“First child of Tharasmund and Ulrica. The name is actually Hathawulf, but it’s easy to see how that got elided to Hamther as the story flowed north over centuries. And they want to call their next son Solbern. The timing is right, too. Those will be young men – will have been – when -” I couldn’t go on.
She leaned forward just long enough that a touch of her hand reached my awareness.
Afterward, her tone stark, she said: “You don’t have to go through with this. Do you, Carl?”
“What?” Astonishment made me stop hurting for an instant. “Of course I do. My job, my duty.”
“Your job is to trace out whatever people put into verses and stories. Not what they actually did. Skip forward, dear. Let… Hathawulf be safely dead when next you return there.”
“No!”
I realized I’d shouted, took a deep and warming draught, made myself confront her and state levelly: “I’ve thought about that. Believe me, I have. And I can’t. Can’t abandon them.”
“Can’t help them, either. It’s predestined, everything.”
“We don’t know just what will… did happen. Or how I might be able to – No, Laurie, please don’t say any more about that.”
She sighed. “Well, I can understand. You’ve been with generations of them, as they grew and lived and suffered and died; but to you it hasn’t been so long.” To you, she did not say, Jorith is a very near memory. “Yes, do what you must, Carl, while you must.”
I had no words, because I could feel her own pain.
She smiled shakily. “You’ve got a furlough now, though,” she said. “Put your work aside. I went out today and brought back a small Christmas tree. How’d you like if we trimmed it this evening, after I’ve fixed a gourmet dinner?”
” ‘Peace on the earth, good will to men,
From Heav’n’s all-gracious King- ‘ ”
348-366
Athanaric, king of the West Goths, hated Christ. Besides holding fast to the gods of his fathers, he feared the Church as a sly agent of the Empire. Let it gnaw away long enough, he said, and folk would find themselves bending the knee to Roman overlords. Therefore he egged men on against it, thwarted the kin of murdered Christians when they sought weregild, at last rammed laws through his Great Moot that left them open to wholesale slaughter as soon as some happening made tempers flare. Or so he thought. For their part, the baptized Goths, who by now were not few, drew together and spoke of letting the Lord God of Hosts decide the outcome.
Bishop Ulfilas called them unwise. Martyrs became saints, he agreed, but it was the body of the faithful that kept the Word alive on earth. He sought and obtained permission from Emperor Constantius for his flock to move into Moesia. Leading them across the Danube, he saw them settled under the Haemus Mountains. There they became a peaceable lot of herdsmen and farmers.
When this news reached Heorot, Ulrica laughed aloud. “Then my father is rid of them!”
She cried that too soon. For the next thirty years and more, Ulfilas worked on in his vineyard. Not every Christian Visigoth had followed him south. Some remained, among them chieftains strong enough to protect themselves and their underlings. These received missionaries, whose labors bore fruit. Athanaric’s persecutions caused the Christians to seek a leader of their own. They found one in Frithigern, also of the royal house. While it never came to open war between the factions, there were clashes aplenty. Younger, soon wealthier than his rival because of being favored by traders from the Empire, Frithigern brought many West Goths to join the Church as the years wore on, merely because that seemed a promising thing to do.
It touched the Ostrogoths little. The number of Christians among them did swell, but slowly and without rousing undue trouble. King Ermanaric cared naught about gods of any sort or about the next world. He was too busy seizing as much as he could of this one.
Up and down eastern Europe his wars raged. In several seasons’ fierce campaigning he broke the Heruls. Those who did not submit moved off to join westerly tribes bearing the same name. Aestii and Vendi were easier prey for Ermanaric. Unsated, he took his armies north, beyond the lands that his father had made tributary. In the end, a sweep of earth from the Elbe River to the Dnieper mouth acknowledged him overlord.