The thought of Billy was what got him out of bed in the morning. With no need to go to work, he might have just rolled over and snoozed until noon, wallowing in surly self-pity, if he had not wanted to see whether Billy had sent him an email.

He hadn’t. But now he was in front of the computer, Martin felt obliged to check all the job and educational websites. He made a list of vacancies for which he could apply, updated his CV, and turned in a half-dozen applications by email, printing out copies for those stone-age institutions that still did their business by paper.

It felt better to be doing things. He felt better about himself once he was up and dressed, showered, with clean teeth and breakfast inside him. The ball of nerves and panic that had made its home in his heart at the thought of an extended period out of work was made manageable by the distraction.

After lunch—more toast—he trekked down to the post office and sent out his printed applications. Thought about going to the job centre to register as unemployed and then shoved the thought away. There was still time to fix this. It would be okay. He would only admit defeat, crawl to the government for help, next month if he hadn’t got a new job once his month’s notice was up.

But he would sign on, ask for housing benefit and jobseeker’s allowance, rather than give up the flat and skulk back to his parents’ house. It was okay. It would not come to that.

Returning home, he found that Billy had still not called. One more worry to swallow down. He pinched the top of his nose, allowed himself to bow his head for a moment under the weight, and then straightened up and gave his living room a speculative glance.

How to get the money to buy petrol to transport Bretwalda’s kit to Scotland?

A warp-weighted loom leaned against his bookshelf, but he couldn’t bear the thought of parting with that. He had more tablet weave than he strictly needed. He could maybe sell the shaving horse and then make himself a new one with some of the logs from the garden. And that wool . . .

Oh, that wool!

Martin pulled the fabric from behind the sofa and laid it ceremonially in the small expanse of free floor space. He rolled a foot of fabric out and gazed at it in reverence, reaching to rub a corner between his thumb and fingers.

Hand spun on drop spindles, hand dyed using nothing more than native dye plants and cauldrons, hand woven on the warp-weighted loom, it was a masterpiece of craft. It was as close to the real thing as humanly possible. All the threads were fine and even, the subtly speckled pattern of the orangy-red colour caused by the wool being dyed before it was spun—drying and lightening slightly on the outside of the hank, giving a flecked appearance when it was spun. The diamond-patterned weave added a further layer of complexity and texture.

It had cost him ridiculous amounts of money, and even so, he’d known he wasn’t paying enough for the amount of work that went into it. He’d been keeping it to make a cloak, a cloak that would make him the envy of every reenactor in the world. He’d just kept putting it off because it had seemed like too much of a blasphemy to cut the stuff.

Telling himself a blatant lie—that it was only a thing, that it wasn’t important—he phoned the guy who had most coveted it, the guy who thought nothing of dropping a couple of hundred pounds on a new sword, or a gold-studded belt or a replica Sutton Hoo helmet. His old group leader.

“Hi Brian. I’m clearing out some stuff. I wondered if you were still interested . . .”

The rest of the day passed without word from Billy. Martin told himself that he shouldn’t expect the guy to be prompt with his responses. Sheena was forever sending out belated birthday cards, belated Christmas cards, because she’d gotten to it as soon as she could, but that hadn’t been soon enough.

Martin was used to waiting for signs of love, concern, interest, until the other person was well enough to give them. But of course he’d grown up with Sheena and was confident of her regard. Billy might not be calling because he didn’t want to. He might have decided Martin’s impulsive visit was a bit stalkery, might be resenting the fact that Martin had pushed things faster than he was ready to go.

If so, getting in contact with the guy from his end would only be compounding the problem.

He rolled out of bed on Wednesday more reluctantly, because Brian was coming, and told himself that if Billy hadn’t called by the end of the week he would . . .

Give up?

No, he would phone, give it one last shot. It wasn’t fair to expect Billy to do all the running if the guy had difficulties in doing more than his normal routine. He just hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Brian arrived at half two, having taken the afternoon off from his job as an IT tech in some small components firm in Trowbridge. His knock on the door brought back memories, and it was briefly pleasurable to see him come in, moving with the deceptive shamble of a silver-backed gorilla through Martin’s flat. The hall seemed too small for him. Even without armour on, the guy was impressive, his layer of fat and his substantial beer belly carried lightly on a bulk of muscle.

Brian was somewhere around sixty years of age, his white hair pulled back into a ponytail at the base of his neck. His moustache was waxed into points and his beard plaited and finished off with a red glass bead. Still a biker, with engine grease under his fingernails and interlaced tattoos up his gnarled arms.

