“Go on.”

“Your beard is white, lord,” he said, blushing, then paused. “Well, gray, lord.” Another pause. “Grayish, lord?” he tried. “In places?”

“And my men,” I went on, “were not eager for battle-slaughter.”

“It’s a poem, lord.”

“My men were terrified,” I told him. “They were frightened. I’d rather fight through the pits of hell than attack Heahburh again. It was a ghastly place.”

It was, too. I first saw Heahburh from the hill across the southern valley, and, seeing it, I cursed the Romans. They had built the fort on a wide spur of land that jutted out from the heights to dominate the Tine’s valley. We were a long way distant, perhaps a mile, but as we climbed the hill I saw more and more of the defenses, and understood why Sköll had chosen to wait for us rather than carry the war across the hills.

The fort, which had stone walls with stubby towers at each corner, was built across the spur’s long crest. I reckoned the two longer walls were some one hundred and fifty paces each, the two shorter maybe a hundred. Those walls had decayed over the years, but Sköll, or maybe Halfdan the Mad who had once occupied Heahburh, had heightened and reinforced the broken places with stout timber barricades. There were buildings roofed with turf inside the fort and the ruins of smaller buildings just outside. Off to the west, where the long hill rose above the fort, I could see pits where, presumably, lead had been mined.

That rising ground to the fort’s west was the obvious place from which to attack. The land between that higher ground and the fort was level, meaning attackers would not have to struggle uphill to reach the walls, but the Romans, or perhaps others who came after them, had seen the danger, and in front of the fort’s western side there were rows of ditches and banks that wrapped around the northern and southern ramparts. They were the ditches that Eadric had watched being deepened. Finan, staring down at the place, made the sign of the cross. “That’s a bastard,” he said mildly.

Sigtryggr leaned on his saddle’s pommel and just stared as a cloud shadow slid across the distant fort. He sighed, and I knew what he was thinking, that too many men must die in this high place. “If I was Sköll,” he said, “I’d put a shield wall on those ditches.”

“He doesn’t need to,” I said. “He can just let us stumble across the ditches and hurl spears at us.”

“I can’t see too well from here,” Finan said, “but it looks as if the entrance behind the ditches is blocked off.” There were four entrances, one on each of the fort’s walls. There were well-worn paths from three of those gates, but outside the fourth gate, which faced the widest stretch of ditches and banks, the grass showed no wear.

“Maybe we just leave the bastard where he is,” Sigtryggr said morosely.