The Roman who had built the villa had been a Christian and had built the chapel as well. But since the Franks had begun to invade, there had been no priest at Athies. Now that Chlothar had had Father Elias sent to teach Hrotgund, he also endowed the funds for a parish. Clerks were soon to join the father. All would stay at the other end of the villa.

The blacksmith had been leading services and one of Father Elias’ first tasks was to correct the errors this layman had spread. He was to spend each afternoon ministering to the Catholics on the estate and doing what he could to bring the others to the Truth, and his mornings teaching Hrotgund.

He had her slaves wake her early the next morning and together they went to the chapel to pray. Then he took her to a small room in the villa where a trunk was set against one wall and a three-legged Roman table stood in the middle. He took a large rectangular object from the trunk and set it on the table. The top was a flat piece of wood which he turned to his left, showing sheets of parchment stacked one on the other and bound at the edge. The top sheet was covered with rows of beautiful shapes, all in black. Hrotgund was entranced by their rhythm. “These are letters,” he said. “They will speak to you in time.” She sprang back, afraid. “Speak, Father?”

He laughed softly. “Not out loud, child. Not with the voice of a demon. It is you who will come to make them speak. But first, here is the story they tell.” He closed the codex and began to tell her how God – the one, the only God – had come to Earth in a city far to the East and been born as a baby, a human baby of flesh and blood. This baby grew up to preach and do miracles, but the perverse people around Him, the Jews, had refused to hear His Word and they had persecuted him so that the Romans – who also ruled that land – allowed Him to be executed as a common criminal. The lowest criminals then were nailed to boards set sideways on other boards – such was the Cross that became the symbol of His Sacrifice. He hung there for days, suffering terribly, until he died on a Friday, which Catholics now called “Good Friday”. Then He was buried in a cave. But three days later He rose from the dead, and ascended to Heaven. And so all who believe in Him would be saved, and also born again after death.

The story entranced Hrotgund. She wondered who these Jews were who did such a horrible thing, and thought how wonderful it was for a god to suffer and die to save mankind. The story reminded her of how Baldur the Beautiful had died, but was to be reborn after Ragnarök.

“Now that you know the story,” said Father Elias, “You must hear it in the words of the Apostle.” He opened the cover again, muttered a prayer over the holy page, and then, following those dark, rhythmic shapes, began to read her the Gospel in Latin. After each line, he stopped to tell her what it meant. This took a very long time and she was glad he had told her the story simply first. Still, she listened intently to the sound of the Latin, to the unfamiliar progress of a story so unlike the sagas she had heard as a child.

The story raised so many questions in her young mind. How could there be only one god, one father, as if Odin was alone and far more powerful? How could a god become a man? Why would he want to suffer? As to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, these cities so far away, she vaguely envisioned them as like Erfurt or Athies. But for now the details were all a jumble, even if she felt the story to be full of power.

By the end of the morning, she understood a few things: that Christ was the Son of God, and Our Lord; that all human beings were soiled, stained from birth by Original Sin; that only Christ could cleanse them, through His suffering and their belief. That belief and suffering were the keys to Salvation.

As the days went on, she learned to pray, by her bed and in the chapel. She learned that Christ loved the poor and that a Christian owed charity to those less fortunate. That God, Christ and the Holy Spirit were One: the Holy Trinity. “This is a Truth,” the father spat, “that the heretics deny!” The most dangerous heretics were those who followed Arius, the Goths above all. The only Goth she knew had been Hermenfred’s wife, who had brought such disaster to the Thuringii. She was happy to hate them.

Soon he began to teach her Latin. “This will be very hard, child,” he warned her, but with the eager hunger of a young mind she devoured each declension, delighted in each new tense, began to gather an ever-increasing store of words. As she learned to decipher those signs, those tiny black pictures she still found so beautiful, it was like stepping out of darkness into light. The father gave her a wax tablet and a stylus and taught her to shape the letters, one by one. She found this wonderfully calming.

And she needed calm. Because her nightmares continued. One morning she woke to the face of her aunt, smiling down at her, her lovely red hair brushing Hrotgund’s cheeks, before she suddenly vomited blood, as her head split open before Hrotgund’s eyes.

She woke a second time, trembling, sweating, and at once fell to her knees, begging Christ for comfort. And it came. As she prayed to the One who had suffered for Man’s Salvation, the Son who was one with God, she felt her terror fade and peace come over her.

Now two things brought her peace: shaping letters and prayer.

