“That family never was grateful,” I said, “except for Æthelflaed.”

“Maybe Edward will take you to his bed then,” Finan said happily, and then there was no more time to talk because I saw the standard-bearer suddenly turn away. Instead of running to the barricade, he was hurrying south toward the arena, followed by most of the household warriors, and that struck me as strange. They numbered as many as we did, or almost as many. They could have formed a shield wall, using the barricade to protect their backs, and we would have been hard put to defeat them. Horses would not charge an obstacle like a well-formed shield wall. Our stallions would veer away rather than crash into the boards, so we would have been forced to dismount, make our own wall, and fight shield to shield. And the besiegers north of the fort, the men we had not yet attacked, could have come to assault our rear. But instead, the enemy ran, led by their standard-bearer.

And then I understood.

It was the Roman arena.

I had been puzzled by the lack of horses, and now realized that the besiegers’ beasts must have been placed in the arena rather than in one of the thin-hedged paddocks to the east. The vast building lay outside the city’s southeastern corner, close to the river, and was a great circle of stone inside which banks of seats surrounded an open space where the Romans had enjoyed savage displays featuring warriors and fearsome animals. The arena’s central space, ringed by a stone wall, made it a safe, even an ideal, place for horses. We had been riding toward the tents, thinking to trap the rebel leaders, but now I shouted at my men to spur toward the great stone arena instead.

The Romans had puzzled me when I was a child. Father Beocca, who was my tutor and was supposed to turn me into a good little Christian, praised Rome for being the home of the Holy Father, the Pope. The Romans, he said, had brought the gospel to Britain, and Constantine, the first Christian to rule Rome, had declared himself emperor in our own Northumbria. None of that inclined me to like Rome or the Romans, but that changed when I was seven or eight years old and Beocca walked me into the arena at Eoferwic. I had stared amazed at the tiers of stone seats climbing all around me to the outer wall where men were using hammers and crowbars to loosen masonry blocks that would be used to make new buildings in the growing city. Ivy crawled up the seats, saplings sprang from cracks in the stone, while the arena itself was thick with grass. “This space,” Father Beocca told me in a hushed voice, “is sacred.”

“Because Jesus was here?” I remember asking.

Father Beocca hit me around the head. “Don’t be stupid, boy. Our lord never left the holy land.”

“I thought you told me he went to Egypt once?”