Erman, the eldest brother at twenty, lay near Edgar, and Eadbald, the middle one, was in the corner. Sometimes they would wake in the middle of the night and embrace, whispering and moving together, until they fell back, panting but they were fast asleep now, Pa snoring. The rest of his family lay around the room, close to the walls where there was less smoke. That meant either that the moon had set, so the night was well advanced, or that the sky was cloudy, which would tell him nothing. He stared in the direction of the door, looking for telltale lines of light around its edges, and saw only darkness. But now there was nothing but the soft lullaby of waves on a sheltered beach. Earlier, he had listened to the sounds of the town settling for the night: a couple of drunks singing an obscene ditty, the bitter accusations of a marital quarrel in a neighboring house, a door slamming and a dog barking and, somewhere nearby, a woman sobbing.

All around the walls were wooden pegs on which were hung clothes, cooking utensils, and boatbuilding tools.Įdgar was not sure how much of the night had passed, because he might have dozed off, perhaps more than once. Over the fire stood an iron tripod from which cooking pots could be hung, and its legs made spidery shadows on the underside of the roof. In the middle of the single room was a square of stones surrounding the hearth. His home was like almost every other house in the town of Combe: oak-plank walls, a thatched roof, and an earth floor partly covered with reeds from the banks of the nearby river.

He turned his head and looked around by firelight. He wondered how much longer he had to wait. He tried to make himself uncomfortable, lying on his fist to stay awake. He would be eighteen three days after Midsummer. That had been years ago, when Edgar was small. Edgar’s elder brother Erman had once said to him: “How come you know when Easter is?” and he had replied: “Because it’s the first Sunday after the first full moon after the twenty-first day of March, obviously.” It had been a mistake to add “obviously,” because Erman had punched him in the stomach for being sarcastic. Most people had to ask priests, who kept calendars. But now the weather was warm: Midsummer Day was a week away.Įdgar always knew dates. In winter he would wrap the cloak around him and lie near the fire. He had spread his cloak over the reeds on the floor and now he lay on it, dressed in the knee-length brown wool tunic that was all he wore in summer, day and night. T was hard to stay awake all night, Edgar found, even on the most important night of your life. This period is sometimes called the Dark Ages, and progress was painfully slow for five hundred years. The technology of Roman pottery-important for storing food-was mostly lost. As the Roman villas crumbled, the people built one-room wooden dwellings without chimneys. When the Roman Empire declined, Britain went backward.

Ken follett the evening and the morning