(The recorders are tiny, operating on the molecular level, self-directing as they collect full sensory input. Mine, one of several I took along, was hidden in the spear that I had leaned against a tree. Wanting to encounter Ulfilas informally, I’d laid out the route of my party to intercept that of his as we both traveled through what the Romans had known as Dacia before they withdrew from it, and I in my day knew as Rumania. After mutual avowals of peaceful intentions, my Ostrogoths and his Byzantines pitched tents and shared a meal.)
Trees walled the forest meadow in gloom. Flame-lit smoke rose to hide stars. An owl hooted, over and over. The night was still mild, but dew had begun chilling the grass. Men sat cross-legged near the coals, save for Ulfilas and me. He had stood up in his zeal, and I could not let myself be dominated before the others. They stared, listened, furtively drew signs of Ax or Cross.
Despite his name – Wulfila, originally – he was short, thick-set, fleshy-nosed; for he took after Cappadocian grandparents, carried off in the Gothic raid of 264. In accordance with the treaty of 332, he had gone to Constantinople as both hostage and envoy. Eventually he returned to the Visigoths as missionary. The creed he preached was not that of the Nicean Council, but the austere doctrine of Arius, which it had rejected as heresy. Nonetheless he moved in the vanguard of Christendom, the morrow.
“- No, we should not merely trade stories of our farings,” he said. “How can those be sundered from our faiths?” His tone was soft and reasonable, but keen was the gaze he leveled at me. “You are no ordinary man, Carl. That I see plain upon you, and in the eyes of your followers. Let none take offense if I wonder whether you are entirely human.”
“I am no evil demon,” I said. Was it truly me looming over him, lean, gray, cloaked, doomed and resigned to foreknowledge – yon figure out of darkness and the wind? On this night, one and a half thousand years after that night, I felt as if it were somebody else, Wodan indeed, the forever homeless.
Ulfilas’ fervor burned at him: “Then you will not fear to debate.”
“What use, priest? You know well that the Goths are not a people of the Book. They would offer to Christ in his lands; they often do. But you never offer to Tiwaz in his.”
“No, for God has forbidden that we bow down to any save him. It is only God the Father who may be worshipped. To the Son, let men give due reverence, yes; but the nature of Christ -” And Ulfilas was off on a sermon.
It was not a rant. He knew better. He spoke calmly, sensibly, even good-humoredly. He did not hesitate to employ pagan imagery, nor did he try to lay more than a groundwork of ideas before he let conversation go elsewhere. I saw men of mine nodding thoughtfully. Arianism better fitted their traditions and temperament than did a Catholicism of which they had no knowledge anyway. It would be the form of Christianity that all Goths finally took; and from this would spring centuries of trouble.
I had not made a particularly good showing. But then, how could I in honesty have argued for a heathenism in which I had no belief and which I knew was going under? For that matter, how could I in honesty have argued for Christ?
My eyes, 1858, sought Tharasmund. Much lingered in his young countenance of Jorith’s dear features….
– “And how goes the literary research?” Ganz asked when my scene was done.
“Quite well.” I escaped into facts. “New poems; lines in them that definitely look ancestral to lines in Widsith and Walt here. To be specific, since the battle at Dnieper side -” That hurt, but I brought forth my notes and recordings, and plowed ahead.
344-347
In the same year that Tharasmund returned to Heorot and took up chieftainship over the Teurings, Geberic died in the hall of his fathers, on a peak of the High Tatra. His son Ermanaric became king of the Ostrogoths.