‘Thanks to you,’ Erlan corrected him. The fat man shrugged. Erlan was eyeing the unfurled parchment and the tiny scribblings all over its face, thinking of what Lilla would do for it. Thinking what she would want him to do. But Alexios was already rolling up the scroll and shoving it inside the folds of his tunic. ‘I ought to destroy this.’ He glanced at the other fires. ‘But the emperor should see it. It’s proof that the Arabs have spies within the city walls.’

‘One fewer now,’ observed Erlan.

‘Mmm. Get some sleep. It’s a long ride to Pliska.’

They were mounted again long before dawn broke, dirty, grey and cold. The ground beneath them was sodden; the snow had melted at last leaving the gullies muddy and the rocks slick. The snows had covered the land for a hundred days, they said. Longer than even the oldest memory in Byzantium could remember. The priests said it was a sure sign of God’s wrath on the infidel. But that was more than Erlan knew.

From the ridge they descended through the gloom, past swaying shadows of alder trees and whitebeams as they picked their way down to the plain below. Alexios bid everyone ride in silence, a command the fat eparch seemed to find impossible to obey. Perhaps he was nervous and was trying to pass off his disquiet as good fellowship with the other men. He wanted to know how every one of them had slept, how far they thought they would reach today, and so on. When the captain hissed him to silence, the eparch only laughed at him.

‘Oh, loosen up, man! What are you so afraid of? The nearest Arab is miles to the south and asleep, half-starved, or more likely dead!’

‘Excellency,’ countered Alexios, his voice cold as a north wind. ‘You are envoy. I command this party until we reach Pliska, so I’ll say this only once – if you don’t shut your mouth, I’ll ram this sword so far up your arse you’ll be spitting iron.’

Lord Daniel’s sleek red cheeks flushed white with fury. His chest puffed like a bullfrog and he was about to unleash fresh invective when an arrow came whistling out of the grey, and took him straight through the throat. Blood spewed from his mouth in great gouts of scarlet. His horse reared up. ‘To arms!’ yelled Alexios. ‘To arms!’ Erlan freed Wrathling from its sheath. ‘Stay on your horse!’ he snarled at Einar who had started to dismount.

‘I can’t wield an axe on top of a blasted horse, can I?’

‘This is no time to make a stand, fat man. Ride like fury!’ The image hardly fitted with the great sack of turnips Einar resembled on horseback. But he took the point and dug his heels into his horse’s flank.