The Last Kingdom

by Bernard Cornwell

  I watched from the Wind-Viper’s prow as the ships’ crews hurried ashore and pulled on leather or mail. What did those Mercians see? They saw young men with wild hair, wild beards, and hungry faces, men who embraced battle like a lover. If the Danes could not fight an enemy they fought among themselves. Most had nothing but monstrous pride, battle scars, and well-sharpened weapons, and with those things they would take whatever they wanted, and that Mercian shield wall did not even stay to contest the fight, but once they saw they would be outnumbered they ran away to the mocking howls of Ragnar’s men who then stripped off their mail and leather and used their axes and the Wind-Viper’s hide-twisted ropes to clear away the fallen trees. It took a few hours to unblock the river, but then we were moving again. That night the ships clustered together on the riverbank, fires were lit ashore, men were posted as sentries, and every sleeping warrior kept his weapons beside him, but no one troubled us and at dawn we moved on, soon coming to a town with thick earthen walls and a high palisade. This, Ragnar assumed, was the place the Mercians had failed to defend, but there seemed to be no sign of any soldiers on the wall so he ran the boat ashore again and led his crew toward the town.

  The earth walls and timber palisade were both in good condition, and Ragnar marveled that the town’s garrison had chosen to march downriver to fight us, rather than stay behind their well-tended defenses. The Mercian soldiers were plainly gone now, probably fled south, for the gates were open and a dozen townsfolk were kneeling outside the wooden arch and holding out supplicant hands for mercy. Three of the terrified people were monks, their tonsured heads bowed. “I hate monks,” Ragnar said cheerfully. His sword, Heart-Breaker, was in his hand and he swept her naked blade in a hissing arc.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Monks are like ants,” he said, “wriggling about in black, being useless. I hate them. You’ll speak for me, Uhtred. Ask them what place this is?”

  I asked and learned that the town was called Gegnesburh.

  “Tell them,” Ragnar instructed me, “that my name is Earl Ragnar, I am called the Fearless, and that I eat children when I’m not given food and silver.”

  I duly told them. The kneeling men looked up at Ragnar who had unbound his hair, which, had they known, was always a sign that he was in a mood for killing. His grinning men made a line behind him, a line heavy with axes, swords, spears, shields, and war hammers.

  “What food there is,” I translated a gray-bearded man’s answer, “is yours. But he says there is not much food.”

  Ragnar smiled at that, stepped forward, and, still smiling, swung Heart-Breaker so that her blade half severed the man’s head. I jumped back, not in alarm, but because I did not want my tunic spattered with his blood. “One less mouth to feed,” Ragnar said cheerfully. “Now ask the others how much food there is.”

  The gray-bearded man was now red bearded and he was choking and twitching as he died. His struggles slowly ended and then he just lay, dying, his eyes gazing reprovingly into mine. None of his companions tried to help him; they were too frightened. “How much food do you have?” I demanded.

  “There is food, lord,” one of the monks said.

  “How much?” I demanded again.

  “Enough.”

  “He says there’s enough,” I told Ragnar.

  “A sword,” Ragnar said, “is a great tool for discovering the truth. What about the monk’s church? How much silver does it have?”

  The monk gabbled that we could look for ourselves, that we could take whatever we found, that it was all ours, anything we found was ours, all was ours. I translated these panicked statements and Ragnar again smiled. “He’s not telling the truth, is he?”

  “Isn’t he?” I asked.

  “He wants me to look because he knows I won’t find, and that means they’ve hidden their treasure or had it taken away. Ask him if they’ve hidden their silver.”

  I did and the monk reddened. “We are a poor church,” he said, “with little treasure,” and he stared wide-eyed as I translated his answer. Then he tried to get up and run as Ragnar stepped forward, but he tripped over his robe and Heart-Breaker pierced his spine so that he jerked like a landed fish as he died.

  There was silver, of course, and it was buried. Another of the monks told us so, and Ragnar sighed as he cleaned his sword on the dead monk’s robe. “They’re such fools,” he said plaintively. “They’d live if they answered truthfully the first time.”

