The Last Kingdom sc-1

by Bernard Cornwell

  We returned to Northumbria. Ragnar liked it there and, though he could have taken better land in Mercia, he liked the northern hills and the deep vales and the dark hanging woods where, as the first frosts crisped the morning, he took me hunting. A score of men and twice as many dogs beat through the woods, trying to trap boar. I stayed with Ragnar, both of us armed with heavy boar spears. “A boar can kill you, Uhtred,” he warned me. “He can rip you from the crotch to the neck unless you place the spear just right.”

  The spear, I knew, must be placed in the beast’s chest or, if you were lucky, down its throat. I knew I could not kill a boar, but if one came, I would have to try. A fullgrown boar can be twice the weight of a man and I did not have the strength to drive one back, but Ragnar was determined to give me first strike and he would be close behind to help. And so it happened. I have killed hundreds of boar since, but I will always remember that first beast, the small eyes, the sheer anger, the determination, the stench, the bristling hairs flecked with mud, and the sweet thud of the spear going deep into the chest, and I was hurled back as if I had been kicked by Odin’s eightlegged horse, and Ragnar drove his own spear through the thick hide and the beast squealed and roared, legs scrabbling, and the pursuing dogs howled, and I found my feet, gritted my teeth, and put my weight on the spear and felt the boar’s life pulsing up the ash shaft. Ragnar gave me a tusk from that carcass and I hung it next to Thor’s hammer and in the days that followed I wanted to do nothing except hunt, though I was not allowed to pursue boar unless Ragnar was with me, but when Rorik was well enough he and I would take our bows into the woods to look for deer.

  It was on one of those expeditions, high up at the edge of the woods, just beneath the moors that were dappled by melting snow, that the arrow almost took my life. Rorik and I were creeping through undergrowth and the arrow missed me by inches, sizzling past my head to thump into an ash tree. I turned, putting an arrow on my own string, but saw no one, then we heard feet racing away downhill through the trees and we followed, but whoever had shot the arrow ran too fast for us.

  “An accident,” Ragnar said. “He saw movement, thought you were a deer, and loosed. It happens.” He looked at the arrow we had retrieved, but it had no marks of ownership. It was just a goosefledged shaft of hornbeam tipped with an iron head. “An accident,” he decreed. Later that winter we moved back to Eoferwic and spent days repairing the boats. I learned to split oak trunks with wedge and mallet, cleaving out the long pale planks that patched the rotted hulls. Spring brought more ships, more men, and with them was Halfdan, youngest brother of Ivar and Ubba. He came ashore roaring with energy, a tall man with a big beard and scowling eyes. He embraced Ragnar, thumped me on the shoulder, punched Rorik in the head, swore he would kill every Christian in England, then went to see his brothers. The three of them planned the new war, which, they promised, would strip East Anglia of its treasures and, as the days warmed, we readied for it. Half the army would march by land, while the other half, which included Ragnar’s men, would go by sea and so I anticipated my first proper voyage, but before we left Kjartan came to see Ragnar, and trailing him was his son Sven, his missing eye a red hole in his angry face. Kjartan knelt to Ragnar and bowed his head. “I would come with you, lord,” he said.

  Kjartan had made a mistake by letting Sven follow him, for Ragnar, usually so generous, gave the boy a sour look. I call him a boy, but in truth Sven was almost a man now and promised to be a big one, broad in the chest, tall, and strong. “You would come with me,” Ragnar echoed flatly.

  “I beg you, lord,” Kjartan said, and it must have taken a great effort to say those words, for Kjartan was a proud man, but in Eoferwic he had found no plunder, earned no arm rings, and made no reputation for himself.

  “My ships are full,” Ragnar said coldly, and turned away. I saw the look of hatred on Kjartan’s face.

  “Why doesn’t he sail with someone else?” I asked Ravn.

  “Because everyone knows he offended Ragnar, so to give him a place at the oars is to risk my son’s dislike.” Ravn shrugged. “Kjartan should go back to Denmark. If a man loses his lord’s trust then he has lost everything.”

