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The rain, says Sighvat, will tell you all about a place if you know how to read it. The Falstermann loomed over me, breathing hard, the seax reversed for a downward thrust straight at my belt loop, rain pearling mistily on the pitted steel, sliding carelessly along the edge. Not that last, especially, for the vision of the first man - the boy - I had killed came back to me, lying on a heath with his bloodless face and his eyes open and startled under little pools of rainwater. I did not want to die in a filthy alley of the Great City with the rain in my eyes.

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The cliff walls of the alley stretched up to frame a patch of indifferent grey sky and it came to me then that this would be the last sight I would see. I was sure death had not been in the plan of this, but the man from Falster had blood in his eye and I had rain in mine, blurring the world.

`Time to row hard for it,' this unseen one growled and I heard his steps squelching through the alley filth. I was gasping and boking too much to do anything about it. Then he plucked the wool-coddled sword from my fluttering hands, easy as lifting an egg from a nest and, dimly, I realised that's what they had wanted all along. Worse than that - even now I sweat with the shame of it - his oarmate came up behind me, elbowed the breath out of me and slammed me to the clotted filth of the alley. He was too old a hand for that, though, and I was too clumsy with the sword wrapped as it was.

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I turned my wrist to try and tangle his blade in cloth and almost managed to twist the seax free of his grasp. His feet shifted and I had been watching for that, so that when he swung I caught the seax on the shredded bundle, wincing at the blow. It was a pity I had not been so clever about taking him on. So I had been clever about him being a Dane, I thought. I am a Falstermann and not one to take such insults from a boy.' I don't think you realise who you are facing, swina fretr. He blinked astonishment, then chuckled like a wolf who has found a crippled chicken. 'Tell you what - you tell me why you are following me all over Miklagard and I will let you go.' `Didn't expect this, did you?' I taunted as we shifted and eyed each other. Showered with brick and plaster chips, he was alarmed, both at the near miss and the fact that there was now a sharp edge involved. The bundled sword cut through the wrappings and struck sparks from the wall. I followed it with a big overarm hack, but missed. He was quick, too, darting in fast and low, but I had been watching his feet not his eyes and swung the bundle so that it smacked him sideways into the wall.

He grinned I backed up, slithering through black-rotted rubbish, wishing I had just gone my way and ignored him. I hefted the wrapped sabre, swung it and revealed how clumsy the weapon was in that single moment. `Big mistake,' he snarled in bad Greek and moved up the alley towards me, hauling a seax the length of my forearm out from under his cloak. They were clouded to the colour of flint, those eyes, and his snake moustaches writhed as he sneered at me, the blow I had given him having done nothing except annoy him. His eyes flicked to the bundle in my hand, then settled on my gape-mouthed face like flies on blood.

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