“I do, lord!” he protested, then leafed back through the pages. “There, the white-tailed eagle—”

“Not the bird,” I said, “the flag! The spread eagle! Berg’s banner!”

“Was that important, lord?”

“Of course it’s important! Didn’t you even talk to Berg? Or to his brothers?”

“No, lord.”

“The flag was flying over the shut gate,” I said, “and all three brothers were there. You should talk to the oldest, he’s a poet.”

“Is he, lord?” The young priest sounded distant, as if he did not like hearing about a rival poet.

“He’s called Egil,” I said. “He’s a skald and a fighter and something of a sorcerer too. He’s a remarkable man.”

“He certainly sounds so, lord,” the priest said, still distant. “You say the flag was over the gate?”

“Berg was waving it.”

The gods do play with us, and, like children, they love surprising us. I could almost hear their delighted laughter when I saw Berg desperately waving his precious flag. I had no idea what it meant at that moment, for a heartbeat I even thought he had joined Sköll’s forces, but then saw that the men around Berg, those men high on the platform above the gate, were throwing spears at the lower ramparts. They were throwing spears at Sköll’s men, not at us, and at that moment I knew the curse was lifted. The pain in my head and the ache in my thigh did not matter because Berg’s banner, the spread-eagle banner of the Skallagrimmr family, was flying over Heahburh.

When Berg had vanished at the battle’s opening the banner had disappeared with him, and I had feared he was dead or a captive, but the truth was much stranger. The gods loved Berg, which made it odd to remember that when I had saved him from death on a Welsh beach I had promised King Hywel I would let the Christians try to convert him. I had kept that promise, but Berg had never succumbed to their persuasion, and ever since the gods had rewarded him. Berg was lucky.

And never more so than on that day at Heahburh. He had thought he was dead when the first surprise attack came from the fog and he was almost overwhelmed by Sköll’s men. “I knew I couldn’t reach you, lord,” he told me after the battle, “so I ran down into the valley. I was going to keep running, but heard my name being called.”

“It was your brother?”

“Both brothers, lord!” Berg had two elder brothers, Egil and Thorolf, who, on the death of their father, had sent their younger brother to sail with a viking crew so he could learn the business of raiding, an education that had ended on the beach where I had discovered him. The older brothers, in the meantime, made farms on Snæland, that raw island of ice and fire in the stormy waters of the northern ocean, and it was there that they heard stories of a new Norse kingdom being carved from the coastal lands of western Britain. And so, leaving their families in Snæland, they had sailed with two ships and seventy-two men. “They only arrived a fortnight ago, lord,” Berg told me.