“Well.” He looked about with curiosity and, Martin thought, condescension. Not enough engine parts on the floor, maybe. “Long time no see, Ametel. How you been doing out there on your own?”

Martin smiled and flourished a mug. It was nice that Brian had remembered his Merotic name—the name by which his reenactment character was known. Brian himself was Ketil when he was in character, which Martin secretly found hilarious.

“Not too bad,” he said, as was only right. No one asked these things because they actually wanted to know. “Cup of tea?”

“Dying for one.”

Martin ducked into the kitchen, leaving Brian at large in the living room on his own. “What about you?” he called through the open door.

“Oh, good. We’ve had a good season for recruiting. Got five newbies at once, if you believe it, from a show we did for the university.”

Martin made a mental note to try to book some events for Bretwalda where concentrations of young people hung out. Give it a couple of months and try Trowbridge to see if anyone had dropped out of their Summer Spectacular. Maybe Trowchester Academy would be interested in something for their summer ball? He wasn’t convinced by the mental picture of a bunch of drunk students in their party frocks watching a fake battle, but they could do something, surely?

“Course, a couple of them were queer as fuck.” Brian laughed, good-humouredly, inviting Martin to share the joke. Martin’s fingers clenched hard on the teaspoon with which he was adding three spoons of sugar to Brian’s tea, bending the metal with his grip.

“Seriously, you should have seen them.” Brian chuckled again. “Raging poofters, they were.”

Martin sidled into his own living room like he was unwelcome, put down the mugs of tea on one of the many wooden stools that littered the floor. The same feelings of guilt and rage, inadequacy and shame that he had when he spoke to his father were curling through him again. He felt like a toilet that had just been flushed—forced to swallow down filth. He wanted to spit it all out but couldn’t quite find certainty and footing enough.

Brian cocked a hip and made like a teapot, warbling in a falsetto voice, “Ooh, everything’s so dirty. I’m getting soot on my nice shoes.”

You’ll get a knee in your fucking balls if you carry on like that, Martin thought, but to his shame he said nothing. Just swallowed.

“Worse than the women,” Brian noted with satisfaction. “Course they didn’t last.”

Martin gritted his teeth and thought again about recruitment. He could get the names, offer a refuge. “You threw them out?”

“Course not! What d’you think we are?” Brian was honestly indignant, as though the thought that anyone could possibly think he was homophobic was downright insulting. “They just had no sense of humour, po-faced bastards. They couldn’t take a joke. And you know what the society’s like—you gotta have a sense of humour, right? You can’t be too much of a special snowflake about this stuff.”

“Yeah,” Martin agreed, sinking his face into his cup and despising himself for not saying anything.

Damn it, he’d left the society to get away from this, and while Brian was proving what a good move that had been, Kayleigh’s “this brooch is so gay” comment had rubbed him exactly the same way. He should say something. He should not let this go past him unchallenged. He should get into the habit of knocking it back so it didn’t take root in his own society and end up driving him out. Except what if it already was there, quieter, more insidious, and he wouldn’t know until too late—until he’d told them and been rejected?

“You remember Dave Bryson?” he managed.

“Biscop Benedict.” Brian looked about for the biscuits, and Martin dived back into the kitchen to bring them. “Yeah, good bloke.”

“He was gay, you know.”

A moment’s feeling of tiny triumph because he had set his trap well, because he had at least got Brian to acknowledge that a gay guy could be a good bloke. But then Brian dunked a digestive in his tea and raised his eyebrows. “You don’t say? Well, that explains a lot.”

“Sorry?”

“Well, you know. Not fighting. Poncing about in purple silk. All that incense and singing. Always thought he was a bit nancy. I don’t know why I’m surprised. He kept that quiet, though. I wonder why?”

“Yeah, who knows.” Martin pinched his protest back behind his thinned lips and decided he’d had about enough of this. “So, that wool.”

He flicked the roll open to show that the colour hadn’t faded. “They said it was pretty colour fast, but I’ve kept it in the dark anyway, so it’s . . . it’s pristine.”

Brian slid off the sofa onto one knee next to the bolt and examined the thread count with a discerning eye. “Your new society having problems, then? If you have to sell this?”

“It’s not the society,” Martin snapped. “I’ve lost my job. The fee from our next show will cover the society’s bills, but only after we’ve done it and been paid. So I need some other means to drum up the petrol money beforehand. And this . . . well, I’d never dare wear it anyway. I got it for three hundred and fifty quid, so I’ll give it to you for three hundred.”

