“Sköll Grimmarson believes Northumbria needs a stronger king, lord,” Beadwulf had finished.

So once again I was fighting for the Christians! I would have laughed if I had not been so fearful for Eoferwic’s fate. Everything Beadwulf told me that night made sense. The Danes in Mercia had succumbed to the Saxons, many of them becoming Christians, just as the conquered Danes in East Anglia had converted. Mercia might be troubled by rebellion, but it was plain to anyone that the Saxons wanted to invade Northumbria when the rebels were defeated. They were making King Alfred’s dream come true. When I was a child the land that would become Englaland had been divided into four kingdoms; Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex. Four kingdoms and four kings. The Danes had invaded, they had taken Northumbria, taken East Anglia, taken all of northern Mercia, and very nearly subjugated Wessex, but the Saxons had fought back. I had fought back, at times reluctantly, fighting to make Alfred’s dream of one Saxon kingdom come true, and the realization of that dream was so close now! The West Saxons had already invaded East Anglia and made it part of their kingdom, and now Edward, Anglorum Saxonum Rex, was binding Mercia to the West Saxon throne. Only Northumbria was left. It was the last pagan kingdom in Englaland.

And the Norse, the fierce Norse, were making Cumbraland their new home. No man fights the Norse willingly, but their weakness is that they rarely unite. They follow their chieftains and, when those chieftains quarrel, they fight each other. And those divisions had led to defeat in Ireland and to savage combats along the western coast of Scotland, and so the losers sailed in their dragon-boats to Cumbraland, the last refuge in Britain. And now a new leader had appeared, Sköll Grimmarson, who had performed the miracle of uniting the Norse war-bands, and was seeking his own kingdom, my kingdom, Northumbria.

“I should have taken the throne of Northumbria,” I grumbled to Finan next morning.

“Yes, lord, you should. Why didn’t you?”

“I never wanted to be a king.”

“And if you had been king,” he asked, “what would you have done?”

“I’d have hammered these Norsemen into obedience for a start,” I said, though in truth I was talking nonsense. If Sigtryggr had taken men west into Cumbraland then either the Mercians or the Scots would have attacked Eoferwic in the east, and so long as he defended the east, so long would the western part of his kingdom stay lawless. “You don’t win wars by defending,” I said, “and if Northumbria is to stay free then it needs to attack.”

But that was a notion as wispy as the high thin clouds that were being driven away by a brisk wind, and behind those wispy clouds was a wall of dark, tumultuous cloud that promised snow. It was still bitterly cold. The horses’ hooves shattered ice at the river’s edge when we took them to the ford to drink, while the turf on which we had tried to sleep was frost hard. Soon after dawn we loaded the packhorses, saddled the stallions, and left the smoking ashes of our campfires behind. I wanted to hurry, but dared not because we had few spare horses and could not risk losing any to a broken leg, and the Roman road was now little more than a trace of half-buried stones in the frost-paled turf of the hills. Our breath misted, and the small streams were frozen. The scouts, mounted on our swiftest stallions, rode ahead, and it was those scouts who first saw the approaching horsemen.