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This story begins long before I met Alfred. It begins when I was ten years oldand first saw the Danes. It was the year 866 and I was not called Uhtred then, butOsbert, for I was my father’s second son and it was the eldest who took the nameUhtred. My brother was seventeen then, tall and well built, with our family’s fairhair and my father’s morose face.

The chiming, which had started in low was now assaulting his senses like physical blows to his skull. He was pretty sure he was hyperventilating, but could not even hear his own ragged breaths as they escaped his lungs like cowards.Hazy blotches of dull light, almost shapes, cutting through the gloom appeared before his all but useless eyes. Indeed, blindness would be a blessing now, but one he would not be granted. No, for whatever his sins were, he would not be afforded such mercies.

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk — that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs. An electric bell rang.