The Last Kingdom

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Are you ready?” Ivar demanded of the king.

  Edmund looked at his priests and monks and I wondered if he was about to suggest that one of them should replace him in this test of God’s power. Then he frowned and looked back to Ivar. “I will accept your proposal,” he said.

  “That we shoot arrows at you?”

  “That I remain king here.”

  “But you want to wash me first.”

  “We can dispense with that,” Edmund said.

  “No,” Ivar said. “You have claimed your god is all powerful, that he is the only god, so I want it proved. If you are right then all of us will be washed. Are we agreed?” This question was asked of the Danes, who roared their approval.

  “Not me,” Ravn said, “I won’t be washed.”

  “We will all be washed!” Ivar snarled, and I realized he truly was interested in the outcome of the test, more interested, indeed, than he was in making a quick and convenient peace with Edmund. All men need the support of their god and Ivar was trying to discover whether he had, all these years, been worshipping at the wrong shrine. “Are you wearing armor?” he asked Edmund.

  “No.”

  “Best to be sure,” Ubba intervened and glanced at the fatal painting. “Strip him,” he ordered.

  The king and the churchmen protested, but the Danes would not be denied and King Edmund was stripped stark naked. Brida enjoyed that. “He’s puny,” she said. Edmund, the butt of laughter now, did his best to look dignified. The priests and monks were on their knees, praying, while six archers took their stance a dozen paces from Edmund.

  “We are going to find out,” Ivar told us, stilling the laughter, “whether the English god is as powerful as our Danish gods. If he is, and if the king lives, then we shall become Christians, all of us!”

  “Not me,” Ravn said again, but quietly so that Ivar could not hear. “Tell me what happens, Uhtred.”

  It was soon told. Six arrows hit, the king screamed, blood spattered the altar, he fell down, he twitched like a gaffed salmon, and six more arrows thumped home. Edmund twitched some more, and the archers kept on shooting, though their aim was bad because they were half helpless with laughter, and they went on shooting until the king was as full of feathered shafts as a hedgehog has spikes. And he was quite dead by then. He was bloodied, his white skin red-laced, openmouthed, and dead. His god had failed him miserably. Nowadays, of course, that story is never told; instead children learn how brave Saint Edmund stood up to the Danes, demanded their conversion, and was murdered. So now he is a martyr and a saint, warbling happily in heaven, but the truth is that he was a fool and talked himself into martyrdom.

  The priests and monks wailed, so Ivar ordered them killed as well, then he decreed that Earl Godrim, one of his chiefs, would rule in East Anglia and that Halfdan would savage the country to quench the last sparks of resistance. Godrim and Halfdan would be given a third of the army to keep East Anglia quiet, while the rest of us would return to subdue the unrest in Northumbria.

  So now East Anglia was gone.

  And Wessex was the last kingdom of England.

  We returned to Northumbria, half rowing and half sailing the Wind-Viper up the gentle coast, then rowing against the rivers’ currents as we traveled up the Humber, then the Ouse, until Eoferwic’s walls came into sight, and there we hauled the ship onto dry land so she would not rot through the winter. Ivar and Ubba returned with us, so that a whole fleet skimmed the river, oars dripping, beastless prows bearing branches of green oak to show we came home victorious. We brought home much treasure. The Danes set much store by treasure. Their men follow their leaders because they know they will be rewarded with silver, and in the taking of three of England’s four kingdoms the Danes had amassed a fortune that was shared among the men and some, a few, decided to take their money back home to Denmark. Most stayed, for the richest kingdom remained undefeated and men reckoned they would all become as wealthy as gods once Wessex fell.

  Ivar and Ubba had come to Eoferwic expecting trouble. They had their shields displayed on the flanks of their ships, but whatever unrest had disturbed Northumbria had not affected the city and King Egbert, who ruled at the pleasure of the Danes, sulkily denied there had been any rising at all. Archbishop Wulfhere said the same. “There is always banditry,” he declared loftily, “and perhaps you heard rumors of it?”

