‘If I die here I’ll go to heaven?’ The youngster asked the question earnestly.

‘You will be at God’s side this very day, my son. You will be with the blessed saints! Now do God’s work!’

The young man knelt for an instant. He closed his eyes and made a clumsy sign of the cross with the hand holding his sword. Egil’s men, my men, and the surviving enemy watched, and I saw the Christians among my crew also make the sign of the cross. Were they praying for me or were they begging forgiveness because they had captured cross-prowed ships? ‘Don’t be a fool, boy,’ I said.

‘I am no fool,’ he said proudly as he stood. ‘God does not choose fools to do his work.’

‘Which is?’

‘To rid the earth of your wickedness.’

‘In my experience,’ I said, ‘your god almost always chooses fools.’

‘Then I will be God’s fool,’ he said defiantly. There was a clatter behind him and he turned, startled, only to see that another of his companions had thrown down spear and shield. ‘You should have more faith,’ he told the man derisively, then turned to me and charged.

He was brave, of course. Brave and foolish. He knew he would die. Maybe not at my hands, but if he had succeeded in killing me then my men would have hacked him down mercilessly, which meant this fool knew he had only minutes to live, yet he believed he would have another life in the sunlit boredom of the Christian heaven. And did he believe he could kill me? Nothing is certain in battle. He might have killed me if he had both the sword-skill and the shield-craft that make a great warrior, but I suspected his faith was not rooted in hard-won craft, but in the belief that his god would reach down and give him victory, and that foolish belief spurred him towards me.

While he had been praying I had slipped my hand out of my shield’s leather grips and was now holding it by just the outer loop. He must have noticed, but he thought nothing of it. I held both shield and sword low, waited until he was just six or seven paces away, then I drew my left arm back and threw the shield. I threw it low, threw it hard, and threw it at his feet and, sure enough, he tripped on the shield and a heave of the waves tipped him sideways so that he sprawled on a rower’s bench, and I stepped forward, swept Serpent-Breath once, and her blade hit his blade with a dull sound and broke it. Two-thirds of his sword clattered across the deck as he desperately stabbed the remaining stub at my thigh. I reached down and took his wrist and held it firm. ‘Are you really so eager to die?’ I asked him.

He struggled against my grip, then tried to hit me with the iron-rimmed edge of his shield, which banged against my thigh without hurting me. ‘Give me another sword,’ he demanded.