Campion saw the sea far in the distance. Its surf fretted shallow at the edge of a great, spreading estuary, and between her and the sea was a mile of slick, rippled mud. The sea seemed to be a gray line, quiet and dull, edged with flashing white where the small waves broke on the glassy mud. Toby, who had seen the sea before, imagined the waters racing over the flat, mud shore, whipped up by an east wind into a savage, engulfing tide that would drown this flat land where the creeks tangled among the marsh.

Campion pulled her cloak tight at her throat. “Is that where we’re going?” She nodded toward a small building, its high gable outlined against the darkening sky.

Toby nodded. “Yes.” Beyond it, almost unseen because its hull was hidden by the land on which the building stood, he could see a ship; its mast a tiny scratch against the sky’s vastness. Journey’s end in England.

“Toby!” Campion had turned, staring back at their path. Her voice was frightened. “Toby!”

He turned. Behind them, a half mile behind, he could see four horsemen. Their horses were motionless. The west wind stirred the cloak of one man. They were helmeted, the setting sun glancing red from the barred steel. At their sides were swords. Campion looked at Toby. “They’re following us!”

Toby looked about him. The track led only to the barn on the horizon. It was the only way to go. He smiled at his wife. “Come on. We’ll be safe.”

He fidgeted with his sword-hilt, took one more look at the horsemen behind, and then led Campion along the marsh track to the place where the seals were being gathered, a building as desolate as the coast on which it stood, a building that had faced the gray sea for a thousand years.

The Romans had first built in this place. They had made a fort to fight the Saxon pirates whose oared ships would come from fog-shrouded dawns into the estuary of the Blackwater. Here the Romans had worshipped the old gods, bleeding a dying bull on to the heads of recruits in the wet pit—the rites of Mithras—praying that the god would preserve their lives in the gray waters and misted dawns.

The Romans had gone and the Saxons, pirates turned settlers, had brought their own savage gods before their conversion to Christianity. They built a church, using stones from the Roman walls, and the church, one of the first in the land of the Saxons, was a place of pilgrimage. Then came new heathens, their swords and axes more terrible than any the land had seen, and the Vikings swept the Christians from the flat, marshy land. The church still stood, but the worshippers of Thor and Odin did not know its God, and so the ancient church became a barn. It had been that ever since, an inconvenient barn, strangely built at the land’s edge, a place where sheep could be penned on a bad night. There was a tower, crumbling now, supporting a tall, iron basket in which a fire could be lit to warn mariners against the killing expanse of mud on which the wind and sea could tumble and tear a ship apart.