  “Or perhaps you are deaf,” Ivar snarled, and Ivar was right to be suspicious for, once it was known that the army had returned, messengers came from Ealdorman Ricsig of Dunholm. Dunholm was a great fortress on a high crag that was almost surrounded by the river Wiire, and the crag and the river made Dunholm almost as strong as Bebbanburg. It was ruled by Ricsig who had never drawn his sword against the Danes. When we attacked Eoferwic and my father was killed, Ricsig had claimed to be sick and his men had stayed home, but now he sent servants to tell Ivar that a band of Danes had been slaughtered at Gyruum. That was the site of a famous monastery where a man called Bede wrote a history of the English church that Beocca had always praised to me, saying that when I learned to read properly I could give myself the treat of reading it. I have yet to do so, but I have been to Gyruum and seen where the book was written for Ragnar was asked to take his men there and discover what had happened.

  It seemed six Danes, all of them masterless men, had gone to Gyruum and demanded to see the monastery’s treasury and, when the monks claimed to be penniless, the six had started killing, but the monks had fought back and, as there were over a score of monks, and as they were helped by some men from the town, they succeeded in killing the six Danes who had then been spitted on posts and left to rot on the foreshore. Thus far, as Ragnar admitted, the fault lay with the Danes, but the monks, encouraged by this slaughter, had marched west up the river Tine, and attacked a Danish settlement where there were only a few men, those too old or too sick to travel south with the army, and there they had raped and killed at least a score of women and children, proclaiming that this was now a holy war. More men had joined the makeshift army, but Ealdorman Ricsig, fearing the revenge of the Danes, had sent his own troops to disperse them. He had captured a good number of the rebels, including a dozen monks, who were now held at his fortress above the river at Dunholm.

  All this we heard from Ricsig’s messengers, then from folk who had survived the massacre, and one of those was a girl the same age as Ragnar’s daughter, and she said the monks had raped her one at a time, and afterward they had forcibly baptized her. She said there had been nuns present as well, women who had urged the men on and had taken part in the slaughter afterward. “Nests of vipers,” Ragnar said. I had never seen him so angry, not even when Sven had exposed himself to Thyra. We dug up some of the Danish dead and all were naked and all were blood spattered. They had all been tortured.

  A priest was found and made to tell us the names of the chief monasteries and nunneries in Northumbria. Gyruum was one, of course, and just across the river was a large nunnery, while to the south, where the Wiire met the sea, was a second monastery. The house at Streonshall was close to Eoferwic, and that held many nuns, while close to Bebbanburg, on the island that Beocca had always told me was sacred, was the monastery of Lindisfarena. There were many others, but Ragnar was content with the chief places, and he sent men to Ivar and Ubba suggesting that the nuns of Streonshall should be dispersed, and any found to have joined the revolt should be killed. Then he set about Gyruum. Every monk was killed, the buildings that were not made of stone were burned, the treasures, for they did indeed have silver and gold hidden beneath their church, were taken. I remember we discovered a great pile of writings, sheet upon sheet of parchments, all smothered in tight black writing, and I have no idea what the writings were, and now I never will, for they were all burned, and once Gyruum was no more we went south to the monastery at the mouth of the Wiire and we did the same there, and afterward crossed the Tine and obliterated the nunnery on the northern bank. The nuns there, led by their abbess, deliberately scarr
ed their own faces. They knew we were coming and so, to deter rape, cut their cheeks and foreheads and so met us all bloody, screaming, and ugly. Why they did not run away I do not know, but instead they waited for us, cursed us, prayed for heaven’s revenge on us, and died.

