“We’ll see. Now I want two long hundreds of men, with our best horses, all with a good meal inside them, ready to move as soon as the slave returns.”

Brand pushed a shutter open a crack and looked at the night and the whirling snow. “What for?” he grunted.

“I need to get your twelve pennies back. And I have another idea.” Slowly, intense concentration furrowing his brow, Shef began to scratch lines into the table in front of him with the point of his knife.

The black monks of St. John’s Minster at Beverley, unlike those of St. Peter’s at York, did not have the safe walls of a legionary fortress round them. Instead, their tenants and the men of the flatlands east of the Yorkshire Wolds could easily put two thousand stout warriors into the field, with many more half-armed spearmen and bowmen to back them. All through the autumn of raids of York, they had known themselves safe against anything but a move by a major detachment of the Great Army. They had known it must come. The sacristan had disappeared months since with all the minster’s most precious relics, reappearing days later with word only for the abbot himself. They had kept half their fighting force mobilized, the rest dispersed among their holdings to oversee the harvest and the preparations for winter. Tonight they felt secure. Their watchers had seen the Great Army split, one detachment even marching away to the South.

But a midwinter night in England is sixteen hours long between sunset and dawn: more than time enough for determined men to ride forty miles. Guided on their way through muddy, meandering farm-tracks for the first few miles, then picking up speed as they walked or trotted their horses along the better roads of the Wolds. They had lost a little time circumventing each village they came to. The slave, Tida, had guided them well, abandoning them only as the first paling sky had shown them the steeple of Beverley Minster itself. The guard-huts just beginning to disgorge sleepy female quern-slaves, to light the fires and grind the grain for the breakfast porridge. At the sight of the Vikings they ran shrieking and wailing, to drag incredulous warriors from their blankets. To be called fools for their pains and to become part of the utter confusion which was the English way of taking surprise.

Shef pushed open the great wooden doors of the minster and walked in, his companions jostling behind.

From inside the minster came the antiphonal song of the choirmonks, facing each other across the nave and singing sweetly the anthems which called the Christ-child to be born. There were no other worshippers, though the doors were unbolted for them. The monks sang lauds every day, whether they were joined or not. At dawn on a winter morning they would not expect to be.