Wynstan said: “At collecting taxes!”

They all laughed, and Ragna knew she had lost.

Edgar was not used to failure. When it came, it bowled him over.

He had tried to build a bridge across the river at Dreng’s Ferry, but it had proved impossible.

He sat with Aldred on the bench outside the alehouse, listening to the sound of the river and staring at the ruins of his plan. He had succeeded, with great difficulty, in building a foundation on the riverbed for one of the pillars of the bridge, a simple box filled with stones to hold the base of the column firmly in place. He had fashioned a mighty beam of heart of oak, stout enough to bear the weight of people and carts as they crossed. But he could not insert the pillar into its socket.

It was evening, and he had been trying in the hot sun all day. At the end almost everyone in the village had been helping. The pillar had been held in place by long ropes, made at high cost by the newcomer Regenbald Roper. People on both banks had hauled on the ropes to keep the timber stable. Edgar and several others had stood on his raft in midstream trying to maneuver the enormous beam.

But everything moved: the water, the raft, the ropes, and the pillar. The timber itself insisted on rising to the surface.

At first it had been like a game, and there was laughter and banter as they all struggled. Several people had fallen into the water, to general hilarity.

To keep the pillar under water and at the same time position it in its socket should have been possible, but they had not done it. They had all become frustrated and bad-tempered. In the end Edgar had given up.

Now the sun was sinking, the monks had returned to the monastery, the villagers had returned to their homes, and Edgar was defeated.

Aldred was not yet willing to abandon the project. “It can be done,” he said. “We need more men, more ropes, more boats.”

Edgar did not think that would work. He said nothing.

Aldred said: “The problem was that your raft kept shifting. Whenever you pushed the pillar into the water, the raft would move away from the foundation.”

“I know.”

“What we really need is a whole row of boats, stretching out from the bank, tied together so that they can’t move so much.”

“I don’t know where we’d get that many boats,” Edgar said gloomily; but he could picture what Aldred was suggesting. The boats could be roped or even nailed together. The whole row would still move, but more slowly, more predictably, less capriciously.

Aldred was still fantasizing. “Maybe two rows, one on each side of the river.”

Edgar was so weary and downhearted that he was reluctant to entertain new ideas, but despite his mood he was intrigued by Aldred’s notion. It would provide a much more stable setup for the awkward task. All the same it might not be enough. However, something else was nagging at him as he pictured the two rows of boats growing out of the banks and reaching out into midstream. They would be steady, they would provide a sturdy platform on which to stand . . .