We still made slow progress. I might have scouts on either side, but I feared a sudden attack like that which had severed my son’s troops, and so I insisted that the column close up and stay closed up, and that meant we could only move as fast as the slowest person on foot. The river slowed us even more because it was in spate, foaming around dead trees that had been carried downstream, and flooding its banks. In one place, where we were forced to ride around a churning flood, I saw Ieremias up to his knees in the rushing water. He had ridden to the head of the column, assuring me that was the best place where his god could warn him of danger, and something had caught his eye in the river. “What are you doing?” I called to him.

“The ram of Abraham, lord! The ram of Abraham!” he called excitedly, bending to his task.

I had no idea what he meant, nor how the ram of Abraham, whatever that was, had reached the Northumbrian hills, but nor did I want to ask for fear of a long and complicated answer. “And where are your angels?” I asked him instead.

“Safe, lord, safe! Still chaste!” He tugged at the tangled birch that half blocked the river, and I saw he was struggling to pull something from the gaunt branches. It proved to be a dead sheep, its fleece reduced to a sodden gray bundle and its body just bones. He managed to wrench free the skull that had a fine pair of curled horns. He held it up triumphantly. “See, lord? The heathen will be humbled! They shall be smitten!”

“By a dead ram?”

“Oh, thou of little faith!” He staggered in the fierce rush of water. “Didn’t Sköll’s sorcerer have a skull in his hands, lord? When he visited you?”

“A wolf skull.”

“Then we need a skull! A Christian skull! Behold,” he held up the ram’s skull. “The ram of Abraham!”

He was still buffeted by the current’s force as he tried to reach the river’s edge so I reached down from the saddle, offered a hand, and helped him and his precious skull up onto the bank. “Stay out of trouble, bishop,” I said, “your flock needs you.”

“My flock are on their knees, lord, praying mightily for us.”

By late morning I was beginning to fear that we needed those prayers. I had joined the scouts on the crest of the southern hill and could see a smear of smoke in the west, but no enemy horsemen. The smoke, which seemed to come from a distant valley, betrayed a settlement, but if it was Heahburh then why did the smoke come from a valley? And we would surely have seen Sköll’s men by now. Had they gone south? Were they even now pushing Sigtryggr’s men out of their path and advancing on Eoferwic?

Then, at midday, we had word at last. Sköll and his army were waiting for us.