He shook his head in silence, then looked up at Shef.

“You know what they are going to do to me? They are building an altar now, to their heathen gods. Tomorrow sometime they will take me out and lay me on it. Then Ivar will get to work. Killing kings is his trade. One of the men who guarded me told me he was standing by when Ivar killed the Irish king of Munster, told me how he stood there while Ivar’s men twisted the rope and twisted the rope and the veins stood out on the king’s neck and he called out curses by all the saints on Ivar’s name. And then the crack as his back broke over the stone. They all remember that.

“But tomorrow Ivar prepares a new fate. They tell me that he meant to save this for the man who killed their father, for Ella of Northumbria. But they have decided I merit it just as much.

“They will take me out, and lay me on their altar, face down. In the hollow of my back, Ivar will place a sword. Then—you have felt how your ribs make a house of bone, and how each of the ribs fits into its place on the backbone? Ivar will cut each of them away, working up from the lowest to the highest. They say he will use a sword only for the first cut. After that he will use hammer and chisel. When he has cut them all away, he will cut the flesh free, and then he will put his hands in and pull the ribs up and out.

“I expect I will die then. They say he can keep a man alive to that point, if he is careful not to cut deep. But when they pull the ribs out, your heart must burst. When it is done, they pull your lungs out of your back, and then turn the ribs out so they look like a raven’s wings, or an eagle’s. They call it ‘cutting the blood-eagle.’

“I wonder what it will feel like when he first puts the sword in the hollow of my back. You know, young churl, I think that if I can hold my courage at that point, the rest will be easier. But the feel of the cold steel on skin, before the pain begins …

“I never thought that I would come to this. I have defended my people, kept all my oaths, been charitable to orphans.

“Do you know, churl, what the Christ said when he hung dying on the cross?”

Father Andreas’s lessons had been confined usually to the merits of chastity or the importance of paying contributions duly to the Church. Shef shook his head dumbly.

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The king paused for a long while.