“I will protect you from Satan’s wiles, lord,” Ieremias said, “and my angels will stand guard over you.”

I thought of sending him back to Lindisfarena, but on a chill spring day of drizzle his arrival, or at least the appearance of his two angels, had brought smiles to my men’s faces. “Just keep your women safe,” I said, “I don’t want trouble.”

“Lord,” he remonstrated, “there can be no trouble. Elwina and Sunniva are heavenly beings! And in heaven there is no marriage.”

“I wasn’t talking about marriage.”

“We shall all be chaste in heaven, lord!”

“Chaste?” I asked. “And you call that heaven?” I gave him no time to answer. “Take your women, make sure they stay chaste, and ride with the baggage.”

“We shall pray for you, lord,” Ieremias said, then beckoned his bedraggled angels to follow as he spurred ahead to join the servants and packhorses.

“What does he want?” my son asked.

“He’s bringing us angelic help.”

“We need it,” he said, and so we did because we were making slow progress. The larger an army, I have found, the slower it moves as men try to keep to the tracks or stay on firmer ground, and so the column stretches, and, at any obstacle, it tangles itself, stops, and so stretches even further as the front of the column moves ahead. We were following the southern bank of the Lower Tine and the first few miles were easy enough as we rode through river meadows and past burned-out steadings, but low clouds misted the hilltops, which meant Sigtryggr’s scouts were forced to ride on the lower slopes. Our disordered column would have made easy meat if Sköll had horsemen on those hills, but the day passed without sight of an enemy.

The clouds lifted in the late afternoon and with them went the steady drizzle that had been soaking us. My son rode with me most of the way and frowned as we passed yet another farm that was nothing but blackened ruin. “Sköll’s work?” he suggested.

“More likely the Scots. Sköll needs all the food a farmer can grow.”

“We’re south of the wall?” he asked.

“We are.” I knew what he was thinking, that if we garrisoned the old Roman wall and its forts we would keep Scottish cattle-raiders well away from most of Northumbria’s farmlands, but, as I told him, we would need an army twenty times the size of this one just to man the forts. “Besides,” I went on, “if we garrison the wall it becomes our frontier and we give Constantin all the land north of it, including Bebbanburg. He’d like that.”

The Tine has two headwaters and we were keeping to the southern branch. The Upper Tine twisted through the hills to the borderlands with Scotland and its valley offered an easy route to the pastures of Northumbria. But at least the Scots weren’t making trouble for us, at least not yet. They had problems of their own with the Norsemen who had settled their western coast, and that thought made me wonder about Sköll’s ambitions. He would not recognize any frontier between Northumbria and Scotland, and he would surely find allies among the Scottish Norse, and even among the Irish who had settled in Strath Clota. Did he dream of a whole new northern kingdom that stretched to the wild cliffs of the far north? “Maybe we should ally with the Scots,” I said to my son.