I have fought many battles. I have stood in shield walls and heard the sound of axes biting willow boards, I have heard men howling, heard them screaming, I have heard the butcher’s sound of blades cleaving flesh, the heart-wrenching sound of grown men weeping for their mothers’ comfort. I have heard the grating breath of the dying and the lament of the living, and in all those fights I have fought for one thing above all others. To take and to keep Bebbanburg.

So my son must live.

Hard were the foemen, hungry their swords.

And stout their ramparts, they offered death

To any man brave enough. Then stood Sigtryggr,

Bold in strife, and called on the Measurer . . .

“The measurer?” I asked the poet.

“The Measurer is the Lord God,” he said. He was an inky-fingered young priest named Father Selwyn, a West Saxon who served Hrothweard, the archbishop of Eoferwic. “He measures our lives, lord.”

“I thought the Norns did that,” I said, and he looked at me blankly, “and besides,” I went on, “Sigtryggr called on Odin for help.”

“It’s a poem, lord,” he said weakly.

“Were you there?”

“No, lord.”

“Who told you to write the poem?” I asked.

“The archbishop, lord.”

Hrothweard of course wanted to spread the idea that Sigtryggr’s baptism had converted a pagan into a Christian. That was not dishonesty, even if it was untrue, but rather Hrothweard’s passionate hatred of warfare. Despite the treacherous Scots he still believed that no two Christian nations would ever go to war with each other, and so wanted to convince the Saxon south, and probably himself too, that Sigtryggr led a Christian nation. The archbishop ordered the poem to be copied by monks and sent south to be read aloud in halls and churches, though I suspect most copies were used to wipe arses or light fires.

We lit no fires that night, which we spent in an upland valley close to the river. We put sentries on the higher ground, and deep in that cold night Finan and I climbed to join one group of men who crouched in the lee of a boulder and gazed westward. The low clouds had lifted and far to the west I could see one star through a rent in the night sky, and beneath it a flicker in the darkness, the dim glitter of firelight on a far-off hilltop. “That must be the fort,” Finan said quietly. No other lights were visible. No fire burned in a hearth to leak flamelight past a shuttered window. The earth was as dark as it must have been when it was first made between the realms of fire and ice. I shivered.

And next day it was our turn to lead the column. We were still following the river, but now the Tine had shrunk to a size that could be easily crossed in places and so I had to put scouts on both flanks, north as well as south. I sent Eadric and Oswi to explore far ahead, trusting their ability to stay hidden. Eadric, the older man, had a poacher’s ability to slide through country unseen, while Oswi had a natural cunning. He had been my servant once, and before that an orphan making a living by theft in the streets of Lundene. He had been caught trying to steal from my storeroom and brought to me for a whipping, but I had liked him, and he had served me ever since. Those two, the older man and the younger, would disappear into the hills, but closer to us I had two large and very visible bands of men, one on the southern skyline and the other high above the river’s northern bank. Both bands numbered thirty men. I called them scouts, but I hoped both were large enough to deal with any attack that might come from Sköll’s scouts. He must have men searching for us, I thought, but as the morning passed we saw no sign of them.