No wonder the garrison was happy. Their enemy had crumpled, and the siege was lifted, even if most of Cynlæf’s troops were still in their encampment. But those troops had shown no lust to fight. They had run or hidden in their shelters. Only the household troops opposed us, and they were now fleeing toward the dubious safety of the old arena. We caught a few laggards, spearing them in the back as they stumbled southward, while others, more sensible, threw down their weapons and knelt in abject surrender. The light was fading now. The reddish stone of the arena reflected the flames of the nearest campfires, giving the masonry the appearance of being washed in blood. I curbed Tintreg by the arena’s entrance as my men, grinning and elated, reined in around me.

“There’s only this one way in?” Finan asked me.

“As I remember, yes, but send a half-dozen men around the back to make sure.”

The one way in was an arched tunnel that led beneath the tiered seats into the arena itself, and in the fading light I could see men pushing a cart to make a barricade at the tunnel’s far end. They watched us fearfully, but I made no move to attack them. They were fools, and, like fools, they were doomed.

Doomed because they had trapped themselves. It was true there were other entrances to the arena, but those entrances, which were evenly spaced about the whole building, only led to the tiered seating, not to the fighting space at the arena’s center. Cynlæf’s men had kept their horses in the arena, and that made sense, but in their desperation to escape they had fled to the horses, and so found themselves ringed by stone with just one way to escape, and my men guarded that one tunnel.

Vidarr Leifson, one of my Norse warriors, had led horsemen around the whole arena and returned to confirm that there was just the one entrance to the fighting level. “So what do we do, lord?” he asked, twisting in his saddle to peer into the tunnel. His breath clouded in the cold evening air.

“We let them rot.”

“Can they climb up to the seats?” Berg asked.

“Probably.” There was a wall a little higher than a tall man that prevented wild beasts from leaping up to maul the spectators, so our enemy could scramble up to the seats and try to escape through one of the stairways, but that meant abandoning their precious horses, and, once out of the building, they would still have to fight past my men. “So block every entrance,” I ordered, “and light fires just outside every stairway.” The barricades would slow any attempt by Cynlæf’s men to escape, and the fires would warm my sentries.

“Where do we get firewood?” Godric asked. He was young, a Saxon, and had once been my servant.

“The barricade, you fool,” Finan said, pointing to the besiegers’ makeshift wall that guarded the road leading from the eastern gate.