  I never told Alfred that I took part in that famous harrowing of the northern houses. The tale is still told as evidence of Danish ferocity and untrustworthiness, indeed every English child is told the story of the nuns who cut their faces to the bone so that they would be too ugly to rape, though that did not work any more than King Edmund’s prayers had saved him from arrows. I remember one Easter listening to a sermon about the nuns, and it was all I could do not to interrupt and say that it had not happened as the priest described. The priest claimed that the Danes had promised that no monk or nun would ever be hurt in Northumbria, and that was not true, and he claimed that there was no cause for the massacres, which was equally false, and then he told a marvelous tale how the nuns had prayed and God had placed an invisible curtain at the nunnery gate, and the Danes had pushed against the curtain and could not pierce it, and I was wondering why, if the nuns had this invisible shield, they had bothered to scar themselves, but they must have known how the story would end, because the Danes were supposed to have fetched a score of small children from the nearby village and threatened to cut their throats unless the curtain was lifted, which it was.

  None of that happened. We arrived, they screamed, the young ones were raped, and then they died. But not all of them, despite the famous tales. At least two were pretty and not at all scarred, and both of them stayed with Ragnar’s men and one of them gave birth to a child who grew up to become a famous Danish warrior. Still, priests have never been great men for the truth and I kept quiet, which was just as well. In truth we never killed everybody because Ravn drove it home to me that you always left one person alive to tell the tale so that news of the horror would spread.

  Once the nunnery was burned we went to Dunholm where Ragnar thanked the ealdorman Ricsig, though Ricsig was plainly shocked by the revenge the Danes had taken. “Not every monk and nun took part in the slaughter,” he pointed out reprovingly.

  “They are all evil,” Ragnar insisted.

  “Their houses,” Ricsig said, “are places of prayer and of contemplation, places of learning.”

  “Tell me,” Ragnar demanded, “what use is prayer, contemplation, or learning? Does prayer grow rye? Does contemplation fill a fishing net? Does learning build a house or plow a field?”

  Ricsig had no answer to those questions, nor indeed did the Bishop of Dunholm, a timid man who made no protest at the slaughter, not even when Ricsig meekly handed over his prisoners who were put to death in various imaginative ways. Ragnar had become convinced that the Christian monasteries and nunneries were sources of evil, places where sinister rites were performed to encourage folk to attack the Danes, and he saw no point in letting such places exist. The most famous monastery of all, though, was that at Lindisfarena, the house where Saint Cuthbert had lived, and the house that had first been sacked by the Danes two generations before. It had been that attack that had been portended by dragons in the sky and whirlwinds churning the sea and lightning storms savaging the hills, but I saw no such strange wonders as we marched north.

  I was excited. We were going close to Bebbanburg and I wondered whether my uncle, the false ealdorman Ælfric, would dare come out of his fortress to protect the monks of Lindisfarena who had always looked to our family for their safety. We all rode horses, three ships’ crews, over a hundred men, for it was late in the year and the Danes did not like taking their ships into hard weather. We skirted Bebbanburg, riding in the hills, catching occasional glimpses of the fortress’s wooden walls between the trees. I stared at it, seeing the fretting sea beyond, dreaming.

  We crossed the flat coastal fields and came to the sandy beach where a track led to Lindisfarena, but at high tide the track was flooded and we were forced to wait. We could see the monks watching us on the farther shore. “The rest of the bastards will be burying their treasures,” Ragnar said.

  “If they have any left,” I said.

  “They always have some left,” Ragnar said grimly.

  “When I was last here,” Ravn put in, “we took a chest of gold! Pure gold!”

  “A big chest?” Brida asked. She was mounted behind Ravn, serving as his eyes this day. She came everywhere with us, spoke good Danish by now, and was regarded as bringing luck by the men who adored her.

  “As big as your chest,” Ravn said.

  “Not much gold then,” Brida said, disappointed.

  “Gold and silver,” Ravn reminisced, “and some walrus tusks. Where did they get those?”

  The sea relented, the bickering waves slunk back down the long sands, and we rode through the shallows, past the withies that marked the track, and the monks ran off. Small flickers of smoke marked where farmsteads dotted the island and I had no doubt those folk were burying what few possessions they owned.

  “Will any of these monks know you?” Ragnar asked me.

  “Probably.”

  “Does that worry you?”

