“Ivar’s taking half the army out in two days, to make the kinglet Jatmund—Edmund, you English call him—fight, or destroy his country for him. We’d rather have done it the easy way, but we wasted too much time already. Be bad news for Jatmund when Ivar catches up with him, I tell you … .”

“Are we going out or staying here?”

“Our crew stays.” Again, the young man looked half curiously, half angrily at Shef. “Why you think I’m telling you all this? We’ll be providing guards all the time. I wish I was going. I’d like to see what they’ll do to that king when he’s caught. I told you about Knowth. Well, I was there at the Boyne when Ivar robbed the tombs of the dead kings and this Christ-priest tried to stop us. What Ivar did, he …”

The subject occupied the young man and his mates all through the dinner of broth, salt pork and cabbage. There was a barrel of ale, someone had taken a hatchet or an axe to its top, and they all dipped into it liberally. Shef drank more than he realized, the day’s events circling in his head. His mind was revolving what he had learned, trying to put together the rudiments of a plan. He lay down that night exhausted. The Irishman leaping in death in his arms was a detail, a matter of the past.

Then exhaustion seized him, drove him into sleep, into something more than sleep.

He was looking out from a building, through a half-shuttered window. It was night. A bright moonlit night, so bright that the racing clouds above threw dim shadows even in the dark. And out there something had flashed. Something had flashed.

There was a man standing next to him, gabbling out explanations of what the something might be. But he did not need them. He knew. A dull feeling of doom grew within him. Against it, a rising tide of fury. He cut the explanations short.

“That is not dawn from the east,” said the Shef-who-was-not-Shef. “Nor is it a dragon flying, nor the gables of this hall burning. That is the flashing of drawn weapons, of secret foes coming to take us in our sleep. For now war awakens, war that will bring about disaster for all the people. So rise now, my warriors, think of courage, guard the doors, fight heroically.”

In the dream, a stirring behind him as the warriors rose, gripped their shields, buckled their sword-belts.

But in the dream and over the dream, not in the hall, not part of the hero-tale that was unfolding before his eyes, he heard a mighty voice, too mighty to come from a human throat. It was a god’s voice, Shef knew. But not the voice anyone would have imagined of a god. Not dignified, not honorable. An amused, chuckling, sardonic voice.