  But Kjartan and his oneeyed son stayed in Eoferwic instead of going back to Denmark, and we sailed, first flowing with the current back down the Ouse and so into the Humber where we spent the night. Next morning we took the shields off the ships’ sides, then waited till the tide lifted their hulls and we could row eastward into the first great seas.

  I had been offshore at Bebbanburg, going with fishermen to cast nets about the Farne Islands, but this was a different sensation. TheWindViper rode those waves like a bird instead of thrashing through like a swimmer. We rowed out of the river, then took advantage of a northwest wind to hoist the great sail, and the oars were fiddled out of their holes, the holes were covered with wooden plugs, and the great sweeps stored inboard as the sail cracked, bellied, trapped the wind, and drove us southward. There were eightynine ships altogether, a fleet of dragonheaded killers, and they raced one another, calling insults whenever they traveled faster than some other boat. Ragnar leaned on the steering oar, his hair flying in the wind and a smile as broad as the ocean on his face. Sealhide ropes creaked; the boat seemed to leap up the seas, seethe through their tops, and slide in flying spray down their faces. I was frightened at first, for theWindViper bent to that wind, almost dropping her leeward side beneath the great green sea, but then I saw no fear on the other men’s faces and I learned to enjoy the wild ride, whooping with delight when the bow smashed into a heavy sea and the green water flew like an arrow shower down the deck.

  “I love this!” Ragnar called to me. “In Valhalla I hope to find a ship, a sea, and a wind!”

  The shore was ever in sight, a low green line to our right, sometimes broken by dunes, but never by trees or hills, and as the sun sank we turned toward that land and Ragnar ordered the sail furled and the oars out.

  We rowed into a water land, a place of marsh and reed, of bird cries and longlegged herons, of eel traps and ditches, of shallow channels and long meres, and I remembered my father saying the East Anglians were frogs. We were on the edge of their country now, at the place where Mercia ended and East Anglia began in a tangle of water, mud, and salt flats. “They call it the Gewæsc,” Ragnar said.

  “You’ve been here?”

  “Three years ago,” he said. “Good country to raid, Uhtred, but treacherous water. Too shallow.”

  The Gewæsc was very shallow and Weland was in theWindViper ’s bow, weighing the depth with a lump of iron tied to a rope. The oars only dipped if Weland said there was sufficient water and so we crept westward into the dying light followed by the rest of the fleet. The shadows were long now, the red sun slicing into the open jaws of the dragon, serpents and eagle heads on the ships’ prows. The oars worked slowly, their blades dripping water as they swept forward for the next stroke, and our wake spread in long slow ripples touched red by dying sun fire.

  We anchored that night and slept aboard the ships and in the dawn Ragnar made Rorik and me climb his mast. Ubba’s ship was nearby and he, too, had men clambering up toward the painted wind vane at the masthead.

  “What can you see?” Ragnar called up to us.

  “Three men on horseback,” Rorik answered, pointing south, “watching us.”

  “And a village,” I added, also pointing south.

  To the men on shore we were something from their darkest fears. All they could see was a thicket of masts and the savage carved beasts at the high prows and sterns of our ships. We were an army, brought here by our dragon boats, and they knew what would follow and, as I watched, the three horsemen turned and galloped south.

  We went on. Ubba’s ship led the way now, following a twisting shallow channel, and I could see Ubba’s sorcerer, Storri, standing in the bows and I guessed he had cast the runes and predicted success.

  “Today,” Ragnar told me wolfishly, “you will learn the Viking way.”

