Lords of the North
Page 34
There was only one answer to that. The Danes, who knew well enough that Hrothweard had been Guthred’s adviser, wanted him dead. Hrothweard, meanwhile, was kneeling on the grass, his hands clasped, staring up at Guthred. “No, lord!” He pleaded.
“You’re the thief?” Guthred asked. He sounded disbelieving.
“I found the relic in his baggage, lord,” Finan said, and held the golden pot toward Guthred. “It was wrapped in one of his shirts, lord.”
“He lies!” Hrothweard protested.
“He’s your thief, lord,” Finan said respectfully, then made the sign of the cross, “I swear it on Christ’s holy body.”
“He’s a sorcerer!” I shouted at Ivarr’s Danes. “He will give your cattle the staggers, he will put a blight on your crops, he will make your women barren and your children sickly! Do you want him?”
They roared their need of Hrothweard, who was weeping uncontrollably.
“You may have him,” I said, “if you acknowledge Guthred as your king.”
They shouted their allegiance. They were beating swords and spears against their shields again, but this time in acclamation of Guthred, and so I leaned over and took his reins. “Time to greet them, lord,” I told him. “Time to be generous with them.”
“But,” he looked down at Hrothweard.
“He is a thief, lord,” I said, “and thieves must die. It is the law. It is what Alfred would do.”
“Yes,” Guthred said, and we left Father Hrothweard to the pagan Danes and we listened to his dying for a long time. I do not know what they did to him, for there was little left of his corpse, though his blood darkened the grass for yards around the place he died.
That night there was a poor feast. Poor because we had little enough food, though there was plenty of ale. The Danish thegns swore their allegiance to Guthred while the priests and monks huddled in the church, expecting murder. Hrothweard was dead and Jænberht had been murdered, and they all expected to become martyrs themselves, but a dozen sober men from Guthred’s household troops were enough to keep them safe. “I shall let them build their shrine for Saint Cuthbert,” Guthred told me.
“Alfred would approve of that,” I said.
He stared across the fire that burned in Cetreht’s street. Ragnar, despite his crippled hand, was wrestling with a huge Dane who had served Ivarr. Both men were drunk and more and drunk men cheered them on and made wagers on who would win. Guthred stared, but did not see the contest. He was thinking. “I would never have believed,” he said at last, puzzled, “that Father Hrothweard was a thief.”
Gisela, sheltering under my cloak and leaning on my shoulder, giggled. “No man would ever believe that you and I were slaves, lord,” I answered, “but so we were.”
“Yes,” he said in wonderment, “we were.”
It is the three spinners who make our lives. They sit at the foot of Yggdrasil and there they have their jests. It pleased them to make Guthred the slave into King Guthred, just as it pleased them to send me south again to Wessex.
While at Bebbanburg, where the gray sea never ceases to beat upon the long pale sands and the cold wind frets the wolf’s head flag above the hall, they dreaded my return.
Because fate cannot be cheated, it governs us, and we are all its slaves.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Lords of the North opens a month or so after Alfred’s astonishing victory over the Danes at Ethandun, a tale told in The Pale Horseman. Guthrum, the leader of the defeated army, retreated to Chippenham where Alfred laid siege to him, but hostilities came to a swift end when Alfred and Guthrum agreed to a peace. The Danes withdrew from Wessex and Guthrum and his leading earls all became Christians. Alfred, in turn, recognized Guthrum as the king of East Anglia.
Readers of the two previous novels in this series will know that Guthrum hardly had a sterling record for keeping peace agreements. He had broken the truce made at Wareham, and the subsequent truce negotiated at Exeter, but this last peace treaty held. Guthrum accepted Alfred as his godfather and took the baptismal name of Æthelstan. One tradition says he was baptized in the font still to be seen in the church at Aller, Somerset, and it seems that his conversion was genuine for, once back in East Anglia, he ruled as a Christian monarch. Negotiations between Guthrum and Alfred continued, for in 886 they signed the Treaty of Wedmore which divided England into two spheres of influence. Wessex and southern Mercia were to be Saxon, while East Anglia, northern Mercia, and Northumbria were to fall under Danish law. Thus the Danelaw was established, that north-eastern half of England which, for a time, was to be ruled by Danish kings and which still bears, in place-names and dialects, the imprint of that era.
The treaty was a recognition by Alfred that he lacked the forces to drive the Danes out of England altogether, and it bought him time in which he could fortify his heartland of Wessex. The problem was that Guthrum was not the king of all the Danes, let alone the Norsemen, and he could not prevent further attacks on Wessex. Those would come in time, and will be described in future novels, but in large part the victory at Ethandun and the subsequent settlement with Guthrum secured the independence of Wessex and enabled Alfred and his successors to reconquer the Danelaw. One of Alfred’s first steps in that long process was to marry his eldest daughter, Æthelflaed, to Æthelred of Mercia, an alliance intended to bind the Saxons of Mercia to those of Wessex. Æthelflaed, in time, was to prove a great heroine in the struggle against the Danes.
