Back at Soissons, Clothild’s example only made Radegund more determined to live a simple life, to come as close to Christ as her rank allowed and to be ruled by her faith. Supper at the palace was never at the same time, but as it pleased Chlothar. Sometimes sitting down to the table, she heard prayers starting and excused herself to join them, infuriating the King. If the meal was too late, she would not appear at all, but busy herself visiting oratories and chapels. Even when Chlothar took his household to another villa, Vitry for instance, she was often distracted by prayer.

When she missed a meal, she made no attempt to make up for it. Food meant little to her. Still, she understood what it meant to others to share a table and even as she picked at her beans or lentils in the middle of a great feast, she did so discretely, not wanting to draw attention.

She understood too that an invitation to a meal was itself a simple human kindness; it was not by chance that one of Christ’s holiest sacraments was a shared meal. And so when she got to know a neighbor at Vitry, a great lady named Ausifreda, she gladly accepted her invitation to dine and set out the next morning with several guards for Ausifreda’s estate.

As always, she was pleased to see crosses and small chapels scattered along the roads. Shrines to the demons had disappeared, driven deeper into the forests where, she knew too well, many still worshiped trees and springs.

She was shocked then to see two simple paddles – exactly like those she had prayed to herself – painted with the faces of Odin and Freya, set on a wooden altar beneath a crude roof of wooden planks. She stopped, and ordered her guards to build a fire. “We must burn this abomination down!” A peasant, approaching the shrine, heard this and ran off. Minutes later, a large crowd of peasants, carrying sickles, scythes, clubs and knives, came running towards her, glaring with fury.

All were Franks, with no Romans among them, and knew only the old gods. They were in a frenzy; if they knew she was a queen, it made no difference.

For a moment, she felt suffocating fear, just as she had at Erfurt. This was the first time since that attack that she had been surrounded by hostile Franks, and if they were not warriors, if their hair was not dyed red, they were every bit as bloodthirsty and clearly ready to do her harm.

But she and her men were not alone here. She sat up straight on her horse, feeling the full presence of Christ as if His hand lay on her shoulder. She rode towards the irate mob, filled with that power.

Seeing this small woman come towards them even as her own guards held back, completely unafraid where she should have been terrified, undid the peasants’ own assurance. They believed in invisible powers, after all, and Radegund rode towards them radiant with her own faith. They began to yell, to threaten, but as she proceeded, oblivious to their cries, they gave way and even recoiled. She lifted her hand and her guards came forward, carrying torches. “Burn it!” she commanded, and they touched the torches to the wooden shrine.

The peasants stood back and watched, watched their gods be destroyed as once Radegund had watched her own burn, waiting in vain for some sign of their power, for fearsome vengeance to descend on the destroyers. But all they saw were flames, and then ashes, just as Radegund had so long ago; like hers, their faith in the old gods collapsed with the shrine. For a moment, she recalled that terrible void, the sense that no god protected her.

It was up to her, she saw, to fill that void for them. Before she continued on her way, she sent a messenger back to Vitry to order that priests be sent here and bring these shattered pagans Christ.

This encounter reminded Radegund how fragile faith still was in Gaul, how much more work the Church had yet to do. Then came more terrible proof of that fact.

Theudebert had gone south to fight the Lombards. The Goths were to join the Franks in this battle and so their women and children came as allies to meet them – only to have the Franks slaughter them, then throw their bodies in the river. A sacrifice to the river god.

Radegund was appalled. “But are Theudebert’s men not Christians?” she asked Chlothar.

“Many, yes. But it makes no difference.” And she recalled his words at the wedding: “Yes, we are Christians, but we are also FRANKS!”

The images of innocent faces, like those of the children at Erfurt, at once filled her mind, and those of their bodies floating in the water, as so long ago had those of her people’s warriors; hacked and bleeding beside them, those of their mothers, some no doubt with milk spurting from their breasts, exactly as she had seen long ago. Again an atrocity woke those memories, the ones she kept fighting to put aside, and again they rose before her, cruel and vivid.

Was she never to escape them?

With that, another horror overcame her: the thought that all this had been done for a demon, and done by many who called themselves Christians. The holy veil of the Church, with all its psalms and hymns, all its magnificent cathedrals, could still be rent by the claws of evil, as the old superstitions again emerged with their hideous thirst for blood.

Peronne -->