Three men were aboard who rowed not.

One stood well forward; another manned the tiller. Wargirt they both were, and brawny.

He at the prow wore no helm, but he had chosen to crown his dark yellow hair with a cap made of catskins. From that barred cap sprouted a little plume of seven eagle feathers. Bronze were the bracers on his arms, one blade-etched from some past time when it had saved his shield-hand. His tunic was blue; over it he wore an excellent leathern jerkin that covered him from collarbones to his thighs just below his genitals. The cordwain belt slung at his hips supported a dagger on either side. He wore no sword. This man’s weapon, with a broad thong forming a loop where it had been stoutly wet-tied in a groove ringing the haft, was an ax. Its head was invisible, covered with an oiled cowhide bag against the salt spray.

The ax-man’s feet and ankles were laced into what were unmistakably caligulae, the short boots of the Roman legionaries who had for so long ruled his land… and protected it from those many who now came from oversea to carve it up among themselves; Saxons and Angles, Jutes and Frisians, Irish and Danes; aye, and from the north over the old wall, Picts and the Scoti of Alba that the Romans had called Caledonia.

The blond ax-man at the prow looked asea.

The man at the stern wore a sword, long at his left hip and down his leg. Though he stood the deck of a hide-covered longboat and with his light auburn hair plaited behind each ear to fall down his back, the sword had surely belonged to a darker man more at home astride a horse; it was a spatha, a Roman cavalryman’s sword.