The thing I had mistaken for a dead tree turned out to be a person nailed to a cross. It looked a lot like the sculpture of the crucified Jesus in church, only instead of his head being to one side it had flopped forward so – thankfully – I couldn’t see his face.
It was the most horrific thing I had ever seen. Then it got worse: he moved. The poor guy was still alive!
My head was fighting with my stomach about whether to pass out or throw up, but my feet kept me moving until I was past it.
But I wasn’t done with death quite yet.
Once again I heard the sound of singing, along with a flute and jingly tambourine. This music was more like a tune, and I could make out words in Latin.
It was another funeral, but these people were burying the body, not burning it. The mist parted to show me mourners and musicians on the left-hand side of the road. There were fewer of them here than at the cremation, only a dozen or so, gathered around an open grave and singing. The ones without instruments were lifting their hands and faces to the sky. Unlike the other mourners, these ones were dressed all in black or grey.
I was about to put my head down and hurry on when I had a thought. According to Solomon Daisy, the blue-eyed girl with the ivory knife had been buried in Southwark. Maybe by some fluke I had arrived on the very day of her funeral. I left the muddy road and made my way gingerly across the waste ground towards the little group of mourners. Were you allowed to gatecrash a funeral?
Apparently you were.
A few people looked at me but nobody objected.
There were ten adults and two kids standing around the grave. As I came to the grave edge, I peeped in and saw what looked like a mummy. Then I realised it was the body of a stocky woman wrapped in unbleached cloth.
I knew this from church; it was a shroud like the one they had wrapped Jesus in. Only this one wasn’t bound up in strips but a kind of bag laid out on a rectangle of pure white powder, like baby powder. There was a clay cup on one side of her head and half a roast chicken on the other. I guessed she was hoping to have some food in the underworld, though how you can eat if your face is covered by a shroud I do not know.
Then someone started crying out the word clementia, which I think means ‘mercy’.
The rest joined in. ‘Clementia!’ they shouted. ‘Clementia!’ Some stretched out their hands towards the body. That made me think Clementia might be the dead woman’s name. One woman beat her chest and cried, ‘Ai! Ai! Ai!’
This was too intense for me, and Clementia wasn’t my girl, so I backed away and returned to the path.
Up ahead, another road joined the one I was on and I saw more people with carts and pack animals.
The sun was up now, but still low in the sky. Its slanting rays made sheets of water on the marshy ground look like bronze, or maybe I should say ‘copper-alloy’. Over on drier ground near the fork in the road, a statue on a column stood between two strange-looking buildings. They were both square with white columns around all four sides and smaller upper storeys poking up from their red tile roofs. I had never seen pictures of any Roman buildings that looked like that.
After a few dozen metres, I came to a low wooden bridge. Was it London Bridge? No. I had glimpsed Londinium’s main bridge when I was swept out of the Walbrook. This was more like a causeway of split timbers than a proper bridge. Then I remembered Solomon Daisy telling me that some of the cemeteries were on islands surrounded by water.
I noticed that people were careful to step onto the bridge with their right foot first. Some of them lifted their hands to the sky. The man with the ox-cart tossed something into the water.
Our Latin-club teacher, Miss Forte, was always telling us that Romans believed evil spirits hung around borders and thresholds, and that if you didn’t step across properly they would get you, so I also stepped onto the wooden bridge with my right foot first. I needed all the luck I could get.
I saw a heron and more ducks and some people fishing from flat-boats.
By the time I reached the middle of the bridge, I could see a few houses emerging from the mist up ahead. They were the first proper Roman London houses I’d seen.
I was surprised to see that they looked even less Roman than the two strange buildings by the fork in the road. Their walls were dirty white plaster criss-crossed with dark beams. Some even had thatched roofs.
A sudden thought froze me on the wooden bridge.
Had Crazy Daisy sent me back to the wrong period in time?