The only answer was a whimper. Footsteps sounded on the stairs and I turned to see Father Oda, Vidarr Leifson and Benedetta come into the attic. Benedetta’s hood shadowed her face. Another whimper made me look back to Gunnald who was shivering, and not from the cold. ‘You, lord?’

‘I killed Halfdan,’ I said. ‘He was fat too.’

That killing had been years before and in a riverside yard not unlike Gunnald’s. Halfdan had thought I had come to buy slaves and had greeted me with an effusive politeness. I still remember his bald head, his waist-long beard, his false smile, and his swollen belly. Finan had been with me that day, and both of us had been thinking of the months we had been enslaved together, chained to a bench of a slaver’s ship, whipped through the ice-cold seas, and kept alive only by the thoughts of revenge. We had seen our fellow oarsmen whipped to death, heard the women sobbing, and seen children dragged screaming to our owner’s house. Halfdan had not been responsible for any of that misery, but he had paid for it all the same. Finan had hamstrung Halfdan and I had slit his throat, and that was the day we freed Mehrasa, a dark-skinned girl who came from the lands beyond the Mediterranean. She had married Father Cuthbert and now lived in Bebbanburg. Wyrd bið ful ãræd.

‘Halfdan,’ I still crouched close to the shivering Gunnald, ‘liked to rape his slaves. Do you rape your slaves?’

Gunnald, terrified, retained enough cunning to understand that I had this strange dislike of slavers raping their own property. ‘No, lord,’ he lied.

‘I can’t hear you,’ I said, standing again, this time taking his abandoned sword with me.

‘No, lord!’

‘So you treat your slaves well?’

‘Yes, lord. I do, lord!’ He sounded frantic now.

‘I am glad to hear it,’ I said. I tossed Gunnald’s sword to Finan, then drew Wasp-Sting and held the seax hilt first towards Benedetta. ‘You’ll find this easier,’ I told her.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

Father Oda began to say something, then looked at my face and thought better of it. ‘One last thing,’ I said, and turned back to the kneeling Gunnald. I stood behind him and dragged the ragged mail coat over his head so that all he wore was a thin woollen robe. When the coat was free of his face and he could see again, he gasped because Benedetta had pushed back her hood. He stammered something, then, as he saw the hatred on her face and the blade in her hand, the stammering turned into a moan. ‘You two know each other, I think,’ I said.

Gunnald’s mouth still moved, or at least quivered, but no sound came now. Benedetta turned the sword so that the attic’s small light glinted on the steel. ‘No, lord!’ Gunnald managed to say in a panicked voice as he shuffled backwards. I kicked him hard, he went still, then moaned again as his bladder gave way.