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the royal precinct, I wondered if I should have been
more honest with Osric. The Oneirokritikon had offered an alternative explanation for my dream. According to Artimedorus, a dream of bees was only a good omen for farmers. For everyone else, to
dream about bees was highly dangerous. Their humming signified confusion, and their stings were symbols for wounds and hurt. If the bees settled on the dreamer’s head, it foretold his
death.
    *
    We rode out from Aachen on the first day of June when the faint glow of dawn was barely visible in the sky. I hoped our small party would be unremarkable among the early
travellers already taking the rutted highway leading out of town. Osric and I wore the sober, practical clothes that marked us as smalltime merchants. Walo was dressed as our servant. I had removed
my eye patch to make myself less noticeable and would replace it only when it was full daylight. Our escort of two burly troopers had been persuaded to leave behind the helmets and armoured coats
that identified them as members of the royal guard. Each man led two pack ponies, his sword hidden among their straw-lined panniers stuffed with the bottles of Rhenish wine that purported to be our
trade goods. Our real wealth was in the leather saddlebags slung from the saddle of my horse and Osric’s: shiny new silver deniers from the king’s mint at Aachen. Each coin was the size
of my fingernail and the moneyers had stamped them with Carolus’s monogram on one side, and the Christian cross on the other. There were three thousand of them, a dazzling prize for any lucky
thief.
    As the morning wore on, I was alarmed to see Walo attracting attention. He stared rudely at the people coming towards us along the road, gazing at them with open curiosity. Some scowled at him
in return. Others met his stare and, noting his moon face, looked away and hurried their steps. Ignoring their reaction, he swivelled right round in the saddle to turn and watch their backs long
after they had passed.
    ‘Walo sticks in people’s memories,’ Osric muttered as he rode up alongside me. ‘Let’s hope that Offa’s spies don’t hear that you are travelling with
Vulfard’s son. We’ll be easy to track.’
    ‘There’s not much I can do about it,’ I admitted.
    ‘Does Walo know where we are going and why?’
    ‘I got him in one of his better moments, and told him that the king was sending us to obtain white bears, hawks and a unicorn. But I didn’t say where we were going.’
    ‘What was his reaction?’
    ‘He accepted everything I said as perfectly normal. He only asked if a unicorn sheds its horn every year.’
    ‘Why on earth would he want to know that?’
    ‘He told me in all seriousness that if the unicorn loses its horn each year, then it is a sort of deer. If not, then it is more like a wisent.’
    Osric raised an eyebrow. ‘For all his strangeness, he knows a lot about the animals. Let’s hope he doesn’t blurt out the reason for our journey to some stranger along our
route.’
    ‘He shies away from strangers. Maybe he doesn’t trust them,’ I reassured Osric. ‘But I’ll keep a close watch on him.’
    We left the town and emerged into gently rolling countryside. The rich soil was intensively cultivated, and here Walo gawked at the prosperous brick-built farms with their tiled stables and
cattle byres, the barns, pigeon lofts and orchards. I guessed that his previous life under his father’s care had been almost entirely spent in the great tracts of untamed forest that the king
reserved for hunting. Edging my horse closer to Walo I took it on myself to try to explain what was happening on the land. Here a flock of sheep was penned next to an open-sided shed. Two men were
shearing while their comrades were carrying away the fleeces to drop them into rinsing baths. A little further on I described why an ox team was ploughing the ground so late in the season. It was
the new agricultural system recommended by the