towards the western hill. He had walked along ruined colonnades, gazed at tumble-down houses with trees growing through where windows had once been, poked his head into alleys filled with bushes as though the disposition of these relics might give him a clue as to where the treasure lay. Several times he had closed his eyes, muttered a prayer to Woden, and turned in a circle, hoping the god might point him in the right direction.

Men use divining rods to find water, he said to himself now. Perhaps you can divine gold underground the same way. But what kind of rods would do it? For an hour and more he tramped around before the light began to fade. “But I’ll come back another day,” he muttered. And another. After all, it was something to do. Besides, he never gave up. He decided, however, to say nothing about his quest, even to Ricola.

And so, at Lundenwic, they came towards the end of
Haligmonath
, the holy month.

Another reason why Ricola was unwilling to leave was that she was becoming attached to her mistress.

Perhaps it was because the girl was a new face, or because she had suffered misfortune, or because Elfgiva had always wanted a daughter, but whatever the reason, the older woman took a liking to Ricola. She would often summon her on some pretext, sometimes only to sit with her, but often to braid her hair or brush it, for which the girl had a talent. And Ricola was glad to do so.

Since Elfgiva was the first woman of the noble class the girl had met, she observed her closely. Not only was her dress different – a long girdled gown instead of the ordinary woman’s modest tunic – but her whole manner subtly marked her out. What was it? “She gets cross just like I do. She laughs. She may be a bit quieter than me, but so are lots of women I know,” the girl explained to Offa. “Yet she is different. She’s a lady.” Gradually Ricola began to reach a conclusion. “You know what it is. It’s as if she is being watched all the time.”

“I suppose she is. By all the people who work for the master.”

“I know. And I dare say she knows it. But,” Ricola’s brow furrowed, “there’s something else. Even when I’m alone with her. She doesn’t care a rap what I think of her. I’m just a slave. She’s too proud for that. But even then she thinks she’s being watched. I can feel it.”

“By the gods, I dare say.”

“Maybe. Actually, I think it’s her own family. Her dead father, his father, the whole lot of them, generations back. She has to behave because she thinks they’re watching her. That’s what I reckon it is.” She nodded with satisfaction. “And all the time, just walking around like you and me, that’s not just the Lady Elfgiva you’re looking at. You’re looking at the whole bunch of them, all the way back to the god Woden himself, I dare say. They’re all there in her mind, you see, whatever she’s doing. That’s what it’s like being a lady.”

Offa looked at his wife wonderingly. He could see what she meant. “So would you like to be her?” he asked.

Ricola gave an earthy laugh. “What, and have that lot to carry around on my back all the time? I’d sooner get in that sack with the snake! It’s too much trouble.”

But while Offa chuckled at her common sense, she remarked more seriously: “It’s terrible for her really, you know. You see, I’ve watched her. I told you the master’s done something bad to her. I still don’t know what it is, but she’s really suffering. Only being a lady, she’s too proud to let it out.”