There is no pleasure, I have always thought, at once so selfish and yet so intense as a good shit. And I’d just had a very good one. Its cause was last night’s meal, our first real one in a couple of days – Italian bread, olives, fish from the sea, which we’d roasted on the beach, and a big jar of wine we’d got in return for some of our bread.
We were on the Aurelian Way, somewhere between Populonium and Telamon. Rome was still a few days along the road. I’d dodged off the road for my shit, leaving Maximin to fix breakfast, and was now washing myself in a little stream that ran down to the sea. Birds sang in the trees around me. Above, a spring sun shone from a cloudless sky, warming me after the night frost.
That, though – considerable as it was – marked the limits of my pleasure. I’d grown up in a world of ruins, and nothing much should have affected me. But my people had moved into England centuries before, and had completed their work of destruction long before I was born. We’d driven out the Romans, pushing them west and southwest, or across the Channel, and had looted and burned until precious little remained. By my time, we held the land, 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 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.’