I decided we would go east anyway. “That way!” I shouted at Finan, pointing. I spurred Tintreg to Finan’s side. “The bastards are coming after us.”

Finan instinctively looked around, but no pursuing horsemen were in sight yet. “What do we do?”

“We’ll ride east and hope we can get back to the road.” I looked up at the still empty skyline. “They can’t pursue us forever.”

“We hope,” Finan said drily.

It was my fault. Discovering what had happened in Eoferwic could have waited, nothing I learned here would make the slightest difference to Sigtryggr. Either he was alive or he was dead, but I had given way to my impatience, and now I had a small army of vengeful Norsemen pursuing me. The curse was working, I thought grimly. I should never have sought out Beadwulf, but should have ridden straight for home, and now, by attacking Sköll’s men and taking prisoners, I had made myself the hunted instead of being the hunter. My best hope was that Sköll would think I was in the vanguard of a Northumbrian pursuit and that an army was not far behind me. So far they had only seen a handful of my men, but soon the scouts would see we were over ninety strong. Why pick a fight with us? Sköll Grimmarson would just lose more men. It was a slender hope.

I swerved to reach the crest again. I was planning to slant down the hillside to rejoin the road, but when I reached the skyline I saw Norsemen racing east along the valley. There had to be fifty or sixty of them, and when I turned in the saddle I saw that even more Norsemen had reached the crest and were now following us. Two bands of pursuers, and the ones below had plainly been sent to get ahead of us. Sköll Grimmarson wanted to trap us.

So I turned south to escape his trap. I was fleeing.

My men outnumbered the smaller war-band racing east along the road, but I had nothing to gain by fighting it. We could have turned back, galloped downhill, and overwhelmed that smaller group, but I would lose men and horses in the fight. Some of my men would be wounded, and I must either abandon them to Sköll’s mercy or try to carry them with us as we escaped. If we escaped, because the Norsemen in the larger war-band were sure to follow and help their comrades. So our only hope was to flee south and pray for nightfall, which was still two or three hours away.

At least the sight of our numbers made the nearest pursuers pause. They outnumbered us, but they had as little to gain from a fight as we did until they were reinforced and thus certain of defeating us easily. We crossed another crest and found a cattle track beaten through the heather and we followed that, going faster now. Ahead of us the land dropped away, leading to fields, and I could see smoke rising from settlements. Somewhere ahead, a good long way ahead, we would pass into Mercia, but we could expect little help there. Any settler in these farmlands would be Danish, and the Danes who lived in southern Northumbria and northern Mercia had learned to be cautious.