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about what I’d read. It was a good continuing of my education. But this was a dead monastery. There was nothing here for me.
        ‘We could spend the night here,’ I’d suggested, looking round the outhouse. It’s surprising what bad smells you can get used to after a couple of hours, and it would be warmer than bedding down again by the side of the road, and perhaps safer.
        Maximin wasn’t so sure. ‘This repose of the godly has been made into a house of Satan,’ he’d insisted.
        So we’d gathered up what food we could carry and started along the road again, turning after a while to the seashore, where some fishermen were looking for somewhere safe to put in for the night.
        We’d slept eventually in a little copse by the shore, waking in terror every time we heard the undergrowth rustle. Now it was morning, and I was sitting by the stream deliberately washing my bum.
        All the signs were for a lovely day ahead. During our passage of France, Maximin had kept me cheerful in the bitter cold and rain by teaching me Greek – he’d recite from The Acts of the Apostles , and let me struggle to compare this with what I could remember of the Latin version I’d read in Canterbury – and by assuring me that the world would soon come to an end. It was because of this, he said, that he’d volunteered for the English mission. Augustine and company and Pope Gregory were of a different opinion. They saw the mission as one of permanent occupation. Maximin’s interest, though, was in getting as many souls converted before the Second Coming of Christ. This would atone for his many sins. What these were, he never let on – I imagine he’d had a few impure thoughts twenty years before: his lack of scruple in advancing the Faith was evidently not something that had ever preyed on his mind. So he declaimed on and on about the approaching end, warming to his theme whenever we passed another derelict villa, or, once into Italy, some present evidence of the decline and fall.
        For myself, the decline and fall seemed purely a human matter. The trees still blossomed. The birds still sang in the trees. The warm Italian sun still shone as it surely always had. And it was a lovely sun – quite unlike anything I’d seen in Kent. It bathed the land in a beautiful golden light, and was reflected back in the living greens and pinks of the vegetation, and in the deep blue of the sea. It could even make the human devastation all around less bleak than it might otherwise have been.
        If the world really was coming to an end, that was not a fact taken into account by the armies of ants scurrying around me to collect building materials for their nest, or by the rabbits hopping about on the other side of the stream. Beyond all doubt, there had been a big change in human affairs – whether good or bad on balance, I leave to you. But the greater universe went undisturbed about its normal business.
        I heard a cry from the embanked road about twenty yards back. It was Maximin crying loud in Latin: ‘My sons, I am but a lone priest on my way to Rome. Take these wretched morsels of food, but spare my life. Spare me in the name of our Common Father in Heaven.’ He began a prayer, then switched into Greek without any change of tone: ‘Save yourself, my boy, for I am surely lost. I have two brutes upon me.’

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    I pulled myself together and raced silently up the slope to the road. I crawled into the ditch beside it and darted my head up and then down again. Two mounted men had caught Maximin. They were big, ugly creatures, in furs and leather armour – possibly from the raiding gang that had taken the monastery. Whatever they might have done, it was plain they had no intention of letting Maximin pass unmolested. They were dismounted, both swaying gently as they passed a wineskin back and forth. They were turned away from me, swords still sheathed, and were laughing at Maximin while he begged at their