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shout that this should be looked into, punished, given immediate attention, priority. The culprit would be caught. His glance winged around the room, dipping to avoid Radegunda’s. He gave orders for the moat to be examined and the palisade. Signs of strangers’ passage were to be reported. At once. His own men must be made to account for how they had spent the night. Nobody was exempt. Nobody. Let the knife be brought to him. Someone might recognize it. The clatter of his talk was like the sounds boys make with clappers to scare crows from crops. His glance sliced air like a slanty knife.
    Radegunda waited for him to finish. She gripped the baluster of the marriage bed.
    “My Lord,” she said, “I shall lay out my brother’s body with my own hands.”
    Clotair nodded without looking at her. As she wished. Whatever she thought fit.
    “Then, my Lord, I crave your permission to leave this court. After the funeral I want to go to Medardus, the Bishop of Noyon, and beg him to consecrate me as a deaconess. I am unfit for matrimony. It will be better if I consecrate my life to God and leave your majesty to take a fitter wife. We have been married fourteen years. God has not blessed our union with children. It would be impious to fly against heaven’s clear dictate. Chlodecharius was my child as well as my brother. Now he is dead I beg your majesty’s permission to give my life to God.”
    The henchmen’s silence thickened. It was congested, palpable. Like gruel in their throats, like ice before their eyeballs. They wrapped themselves in it, insulated their nerves and waited. Some must have been remembering other occasions when Clotair’s will was thwarted or his pride assailed. Savage acts … There were many to choose from. Expecting another, they were braced, for Clotair’s rage could whirl off-target, bolt like a freshly branded beast and flatten whatever lay along its unpredictable passage.
    Clotair frowned. Head bent, he squinted at the daylight glittering on the gold balusters of his bed and on the tufty flames of its fox-fur cover. His own beard and hair flared with the same red, foxy vigour. His spirit too was foxy, like that of all his race, known for their nerve and perfidy in the tremulous chronicles of their time. A shudder threw his body into a rampant posture.
    “So, Radegunda!” he roared. “You want to leave me. Is that it?”
    “For God, my Lord!”
    “For God! For God!” The tawny head was thrown back. “Well! What do you say to that?” he challenged his men. “Ha? What kind of a king do you think reigns up there,” with an upward jerk and flounce of his mane, “what sort must he be if he’s not afraid to steal the wife of a king as great as me?”
    No answer. This was a tricky one. The henchmen’s eyes stayed lowered. Only Radegunda stared straight at Clotair awaiting his reply. For a moment they locked glances. Clotair broke the lock. Shaking his spine like a wet dog, he said irritably, “Go then, woman! Go lay out your brother and go to God when you choose. Go! Go!”
    He turned and walked out of the bedroom.

    Chapter Three
     
     
    [ A.D. 568]
    Hilarious and worn, Fortunatus was back from another trip. He had stayed in villas porous with inner courtyards where peacocks and turtle-doves were kept for table and display. He had lived high, suffered discomfort on the roads back and returned with a baggage of fresh anecdote.  He had seen a merchant from the East with a coat made  from phoenix-breasts joined so cunningly as to show no  join.
    “Like the seamless robe of Christ,” he told Agnes,  for it was time to sound a pious note after betraying what was perhaps too frank a delight in the crass richness of villa life. “Moreover the phoenix, since it rises after death, signifies Christ. The peacock too …”
    Its colours moved in the prism of his eye.
    “We shall seem dull to you now.”
    “Oh, if you only knew how glad I am to be back!”
    They told each other this in a