Unrolling the bolt, Brian slung the fabric over one shoulder and admired himself in the black reflective surface of the TV, pulling it in at the waist to look like a tunic, checking the way it draped, the way the skirt flared out when he moved.

Martin watched, in two minds. The part of him that was a ninth-century Viking noted regretfully how awesome the fabric looked—how the folds fell exactly as they were depicted on the carvings and the manuscripts of the time. The part of him that was a modern man reflected caustically on how “gay” it was of Brian to be admiring his pretty dress in the mirror.

“It’s a deal,” Brian said. They exchanged a handshake and then money, counted out in twenty-pound notes into Martin’s hand. He and Martin rolled the material back into the old curtain in which Martin had been keeping it dark and safe and under wraps.

Brian picked it up and tucked it under his arm. “Listen, kiddo. If you get fed up with all the work, you know you’d be welcomed back. You and all the splitters who went with you. I was sad to see you all go, no kidding.”

That was enough to give Martin an ache in his chest because yes, there had been good times, full of the rough and ready camaraderie that came from being the toughest, the most kick-ass, the most dangerous, the all-round-best society in the country.

But he couldn’t say he was sad to go because if he did, Brian would ask him why he had felt the need to split in the first place, and he’d rather get out of it with the man’s respect, even if it was fake, contingent on Martin being something he wasn’t.

I’m one of those poofters myself. He could almost feel the words behind his teeth, filling his mouth like saliva. All this time you’ve been thinking I was one of the lads, and actually I was gay. And no, I don’t have a sense of humour, because I don’t find it funny to be mocked.

But what good would it do to tell Brian now, when he would probably never seen the man again? He swallowed the spit. “We’re doing okay,” he said instead, walking his guest out to the car. “But yeah, if it doesn’t work out, then thanks.”

Why did you do that? he asked himself as he watched the car drive away. You hate people falsifying the past. Why do you falsify your present?

Because I’m not putting one more thing in the way of getting a new job. I’m not giving Dad one more thing to complain about. I’m not making it even harder to get anyone to do anything I say in Bretwalda, and I’m not . . . I’m just not ready.

Feeling tired and vaguely unclean, he switched the computer back on, intending to check whether anyone had offered him an interview. No one had, but his despondency was interrupted when his email programme flashed up a window that made him catch his breath, telling him he had new messages.

It flickered out before he could be sure what he’d seen. Something about morris, from an address he didn’t recognise. Trying not to get his hopes up, he clicked through to his emails and yes, there was one labelled “history of morris” that he could not imagine would have come from anyone other than Billy.

He opened it up with an easing around his heart. One good thing in a shit day.

Thought you’d like to see this, the message said, with a link to a website that took the origins of morris dancing back to the fifteenth century, and showed him pictures of guys in doublets with sleeves that grazed the ground. A medieval lady stood like a judging queen in the centre of a ring of dancers, all of whom were trying to impress her with their capering.

It was very odd. Billy had included a quote from a seventeenth-century Puritan who obviously regarded the dance as a highway to hell. “It hath been tould that your morice dauncers have daunced naked in nettes: what greater entisement unto naughtines could have been devised?” And despite everything that had gone wrong today, that was so bizarre it made Martin laugh out loud.

He’d thought that perhaps the Griffins were fooling themselves when they talked about the history behind what they did. He was impressed to find they had evidence, some kind of rigour. This brush with the sheer strangeness of humanity had the same texture as the experience he had when reading ibn Fadlan, seeing the Vikings from the inside.

Encountering the minds of people from history was like encountering aliens. Funny and bizarre, unsettling and uncomfortable, sometimes even repellent. But you always returned from it with a refreshed perspective, so that just for a little while, before habit kicked back in, you could see your own world with a stranger’s eyes, and all the things that were normally invisible showed up like cancer cells tagged with radiant dye.

It put his problems into perspective, for a while at least.

There’s a session at the King’s Arms tonight, Billy’s email finished. I wondered if you’d like to come. But then I thought you’re hardly going to want to drive an hour here and then have to drive an hour back in time for work in the morning. So maybe you could come at the weekend?

Martin thought about breakdown cover and the cost of petrol, and then he thought, Oh, what the hell. He had just come into three hundred pounds, and he might as well enjoy the advantages of joblessness, such as they were.

He put another sheaf of copies of his printed CV into envelopes and dropped them in the postbox on the way out, phoning Billy this time to let him know he was on his way.