“Bugger the bowstrings,” Sigtryggr snarled, but he knew I was right. In rain the bowstrings became slack. I had brought the archers to harass the men on the ramparts, and wet bowstrings would make the arrow strikes feeble. Even a dry and taut cord would not give a hunting arrow enough force to pierce a shield, and it was a rare strike that drove through mail, but a hail of arrows forced men to keep their faces down beneath their shield rims.

“So what do we do, lord?” Svart asked.

“Dawn, tomorrow,” Sigtryggr sounded anything but enthusiastic. “We’ll attack across the ditches,” he had stressed the “we,” meaning that his own household warriors would make that attack. “But we don’t push it too hard. We’re trying to make them think that’s our main assault. You,” he had edged back from the skyline and was looking at Sihtric who had brought sixty-two warriors from Dunholm, “you’ll be on our right. You and your men are there to stop them outflanking us with horsemen, and you, Father-in-law,” he looked at me, “will be on the left, doing the same thing.”

“Stopping horsemen?”

“And slowly getting closer to the northern corner.” He paused, as if expecting me to say something, but I just nodded. “And when you think the moment’s right,” he went on.

“We attack.” I finished the phrase for him.

“You attack the northern corner.” He sounded anything but confident, and I knew he was tempted to withdraw, to leave Sköll in his fortress and march south in hope of finding a better place to fight. “Damn the rain,” he said, as he slid back from the skyline.

The rain not only enfeebled bowstrings, it made sword hilts slippery, it made shields heavier, it seeped beneath our mail so we were chilled and the leather liners chafed. It was the same for the enemy, of course, but that night our enemy was in shelter, with fires, listening to the rain pelt on the roof. They slept while we suffered and prayed.

“Prayed, lord?” the poet-priest asked me eagerly.

“We were horribly vulnerable there,” I explained. “We were in a deep valley, and Sköll could have led his men out and attacked us from the heights. He didn’t. He left us alone.” I paused, remembering. “It was a risk, but the Norse don’t like fighting at night. They never have.”

“But you prayed,” Father Selwyn insisted.

I saw what he was suggesting. “Of course we prayed,” I said, “but to Freyr, not to your god.”

“Ah,” he reddened. “Freyr?”

“He’s the god of weather,” I explained, “the son of Njörðr, the sea-god. Doesn’t your religion have a god of weather?”

“There is only the one god, lord,” he was too nervous to see I was teasing him. “One god, lord, to govern everything.”

“No wonder it rains so much, but Freyr answered our prayers.”

“He did, lord?”

“The rain stopped overnight and the wind went into the south.”

“South, lord?” He understood that the rain ending was good news, but could not see the significance of the wind backing.