The Armenian’s eyes didn’t shift from the table. ‘Those walls have taken everything thrown at them for two hundred years. Every household has provisions enough for three winters. The cisterns are brimming. The navy’s at full strength. We’re well led. Now, anyway,’ he added. ‘What’s to worry about?’ He had to shout now because Orlana had just mounted the table and was standing astride the redhead, loosening the flimsy girdle around her slender waist and shrugging her robe off her shoulders. Einar had seen a good deal in his long life, but so far nothing had disarmed him quite like the sight of that splendid torso in the flickering torchlight. She stood there, naked as a babe, apparently with no shame at all. Einar skulled back the rest of his cup.

‘So what’s your trade?’ said the Armenian, as if the sight of that goddess shining like a sun in this dingy hovel was nothing new.

‘Back home, they call me a hus karl.’

‘What’s that then?’

Orlana was crouching over the redhead’s face. Someone passed her the jug full of grain and she began to pour. Einar’s gaze followed the trickle of seeds south between her breasts and down the shallow furrow of her stomach. ‘A guard, more or less.’ He frowned. ‘Sworn to a queen.’ There was a roar as the grain spilled over Orlana’s dark triangle and ran off into the redhead’s open mouth.

‘A queen, no less! Well, well! Where is she then?’

‘Thankfully not in here,’ Einar replied. ‘And you?’ The Armenian’s answer was swallowed up in a gale of laughter as the redhead lurched upright and spluttered a shower of grain all over the eager onlookers. The woman looked wild-eyed. She cast around her, yelling, ‘Krasí! Krasí!’

Wine. Well, it did look like thirsty work.

The Armenian dug an elbow in Einar’s ribs. ‘I said – I serve the senior general in the city. His name is Arbasdos. The emperor just made him kouropalates.’

Einar had no idea what kouropalates meant, but he nodded along. ‘Sounds impressive,’ he said, somewhat absorbed with the sight of blood-red wine flowing like a river where the grain had run before, and the redhead’s tongue lapping the stuff down like it was the mead of the gods.

‘There’s no higher honour in the empire. If you get bored of waiting on your queen, you could do worse than serve him. He’s developing a taste for Northmen.’

The word sent a jolt through Einar’s brain. ‘Northmen, you say?’

The noise was rising. Orlana knew how to spin out her performance, no error, reducing the flow of the wine to a trickle, toying with her audience and the redhead.