  “But suppose there wasn’t any treasure?” I asked him.

  “Then they’d tell the truth and die,” Ragnar said, and found that funny. “But what’s the point of a monk except to hoard treasure for us Danes? They’re ants who hoard silver. Find the ants’ nest, dig, and a man’s rich.” He stepped over his victims. At first I was shocked by the ease with which he would kill a defenseless man, but Ragnar had no respect for folk who cringed and lied. He appreciated an enemy who fought, who showed spirit, but men who were weakly sly like the ones he killed at Gegnesburh’s gate were beneath his contempt, no better than animals.

  We emptied Gegnesburh of food, then made the monks dig up their treasure. It was not much: two silver mass cups, three silver plates, a bronze crucifix with a silver Christ, a bone carving of angels climbing a ladder, and a bag of silver pennies. Ragnar distributed the coins among his men, then hacked the silver plates and cups to pieces with an ax and shared out the scraps. He had no use for the bone carving so shattered it with his sword. “A weird religion,” he said. “They worship just one god?”

  “One god,” I said, “but he’s divided into three.”

  He liked that. “A clever trick,” he said, “but not useful. This triple god has a mother, doesn’t he?”

  “Mary,” I said, following him as he explored the monastery in search of more plunder.

  “I wonder if her baby came out in three bits,” he said. “So what’s this god’s name?”

  “Don’t know.” I knew he had a name because Beocca had told me, but I could not remember it. “The three together are the trinity,” I went on, “but that’s not god’s name. Usually they just call him god.”

  “Like giving a dog the name dog,” Ragnar declared, then laughed. “So who’s Jesus?”

  “One of the three.”

  “The one who died, yes? And he came back to life?”

  “Yes,” I said, suddenly fearful that the Christian god was watching me, readying a dreadful punishment for my sins.

  “Gods can do that,” Ragnar said airily. “They die, come back to life. They’re gods.” He looked at me, sensing my fear, and ruffled my hair. “Don’t you worry, Uhtred, the Christian god doesn’t have power here.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “Of course not!” He was searching a shed at the back of the monastery and found a decent sickle that he tucked into his belt. “Gods fight each other! Everyone knows that. Look at our gods! The Aesir and Vanir fought like cats before they made friends.” The Aesir and the Vanir were the two families of Danish gods who now shared Asgard, though at one time they had been the bitterest of enemies. “Gods fight,” Ragnar went on earnestly, “and some win, some lose. The Christian god is losing. Otherwise why would we be here? Why would we be winning? The gods reward us if we give them respect, but the Christian god doesn’t help his people, does he? They weep rivers of tears for him, they pray to him, they give him their silver, and we come along and slaughter them! Their god is pathetic. If he had any real power then we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

  It seemed an unassailable logic to me. What was the point of worshipping a god if he did not help you? And it was incontrovertible that the worshippers of Odin and Thor were winning, and I surreptitiously touched the hammer of Thor hanging from my neck as we returned to the Wind-Viper. We left Gegnesburh ravaged, its folk weeping and its storehouses emptied, and we rowed on down the wide river, the belly of our boat piled with grain, bread, salted meat, and smoked fish. Later, much later, I learned that Ælswith, King Alfred’s wife,
had come from Gegnesburh. Her father, the man who had failed to fight us, was ealdorman there and she had grown up in the town and always lamented that, after she had left, the Danes had sacked the place. God, she always declared, would have his revenge on the pagans who had ravaged her hometown, and it seemed wise not to tell her that I had been one of the ravagers.

  We ended the voyage at a town called Snotengaham, which means the Home of Snot’s people, and it was a much greater place than Gegnesburh, but its garrison had fled and those people who remained welcomed the Danes with piles of food and heaps of silver. There would have been time for a horseman to reach Snotengaham with news of Gegnesburh’s dead, and the Danes were always happy for such messengers to spread fear of their coming, and so the larger town, with its walls, fell without a fight.

