He had a rope around his hips and his chest, lashing him to the alder’s trunk so that he suspected he would hang there even without the branch below his feet which he could just reach. But he was glad of that branch for it meant he could share the burden between the ropes and his legs. Either side of him his arms were tied to smaller boughs with reeds which they had braided because they had not enough rope. He was cut, too. Asgot had taken his wicked sharp knife to Sigurd’s right side, to the soft flesh beneath the twelfth rib. He had not cut deeply, the wound no longer than Sigurd’s thumb, but the sting of it felt twice as long and Olaf had cursed and smouldered like a day-old pyre when it was done because even a small cut like that can get the wound rot and kill a man as surely as an axe to the head, if only more slowly. ‘I don’t even want to think about what your father and brothers would say if they could see you now, lad,’ Olaf had growled at Sigurd as Hendil, who claimed to be a champion tree climber, had straddled the boughs checking the knots.
