So quietly that for a moment Hugh did not take in what he had said, Miles murmured, 'The wonder is that one of us hasn't killed him yet.' And after another moment's silence, 'Or that someone hasn't, if not one of us. He's crossed enough men in his life that you'd think somebody would have done for him by now.'
'Kill him?' Hugh repeated, still watching the leaves above him.
'Or beaten him bloody,' Miles went on, in the same mild voice.
Hugh pushed Brigand's head aside and propped himself up on one elbow to look at Miles, still gazing away across the clearing. 'Miles,' he said. 'Don't.'
Miles rolled his head sideways to meet his gaze. 'Don't say it or don't do it?'
'Don't do either one.'
Miles turned his face away, back to looking across the clearing. 'The pity is that I won't. I just wish someone would. His death is the only way we'll ever be cut loose from him. You have to know that. His death or ours.'
The time of the Anglo-Saxons is commonly seen, in the words of the great historian of the period Sir David Wilson, as 'a no-man's-land, across which flit insubstantial, semi-legandary figures - Hengist and Horsa, Arthur, Alfred and Offa.' That air of mystery, though which move the shrouded figures, has allowed people to take their eyes off the archaeological ball. After all, there is something wonderfully romantic and exciting about 'semi-legendary figures' with strange-sounding names who perform heroic deeds. I would not wish Hengist and Horsa to be banished from the centre stage of British history, but they have occupied it for a very long time. We should allow some of those in the wings their share of the limelight. In other words, let's look at the archaeology, because today we know a surprising amount not only about Early Saxon times, but about the last years of Roman Britain. Our principal sources of information on the origins of the Anglo-Saxon phenomenon are not historical, but almost entirely archaeological. We must briefly set the likes of Gildas and even Bede temporarily to one side.
'Come to lead us in our prayers, Father?' one of the recently delivered women asked cheerfully. She was a street woman from Tonbridge, known to the nuns because she had earlier brought a younger colleague to Hawkenlye. They had been surprised to see her present herself into their care; as Sister Tiphaine had remarked, she had been engaged in her trade for so long without mishap that they had imagined she could take care of herself.
Now, a first-time mother at the advanced age of twenty-nine, she held up her chubby and gurgling baby girl for the priest to bless.
He did no such thing. Instead, drawing his robes aside as if he feared that contact with a whore would pollute them, he said, 'Begone from my sight, harlot! And take that spawn of Satan with you.'
Then he spun round and marched ouit of the room.
Helewise heard the noisy sobs of the woman, the angry cries of her fellow-patients and, as an inevitable aftermath, the crying of their babies, frightened and upset by the disturbance. Above the babble a single female voice shouted out, making a suggestion as to what Father Micah ought to do with himself that was highly imaginative if biologically impossible.
