‘A man called Eric the Red made the first journey,’ Orm said. ‘A son of Egil sailed with him. This was Egil’s son’s son’s—’

‘Never mind.’

Eric led settlers to this new island, which he enticingly called Greenland, and soon two healthy settlements developed. ‘I visited them myself,’ Orm said. ‘My father once took me there on a trading voyage. They raise cattle and sheep, and they hunt walrus, seals, white bears, and catch fish. Some cling to the old faiths, as my father did, as I do. Mostly they are good Christians. They send tributes to the bishops at home, who send them on to the Pope.’

‘And,’ Sihtric prompted him, ‘explorers went further west yet.’

So they had. The new lands had been first sighted in the time of Eric the Red by a man called Bjarni Herjolffson who, sailing for Greenland, had been blown off course by strong winds and lost in deep fog. He came to a thickly forested shoreline he had not recognised as Greenland. Bjami had not landed, but some time later Leif, the son of Eric the Red, intrigued by Bjarni’s account, tried to recreate Bjarni’s accidental journey. He used Bjarni’s ship, for ships knew their own way.

Sihtric rolled his eyes. ‘Pagan superstition!’

The first place Leif landed was worthless, nothing but glaciers and slabs of rock, and he called it Helluland. The next landing was at a place he called Markland, which was thickly forested. And finally he came to a place called Vinland, the land of wine, for one of his men got drunk from eating the grapes that grew abundantly. Leif wintered in Vinland and returned to Greenland with a cargo of grapes and timber. Leif never returned, but later other children of Eric the Red led an expedition to colonise.

Sihtric leaned close, studying Orm, his breath foul with wine. ‘And you,’ he said. ‘You visited this Vinland?’

‘With my father, as a boy. He showed me the places my grandparents lived.’

It had been a late afternoon when his father and his men dragged the ship up a boggy beach from the still water of a bay. The land was low, with worn islands offshore. On a scrap of land above the marshy beach stood the settlement, a clump of huts with walls of sod. Fires had curled up into the sky, and voices in clipped Danish or Norwegian called to and fro, just like home. ‘I was thrilled,’ Orm admitted. ‘I was old enough to understand that I had crossed an ocean, and yet here were people living and working, and speaking in my own language.’

Godgifu smiled, enchanted.

Orm remembered that as he had walked with his father and his men along the beach, they discovered what looked like three humps on the beach. They turned out to be skin boats, upturned, with three skraelings hiding beneath each one.

‘Skraelings?’