That might be true enough. Nevertheless he forced himself to all fours and was about to get up when something across the street stopped him. Something watching him from the alleyway opposite, one eye glinting bright and solemn in the moonlight.

‘Aska?’ he murmured, sure he must be dreaming. But the darkness shifted, a scrap of chain rattled, and for a second he saw the outline of a dog.

A spear clattered on the cobbles beside him. A torch appeared at the corner of the street. He dragged himself to his feet, gritting his teeth against the pain, as more projectiles rained about him. ‘Aska!’ he called, but the wolfhound was gone, and Erlan could only blunder after him into the dark alley, while behind him the cries of pursuit rang across the city.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Mist covered the water as the ferry set out from the port of Chalcedon and nudged around the headland. Lilla stared ahead. Sunbeams were making strange shifting patterns through the mist. Under the hull, the stream flowing south through the straits felt strong. She listened to the dip and gnaw of the oars. She smelled the boatman’s sour sweat and her own hair blowing about her face unwashed, mingling with the salty sea air.

‘You can’t see it yet, but up that way there’s a long inlet,’ said the Greek, pointing across the straits to the north-west. ‘Chrysokeras. The Golden Horn. The entire imperial fleet is crammed in there, safe as bugs behind a huge chain they pull across the mouth of the bay. Each link as fat as that one’s belly.’ He jabbed a thumb at Einar who was sitting astride a thwart in the bows. Girthy Einar might be, but Lilla thought he had never looked better. His ruddy jowls had leaned out, his forehead was brown as leather and his bushy eyebrows were dyed blonde with the sun.

Gerutha suddenly leaped to her feet. ‘Sweet lies of Loki! Would you look at that?’

Lilla peered into the thinning mist. She saw first colours, then shapes. A slope daubed red and white and green, slanting away towards a distant ridge. Then all at once sunlight exploded over everything, bathing the red and white city in a coral dawn. She saw bands of pink-grey blocks and red brick, and above them bank after bank of rust-red tiles climbing away, punctuated with fans of dark cedar trees.

‘What in the Nine Worlds is that?’ cried Einar, pointing at a hall seated on the eastern shoulder of the promontory, whose massive buttresses of red ochre dominated every other building.

‘The Church of the Holy Wisdom,’ said Demetrios the Greek. ‘There’s no finer building in all the wide world.’ Lilla could well believe it.

‘And there?’ asked Gerutha, pointing further south.

‘They call it the hippodrome.’

‘Hippo—what?’ said Einar.

The Greek laughed. ‘They race horses there, you damned barbarian.’