Ivar had made his fortified camp in exactly the same style as the one which King Edmund had stormed south of Bedricsward by the Stour: a low ditch and bank with stakes driven into it, forming three sides of a square with the river Ouse as the fourth side, his ships drawn up along the muddy bank. The sentry who paced the bank behind the stockade had been at that battle too, and lived. He needed no urging to keep alert. Yet to him the dark hours were the dangerous ones, short enough at this time of year. As he saw the sky beginning to pale, and felt the little wind that comes before the dawn, he relaxed and began to think of the day that might follow. He had no great desire to see Ivar Ragnarsson at his butcher’s work again among his prisoners. Why, he wondered, did they not move on? If Ivar had been challenged to fight at Ely, he had met the challenge. It was Sigvarthsson and the Way-folk who must feel disgrace.

The sentry halted, braced himself chest-high against the wall of the stockade, fighting to keep alert. He brooded on the sounds he had heard so often in the last few days, coming from under the bloody.hands of Ivar. Out there two hundred corpses lay in fresh graves, the product of a week’s sacrifice and slaughter of Mercian prisoners taken after the battle. An owl called, and the sentry started, thinking for an instant it was the shriek of a spirit come for vengeance.

It was his last thought. Before he heard the thrum of the bowstring the quarrel drove through his throat. From the ditch, the figures who had crept up in the mist caught him, eased him to the ground, waited. Knowing the other sentries on the wall had been dispatched in the same instant, on the cry of the owl.

Even the softest of shoes makes a sound moving through the grass. The hundreds of running feet sounded like small waves rushing down a pebbled strand. Dark bulks loomed, moving swiftly toward the western palisade of the camp, their moment carefully chosen. They were black shapes against a black sky behind them. But the lightening sky in the east would silhouette the defenders when they awoke and rushed to battle.

Shef stood to the side, watching the attack, fists clenched: the success or failure of everything depended on the next few seconds. Taking the camp would be like taking York—only simpler and quicker. No clumsy, moving towers, no slow development of the attack in stages. This was being done in a way even the Ragnarssons would understand—in explosive attack, win or lose in the first minute.