“Where did you go?”

“Away. Couldn’t live with what I’d done. Couldn’t face up to it. Got into trouble, on and off. Lost my way. Like that sheep, the one who strayed from the path. Only Jesus didn’t find me and lead me back. Why not? Because the day the raiders came, I stopped believing he could.”

“And now? Here you are, back among us.”

“Only chance. Found Blackthorn. Got a reason to go on now. She needs me. And this, the thatching . . . Hard to come up here. Kept seeing them. All the time. But she wanted me to do it.”

Silence again for a while. “You’re wrong about that day, Brother Conall,” says Ríordán, quiet-like. “Someone did see. One of the lay helpers, hiding up in the tower, knowing if he came out he’d be slaughtered along with the others. He stayed up there a long time, too frightened to come down. It was only after folk from the local village arrived that he emerged to tell the remarkable tale of how you stood up to a band of thirty armed raiders, and kept them out of the scriptorium until, at long last, you were overcome and collapsed. Dead, he thought; but by the time he came down from the tower, you were gone. Gone before anyone could thank you. Gone before anyone could acknowledge your remarkable courage. They found Brother Galen laid out with his hands crossed on his breast, and Bathsheba beside him, wrapped in a man’s shirt. A torn fragment of manuscript in his fingers.”

“They took his book. His beautiful book with all the little pictures. Not even for reading, only for the cover. I loved that book. He put his soul in it. You know what the Norsemen do? Just toss the pages on the fire.”

“His soul is in Heaven now,” says Fergal.

I say nothing. I may not believe in God anymore, but I can’t believe a good soul like Brother Galen’s could go anywhere else, unless it’s to be a lark singing high in a perfect sky or something of that kind.

“That’s what it is to be a hero,” Ríordán says. “It’s fighting on even when you’re hopelessly outnumbered. It’s seeing your friends dying all around you, witnessing the most shocking cruelty you could imagine, and still finding the courage to go on. It’s doing the very best you can.”

“Didn’t feel that way,” I say, but his words are some comfort. Someone was there. I wasn’t alone, not quite. “Felt like defeat. Felt like failure.”

“And you’ve borne it on your shoulders ever since,” says Fergal.

That’s the truth. Funny thing, though. The burden feels a bit lighter now.

We finish the bread and butter. Drink a second cup of mulled ale each. I’m warming up at last. Can feel my feet. Outside, it sounds as if the worst of the rain might be over. Be a muddy old walk back.

Still a lot of questions to ask. So many I don’t know where to start. Think about Blackthorn, not myself. “Who else knows?” I ask. “Who I am and where I came from, I mean.” Even Blackthorn doesn’t know that story. Hadn’t planned on telling her. Or anyone.