The Last Kingdom

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Go on seeing while you have eyes,” Ragnar said carelessly. “Is the king here?”

  “He only grants audience to those people who arrange to see him,” Kjartan said.

  Ragnar sighed and turned on his erstwhile shipmaster. “You itch me like a louse,” he said, “and if it pleases you, Kjartan, we shall lay the hazel rods and meet man to man. And if that does not please you, then fetch the king because I would speak with him.”

  Kjartan bridled, but decided he did not want to face Ragnar’s sword in a fighting space marked by hazel branches, and so, with an ill grace, he went into the palace’s back rooms. He made us wait long enough, but eventually King Egbert appeared, and with him were six guards who included one-eyed Sven who now looked as wealthy as his father. Big too, almost as tall as I was, with a broad chest and hugely muscled arms.

  Egbert looked nervous but did his best to appear regal. Ragnar bowed to him, then said there were tales of unrest in Northumbria and that Halfdan had sent him north to quell any such disturbances. “There is no unrest,” Egbert said, but in such a frightened voice that I thought he would piss his breeches.

  “There were disturbances in the inland hills,” Kjartan said dismissively, “but they ended.” He patted his sword to show what had ended them.

  Ragnar persevered, but learned nothing more. A few men had evidently risen against the Danes, there had been ambushes on the road leading to the west coast, the perpetrators had been hunted down and killed, and that was all Kjartan would say. “Northumbria is safe,” he finished, “so you can return to Halfdan, my lord, and keep on trying to defeat Wessex.”

  Ragnar ignored that last barb. “I shall go to my home,” he said, “bury my son, and live in peace.”

  Sven was fingering his sword hilt and looking at me sourly with his one eye, but while the enmity between us, and between Ragnar and Kjartan, was obvious, no one made trouble and we left. The ships were hauled onto shore, the silver fetched from Readingum was shared out among the crews, and we went home carrying Rorik’s ashes.

  Sigrid wailed at the news. She tore her dress and tangled her hair and screamed, the other women joined her, and a procession carried Rorik’s ashes to the top of the nearest hill where the pot was buried. Afterward Ragnar stayed there, looking across the hills and watching the white clouds sail across the western sky.

  We stayed home all the rest of that year. There were crops to grow, hay to cut, a harvest to reap and to grind. We made cheese and butter. Merchants and travelers brought news, but none from Wessex where, it seemed, Alfred still ruled and had his peace, and so that kingdom remained, the last one of England. Ragnar sometimes spoke of returning there, carrying his sword to gain more riches, but the fight seemed to have gone from him that summer. He sent a message to Ireland, asking that his eldest son come home, but such messages were not reliable and Ragnar the Younger did not come that year. Ragnar also thought of Thyra, his daughter. “He says it’s time I married,” she said to me one day as we churned butter.

  “You?” I laughed.

  “I’m nearly thirteen!” she said defiantly.

  “So you are. Who’ll marry you?”

  She shrugged. “Mother likes Anwend.” Anwend was one of Ragnar’s warriors, a young man not much older than me, strong and cheerful, but Ragnar had an idea she should marry one of Ubba’s sons, but that would mean she would go away and Sigrid hated that thought and Ragnar slowly came around to Sigrid’s way of thinking. I liked Anwend and thought he would make a good husband for Thyra who was growing ever more beautiful. She had long golden hair, wide set eyes, a straight nose, unscarred skin, and a laugh that was like a ripple of sunshine. “Mother says I must have many sons,” she said.

  “I hope you do.”

  “I’d like a daughter, too,” she said, straining with the churn because the butter was solidifying and the work getting harder. “Mother says Brida should marry as well.”

  “Brida might have different ideas,” I said.

  “She wants to marry you,” Thyra said.

  I laughed at that. I thought of Brida as a friend, my closest friend, and just because we slept with each other, or we did when Sigrid was not watching, did not make me want to marry her. I did not want to marry at all. I thought only of swords and shields and battles, and Brida thought of herbs.

