I lay on the crest, waiting, watching, and shivering. A hard fall of rain swept the valley. It was no longer sleet, so perhaps it was warmer, though I felt chilled to the marrow. The wind gusted, died, and gusted again, billowing the great veils of rain. The hard rain stopped, and for a while there was nothing to see except a pair of curlews above the empty valley and a buzzard drifting south on the uncertain wind. Was that an omen? During the night I had woken, cold and shivering, with the memory of a dream fresh in my mind. I had been steering a ship along a strange shore, looking for a safe harbor and finding none, and I had tried to see the message in that dream, but I could find nothing ominous in the dream-ship or the placid shore. The gods do talk to us in our dreams, just as the flight of birds can reveal their wishes, but it seemed the gods were not talking to me. The buzzard flew out of sight. I wanted a reassurance from the gods, and I was finding none.

“There,” Finan said beside me, and I saw the first horsemen appear on the eastern crest.

And so they came, horseman after horseman, and in the wide valley to their north were straggling lines of cattle herded by boys. “Christ,” Finan said, “there’s more than two hundred of the bastards!”

Some men were on foot, while others guarded the women and children who had been captured. Those women would mostly be sold as slaves, though doubtless some would find new husbands among the Norse. I had gestured Beadwulf to join us, snarling at him to crawl the last few paces so his head did not show above the skyline. “Tell me if you see Sköll,” I ordered him.

“I’ve never seen him, lord.” He saw the anger on my face. “But they say he is a big man and that he wears a cloak of white fur.”

For a time we lay in silence, just watching the folk trudge along the road. I counted over three hundred men before Beadwulf made a nervous sound. “There, lord,” he said, his eyes widening as he watched a knot of horsemen, perhaps forty or fifty strong, appear beneath us.

“There what?”

“That must be Sköll Grimmarson,” he said, speaking softly as though he feared the far horsemen could hear us. “The man in the white bear fur, lord,” he added, and there, riding alone at the center of the horsemen, was a big man on a big horse wearing a big cloak of pure white fur.

I had heard of the white bears, though I had never seen one. But travelers said that in the far north where the snow never melts and where even in summer the sea is ice-locked there are massive bears with thick white pelts. I would never have believed such stories had I not once seen such a pelt for sale in Lundene, though at a price that only a king could afford. Most of the men riding with Sköll wore gray cloaks. Wolf pelts? Were those men, I wondered, the feared úlfhéðnar?