At first his troop moved fast. No foeman met them. No one did at all. They had been here earlier. Fire-blackened snags of farmsteads stood like runestones above scattered bones, among fields gone to grass and brambles. Poppies blazed, finches trilled, deer bolted off into shaws, geese flapped startled from fens, but the land lay eerily still. Nobody spoke loudly around the campfires at night, and looks kept shifting outward into the dark.

The way steepened. These parts were new to the Danes. They came on steadings and thorps that were unscarred, croplands that were ripening. Yet they seldom saw the dwellers. Those had fled: Smoke from hilltops afar showed how word of the raiders got about. “Strange that they don’t stand fast and fight,” Hadding murmured. “This was always a stouthearted folk. I should think they’d at least try slowing us, down. Have they lost heart altogether?” He laughed. “Well, the better for us.”

His men had eaten the food they brought from the ships. This many could not live off wild game. The yeomen had taken their herds and flocks with them, but it hampered their flight and soon they let most go. Since Hadding’s scouts found no hostile host anywhere near, his warriors could range rather freely in search of strayed kine. It was skimpy fare, but enough to keep them as they pushed on. Behind him smoldered the homesteads and storehouses they had gutted. They would return to the sea by another way.

Suddenly smoke was everywhere in sight. It rose above trees, it lay like mist over blackened fields, it blued and made. bitter the air men breathed. There were no more cows, pigs, or sheep. Hunters came only on carcasses where the maggots and ants were cleaning up what the wheeling, rasping crows had left.

“What1s this?” wondered Eyjolf Lysirsson. “Are they offering everything to the gods, in hopes we’ll be smitten?”

“I know not,” said Hadding, “but neither do I like it.” He thought. “We will seek back to our ships.”

By then they had trekked onward three more days, for they had not understood how thorough the burning and slaughter were. They were into uplands, thinly settled, thickly wooded, hard going even along the few roads. Hadding took heed of sun and stars. In his head he laid out a course that should swing him wide of these forbidding reaches.

But as the Danes found their way, they found no food. Everywhere the same earth-scorching dogged them. Now and then they spied horsemen in the offing. A few times they caught a dweller or two. These said they knew merely that the king’s men had bidden them lay bare the path of his foes, and widely around. Hadding nodded. “That’s plain to see,” was all he answered, and let the captives go.