  She was like a cat. She came and went secretly, and she learned all that Sigrid could teach her about herbs and their uses. Bindweed as a purgative, toadflax for ulcers, marsh marigold to keep elves away from the milk pails, chickweed for coughs, cornflower for fevers, and she learned other spells she would not tell me, women’s spells, and said that if you stayed silent in the night, unmoving, scarce breathing, the spirits would come, and Ravn taught her how to dream with the gods, which meant drinking ale in which pounded red-cap mushrooms had been steeped, and she was often ill for she drank it too strong, but she would not stop, and she made her first songs then, songs about birds and about beasts, and Ravn said she was a true skald. Some nights, when we watched the charcoal burn, she would recite to me, her voice soft and rhythmic. She had a dog now that followed her everywhere. She had found him in Lundene on our homeward journey and he was black and white, as clever as Brida herself, and she called him Nihtgenga, which means night-walker, or goblin. He would sit with us by the charcoal pyre and I swear he listened to her songs. Brida made pipes from straw and played melancholy tunes and Nihtgenga would watch her with big sad eyes until the music overcame him and then he would raise his muzzle and howl, and we would both laugh and Nihtgenga would be offended and Brida would have to pet him back to happiness.

  We forgot the war until, when the summer was at its height and a pall of heat lay over the hills, we had an unexpected visitor. Earl Guthrum the Unlucky came to our remote valley. He came with twenty horsemen, all dressed in black, and he bowed respectfully to Sigrid who chided him for not sending warning. “I would have made a feast,” she said.

  “I brought food,” Guthrum said, pointing to some pack horses. “I did not want to empty your stores.”

  He had come from distant Lundene, wanting to talk with Ragnar and Ravn, and Ragnar invited me to sit with them because, he said, I knew more than most men about Wessex, and Wessex was what Guthrum wished to talk about, though my contribution was small. I described Alfred, described his piety, and warned Guthrum that though the West Saxon king was not an impressive man to look at, he was undeniably clever. Guthrum shrugged at that. “Cleverness is overrated,” he said gloomily. “Clever doesn’t win battles.”

  “Stupidity loses them,” Ravn put in, “like dividing the army when we fought outside Æbbanduna.”

  Guthrum scowled, but decided not to pick a fight with Ravn, and instead asked Ragnar’s advice on how to defeat the West Saxons, and demanded Ragnar’s assurance that, come the new year, Ragnar would bring his men to Lundene and join the next assault. “If it is next year,” Guthrum said gloomily. He scratched at the back of his neck, jiggling his mother’s gold-tipped bone that still hung from his hair. “We may not have sufficient men.”

  “Then we will attack the year after,” Ragnar said.

  “Or the one after that,” Guthrum said, then frowned. “But how do we finish the pious bastard?”

  “Split his forces,” Ragnar said, “because otherwise we’ll always be outnumbered.”

  “Always? Outnumbered?” Guthrum looked dubious at that assertion.

  “When we fought here,” Ragnar said, “some Northumbrians decided not to fight us and they took refuge in Mercia. When we fought in Mercia and East Anglia the same thing happened, and men fled from us to find sanctuary in Wessex. But when we fight in Wessex they have nowhere to go. No place is safe for them. So they must fight, all of them. Fight in Wessex and the enemy is cornered.”

  “And a cornered enemy,” Ravn put in, “is dangerous.”

  “Split them,” Guthrum said pensively, ignoring Ravn again.

  “Ships on the south coast,” Ragnar suggested, “an army on the T
emes, and British warriors coming from Brycheiniog, Glywysing, and Gwent.” Those were the southern Welsh kingdoms where the Britons lurked beyond Mercia’s western border. “Three attacks,” Ragnar went on, “and Alfred will have to deal with them all and he won’t be able to do it.”

  “And you will be there?” Guthrum asked.

  “You have my word,” Ragnar said, and then the conversation turned to what Guthrum had seen on his journey, and admittedly he was a pessimistic man and prone to see the worst in everything, but he despaired of England. There was trouble in Mercia, he said, and the East Anglians were restless, and now there was talk that King Egbert in Eoferwic was encouraging revolt.

  “Egbert!” Ragnar was surprised at the news. “He couldn’t encourage a piss out of a drunk man!”

