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narrow ways snaking between the huddled bothies that were some turf-and-timber built, some still roofed with spars and ships’ awnings; I knew, from the outside, the church of St Columba with its gable-end cross stark against the sky – for Cuiran the King was Christian and his city Christian, after a fashion, with him, though many of the Viking Kind still made their vows on Thor’s Ring in the little dark God-House with the blood-splashed doorposts, beyond the boat-strand. I knew the King’s timbered and painted Hall amid its byres and barns and outbuildings; and every ale-house and wine-shop in the sprawling length and breadth of the city.
    But they did not always take me with them. I was not with them when they strolled down into the town in search of amusement on Midwinter’s night – Christmas night – Yule. I had been to get myself some supper – there was always food for all comers, thrall or free, to be had from the cookshed behind the King’s Hall – and with a good meal of bannock and ewe-milk cheese inside me, I had come back and made upthe fire on the bothy’s small central hearth, and settled to clearing up and tending the war-gear that they had left scattered when they came off duty. I mind sitting with Thormod’s war-cap on my knees, burnishing the iron rim; and hearing, behind the rub of the burnishing cloth and the flutter of the hearth flames and the quiet of the empty bothy, the surf-roar of Dublin keeping its Midwinter Festival.
    Last year, we had lit the Midwinter Fires on the thorn-crowned hillock above the village as usual, to the fury, every year the same fury, of Aldred the Priest, who had every year the same things to say as to the lighting of pagan fires by his Christian flock, to help the Sun grow strong and bring the summer back. This year, too, the fire would be blazing, and Priest Aldred in the same fury, poor old man. And suddenly, achingly, I wondered where I would be, whose thrall I would be, the next time the Midwinter Fires were lit.
    ‘What will you do with him when the time comes for heading homeward in the spring?’ Tostig had asked, that first day down at the slave-sheds; and Haki had said, ‘Sell him off again.’ And come the spring and the seafaring weather, they would run the
Sea Swallow
down into the water and head for home. And for me, there would be the slave-sheds again, and a new master. The thought brought me up with a sickening jerk. Thormod was not a particularly kind master, but I had never known much of kindness, and it did not greatly matter to me. After that moment at the slave-sheds when I had thought that he looked at me as a man looks at a man, he had whistled me to heel like a hound: and like a hound, I had followed. Still, I knew that I could live as a thrall so long as I was Thormod’s, but to be anybody else’s would be beyond bearing.
    I turned my thinking hurriedly aside, and reached for Thormod’s worn leather byrnie that lay across the foot of the sleeping-place. As I picked it up, something that had beencaught inside it fell out. A lump of raw yellow amber, roughly hammer-head shaped, with a hole in one end, and trailing through the hole, a broken leather thong. I had seen it often round his neck, when he stripped off to sleep, or to scrub away the muck and stiffness of a day’s hunting. He always wore it inside his sark; so it must be that he wore it not for ornament, but for luck or for some private reason of his own; maybe for its shape. Many of the Northmen wore Thor’s Hammer carved in bone or hammered out of metal round their necks for a kind of talisman I knew, and this, being natural, would be all the more a thing of power. And I had never seen it off his neck until now. The thong must have worn thin, and somehow he must have caught it when he pulled off his war-gear.
    I sat turning the thing over in my hand and looking at it in the light of the fire. It was the colour of honey that runs from the comb; almost clear in places, so