“Men outside,” said Sibba. “Not friendly.”

“Nothing to do with me.”

“We know. Look, lord, they’ll let you out. If you go now.”

The thane hesitated. He called to his wife and children, dressing hastily, spoke to them in a low voice.

“Can I open the door?”

Sibba looked round. His men were ready, weapons prepared. “Yes.”

The thane lifted the heavy bar that held closed the main double doors, and pushed them both open together. As he did so a groan came from outside, almost a sigh. There were many men out there, poised for a rush. But now they knew they had been seen.

“My wife and children—coming out!” shouted Elfstan. Quickly the children slipped through the door, his wife scurrying after them. A few feet beyond she turned, beckoned frantically to him. Her husband shook his head.

“They are my guests,” he said. His voice rose to a shout, addressing the ambushers outside. “My guests and the guests of King Alfred. I do not know who are these thieves in the night, within the bounds of Wessex, but they will hang when the king’s reeve catches them.”

“There is no king in Wessex,” shouted a voice from outside. “And we are men of King Burgred. Burgred and the Church. Your guests are vagabonds and heretics. Slaves from outside! We have come to collar and brand them.”

Suddenly the moonlight shone on dark shapes, moving together out of the cover of houses and fences.

They did not hesitate. It would have been easier to catch their enemies sleeping, but they had been told what their enemies were: released slaves, lowest of the low. Men who had never been taught swordplay, who had not been conditioned from birth to war. Who had not felt the bite of edges over the linden-shield. A dozen Mercian warriors swarmed together at the dark doors of the hall. Behind them, now that concealment was gone, horns blew for the assault.

The double doors of the hall were six feet across, a man’s full arm-span. Room only for two armed men to enter at once. Two champions rushed in together, shields up, faces glaring.

Neither saw the blows that killed them. As they peered into the gloom for men to face them, faces to hack at, the halberds swept from both sides, at thigh level, below shield and mail-shirt. The halberd-heads, axe one side, spike the other, were twice the weight of a broadsword. One shore through a warrior’s leg and deep into the facing thigh. The other sliced upward from the bone, deep into the pelvis. As one man lay in the flow of blood that would kill him in seconds, the other flapped and twisted, shrieking, trying to tear free the great blade lodged in bone.