With all her nightmares and her studies, she was still a girl of nine. And so in the afternoon, she went beyond the stone villa, out its gates, and down among the huts of wattle and daub. While stolid, sun-burnt fathers went out to drive oxen in the fields or bent to their many tasks besides the huts, while weary mothers with their deeply lined faces mended clothes, spun wool, churned butter or otherwise made use of their day, she would play with their dirty, half-starved children. The children were shy at first, knowing she was of royal blood, and also a little afraid of her. “You are a Thuringii!” one boy cried. “The Thuringii are cruel!”. Hrotgund was shocked. “Why do you say such things?”

“Why everyone knows! They murdered hostages!”

“They hung our warriors by the muscles of their thighs and left them to die!”

“They tied women’s arms around the necks of horses and stampeded them! Or they stretched them out on the rutted roads and then drove wagons over them!”

“That’s right! And when all their bones were broken, they threw them to the dogs and birds to feed on!”

Indignation rose in Hrotgund’s small body. She wanted to cry out, “No! Our warriors would never do such things! No Thuringii is so cruel!” But then she thought of her uncle and all he had done, and wondered, could she really say he was incapable of such horrors? Could she be sure he had never had his men commit such acts?

Swallowing her rage, she said, “Warriors do much evil. But I am no warrior. And you see for yourself I am no monster.” She said this so simply and sweetly that at once the children were ashamed to have repeated things they had only heard. What is more, not only was she cleaned and combed and neatly dressed, more than any of them ever had been, she was beautiful; to them, enchantingly so, not least because she had always been well fed, and wore fine woolen clothes, and had never labored in the sun. In their eyes, she almost seemed to glow. Far from being terrifying, she was small and almost too fine-boned, so that, without quite thinking about it, they found her fragile, like some precious thing they dared not touch. And so they smiled and laughed and mocked their own tales, and welcomed her as a friend.

Many had chores, and could only play for so long. No hand was wasted among the poor. But their parents dared not refuse her their company and even had hopes it might bring them some good.

As she ran with them about the courtyard or outside the gates to the stream, she began to understand that many of these children and their parents still followed Odin and Thor. Father Elias had taught her that those still deluded by the old religion were pagans, not to be hated, like heretics, but treated as lost lambs, who must be brought into the fold. Also, others of them were Catholic and all knew that that was the King’s creed, and so everyone played together, unconcerned with Christ, Odin or Thor.

The father began to teach her the lives of the saints. How St. Denis was beheaded on the Mount of the Martyrs, then carried his own head to where he was now buried; how St. Agatha was torn with iron hooks and had her breasts cut off; how St. Sebastian was pierced with arrows, but did not die; how St. Genovefa, a woman by herself, had saved Paris from both Attila and a pagan Frankish king. So many of the early martyrs, she learned, were girls whose parents wanted them to marry, but who wanted to stay virgins for God. Hrotgund knew only that a virgin was pure, and never married. She soon decided that she would be one, that she would belong to no man but Christ.

“Why did the Romans hurt the Christians so, Father?”

“Because they had many gods, gods they carved from stone and treated as divine. You will still see their statues in Gaul today, and even hear the old pagan names: Mercury, Mars… Though you must know that sometimes these are only Roman names for the German demons. And so Mercury is Odin, Jupiter, Thor. But above all you will hear the farmers talk of Ceres, whom they thank for their wheat. The Church struggles to uproot her cult, but many believe she protects their crops.”

She began to understand then that pagans were not only German, like the Franks and the Thuringii. The Romans too had once been pagans. “Before Constantine saw a flaming Cross in the sky, and made all who followed him Christian.” Even some Gauls, deep in the forests, kept alive their old ideas from before Roman rule, worshiping streams and trees.

The Church still had many enemies to fight, even as it built cathedrals and founded ever more parishes in the countryside.

Now when she played with the ragged, hungry children of Athies and its estates, she would tell them of the saint who carried his own head a long distance after he had been beheaded. Even the pagans among them listened eagerly, and then acted out the beheading on one of their friends, whose head another would then carry as if it was his own. A boy would choose to be St. Sebastian as others aimed sticks at him like arrows. When she told the tale of Genovefa, herself acting the part of the woman defying fierce invaders, they would delight in roaring and threatening like Huns, or screaming like terrified Parisians. They loved the other tales Hrotgund told them too, of saints burned, torn to pieces, buried alive, resisting to the end with the help of God. But when one said it showed how powerful Odin was, she sternly corrected him. “Odin does not have such power! It is Christ that makes one strong!” Some would laugh at her indignation, but others were curious, asking who this god was, so much stronger than the ones they knew. Her own joy at this surprised her: that her innocent tales of saints could bring others to Christ, whom she herself now adored. And so in her studies she paid all the more attention to the lives of the saints, storing up more tales to tell.

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