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gnashed his own like an angry hound, ‘you looked ready to tear hell a new arsehole. I reckon you would have scythed my head off if I had got too close.’
    ‘I’ll relieve you of it now if you fart like that again,’ I said, screwing up my face at the awful smell. He grinned contentedly, altering the course of the livid scar someone had carved from his left cheek to beneath his chin.
    ‘The Welsh must have thought some demon from theirchildren’s nightmares had come for them,’ he said. ‘Poor bastards.’
    ‘The way I remember it they mauled us , Penda,’ I said with a grimace. ‘It’s a miracle we’re still alive to enjoy this pissing rain.’
    Penda’s gaze rested on me, his eyes dulling like standing water growing a skin of ice. He had lost countrymen and friends that day. He nodded, his eyes sharpening again. ‘You never know, we might make a decent fighter of you one day. Give you some craft to go with that black temper of yours. You really don’t take it well when someone tries to kill you, eh, lad?’ He smiled. ‘Lucky you’ve got that over there,’ he added, pointing towards a rock half hidden in a tuft of grass.
    ‘Got what?’ I asked.
    ‘That invisible shield, you clod,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get my hands on one of those.’
    I shook my head. ‘Very rare those invisible shields,’ I said, ‘you hardly come across them these days. But if I find another one I’ll let you know.’
    ‘Good lad,’ he said. But it was a thin joke, for Penda was not the only one who thought it some strange wyrd that I had survived this far when other war-skilled men had not. Perhaps there was some seidr shield raised before me. And perhaps that shield belonged to Óðin.
    I swallowed the wet bread as my mind swam back to that bloody day and the hillside where we had made our stand. Men had turned that grass greasy with gore and afterwards the pale dead had lain like a litter of bones. In truth Penda had saved my life, dragging me to my feet when my limbs had given up. I owed him. But then, I owed Sigurd too and all the Norsemen. They had stood with me, killed for me as men do for those in the shieldwall beside them, but more than this, they had taken me into their Fellowship. I was young and arrogant and wrapped up in the blind lust of young life, and yet, in thequiet times, I sometimes considered all I had been given: a row bench, a sword, a place amongst men who were weaving a rare saga tale. Whenever I thought about these things I became dizzy. I would shake my head and puff my cheeks. My chest would fill with warm pride and my heart would thump like an axe head on a shield. I wanted to repay the debt somehow. So on that pissing night I stared out across the bay, over the channel towards the north-west and the last glow of the fallen sun, hoping that I should spy Fjord-Elk and be the one to give Sigurd the news.
    The moon had bobbed and sunk again by the time Svein the Red and Bram Bear came to relieve us of our watch. Their figures loomed on the crunching ledge beside us, black shapes against a dawn the colour of dragon’s fire. At last the rain had stopped and in the pure morning air I could smell the mead on the two Norsemen as they approached.
    ‘I hope you two didn’t get too scared up here on your own,’ Bram said, winking at Svein. One hand gripped his ash spear, the other a bulging skin of mead.
    ‘With that Englishman’s hideous hair and Raven’s blood-eye, it would be a brave draugr that tried to spook these two,’ Svein said, resting the butt of his spear beside a thicket of sea thrift which rustled in the breeze. Just then a screech ripped the air behind us. Bram ducked and spun, extending his spear ready as a peregrine streaked like an arrow down into the long grass.
    ‘Don’t be afraid, Bram,’ I said, laughing with the others, ‘Svein’s got your back. You wouldn’t let that mean old bird peck the Bear’s beard off, would you, Svein?’
    ‘I might,’ Svein replied with