  “It’s what I’m told,” Guthrum said. “May not be true. Fellow called Kjartan told me.”

  “Then it’s almost certainly not true.”

  “Not true at all,” Ravn agreed.

  “He seemed a good man to me,” Guthrum said, obviously unaware of Ragnar’s history with Kjartan, and Ragnar did not enlighten him, and probably forgot the conversation once Guthrum had traveled on.

  Yet Guthrum had been right. Plotting was going on in Eoferwic, though I doubt it was Egbert who did it. Kjartan did it, and he started by spreading rumors that King Egbert was secretly organizing a rebellion, and the rumors became so loud and the king’s reputation so poisoned that one night Egbert, fearing for his life, managed to evade his Danish guards and flee south with a dozen companions. He took shelter with King Burghred of Mercia who, though his country was occupied by Danes, had been allowed to keep his own household guard that was sufficient to protect his new guest. Ricsig of Dun-holm, the man who had handed the captured monks to Ragnar, was declared the new king of Northumbria, and he rewarded Kjartan by allowing him to ravage any place that might have harbored rebels in league with Egbert. There had been no rebellion, of course, but Kjartan had invented one, and he savaged the few remaining monasteries and nunneries in Northumbria, thus becoming even wealthier, and he stayed as Ricsig’s chief warrior and tax collector.

  All this passed us by. We brought in the harvest, feasted, and it was announced that at Yule there would be a wedding between Thyra and Anwend. Ragnar asked Ealdwulf the smith to make Anwend a sword as fine as Serpent-Breath, and Ealdwulf said he would and, at the same time, make me a short sword of the kind Toki had recommended for fighting in the shield wall, and he made me help him beat out the twisted rods. All that autumn we worked until Ealdwulf had made Anwend’s sword and I had helped make my own saxe. I called her Wasp-Sting because she was short and I could not wait to try her out on an enemy, which Ealdwulf said was foolishness. “Enemies come soon enough in a man’s life,” he told me. “You don’t need to seek them out.”

  I made my first shield in the early winter, cutting the limewood, forging the great boss with its handle that was held through a hole in the wood, painting it black, and rimming it with an iron strip. It was much too heavy, that shield, and later I learned how to make them lighter, but as the autumn came I carried shield, sword, and saxe everywhere, accustoming myself to their weight, practicing the strokes and parries, dreaming. I half feared and half longed for my first shield wall, for no man was a warrior until he had fought in the shield wall, and no man was a real warrior until he had fought in the front rank of the shield wall, and that was death’s kingdom, the place of horror, but like a fool I aspired to it.

  And we readied ourselves for war. Ragnar had promised his support to Guthrum and so Brida and I made more charcoal and Ealdwulf hammered out spear points and ax heads and spades, while Sigrid found joy in the preparations for Thyra’s wedding. There was a betrothal ceremony at the beginning of winter when Anwend, dressed in his best clothes that were neatly darned, came to our hall with six of his friends and he shyly proposed himself to Ragnar as Thyra’s husband. Everyone knew he was going to be her husband, but the formalities were important, and Thyra sat between her mother and father as Anwend promised Ragnar that he would love, cherish, and protect Thyra, and then proposed a bride-price of twenty pieces of silver, which was much too high, but which, I suppose, meant he really loved Thyra.

  “Make it ten, Anwend,” Ragnar said, generous as ever, “and spend the rest on a new coat.”

  “Twenty is good,” Sigrid said firmly, for the bride-price, though given to Ragnar, would become Thyra’s property once she was married.

  “Then have Thyra give you a new coat,” Ragnar said, taking the money, and then he embraced Anwend and there was a feast and Ragnar was happier that night than he had been since Rorik’s death. Thyra watched the dancing, sometimes blushing as she met Anwend’s eyes. Anwend’s six friends, all warriors of Ragnar, would come back with him for the wedding and they would be the men who would watch Anwend take Thyra to his bed and only when they reported that she was a proper woman would the marriage be deemed to have taken place.