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nbsp; To be a Viking was to be a raider, and Ragnar had not conducted a shipborne raid in many years. He had become an invader instead, a settler, but Ubba’s fleet had come to ravage the coastline and draw the East Anglian army toward the sea while his brother, Ivar, led the land army south from Mercia, and so that early summer I learned the Viking ways. We took the ships to the mainland where Ubba found a stretch of land with a thin neck that could easily be defended and, once our ships were safely drawn onto the beach, we dug an earthwork across the neck as a rampart. Then large parties of men disappeared into the countryside, returning next morning with captured horses, and the horses were used to mount another warband that rode inland as Ragnar led his men on foot along the tangled shoreline. We came to a village, I never did learn its name, and we burned it to the ground. There was no one there. We burned farmsteads and a church and marched on, following a road that angled away from the shore, and at dusk we saw a larger village and we hid in a wood, lit no fires, and attacked at dawn. We came shrieking from the halflight. We were a nightmare in the dawn: men in leather with iron helmets, men with round painted shields, men with axes, swords, and spears. The folk in that place had no weapons and no armor, and perhaps they had not even known there were Danes in their countryside for they were not ready for us. They died. A few brave men tried to make a stand by their church, but Ragnar led a charge against them and they were slaughtered where they stood, and Ragnar pushed open the church door to find the small building filled with women and children. The priest was in front of the altar and he cursed Ragnar in Latin as the Dane stalked up the small nave, and the priest was still cursing when Ragnar disemboweled him.

  We took a bronze crucifix, a dented silver plate, and some coins from the church. We found a dozen good cooking pots in the houses and some shears, sickles, and iron spits. We captured cattle, goats, sheep, oxen, eight horses, and sixteen young women. One woman screamed that she could not leave her child and I watched Weland spit the small boy on a spear, then thrust the bloodied corpse into the woman’s arms. Ragnar sent her away, not because he pitied her, but because one person was always spared to carry news of the horror to other places. Folk must fear the Danes, Ragnar said, and then they would be ready to surrender. He gave me a piece of burning wood he had taken from a fire. “Burn the thatch, Uhtred,” he ordered, so I went from house to house, putting fire to the reed thatch. I burned the church and then, just as I approached the last house, a man burst from the door with a threepronged eel spear that he lunged at me. I twisted aside, avoiding his thrust by luck rather than judgment, and I hurled the burning wood at the man’s face and the flames made him duck as I backed away, and Ragnar threw me a spear, a heavy war spear made for thrusting rather than throwing, and it skidded in the dust in front of me and I understood he was letting me fight as I plucked it up. He would not have let me die, for he had two of his bowmen standing ready with arrows on their strings, but he did not interfere as the man ran at me and lunged again.

  I parried, knocking the rusted eel spear aside and stepping back again to give myself room. The man was twice my size and more than twice my weight. He was cursing me, calling me a devil’s bastard, a worm of hell, and he rushed me again and I did what I had learned hunting the boar. I stepped to my left, waited till he leveled the spear, stepped back to the right, and thrust. It was not a clean thrust, nor did I have the weight to hurl him back, but the spear point punctured his belly and then his weight pushed me back as he half snarled and half gasped, and I fell, and he fell on top of me, forced sideways because the spear was in his guts, and he tried to take a grip of my throat, but I wriggled out from beneath him, picked up his own eel spear, and rammed it at his throat. There were rivulets of blood on the earth, droplets spraying in the air, and he was jerking and choking, blood bubbling at his ripped throat, and I tried to pull the eel spear back, but the barbs on the points were caught in his gullet, so I ripped the war spear from his belly and tried to stop him jerking by thrusting it down hard into his chest, but it only glanced off his ribs. He was making a terrible noise, and I suppose I was in a panic, and I was unaware that Ragnar and his men were almost helpless with laughter as they watched me try to kill the East Anglian. I did, in the end, or else he just bled to death, but by then I had poked and stabbed and torn him until he looked as though a pack of wolves had set on him. But I got a third arm ring, and there were grown warriors in Ragnar’s band who only wore three. Rorik was jealous, but he was younger and his father consoled him that his time would come. “How does it feel?” Ragnar asked me.

  “Good,” I said, and God help me, it did.

