I swerved off the track, going away from the palisade and forcing Tintreg onto a plowed field that slowed him. Finan and most of my men followed, but Berg led eleven of my youngest and most agile warriors straight toward the palisade’s closest corner, which was protected, like the rest of the landward wall, by a flooded ditch. Reeds grew in the ditch and betrayed that it was not deep, indeed I suspected that the ditch dried out quickly on a falling tide. One of the slaves at Hallbjorn’s farm had said the ditch was little more than knee-deep, and I could only hope he was right. The man who had shouted from the fighting platform was calling again, pointing to the corner where I saw Berg’s horse scramble into the ditch and saw Berg steady himself with one hand on the palisade as he stood on the saddle, then I watched as he reached up and grasped the wall’s top. For a heartbeat he was poised against the winter sky, then he scrambled over, and I saw there must be a platform at the corner because Berg was able to stand there, lean over, and help the next man. The other horses crowded into the ditch and it seemed to take a long time, but at last all twelve managed to climb from their horses’ backs, clamber over the high wall, and jump from the fighting platform to the ground beyond.

“Remember when we could have done that?” Finan asked. He had reined in beside me.

I laughed. “If we had to, my friend, we still could.”

“Two shillings says you’d have fallen off the horse,” he said, and he was probably right.

The fighting platform did not extend along the whole length of the southern wall because the two spearmen at the gate had disappeared from sight rather than run to confront the invaders. I heard a shout, the clang of swords, and I nudged Tintreg toward the gate. The noise from within the steading was louder, the harsh clash and scrape of blade on blade, a bellow of anger. “I should have led them,” I said.

“You’d still be halfway up the wall,” Finan said. “That’s a job for young fools, not old men like us.”