‘King Edward could have arranged Gunnald’s death for you,’ I said.

She sneered at that. ‘Edward took money from Gunnald. Why kill him? I meant nothing to Edward, rest his soul.’ She made the sign of the cross. ‘What happens to us in Lundene?’

‘We meet with Æthelstan, if he’s there.’

‘And if he’s not?’

‘We go to meet him.’

‘And what will he do to us? To my lady? To her children?’

‘Nothing,’ I said flatly. ‘I’ll tell him you’re under my protection.’

‘He will honour that?’ She sounded sceptical.

‘I have known King Æthelstan since he was a child,’ I said, ‘and he is an honourable man. He will send you under escort to my home at Bebbanburg while we fight our war.’

‘Bebbanburg!’ She pronounced the name in her strange accent. ‘What is at Bebbanburg?’

‘Safety. You’ll be under my protection there.’

‘Awyrgan says we are wrong to accept a pagan’s protection,’ she said flatly.

‘Awyrgan doesn’t have to go with the queen,’ I said.

I thought she would smile for a heartbeat, but the impulse left her and she just nodded. ‘He will go with her,’ she said in a tone of disapproval, then turned her large grey-green eyes on me. ‘Are you truly a pagan?’

‘I am.’

‘That is not good,’ she said seriously.

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘is Gunnald Gunnaldson a pagan?’

She did not answer for a long while, then she shook her head abruptly. ‘He wears the cross.’

‘Does that make him a better man than me?’

She hesitated for a brief moment. ‘No,’ she finally admitted.

‘Then maybe,’ I said, ‘if he’s still in Lundene, I’ll kill him.’

‘No,’ she said firmly.

‘No?’

‘Let me kill him,’ she said and, almost for the first time since I had met her, Benedetta looked happy. We rowed on.

We reached Lundene at dusk, a dusk made darker by the city’s canopy of smoke. At least a score of other ships were lumbering upriver, most laden with the food and supplies that a city’s horde of people and horses need, one ship so heavily laden that it looked like a floating hayrick as it rode the flooding tide about the river’s great bends. We passed the smaller settlements built to Lundene’s east; the shipbuilders with their stacks of timber and the smoking pits where they burned pine to make stinking pitch, and the tanners who made a stink all of their own as they cured pelts with shit. Above it all was Lundene’s own thick stench of woodsmoke and sewage. ‘It’s not a river,’ Finan complained, ‘it’s a cesspool.’

‘You get used to it,’ I said.

‘Who’d want to?’ He looked down at the water flowing past Spearhafoc’s hull. ‘Those are turds!’

We left the marshy banks for the two low hills of Lundene. It was getting dark now, but there was still just enough light to show three spearmen standing on the high stone rampart of the small Roman bastion that guarded the eastern end of the city. None of the three was wearing a dark red cloak and no leaping stag banners hung against the wall. Nor did the three men show any interest as we passed. The wharves, packed with ships, began just beyond the small fort, and in their centre, still downstream of the great bridge, was the stone wall I knew so well. The wall had been made by the Romans and protected a masonry platform on which they had built a lavish house. I had lived there with Gisela.