  It was then that I first saw Brida. She was my age, black haired, thin as a twig, with big dark eyes and a spirit as wild as a hawk in spring, and she was among the captured women and, as the Danes began dividing those captives among themselves, an older woman pushed the child forward as if giving her to the Vikings. Brida snatched up a piece of wood and turned on the woman and beat at her, driving her back, screaming that she was a sourfaced bitch, a dried up hank of gristle, and the older woman tripped and fell into a patch of nettles where Brida went on thrashing her. Ragnar was laughing, but eventually pulled the child away and, because he loved anyone with spirit, gave her to me. “Keep her safe,” he said,

  “and burn that last house.”

  So I did.

  And I learned another thing.

  Start your killers young, before their consciences are grown. Start them young and they will be lethal. We took our plunder back to the ships and that night, as I drank my ale, I thought of myself as a Dane. Not English, not anymore. I was a Dane and I had been given a perfect childhood, perfect, at least, to the ideas of a boy. I was raised among men, I was free, I ran wild, I was encumbered by no laws, I was troubled by no priests, I was encouraged to violence, and I was rarely alone. And it was that, that I was rarely alone, which kept me alive.

  Every raid brought more horses, and more horses meant more men could go farther afield and waste more places, steal more silver, and take more captives. We had scouts out now, watching for the approach of King Edmund’s army. Edmund ruled East Anglia and unless he wished to collapse as feebly as Burghred of Mercia, he had to send men against us to preserve his kingdom, and so we watched the roads and waited.

  Brida stayed close to me. Ragnar had taken a strong liking to her, probably because she treated him defiantly and because she alone did not weep when she was captured. She was an orphan and had been living in the house of her aunt, the woman whom she had beaten and whom she hated, and within days Brida was happier among the Danes than she had ever been among her own people. She was a slave now, a slave who was supposed to stay in the camp and cook, but one dawn as we went raiding she ran after us and hauled herself up behind my saddle and Ragnar was amused by that and let her come along. We went far south that day, out of the flatlands where the marshes stretched, and into low wooded hills among which were fat farms and a fatter monastery. Brida laughed when Ragnar killed the abbot, and afterward, as the Danes collected their plunder, she took my hand and led me over a low rise to a farm that had already been plundered by Ragnar’s men. The farm belonged to the monastery and Brida knew the place because her aunt had frequently gone to the monastery to pray. “She wanted children,” Brida said, “and only had me.” Then she pointed at the farm and watched for my reaction. It was a Roman farm, she told me, though like me she had little idea who the Romans really were, only that they had once lived in England and then had gone. I had seen plenty of their buildings before—there were some in Eoferwic—but those other buildings had crumbled, then been patched with mud and reroofed with thatch, while this farm looked as though the Romans had only just left. It was astonishing. The walls were of stone, perfectly cut, square, and closemortared, and the roof was of tile, patterned and tightfitting, and inside the gate was a courtyard surrounded with a pillared walkway, and in the largest room was an amazing picture on the floor, made up of thousands of small colored stones, and I gaped at the leap
ing fish that were pulling a chariot in which a bearded man stood holding an eel spear like the one I had faced in Brida’s village. Hares surrounded the picture, chasing one another through looping strands of leaves. There had been other pictures painted on the walls, but they had faded or else been discolored by water that had leaked through the old roof. “It was the abbot’s house,” Brida told me, and she took me into a small room where there was a cot beside which one of the abbot’s servants lay dead in his own blood. “He brought me in here,” she said.

  “The abbot did?”

  “And told me to take my clothes off.”

  “The abbot did?” I asked again.

  “I ran away,” she said in a very matteroffact tone, “and my aunt beat me. She said I should have pleased him and he’d have rewarded us.”

  We wandered through the house and I felt a wonder that we could no longer build like this. We knew how to sink posts in the ground and make beams and rafters and roof them with thatch from rye or reed, but the posts rotted, the thatch moldered, and the houses sagged. In summer our houses were winter dark, and all year they were choked with smoke, and in winter they stank of cattle, yet this house was light and clean and I doubted any cow had ever dunged on the man in his fishdrawn chariot. It was an unsettling thought, that somehow we were sliding back into the smoky dark and that never again would man make something so perfect as this small building. “Were the Romans Christians?” I asked Brida.