I remember the ravens. They kept us company next day as we struggled to reach the place from where we could launch our onslaught. The ravens were big and glossy-black, raucous and hungry, and they seemed to know what feast we were preparing, and those preparations took all day as we left the Tine valley and crossed a high saddle of the hills to the southeast of Heahburh. Once across the saddle we dropped to another valley where a stream ran fast. Sköll must have watched us, but such was the skill of his scouts that we saw none of them, though once in a while a raven would fly from a boulder, and I suspected the bird had been disturbed, but when my own scouts climbed the heights they saw no one. Perhaps Sköll sent no scouts. He must have guessed we would attack from the high ground to the west and were hiding in the valley beyond. We would stay in the valley through the night, and our horses would stay there when we attacked at dawn. Sigtryggr sent twenty men down to the Tine with orders to light fires once night fell. I doubted Sköll would be fooled by the glow in the darkness into thinking we were camped there, but Sigtryggr wanted to put a small nagging doubt into his mind.

I had a thousand nagging doubts. At dusk, just as the rain started, Sigtryggr, Finan, Sihtric, Svart, and I climbed to the hilltop with a dozen men to protect us. We lay on the coarse damp grass and stared down at the fort. The southern corner with its low tower faced us, and in front of the western wall I counted seven banked ditches. “He’ll expect us to attack there,” Sigtryggr said. “Across the ditches. It’s the easiest approach.”

“Which is why there are ditches,” I said.

“And your mad bishop thinks we should assault the northern corner?”

“So do I,” I said. From our new vantage point I could see there was a ditch at that far corner, but it looked shallow, and beyond the ditch was a rough patch of land before the ground fell sharply away to a stream. There was a tower at that northern corner. I supposed it had once been made of stone, but now was a timber platform with a wall around its summit. A flag hung limp and damp from a pole on the tower.

“We should do what he expects,” Sigtryggr said, “and attack from the hill. And maybe that will pull men away from the northern corner. Then we make a surprise assault from the north.”

I was not sure how we were to spring that surprise. The defenders on the wall and the corner tower would be above us and could watch our movements. “That might work,” I said dubiously, “but he has plenty of men.” I could see my comment had annoyed Sigtryggr. He wanted to attack and was in no mood to hear of difficulties; he knew them anyway, and the persistent rain, that was being blown by an east wind and was hard enough to obscure our view of the fort, only added a new problem. “The bowstrings will be sloppy,” I added.