1073 - under the merciless sun of the east, a dark force has risen - a Norman adventurer who could rival the feared King William for bloody ambition. He has conquered his land, he has built his fortress and he has amassed his army. And now he has taken Constantinople's ruler as his prisoner...It falls to Hereward to rescue this precious captive. For this great English warrior-in-exile and his spear-brothers, it will mean mounting a raid that could prove the most dangerous and deadliest of their lives. Assisting them in their task will be an elite and legendary band of fighters, the Immortals - so-called because they believe they cannot die in battle. But it will not be enough - for enemies hide within the jewelled heart of Byzantium: vipers who spread their poison, who want to see the English dead at any cost and who are to transform a mission that was at best dangerous into an adventure that is now suicidal...With this rousing adventure full of brutal sword play, treachery, camaraderie and honour, James Wilde continues his bestselling account of the action-packed life and times of England's great and now, thanks to his fiction, perhaps not-so-forgotten hero - Hereward the Wake.

James Wilde is a Man of Mercia. Raised in a world of books, the author studied economic history at university before travelling the world in search of adventure. Unable to forget a childhood encounter - in the pages of a comic - with the great English warrior, Hereward, Wilde returned to the haunted fenlands of Eastern England, Hereward's ancestral home, where he became convinced that this legendary hero should be the subject of his first novel. Wilde indulges his love of history and the high life in the home his family have owned for several generations in the heart of a Mercian forest.