Brindle dozed beside him, but every now and again the dog would whimper and tremble in her sleep. Edgar wondered whether dogs had bad dreams.

Edgar sometimes had nightmares: he was on a sinking ship, or an oak tree was falling and he could not get out of the way, or he was fleeing from a forest fire. When he woke up from such dreams he experienced a feeling of relief so powerful that he wanted to weep. Now he kept thinking that the Viking attack might be a nightmare from which he would wake at any moment to find Sunni still alive. But he did not wake.

At last he heard voices speaking plain Anglo-Saxon. Still he hesitated. The speakers sounded troubled but not panicked; grief-stricken rather than in fear of their lives. That must surely mean the Vikings had gone, he reasoned.

How many of his friends had they taken with them to sell as slaves? How many corpses of his neighbors had they left behind? Did he still have a family?

Brindle made a hopeful noise in her throat and tried to stand up. She could not rise in the confined space, but clearly she felt it was now safe to move.

Edgar lifted the manger. Brindle immediately stepped out. Edgar rolled from under it, holding the Viking ax, and lowered the trough back to the floor. He got to his feet, limbs aching from prolonged confinement. He hooked the ax to his belt.

Then he looked out of the dairy door.

The town had gone.

For a moment he was just bewildered. How could Combe have disappeared? But he knew how, of course. Almost every house had burned to nothing. A few were still smoldering. Here and there masonry structures remained standing, and he took awhile to identify them. The monastery had two stone buildings, the church and a two-story edifice with a refectory on the ground floor and a dormitory upstairs. There were two other stone churches. It took him longer to identify the home of Wyn the jeweler, who needed stonework to protect him from thieves.

Cyneric’s cows had survived, clustering fearfully in the middle of their fenced pasture: cows were valuable, but, Edgar reasoned, too bulky and cantankerous to take on board ship—like all thieves, the Vikings would prefer cash or small, high-priced items such as jewelry.

Townspeople stood in the ruins, dazed, hardly speaking, uttering monosyllables of grief and horror and bewilderment.

The same vessels were anchored in the bay, but the Viking ships had gone.

At last he allowed himself to look at the bodies in the dairy. The Viking was barely recognizable as a human being. Edgar felt strange, thinking that he had done that. It was hardly believable.

Sunni looked surprisingly peaceful. There was no visible sign of the head injury that had killed her. Her eyes were half open, and Edgar closed them again. He knelt down and again felt for a heartbeat, knowing it was foolish. Her body was already cool.