  It did, but I said it did not, and I touched Thor’s hammer and somewhere in my thoughts there was a tendril of worry that God, the Christian god, was watching me. Beocca always said that everything we did was watched and recorded, and I had to remind myself that the Christian god was failing and that Odin, Thor, and the other Danish gods were winning the war in heaven. Edmund’s death had proved that and so I consoled myself that I was safe.

  The monastery lay on the south of the island from where I could see Bebbanburg on its crag of rock. The monks lived in a scatter of small timber buildings, thatched with rye and moss, and built about a small stone church. The abbot, a man called Egfrith, came to meet us carrying a wooden cross. He spoke Danish, which was unusual, and he showed no fear. “You are most welcome to our small island,” he greeted us enthusiastically, “and you should know that I have one of your countrymen in our sick chamber.”

  Ragnar rested his hands on the fleece-covered pommel of his saddle. “What is that to me?” he asked.

  “It is an earnest of our peaceful intentions, lord,” Egfrith said. He was elderly, gray haired, thin, and missing most of his teeth so that his words came out sibilant and distorted. “We are a humble house,” he went on, “we tend the sick, we help the poor, and we serve God.” He looked along the line of Danes, grim helmeted men with their shields hanging by their left knees, swords and axes and spears bristling. The sky was low that day, heavy and sullen, and a small rain was darkening the grass. Two monks came from the church carrying a wooden box that they placed behind Egfrith, then backed away. “That is all the treasure we have,” Egfrith said, “and you are welcome to it.”

  Ragnar jerked his head at me and I dismounted, walked past the abbot, and opened the box to find it was half full of silver pennies, most of them clipped, and all of them dull because they were of bad quality. I shrugged at Ragnar as if to suggest they were poor reward.

  “You are Uhtred!” Egfrith said. He had been staring at me.

  “So?” I answered belligerently.

  “I heard you were dead, lord,” he said, “and I praise God you are not.”

  “You heard I was dead?”

  “That a Dane killed you.”

  We had been talking in English and Ragnar wanted to know what had been said, so I translated. “Was the Dane called Weland?” Ragnar asked Egfrith.

  “He is called that,” Egfrith said.

  “Is?”

  “Weland is the man lying here recovering from his wounds, lord.” Egfrith looked at me again as though he could not believe I was alive.

  “His wounds?” Ragnar wanted to know.

  “He was attacked, lord, by a man from the fortress. From Bebbanburg.”

  Ragnar, of course, wanted to hear the whole tale. It seemed Weland had made his way back to Bebbanburg where he claimed to have killed me, and so recei
ved his reward in silver coins, and he was escorted from the fortress by a half dozen men who included Ealdwulf, the blacksmith who had told me stories in his forge, and Ealdwulf had attacked Weland, hacking an ax down into his shoulder before the other men dragged him off. Weland had been brought here, while Ealdwulf, if he still lived, was back in Bebbanburg.

  If Abbot Egfrith thought Weland was his safeguard, he had miscalculated. Ragnar scowled at him. “You gave Weland shelter even though you thought he had killed Uhtred?” he demanded.

  “This is a house of God,” Egfrith said, “so we give every man shelter.”

  “Including murderers?” Ragnar asked, and he reached behind his head and untied the leather lace that bound his hair. “So tell me, monk, how many of your men went south to help their comrades murder Danes?”

  Egfrith hesitated, which was answer enough, and then Ragnar drew his sword and the abbot found his voice. “Some did, lord,” he admitted. “I could not stop them.”

  “You could not stop them?” Ragnar asked, shaking his head so that his wet unbound hair fell around his face. “Yet you rule here?”

  “I am the abbot, yes.”

  “Then you could stop them.” Ragnar was looking angry now and I suspected he was remembering the bodies we had disinterred near Gyruum, the little Danish girls with blood still on their thighs. “Kill them,” he told his men.

  I took no part in that killing. I stood by the shore and listened to the birds cry and I watched Bebbanburg and heard the blades doing their work, and Brida came to stand beside me and she took my hand and stared south across the white-flecked gray to the great fortress on its crag. “Is that your house?” she asked.