It was nesting season. Birds that were making their homes in the thatch of homes flew to and fro. Hadding had brought. a few skilled fowlers with him. They set out their nets and snares. Soon they had taken scores. They bound wicks to the legs, lighted these, and let the birds go. A number did not scatter but sought back to their nests. Dry reeds and moss blazed up. Shingles caught, then the buildings underneath. Smoke and flame ran high through Dynaborg.

Men fought the fires as best they could, lest they and their families burn together with everything else. Hadding winded his horn. The vikings set ladders against the now unguarded walls and swarmed over. The fighting did not last long.

Hadding had told his men strictly to hurt no one who yielded and to lay no hand on woman or child. He meant to do his business here fast. As his troop reached the king’s hall, Andvan came forth, empty-handed, and named himself. He spoke the Northern tongue, having that blood in him like many lords of Gardariki. Through the smoke and reek he squinted into Hadding’s eyes; through the crackle of the dying fires he asked, “What would you of me?”

“I could avenge my mother on you,” Hadding told him, “but you did not kill her. I will take weregild instead and go away—your weight in gold.”

That stripped the wealth of Dynaborg, but the town lived. Some vikings grumbled that they should have been let at the women. Hadding answered that with their shares of the winnings they would soon find plenty of willing wenches. Meanwhile let them be off before an overwhelming host came at them.

They did not go straight home from their raid. Rather, most of them were abroad with Hadding for the next four years, ranging the Eastlands. They rowed along the rivers and over the lakes, sailed by the strands, got horses and rode through green endlessness, saw towns and tents and many different folk strange to them, warred and traded, caroused and hungered, buried fallen friends and took new ones into their ranks, from Ladoga to the White Sea and south to the lands of the Greeks. They huddled together in the gruesome winter of Gardariki and ate the golden apples that grow in the orchards of Krim. They watched a Finnish wizard send his soul in quest out of a smoky turf but and they heard a poet read aloud from the steps of a white-pillared temple in a Roman city. They talked with kings and merchants, they walked with herdsmen and hunters. They sated their lust wherever they could and sometimes it hurt to say farewell, but always Hadding led them on.