If they thought they could break him with an empty stomach and a few days’ discomfort, they were wrong. He was steel tempered over fire. That had been Vargalf’s gift to him. He would not break.

Day and night passed but he knew not the hour of their coming and going. Now and then a sound reached him from above. The first time he heard it, he had looked up and the shock of cold water hit him full in the face. Thirstily he licked up what droplets he could, off his filthy hands and face, sucking greedily at the thread of his stinking breeks, although he baulked at licking the slimy stones. For now.

He wasted no time on thoughts of regret or self-pity. Vargalf’s fire had burned all that out of him. If you still have breath in your lungs, you’re alive, he told himself. That was something. Better to wait in the shit and the silence and see what the morrow would bring.

Even so, while he waited, his mind would pick at the words Vassili had spoken like a raven picking at the bones of the slain. Unless you drink the blood of the king of kings, you shall be a slave to that other. . . Only the blood of the king of kings will set you free. It remained obscure, an image in a muddied mirror. He had found the city of the king of kings, had he not? But what had that profited him? Here he was, a slave, imprisoned in this dank hole. And what strange charge was this? ‘Drink his blood.’ He knew not what to make of it, and the thought troubled him. Though many times the answer to the riddle seemed plain. So plain it came like a voice in his head. ‘Kill him.’ How else could he drink another man’s blood, after all?

‘You still with us, Northman?’ The words startled him. He recognized Silanos’s voice, and peering up he saw a flame flicker high above him.

‘Still with you, Greek,’ he muttered back.

‘The general says you’re to stay down there another week.’ Erlan’s heart sank at this. ‘He thinks by then you’ll accept your position. . . I told him you never would.’

‘What is it then?’ growled Erlan. ‘Another month?’

‘Not exactly. I have other plans for you.’ Then the steward addressed someone else up there. ‘Go ahead then. Pull him up.’

It was the dead of night. The air outside the hole tasted fresh as falling snow. Erlan gulped it down hungrily.