“Five hundred,” Finan decided.

“I never thought I’d see this place again,” I said. “Never wanted to see it again.”

“They broke the bridge,” Finan said, peering far to the south.

“Wouldn’t you, in their place?”

The place was Ceaster, and our enemy was besieging the city. Most of that enemy was to the east of the city, but smoking campfires betrayed plenty to the city’s north. The River Dee flowed just south of the city walls, then turned north toward its widening estuary, and by breaking the central span of the ancient Roman bridge, the enemy had ensured that no relief force could come from the south. If the city’s small garrison was to fight its way out of the trap they would need to come north or east where the enemy was strongest. And that garrison was small. I had been told, though it was nothing more than a guess, that fewer than a hundred men held the city.

Finan must have been thinking the same thing. “And five hundred men couldn’t take the city?” he said derisively.

“Nearer six hundred?” I suggested mildly. It was hard to estimate the enemy because many of the folk in the besiegers’ encampment were women and children, but I thought Finan’s guess was low. Tintreg lowered his head and snorted. I patted his neck, then touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt for luck. “I wouldn’t want to assault those walls,” I said. Ceaster’s stone walls had been built by the Romans, and the Romans had built well. And the city’s small garrison, I thought, had been well led. They had repelled the early assaults, and so the enemy had settled down to starve them out.

“So, what do we do?” Finan asked.

“Well, we’ve come a long way,” I said.

“So?”

“So it seems a pity not to fight.” I gazed at the city. “If what we were told is true, then the poor bastards in the city will be eating rats by now. And that lot?” I nodded down to the campfires. “They’re cold, they’re bored, and they’ve been here too long. They got bloodied when they attacked the walls, so now they’re just waiting.”

I could see the thick barricades that the besiegers had made outside Ceaster’s northern and eastern gates. Those barricades would be guarded by the enemy’s best troops, posted there to stop the garrison sallying out or trying to escape. “They’re cold,” I said again, “they’re bored, and they’re useless.”

Finan smiled. “Useless?”

“They’re mostly from the fyrd,” I said. The fyrd is an army raised from field laborers, shepherds, common men. They might be brave, but a trained house-warrior, like the ninety who followed me, was far more lethal. “Useless,” I said again, “and stupid.”

“Stupid?” Berg, mounted on his stallion behind me, asked.

“No sentries out here! They should never have let us get this close. They have no idea we’re here. And stupidity gets you killed.”

“I like that they’re stupid,” Berg said. He was a Norseman, young and savage, frightened of nothing except the disapproval of his young Saxon wife.