No adornment relieved his helmet, which was composed of four bands of dull grey metal laid onto a soft leathern caul. He too wore a jerkin of boiled leather, over a tunic of grey wool. The score or more steel rings fixed to the front of that plain lorica were as much reinforcing protection as decoration. This man’s full drooping mustachioes contained more bronze-red than his braids.

Oars creaked and thumped. Men grunted; water gurgled and swished, and the twenty-oared boat seemed to scud on the very surface of the sea as it swept forward, with unusual smoothness. Its heading was southerly.

The man at the bow was gazing southwestward, ahead and to starboard. Gazing that way as well were the auburn-haired man at the tiller and the third of those who did not row.

The blond ax-man at the prow moved his left arm out from his side, almost stiffly. It was fisted but for the forefinger, which pointed. With a nod, though no eyes were turned his way, the man at the stern changed the pressure of his tanned hands on the tiller. The ship, which was little more than fifty feet in length, did not veer, but angled to port; eastward, on its southerly bearing.

The blond at the bow glanced back. His nose had once been broken and was askew, nor did he quite close his mouth, ever.

“Irish,” he grunted, just loud enough to be heard by three-and-twenty men.

An oarsman to port asked, “Reavers?”

“I think not. Cynwas?”

“I think not,” the steersman said, just as quietly. “They’d be fighting else, Bedwyr, not suffering that… harassment.”

“Leaguered about by wolves,” Bedwyr the blond ax-man said, and there was amusement in his voice. “They’ll not see this sun set, though it’s soon crimson they’ll see!”

“Wolves?” This from another oar-plier, a man with a break in his beard from an old slash of sword or knife; surely no ax could have sliced him so without wrecking his jaw.