‘We need sentries,’ he interrupted me.

‘I’ll take the first part of the night,’ I said, ‘and you the second. We each need three men with us.’

‘Out here?’ he asked. We were standing just outside the barn.

‘One man out here,’ I said, ‘and you or me inside with the other two.’

‘Inside?’

‘Do you trust the slaves?’ I asked.

‘They’re chained,’ he said.

‘And desperate. They know we’re being pursued. Maybe they think it’s better to run now than wait for Waormund’s troops to capture us. And they know we have money, women, and weapons.’

He thought for a heartbeat, then, ‘Jesus,’ he said quietly, ‘you really think they’ll dare attack us?’

‘I think we should be ready if they do.’

‘And there’s near thirty of them. If they all attack us …’ his voice trailed away.

‘Even if only half,’ I said, ‘or maybe I’m imagining it.’

‘And if they do attack?’

‘Put them down hard and fast,’ I said grimly.

‘Jesus,’ he said again.

‘And warn all our men,’ I added.

We went back inside. Moonlight came through the ragged holes in the shattered roof. Men were snoring. I could hear a child crying, and Benedetta singing softly to her. After a while the crying ended. An owl hooted in the woods beyond the barn.

I put Oswi outside the barn and sat inside with Beornoth and Gerbruht, the three of us leaning against the wall in dark shadow. None of us spoke and my thoughts drifted as I fought against sleep. I remembered the Lundene house where I had lived with Gisela and I tried to conjure her face in my memory, but it would not come. It never did. Stiorra, my daughter, had resembled her mother, but Stiorra was dead too, and her face was just as elusive. What I could remember was Ravn, the blind skald, who was father to Ragnar the Fearless. It had been Ragnar who had captured me when I was a child, who had enslaved me and then made me his son.

Ravn had been a great warrior till a Saxon sword took his eyes, and so he had become a skald. He had laughed when I said I did not know what a skald was. ‘You would call a skald a scop,’ he had explained.

‘A shaper?’

‘A poet, boy. A weaver of dreams, a man who makes glory from nothing and dazzles you with its making.’

‘What use is a poet?’ I had asked.

‘None at all, boy, none at all! Poets are quite useless! But when the world ends folk will remember our songs, and in Valhalla they will sing those songs and so the middle-earth’s glory will not die.’

Ravn had taught me about his gods and, now that I was as old as Ravn had been when I knew him, I wished I had asked him more, but I did remember him saying that he believed there was a place in the afterworld for families. ‘I will see my wife again,’ he had told me wistfully, and I had been too young to know what to say and too foolish to ask him more. All I had wanted to hear was his tales of battle, but now, in the moonlit barn, I clung to those few words spoken so long ago and dreamed of Gisela waiting in some sunlit hall to welcome me. I tried again to summon her face, her smile. I saw her in my dreams sometimes, but never when I was awake.