That same purple night of summer lay on another coast far to the south and west; on Brigantium in the Suevic kingdom. Here in northern Hispania the night was graciously warm and all but cloudless. The spacious harbour with its triple bays sighed and surged with the tide.

In a richly tapestried chamber, five men conferred ’neath the beams of a low ceiling. At the head of the smooth-topped oaken table sat Veremund the Tall, king of this land. Though his long legs were stretched out he was not the tallest of this extraordinary gathering. At his right hand sat his kinsman and advisor, tawny-moustached Irnic Break-ax in his tunic of blue with its crossed sets of yellow stripes; Zarabdas the mage, once a priest of Bel in Syria and now among the Suevic king’s most valued servants, was at his left. His dusky skin, forked jet-black beard and expressive dark eyes, no less than his eastern robes among the fair, Germanic Suevi, gave him an air of strangeness and alien mystery that Zarabdas was not ashamed to exploit. No charlatan, this dark mage among people whose hair ranged in hue from nigh white to a medium brown, and seldom that dark. His powers and learning were real. So too were the theatrical instincts he had cultivated, along with his impressive robes.

“Wisdom alone,” Zarabdas had told his king, “will not gain one a hearing.”

They three dominated and ruled the Sueves who dominated northwestern Spain. They three sat at table’s head, and did not dominate that gathering.

The other men at the stained and battered table were more memorable still. Neither Germans nor Easterners nor even Celts were these twain, neither members of royal family nor wizards-in the usual sense. They did possess a certain wizardry at tactics, and at relieving laden ships of their cargoes. And at the bloody work of sharpened steel. Indeed one of them combined dark hair and dusky skin with pale Celtish eyes, though they were so deeply set in their slits as frequently to appear darker.