‘Just exercising the horses,’ I said, relieved.

‘They were good horses too,’ Finan said, ‘not cheap country nags.’

‘I’m sure they have good horses here,’ I said. ‘It’s good land once you’re off the marshes.’

‘But the bastards came by ship,’ Finan pointed out. ‘No one told us they brought horses with them.’

‘So they took them from the townsfolk.’

‘Or they’ve been reinforced,’ Finan said ominously. ‘It feels bad, lord. We should go back.’

Finan was no coward. I am ashamed even to have thought this. Of course he was no coward! He was among the two or three bravest men I have ever known, a swordsman of lightning speed and deadly skill, but that day he had an instinct of doom. It was a feeling of dread, a certainty based on nothing he could see or hear, but a certainty all the same. He claimed the Irish had a knowledge denied to the rest of us, that they could scent fate, and though he was a Christian I knew he believed the world to be seething with spirits and it seemed those unseen creatures had spoken to him. In the night he had tried to persuade me to board Spearhafoc and sail back north. We were too few, he had said, and our enemies too numerous. ‘And I saw you dead, lord,’ he had finished, sounding grieved to speak of such a thing.

‘Dead?’ I had asked.

‘Naked, blood-covered, lord, in a field of barley.’ He paused, but I said nothing. ‘We should go home, lord.’

I was tempted. And Finan’s vision or dream had almost convinced me. I touched my hammer amulet. ‘We’ve come this far,’ I told him, ‘but I need to speak to Eadgifu.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’ We had been sitting on a bench beside the tavern’s hearth. All around us men snored. The wind still rattled the shutters and fretted at the reed thatch, and rain still fell through the roof-hole to hiss in the fire, but the storm had gone out to sea and only the remnants disturbed the night.

‘Because that’s what I came to do,’ I had answered stubbornly.

‘And she was supposed to raise a force of Centish men?’

‘That’s what the priest told me.’

‘And has she?’

I had sighed. ‘You know the answer as well as I do.’

‘So tomorrow we go inland?’ he asked. ‘We’ve no horses. What happens if we get cut off from the harbour?’

I had thought of answering him by saying I needed to fulfil my oath, but of course Finan was right. There were other ways to keep my promise to Æthelstan. I could have joined him in Mercia, but instead I had chosen to believe the priest and had hoped to lead a rebellious band of Centish warriors to attack Æthelhelm from within Wessex. ‘So I’m a fool,’ I had said instead to Finan, ‘but tomorrow we find Eadgifu.’

He had heard the resolve in my voice and accepted it. ‘Amazing what a pair of good-smelling tits will make a man do,’ he had said, ‘and you should sleep.’