  Some ships’ crews were ordered to man the walls, while others raided the countryside. The first thing they sought was more horses, and when the war bands were mounted they ranged farther afield, stealing, burning, and harrowing the land. “We shall stay here,” Ragnar told me.

  “All summer?”

  “Till the world ends, Uhtred. This is Danish land now.” At winter’s end Ivar and Ubba had sent three ships back to the Danish homeland to encourage more settlers, and those new ships began arriving in ones and twos, bringing men, women, and children. The newcomers were allowed to take whatever houses they wished, except for those few that belonged to the Mercian leaders who had bent the knee to Ivar and Ubba. One of those was the bishop, a young man called Æthelbrid, who preached to his congregations that God had sent the Danes. He never said why God had done this, and perhaps he did not know, but the sermons meant that his wife and children lived and his house was safe and his church was allowed to retain one silver mass cup, though Ivar insisted that the bishop’s twin sons be held as hostages in case the Christian god changed his mind about the Danes.

  Ragnar, like the other Danish leaders, constantly rode out into the country to bring back food and he liked me to go with him, for I could translate for him, and as the days passed we heard more and more stories of a great Mercian army gathering to the south, at Ledecestre, which Ragnar said was the greatest fortress in Mercia. It had been made by the Romans, who built better than any man could build now, and Burghred, Mercia’s king, was assembling his forces there, and that was why Ragnar was so intent on gathering food. “They’ll besiege us,” he said, “but we’ll win and then Ledecestre will be ours and so will Mercia.” He spoke very calmly, as though there could be no possibility of defeat.

  Rorik stayed in the town while I rode with his father. That was because Rorik was sick again, struck by cramping pains in his belly so severe that he was sometimes reduced to helpless tears. He vomited in the night, was pale, and the only relief came from a brew of herbs made for him by an old woman who was a servant of the bishop. Ragnar worried about Rorik, yet he was pleased that his son and I were such good friends. Rorik did not question his father’s fondness for me, nor was he jealous. In time, he knew, Ragnar planned to take me back to Bebbanburg and I would be given my patrimony and he assumed I would stay his friend and so Bebbanburg would become a Danish stronghold. I would be Earl Uhtred and Rorik and his older brother would hold other strongholds, and Ragnar would be a great lord, supported by his sons and by Bebbanburg, and we would all be Danes, and Odin would smile on us, and so the world would go on until the final conflagration when the great gods fought the monsters and the army of the dead would march from Valhalla and the underworld give up its beasts and fire would consume the great tree of life, Yggdrasil. In other words everything would stay the same until it was all no more. That was what Rorik thought, and doubtless Ragnar thought so, too. Destiny, Ravn said, is everything.

  News came in the high summer that the Mercian army was marching at last and that King Æthelred of Wessex was bringing his army to support Burghred, and so we were to be faced by two of the three remaining English kingdoms. We stopped our raids into the countryside and readied Snotengaham for the inevitable siege. The palisade on the earth wall was strengthened and the ditch outside the wall was deepened. The ships were drawn up on the town’s riverbank far from the walls so they could not be reduced to ash by fire arrows shot from outside the defenses, and the thatch of the buildings closest to the wall was pulled off the houses so that they could not be set ablaze.

  Ivar and Ubba had decided to endure a siege because they reckoned we were strong enough to hold what we had taken, but that if we took more territory then the Danish forces would be stretched thin and could be defeated piece by piece. It was better, they reckoned, to let the enemy come and break himself on Snotengaham’s defenses.

  That enemy came as the poppies bloomed. The Mercian scouts arrived first, small groups of horsemen who circled the town warily, and at midday Burghred’s foot soldiers appeared, band after band of men with spears, axes, swords, sickles, and hay knives. They camped well away from the walls, using branches and turf to make a township of crude shelters that sprang up across the low hills and meadows. Snotengaham lay on the north bank of the Trente, which meant the river was between the town and the rest of Mercia, but the enemy army came from the west, having crossed the Trente somewhere to the south of the town. A few of their men stayed on the southern bank to make sure our ships did not cross the river to land men for foraging expeditions, and the presence of those men meant that the enemy surrounded us, but they made no attempt to attack us. The Mercians were waiting for the West Saxons to come and in that first week the only excitement occurred when a handful of Burghred’s archers crept toward the town and loosed a few arrows at us and the missiles whacked into the palisade and stuck there, perches for birds, and that was the extent of their belligerence. After that they fortified their camp, surrounding it with a barricade of felled trees and thorn bushes. “They’re frightened that we’ll make a sally and kill them all,” Ragnar said, “so they’re going to sit there and try to starve us out.”

