‘I didn’t want him complaining to Æthelhelm,’ I explained. Not that the elderly man was likely to send a messenger to Lundene, but nor did I want news spreading through the neighbourhood of a Mercian force taking boats. ‘Besides,’ I went on, ‘we are Æthelhelm’s men now, or we are until we start killing them.’ We had plenty of captured red cloaks, and we had the charred crosses on our shields. I looked up at Wihtgar. ‘So you speak Danish?’ That was unusual for a Saxon.

He gave me a lopsided grin. ‘Married to one, lord.’ He touched the wrinkled scar where his left ear had been. ‘Her husband did this. He got my ear, I got his woman. A fair exchange.’

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘Did he live?’

‘Not long, lord.’ He patted the hilt of his sword. ‘Flæscmangere saw to that.’

I half smiled. Flæscmangere was a good name for a sword, and the butcher’s blade, I thought, would soon be busy in Lundene.

It was midday before the ebb started, but even before the tide turned, when it was slack water, we untied the ships, poled them off the wharf, and started downriver. It was another bright summer’s day, too hot to wear mail. The sun dazzled from the river’s ripples, a lazy west wind stirred the willow leaves, and slowly, slowly, we lumbered downstream. We used the oars, but clumsily, because the Mercians were not used to rowing. I had put Gerbruht on the second barge and Beornoth on the third because they were both Frisian seamen and both knew boats. Their barges lumbered behind ours, the oars splashing and clashing, and mostly it was the river’s current and the fall of the quickening tide that took us southwards.

We reached the Temes in the late afternoon and it was there that I discovered the purpose of the four great posts buried in the river bed where the Ligan’s channels joined the greater river. A hay barge was moored to one of the posts. The crew, just three men, were waiting for the tide to turn and, rather than run aground, they were floating, tethered to the post, which meant they did not have to wait for the flood tide to lift them from the mud, but could take advantage of the first strong tidal surge to carry them towards Lundene. We moored with them, then waited again.

The sun blazed. There was hardly a breath of wind now. No clouds. Yet to the west there was a great dark smear in the sky, ominous as any thunderhead. That was the smoke of Lundene. It was a city, I thought, of darkness. I wondered if the smoke lingered above Bebbanburg, or whether a sea breeze was blowing it inland, and then I touched my new hammer to avert the curse of plague. I closed my eyes and gripped the hammer so tightly that it hurt my fingers. I prayed to Thor. I prayed that my lacerations would heal, that my ribs would stop hurting with every breath, and that my torn shoulder would let me wield a sword. I prayed for Bebbanburg, for Northumbria, for my son, for all the folk at home. I thought of Berg, with his strange cargo of a fugitive queen and her children. I prayed there was no plague.