So Æthelhelm the Younger had sent his youngest brother to kill me. He had equipped a fleet, and offered gold to the crew, and placed a rancid priest on the ships to inspire Æthelwulf with righteous anger. Æthelhelm knew it would be next to impossible to kill me while I stayed inside the fortress and knew too that he could not send sufficient men to ambush me on my lands without those men being discovered and slaughtered by Northumbria’s warriors, so he had been clever. He had sent men to ambush me at sea.

Æthelwulf was the fleet’s leader, but Æthelhelm knew that his brother, though imbued with the family’s hatred for me, was not the most ruthless of men, and so he had sent Father Ceolnoth to fill Æthelwulf with holy stupidity, and he had also sent the man they called Edgar. Except that was not his real name. Æthelhelm had wanted no one to know of the fleet’s true allegiance, or to connect my death to his orders. He had hoped the blame would be placed on piracy, or on some passing Norse ship, and so he had commanded the leaders to use any name except their own. Æthelwulf had become Wistan, and I learned that Edgar was really Waormund.

I knew Waormund. He was a huge West Saxon, a brutal man, with a slab face scarred from his right eyebrow to his lower left jaw. I remembered his eyes, dead as stone. In battle Waormund was a man you would want standing beside you because he was capable of terrible violence, but he was also a man who revelled in that savagery. A strong man, even taller than me, and implacable. He was a warrior, and, though you might want his help in a battle, no one but a fool would want Waormund as an enemy. ‘Why,’ I asked Æthelwulf the next morning, ‘was Waormund in your smallest ship?’

‘I ordered him into that ship, lord, because I wanted him gone! He’s not a Christian.’

‘He’s a pagan?’

‘He’s a beast. It was Waormund who tortured the captives. I tried to stop him.’

‘But Father Ceolnoth encouraged him?’

‘Yes.’ Æthelwulf nodded miserably. We were walking on Bebbanburg’s seaward ramparts. The sun glittered from an empty sea and a small wind brought the smell of seaweed and salt. ‘I tried to stop Waormund,’ Æthelwulf went on, ‘and he cursed me and he cursed God.’

‘He cursed your god?’ I asked, amused.

Æthelwulf made the sign of the cross. ‘I said God would not forgive his cruelty, and he said God was far more cruel than man. So I ordered him into Hælubearn because I couldn’t abide his company.’

I walked on a few paces. ‘I know your brother hates me,’ I said, ‘but why send you north to kill me? Why now?’

‘Because he knows you swore an oath to kill him,’ Æthelwulf said, and that answer shocked me. I had indeed sworn that oath, but I had thought it was a secret between Æthelstan and myself, yet Æthelhelm knew of that oath. How? No wonder Æthelhelm wanted me dead before I attempted to fulfil the oath.