He thought for a heartbeat, then, ‘Jesus,’ he said quietly, ‘you really think they’ll dare attack us?’
‘I think we should be ready if they do.’
‘And there’s near thirty of them. If they all attack us …’ his voice trailed away.
‘Even if only half,’ I said, ‘or maybe I’m imagining it.’
‘And if they do attack?’
‘Put them down hard and fast,’ I said grimly.
‘Jesus,’ he said again.
‘And warn all our men,’ I added.
We went back inside. Moonlight came through the ragged holes in the shattered roof. Men were snoring. I could hear a child crying, and Benedetta singing softly to her. After a while the crying ended. An owl hooted in the woods beyond the barn.
I put Oswi outside the barn and sat inside with Beornoth and Gerbruht, the three of us leaning against the wall in dark shadow. None of us spoke and my thoughts drifted as I fought against sleep. I remembered the Lundene house where I had lived with Gisela and I tried to conjure her face in my memory, but it would not come. It never did. Stiorra, my daughter, had resembled her mother, but Stiorra was dead too, and her face was just as elusive. What I could remember was Ravn, the blind skald, who was father to Ragnar the Fearless. It had been Ragnar who had captured me when I was a child, who had enslaved me and then made me his son.
Ravn had been a great warrior till a Saxon sword took his eyes, and so he had become a skald. He had laughed when I said I did not know what a skald was. ‘You would call a skald a scop,’ he had explained.
‘A shaper?’
‘A poet, boy. A weaver of dreams, a man who makes glory from nothing and dazzles you with its making.’
‘What use is a poet?’ I had asked.
‘None at all, boy, none at all! Poets are quite useless! But when the world ends folk will remember our songs, and in Valhalla they will sing those songs and so the middle-earth’s glory will not die.’
Ravn had taught me about his gods and, now that I was as old as Ravn had been when I knew him, I wished I had asked him more, but I did remember him saying that he believed there was a place in the afterworld for families. ‘I will see my wife again,’ he had told me wistfully, and I had been too young to know what to say and too foolish to ask him more. All I had wanted to hear was his tales of battle, but now, in the moonlit barn, I clung to those few words spoken so long ago and dreamed of Gisela waiting in some sunlit hall to welcome me. I tried again to summon her face, her smile. I saw her in my dreams sometimes, but never when I was awake.
‘Lord,’ Beornoth hissed, elbowing me.
I must have fallen half asleep, but woke abruptly. Serpent-Breath was drawn, lying hidden in the straw beside me and I instinctively took her hilt. I looked to my right where the rowers had bedded down. I could see none moving and could hear nothing but snoring, but after a moment I also heard low muttering and assumed that sound had alerted Beornoth. I could make out no words. The muttering stopped then started again. I heard the filthy straw rustling and the clink of the chains. That sound had not stopped all night, but sleeping men move their feet and I had dismissed it. The moon was low in the sky, so little light leaked through the barn’s broken roof, but all the rowers appeared to be sleeping. I listened, trying to distinguish the noise a chain might make if it were being slowly drawn through the ring of an ankle fetter, but all I heard were snores. An owl called. One of the children at the other end of the barn cried in her sleep and was hushed. A chain clinked again, stopped, and then sounded louder. The straw rustled, then went quiet. I waited, tense, my hand tight on Serpent-Breath’s hilt.
Then it happened. A big man, little more than a shadow in the darkness, stood and charged towards me. He bellowed a challenge as he lunged at me. The chain clattered behind him. I shouted too, a wordless shout of rage, and I lifted Serpent-Breath and let the big man run onto the blade. I was trying to stand, but the weight of the man pushed me against Beornoth and we both fell back. Serpent-Breath had gone deep, I had felt her punch through layers of muscle, but the man, still roaring, swung at me with a seax, which must have been the blade I had given to Irenmund, and I felt my mail rip and a sharp pain score across my left shoulder. I had been driven down to the barn’s floor. I was still gripping Serpent-Breath and was suddenly aware of warm blood soaking my right hand. Beornoth was shouting, children were screaming, I heard Finan curse, but I could see nothing because I was still trapped beneath the big man who was breathing gutturally, gasping into my face. I heaved him off me, managed to get to my knees, and ripped Serpent-Breath up. I should have been using Wasp-Sting because there was no room to wield the long blade, but before I could free the sword, two more men came at me, their faces distorted by fear and rage. The big man was dying, but had my left leg in his grip. I twisted Serpent-Breath in his guts just as one of the two men lunged at my belly and in the moonlight I saw a small knife in his hand. I twisted away and the dying man’s grip tripped me so I fell again and the man with the knife followed me down, snarling, the knife aimed at