  But those ceremonies would have to wait until Yule. Thyra would be wedded then, we would have our feast, the winter would be endured, we would go to war. In other words, we thought the world would go on as it ever did.

  And at the foot of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, the three spinners mocked us.

  I spent many Christmasses at the West Saxon court. Christmas is Yule with religion, and the West Saxons managed to spoil the midwinter feast with chanting monks, droning priests, and savagely long sermons. Yule is supposed to be a celebration and a consolation, a moment of warm brightness in the heart of winter, a time to eat because you know that the lean times are coming when food will be scarce and ice locks the land, and a time to be happy and get drunk and behave irresponsibly and wake up the next morning wondering if you will ever feel well again, but the West Saxons handed the feast to the priests who made it as joyous as a funeral. I have never really understood why people think religion has a place in the midwinter feast, though of course the Danes remembered their gods at that time, and sacrificed to them, but they also believed Odin, Thor, and the other gods were all feasting in Asgard and had no wish to spoil the feasts in Midgard, our world. That seems sensible, but I have learned that most Christians are fearfully suspicious of enjoyment and Yule offered far too much of that for their taste. Some folk in Wessex knew how to celebrate it, and I always did my best, but if Alfred was anywhere close then you could be sure that we were required to fast, pray, and repent through the whole twelve days of Christmas.

  Which is all by way of saying that the Yule feast where Thyra would be married was to be the greatest in Danish memory. We worked hard as it approached. We kept more animals alive than usual, and slaughtered them just before the feast so that their meat would not need to be salted, and we dug great pits where the pigs and cows would be cooked on huge gridirons that Ealdwulf made. He grumbled about it, saying that forging cooking implements took him away from his real work, but he secretly enjoyed it because he loved his food. As well as pork and beef we planned to have herring, salmon, mutton, pike, freshly baked bread, cheese, ale, mead, and, best of all, the puddings that were made by stuffing sheep intestines with blood, offal, oats, horseradish, wild garlic, and juniper berries. I loved those puddings, and still do, all crisp on the outside, but bursting with warm blood when you bite into them. I remember Alfred grimacing with distaste as I ate one and as the bloody juices ran into my beard, but then he was sucking on a boiled leek at the time.

  We planned sports and games. The lake in the heart of the valley had frozen and I was fascinated by the way the Danes strapped bones to their feet and glided on the ice, a pastime that lasted until the ice broke and a young man drowned, but Ragnar reckoned the lake would be hard frozen again after Yule and I was determined to learn the skill of ice-gliding. For the moment, though, Brida and I were still making charcoal for Ealdwulf who had decided to make Ragnar a sword, the finest he had ever made, and we were charged with turning two wagonloads of alderwood into the best possible fuel.

  We p
lanned to break the pile the day before the feast, but it was bigger than any we had made before and it was still not cool enough, and if you break a pile before it is ready then the fire will flare up with terrible force and burn all the half-made charcoal into ash, and so we made certain every vent was properly sealed and reckoned we would have time to break it on Yule morning before the celebrations began. Most of Ragnar’s men and their families were already at the hall, sleeping wherever they could find shelter and ready for the first meal of the day and for the games that would take place in the meadow before the marriage ceremony, but Brida and I spent that last night up at the pile for fear that some animal would scratch through the turf and so start a draft that would revive the burn. I had Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting, for I would go nowhere without them, and Brida had Nihtgenga, for she would go nowhere without him, and we were both swathed in furs because the night was cold. When a pile was burning you could rest on the turf and feel the heat, but not that night because the fire was almost gone.

  “If you go very still,” Brida said after dark, “you can feel the spirits.”

  I think I fell asleep instead, but sometime toward dawn I awoke and found Brida was also asleep. I sat up carefully, so as not to wake her, and I stared into the dark and I went very still and listened for the sceadugengan. Goblins and elves and sprites and specters and dwarves, all those things come to Midgard at night and prowl among the trees, and when we guarded the charcoal piles both Brida and I put out food for them so they would leave us in peace. So I woke, I listened, and I heard the small sounds of a wood at night, the things moving, the claws in the dead leaves, the wind’s soft sighs.

  And then I heard the voices.