It took them a day to follow the river beyond the last of the rapids. Leikr hardly said a word. As for Erlan, he tried not to think how every friend he ever made seemed to die. Except for this dog, and this boy. It was his fault. The twins should have stayed behind to sit out the last of the winter in Osvald’s rotten hall. Then again, he hadn’t forced them to come. They wanted adventure, to win a name and if they were lucky, a fortune. But all Adalrik had won himself was an unmarked grave in a sodden piece of turf, far from his home and hearth.

It was another day before they spied the first sign of any human habitation: a few smears of smoke in the sky.

‘You think it’s safe?’ asked Leikr, nodding ahead to a sizeable village spread along the Dnipar’s eastern bank.

Erlan cast a look over their sorry crew. ‘Safe from us, certainly.’

‘We could go round it.’

‘No. We’re going to have to face the folk in this land sooner or later. Might as well be now.’

Still it was a risk, and with only a sword and a couple of knives between them, Erlan felt severely under-armed.

The riverbank was a bustle of small craft coming and going from a shallow landing beach on the inside of a curve in the river. By the time the pair reached the outlying dwellings, the bustle had turned into a commotion.

Suddenly they saw why. A large boat loomed around the bend downriver. A stout, cumbersome vessel, making heavy way upstream with a bright orange sail that bulged with the wind.

‘A raiding ship?’ asked Leikr.

‘No. Trade, is my guess,’ Erlan replied. ‘Though what they hope to trade in this place, I’ve no idea.’ There was no way a boat that size could progress much further, not with those rapids less than a day’s voyage upriver. That meant, whatever its business here, it had to be returning whence it came. That meant south. That meant the sea. ‘We need to get on that boat.’

Cautiously, they walked down towards the landing beach where already a considerable crowd had gathered. The handful of women left behind who noticed them prudently backed away into shadowy doorways, pulling their little ones after them. But no one challenged them. Most were short, fair of complexion, with a rusty tinge to their hair.

By the time the two companions and their dog had reached the shoreline the ship had dropped anchor. Some locals had poled out flat-bottomed skiffs alongside into which the traders were unloading their cargo. Erlan touched Leikr’s arm. ‘Let’s watch a while.’ They backed into the lee of a forge left unmanned for the moment.