‘And they haven’t attacked?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Do you have horses?’ I asked Hyglac.

‘We left them in the city,’ he said. ‘There’s a stable there,’ he nodded towards the smaller of the two thatched buildings that lay inside the fort. ‘If you need it,’ he added, perhaps thinking we had horsemen following us across the bridge.

‘We came by boat,’ I said. Both the buildings looked new and both were made of stout timbers. I assumed the larger was to house the garrison, which in peacetime would surely not number more than twenty men, just sufficient to stand guard over whoever collected the custom dues from the merchants entering or leaving the city. I nodded towards the larger building. ‘That looks sturdy enough.’

‘Sturdy?’ Hyglac asked.

‘To keep prisoners,’ I explained.

He grimaced. ‘Lord Æthelhelm won’t like that. He says we’re not to take prisoners. We’re to kill them all. Every last man.’

‘All of them?’

‘More land, you see? He says he’ll share out Mercian land to us. And give us all of Northumbria too!’

‘All of Northumbria!’

Hyglac shrugged. ‘Not sure I want to be part of that war. They’re god-damned savages in Northumbria.’

‘They are,’ Finan said fervently.

‘I still need a place to keep prisoners,’ I said.

‘Lord Æthelhelm won’t like that,’ Hyglac warned me again.

‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘he won’t, because you’re the prisoners.’

‘Me?’ He was certain he had misheard or, at the least, misunderstood.

‘You,’ I said mildly. ‘I’m giving you a choice, Hyglac.’ I spoke softly, reasonably. ‘You can die here, or you can give me your sword. You and your men will be stripped of your mail, your weapons and boots, then put into that building. It’s that or death.’ I smiled. ‘Which is it to be?’

He stared at me, still trying to understand what I had said. He opened his mouth, revealing three crooked yellow teeth, said nothing and so closed it.

I held out my hand. ‘Your sword, Hyglac.’

He still seemed dazed. ‘Who are you?’

‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said, ‘lord of the Northumbrian savages.’ For a moment I thought he was going to piss himself with terror. ‘Your sword,’ I said politely, and he just gave it to me.

It was that easy.

A warrior called Rumwald led the Mercians who had threatened Suðgeweork’s fort. He was a short man with a round cheerful face, a straggling grey beard, and a brisk manner. He had led one hundred and thirty-five men into the fort. ‘You had us worried, lord,’ he confessed.

‘Worried?’

‘We were about to assault the fort, then your men showed up. I thought we’d never capture the place after that!’

Yet captured it was, and we now had a little more than three hundred men, ten of whom I would leave to guard Hyglac’s garrison, who were safely imprisoned inside the larger of the two buildings. The West Saxons had been surly, resentful, and outnumbered, but they had little choice except to surrender, and once they had been disarmed and shut away we had opened the fort’s southern gates and shouted at the Mercians to join us. Rumwald had been reluctant to let his men approach the fort, fearing a trap, and in the end Brihtwulf had walked without shield or sword to persuade his fellow Mercians that we were allies.