As Macson kept saying, this wasn’t his fight. But remarkably, all around him, the prophecy was coming true, a tapestry of omens and numbers that had somehow tangled him up. He was part of this now and felt he could not leave, not until these darkly foreshadowed events had played out.

‘We go on,’ he said grimly. ‘We swim if we have to. But we go on.’ And he marched on towards the island, splashing in the deepening water. He didn’t look back. Macson was engaged in his own conflicts, a war between his greed for the Menologium and his urge for self-protection. At last Belisarius heard a curse, couched in an obscure mix of Latin and British, as Macson came wading after him.

Gudrid had been on one raid before.

It was five years ago. She had been fifteen, about to be wed. It had just been a jaunt along the coast, an assault on a village against whom Bjami and his elders had a grudge over an unpaid debt. Raiding wasn’t a woman’s work, but her father Bjarni insisted she saw blood spilled, just once, so she might be better prepared if anybody ever came to raid her home. One man on each side was killed, a few heads were broken and limbs chopped, and Bjarni’s raiders had crowded a few head of nervous rustled cattle into the boats. It had all been brisk, efficient, business-like. And although the target village had launched a petty raid in their turn the next season, nobody held a grudge.

Gudrid had found the sight of blood hugely distressing. But her father understood. He hated to see slaughter too, clearly. But this was how things were. If you went hungry, your neighbours’ cattle were your emergency larder. Others did the same if you had a good year and them a bad one. It was just work, just business.

Here, though, on this British island, it was different. Here, the villagers didn’t scatter, even when the shallow-draught Viking ships came sliding up the beach. They didn’t try to gather their children and livestock and petty valuables when the Vikings came striding out of their boats, weapons in hand. They even clustered around, curious, as Bjarni confronted the scowling, arrogant man in the black habit - the monk. They felt safe here, on their holy island. They hadn’t played this game before, this lethal game of iron and blood, and didn’t know the rules.

It was only when the monk’s brains oozed grey through his split-open face that the villagers ran, and mothers tried to find their children, and fathers and sons hunted for weapons in their huts.