To move from the history of Wessex in the late ninth century to that of Northumbria is to pass from light into confusing darkness. Even the northern regnal lists, which provide the names of kings and the dates they ruled, do not agree, but soon after Ethandun a king named Guthred (some sources name him as Guthfrith) did take the throne at York (Eoferwic). He replaced a Saxon king, who was doubtless a puppet ruler, and he ruled into the 890s. Guthred is remarkable for two things; first, though Danish, he was a Christian, and second, there is a persistent story that he was once a slave, and on those slender foundations I have concocted this story. He was certainly associated with Abbot Eadred who was the guardian of Cuthbert’s corpse (and of both the head of Saint Oswald and the Lindisfarne Gospels), and Eadred was eventually to build his great shrine for Cuthbert at Cuncacester, now Chester-le-Street in County Durham. In 995 the saint’s body was finally laid to rest at Durham (Dunholm) where it remains.
Kjartan, Ragnar, and Gisela are fictional characters. There was an Ivarr, but I have taken vast liberties with his life. He is chiefly notable for his successors who will cause much trouble in the north. There is no record of a ninth-century fortress at Durham, though it seems to me unlikely that such an easily defensible site would have been ignored, and more than possible that any remnants of such a fort would have been destroyed during the construction of the cathedral and castle which have now occupied the summit for almost a thousand years. There was a fortress at Bebbanburg, transmuted over time into the present glories of Bamburgh Castle, and in the eleventh century it was ruled by a family with the name Uhtred, who are my ancestors, but we know almost nothing of the family’s activities in the late ninth century.
The story of England in the late ninth and early tenth centuries is a tale which moves from Wessex northward. Uhtred’s fate, which he is just beginning to recognize, is to be at the heart of that West Saxon reconquest of the land that will become known as England and so his wars are far from over. He will need Serpent-Breath again.
About the Author
BERNARD CORNWELL is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Saxon Tales, which began with The Last Kingdom and continued with The Pale Horseman; the Richard Sharpe novels; the Grail Quest series; the Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles; the Warlord Chronicles; and many other works of fiction, including Stonehenge and Gallows Thief. Raised in Britain, Cornwell now lives with his wife on Cape Cod.
www.bernardcornwell.net
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BOOKS BY BERNARD CORN
WELL
The Saxon Tales
THE LAST KINGDOM
THE PALE HORSEMAN
The Sharpe Novels (in chronological order)
SHARPE’S TIGER*
Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Seringapatam, 1799
SHARPE’S TRIUMPH*
Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803
SHARPE’S FORTRESS*
Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Gawilghur, December 1803
SHARPE’S TRAFALGAR*
Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805
SHARPE’S PREY*
Richard Sharpe and the Expedition to Copenhagen, 1807
SHARPE’S RIFLES
Richard Sharpe and the French Invasion of Galicia, January 1809
SHARPE’S HAVOC*
Richard Sharpe and the Campaign in Northern Portugal, Spring 1809
SHARPE’S EAGLE
Richard Sharpe and the Talavera Campaign, July 1809
SHARPE’S GOLD
Richard Sharpe and the Destruction of Almeida, August 1810
SHARPE’S ESCAPE*
Richard Sharpe and the Bussaco Campaign, 1810
SHARPE’S BATTLE*
Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Fuentes de Onoro, May 1811
SHARPE’S COMPANY
Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Badajoz, January to April 1812
SHARPE’S SWORD
Richard Sharpe and the Salamanca Campaign, June and July 1812
SHARPE’S ENEMY
Richard Sharpe and the Defense of Portugal, Christmas 1812
SHARPE’S HONOUR
Richard Sharpe and the Vitoria Campaign, February to June 1813
SHARPE’S REGIMENT
Richard Sharpe and the Invasion of France, June to November 1813
SHARPE’S SIEGE
Richard Sharpe and the Winter Campaign, 1814
SHARPE’S REVENGE
Richard Sharpe and the Peace of 1814
SHARPE’S WATERLOO
Richard Sharpe and the Waterloo Campaign, 15 June to 18 June 1815
SHARPE’S DEVIL*
Richard Sharpe and the Emperor, 1820–21
The Grail Quest Series
THE ARCHER’S TALE
VAGABOND
HERETIC
The Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles
REBEL
COPPERHEAD
BATTLE FLAG
THE BLOODY GROUND
The Warlord Chronicles
THE WINTER KING
ENEMY OF GOD
EXCALIBUR
Other Novels
REDCOAT
A CROWNING MERCY
STORMCHILD
SCOUNDREL
GALLOWS THIEF
STONEHENGE, 2000 B.C.: A NOVEL
* Published by HarperCollinsPublishers.
Credits
Jacket illustration by Steve Stone
Copyright
LORDS OF THE NORTH. Copyright © 2007 by Bernard Cornwell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Mobipocket Reader January 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-125996-8
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Table of Contents
Start
LORDS OF THE NORTH
Dedication
CONTENTS
Map
PLACE-NAMES
PART ONE THE SLAVE KING
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
PART TWO THE RED SHIP
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
PART THREE SHADOW-WALKER
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
HISTORICAL NOTE
About the Author
BOOKS BY BERNARD CORNWELL
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher