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and the few bits of town that were left had become wretched, crumbling places, the ruins mostly decorously hidden under little mounds. Until the missionaries turned up and began the rebuilding, it was a world of balance, in which the old was passing out of memory and the new becoming immemorial.
        Italy was different. The signs were all around us of recent, savage destruction. Coming out of France, we’d entered an active war zone. This wasn’t the half-hearted fighting within the royal family that had been slowly ruining France for generations. It was nasty stuff. Farms and villages and whole towns were abandoned. Whole regions that still, here and there, showed signs of formerly dense habitation, had reverted to wilderness. The roads remained – they were constructed of solid basalt on deep foundations. But they passed mostly through a desert, going for whole days from nowhere to nowhere else.
        It was all such a pity. Until just a few generations before I was born, Italy had been much the same as in ancient times. There was no emperor in Rome or Ravenna, and the Eastern capital, Constantinople, had no authority here. But the territory had passed under quite a decent barbarian, who’d tried to keep up the civilised decencies.
        Then that fool Justinian had reached out from Constantinople, eager to reunite all the provinces under his rule. It wasn’t enough for him to be emperor in the East and to enjoy a vague primacy over the new barbarian kingdoms of the West. He wanted it all.
        After twenty years of hard fighting, and the plague, there wasn’t that much left of Italy worth ruling. Since then, it had drifted further towards ruin. With the more settled barbarians shattered, and the imperial forces barely strong enough to collect the taxes, it hadn’t taken much for the Lombards to break in and really tear things apart.
        A nasty lot, the Lombards. They were rather like my own people. They’d recently improved somewhat by taking to the Faith – even if this was the usual Arian heresy. They’d also sort of agreed to stabilise the frontiers between their bits of Italy and the fragments left to the Empire. But it was all very grim. There might be hopes of peace, but its reality was a fading memory.
        After passing though a thin strip of imperial territory on the coast, Maximin and I had gone into Lombard territory. Except for the fact we had to hand over all our silver and persuade some barbarous priest got up in stolen finery that we weren’t wholly convinced by the Nicene Creed, we’d been let through unmolested. Now we were back in the part of imperial territory that surrounded Rome. At least, that was the theory. But there had been another hard winter, and a bit of plague the year before had got the Lombards back into a mood for localised plunder.
        We’d come across evidence of this the day before. Maximin had urged me up the road all afternoon, telling me about a nice monastery outside Populonium that would put us up for the night. Just before sunset, we arrived by a pile of smoking ruins. A plundering band had got there a few days earlier and somehow broken through the fortification. There was a bit of food left in an undamaged outhouse – hence our nice dinner. But the monastery itself was no more. We’d smelt what we found there from a good quarter-mile away. But two-score rotting bodies, many hideously mutilated before death, was a dispiriting sight. Maximin had studied with the abbot, and was naturally upset to find parts of the man carefully draped around what remained of the chapel.
        I found a couple of books that hadn’t been consumed by the flames, but they were too heavy to carry away, and weren’t worth the effort. At every monastery we’d stopped at along the way to beg a meal and a warm place for the night, I’d charmed my way into what library was available. In the evenings, I’d read. By day on the road, when not talking with Maximin, I thought