He sat beside her, solid, round-shouldered, his hair greasy. With ill grace he took the food. Sitting side by side, not touching, they ate.

Askold had always been a bit short, solidly built, not the brightest -‘muscle all the way to the top of his head’, her father liked to joke. He wouldn’t have been her first choice of husband. But he had been the first to come courting, in his clumsy way, when she was fourteen. Since then he had stuck with her, and she had never seen him do a deliberate unkindness to another - although she had heard he could be brutal when he went raiding. He wasn’t a bad man, then. Probably.

But he was disappointing, she thought drearily. Sex with him had been painful the first few times, then for a while vaguely pleasurable - but quickly, like much else in their lives, it had become a chore. Nowadays they would lie together of a night, and he would spend himself into her, and they would roll apart and sleep, all without exchanging a single word, even without kissing. It had been like this since she was sixteen years old.

And when the sons refused to blossom in her womb, their relationship turned dull. He had stayed with her. Perhaps he loved her in his way. But it was a cold, deadened love. Surely the love of Ulf and Sulpicia, six generations back, had been much more fiery than this.

It didn’t help that these days the fjords swarmed with other men’s sons. Sons were a source of pride, a sign of virility, a promise of wealth in old age. And all those sons wanted their own homes.

That was the trouble, her father said. The fjords were full, they were already living halfway up the mountains, and still more sons popped from the women’s loins. That was why the people were sailing off to Britain, or even further.

These thoughts reminded her why Askold had said he had come here. ‘You say my father is back?’

He nodded and pointed. ‘Look, you can see his ship. Good trading with the British. Whale ivory in exchange for wool and hunting dogs and slaves. Plenty of good places for a landing, he said.’

She knew what that meant. Good places to raid.

‘Oh,’ Askold said. ‘He told me to tell you. The island you’ve mentioned before - where the story of Ulf and Sul - Sulpi—’

‘Sulpicia.’

‘Where all that’s supposed to have happened.’

She guessed, ‘Lindisfarena?’

‘That’s the place.’

‘It didn’t happen there. There’s just supposed to be a copy of the prophecy there. The Menologium of Isolde ...’

Askold waited, staring into the misty distance and chewing his meat, until she shut up. He hated to be corrected.

‘Tell me what my father said.’