  “Will they?” I asked.

  “They couldn’t starve a mouse in a pot,” Ragnar said cheerfully. He had hung his shield on the outer side of the palisade, one of over twelve hundred bright-painted shields that were displayed there. We did not have twelve hundred men, but nearly all the Danes possessed more than one shield and they hung them all on the wall to make the enemy think our garrison equaled the number of shields. The great lords among the Danes hung their banners on the wall, Ubba’s raven flag and Ragnar’s eagle wing among them. The raven banner was a triangle of white cloth, fringed with white tassels, showing a black raven with spread wings, while Ragnar’s standard was a real eagle’s wing, nailed to a pole, and it was becoming so tattered that Ragnar had offered a golden arm ring to any man who could replace it. “If they want us out of here,” he went on, “then they’d best make an assault, and they’d best do it in the next three weeks before their men go home and cut their harvest.”

  But the Mercians, instead of attacking, tried to pray us out of Snotengaham. A dozen priests, all robed and carrying cross-tipped poles, and followed by a score of monks carrying sacred banners on cross-staffs, came out from behind their barricades and paraded just beyond bowshot. The flags showed saints. One of the priests scattered holy water, and the whole group stopped every few yards to pronounce curses on us. That was the day the West Saxon forces arrived to support Burghred whose wife was sister to Alfred and to King Æthelred of Wessex, and that was the first day I ever saw the dragon standard of Wessex. It was a huge banner of heavy green cloth on which a white dragon breathed fire, and the standard-bearer galloped to catch up with the priests and the dragon streamed behind him. “Your turn will come,” Ragnar said quietly, talking to the rippling dragon.

  “When?”

  “The gods only know,” Ragnar said, still watching the standard. “This year we should finish off Mercia, then we’ll go to East Anglia, and after that, Wessex. To take all the land and treasure in England, Uhtred? Three years? Four? We need more ships though.” He meant we needed mor
e ships’ crews, more shield Danes, more swords.

  “Why not go north?” I asked him.

  “To Dalriada and Pictland?” he laughed. “There’s nothing up there, Uhtred, except bare rocks, bare fields, and bare arses. The land there is no better than at home.” He nodded out toward the enemy encampment. “But this is good land. Rich and deep. You can raise children here. You can grow strong here.” He fell silent as a group of horsemen appeared from the enemy camp and followed the rider who carried the dragon standard. Even from a long way off it was possible to see that these were great men for they rode splendid horses and had mail coats glinting beneath their dark red cloaks. “The King of Wessex?” Ragnar guessed.

  “Æthelred?”

  “It’s probably him. We shall find out now.”

  “Find out what?”

  “What these West Saxons are made of. The Mercians won’t attack us, so let’s see if Æthelred’s men are any better. Dawn, Uhtred, that’s when they should come. Straight at us, ladders against the wall, lose some men, but let the rest slaughter us.” He laughed. “That’s what I’d do, but that lot?” He spat in derision.

  Ivar and Ubba must have thought the same thing, for they sent two men to spy on the Mercian and West Saxon forces to see if there was any sign that ladders were being made. The two men went out at night and were supposed to skirt the besiegers’ encampment and find a place to watch the enemy from outside their fortifications, but somehow they were both seen and caught. The two men were brought to the fields in front of the wall and made to kneel there with their hands tied behind their backs. A tall Englishman stood behind them with a drawn sword and I watched as he poked one of the Danes in the back, as the Dane lifted his head and then as the sword swung. The second Dane died in the same way, and the two bodies were left for the ravens to eat. “Bastards,” Ragnar said.