One

      It began with three ships.

      Now there were four.

      The three ships had come to the Northumbrian coast when I was a child, and within days my elder brother was dead and within weeks my father had followed him to the grave, my uncle had stolen my land and I had become an exile. Now, so many years later, I was on the same beach watching four ships come to the coast.

      They came from the north, and anything that comes from the north is bad news. The north brings frost and ice, Norsemen and Scots. It brings enemies, and I had enemies enough already because I had come to Northumbria to recapture Bebbanburg. I had come to kill my cousin who had usurped my place. I had come to take my home back.

      Bebbanburg lay to the south. I could not see the ramparts from where our horses stood because the dunes were too high, but I could see smoke from the fortress’s hearths being snatched westward by the wild wind. The smoke was being blown inland, melding with the low grey clouds that scudded towards Northumbria’s dark hills.

      It was a sharp wind. The sand flats that stretched towards Lindisfarena were riotous with breaking waves that seethed white and fast towards the shore. Further out the waves were foam-capped, their spume flying, turbulent. It was also bitterly cold. Summer might have just come to Britain, but winter still wielded a keen-edged knife on the Northumbrian coast and I was glad of my bearskin cloak.

      ‘A bad day for sailors,’ Berg called to me. He was one of my younger men, a Norse who revelled in his skill as a swordsman. He had grown his long hair even longer in the last year until it flared out like a great horsetail beneath the rim of his helmet. I had once seen a Saxon seize a man’s long hair and drag him backwards from his saddle, then spear him while he was still flailing on the turf.

      ‘You should cut your hair,’ I told him.

      ‘In battle I tie it up!’ he called back, then nodded seawards. ‘They will be wrecked! They’re too close to shore!’

      The four ships were following the shore but struggling to stay at sea. The wind wanted to drive them ashore, to strand them on the flats, to tip them there and break them apart, but the oarsmen were hauling on their looms as the steersmen tried to force the bows away from the breakers. Seas shattered on their bows and spewed white along their decks. The beam wind was too strong to carry yards or sailcloth aloft and so their heavy sails were stowed on deck.

      ‘Who are they?’ my son asked, spurring his horse alongside mine. The wind lifted his cloak and whipped his horse’s mane and tail.

      ‘How would I know?’ I asked.

      ‘You’ve not seen them before?’

      ‘Never,’ I said. I knew most of the ships that prowled the Northumbrian coast, but these four were strangers to me. They were not trading vessels, but had the high prows and low freeboard of fighting ships. There were beast-heads on their prows, marking them as pagans. The ships were large. Each, I reckoned, held forty or fifty men who now rowed for their lives in spiteful seas and bitter wind. The tide was rising, which meant