“Mercian, lord.” Her voice was scarce above a whisper.

“A slave?”

“Yes, lord.”

She had been scaring birds away from a newly sown field when the Norse raiders had found her. She said it had happened a year before. I asked where she came from, and she seemed confused by the question. “Home, lord,” was all she could say. She started crying, and Beadwulf put an arm around her shoulders.

“Give me one good reason,” I said to him, “why I should not take your head from your shoulders.”

“They were going to kill her, lord,” Beadwulf said.

“Wynflæd?”

“Arnborg said he would kill her if I didn’t do what he wanted.” He lowered his head and waited. I said nothing. “They said they would drown her, lord,” Beadwulf muttered, “just as they drowned Brother Edwin.”

“He was the other missionary?”

“Yes, lord.”

“You say they drowned him?”

“You can see him, lord,” Beadwulf said with a sudden pleading energy. He pointed northward. “He’s still there, lord!”

“Where?”

“Out there, lord.”

He had pointed toward a smaller gate that led, I assumed, to the long wharf where the ships were moored. I was curious. “Show me,” I said.

Berg pushed the gate open and we went onto the timber wharf. The tide was low and the three ships were canted on the mud, their mooring lines slack. “There, lord,” Beadwulf said, and pointed across the nearest ship’s deck, and I saw a thick stake had been driven into the mudbank on the creek’s further side. A skeleton hung there, held in place by twisted ropes. The skull had fallen off, the ribs were mangled, and the flesh had long been torn away by beaks.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Jarl Arnborg tied him there at low tide, lord.”

“Why?”

“The jarl said we had no need to pay tribute to Mercia, lord, and he had no need of driveling missionaries. That’s what he said, lord.”

That made some sense. The Mercian rebellion would have persuaded Arnborg that the Saxons were weakened and he must have reckoned he no longer needed to pay tribute, nor keep Christian missionaries, and so Brother Edwin had been lashed to the stake, and I imagined the strong tide swirling up the creek, flooding the mudbank, and rising slowly for the amusement of the watching Norse. The monk would have cried out, praying to either his god or the Norse to spare him, to save him. And still that great tide rose, and he would have strained upward, gasping for every last breath, and in his ears would have been the laughter of his enemies. “Why didn’t Jarl Arnborg kill you too?” I asked Beadwulf.

He gave me no answer so I seized his robe and pushed him to the wharf’s edge where I made him gaze down into the rippled water that just covered the creek’s muddy bed. “Why,” I snarled, “did Jarl Arnborg not kill you too?”

He made a sound, half whimper, half moan, and I nudged him as though I was about to let him fall. “Tell me,” I said.