The Last Kingdom

by Bernard Cornwell

  Leofric and I found a place to sleep in a tavern close to the cathedral, which was the bishop’s church, and that night I got drunk as a spring hare. I picked a fight with someone, I have no idea who, and only remember that Leofric, who was not quite as drunk as me, pulled us apart and flattened my opponent, and after that I went into the stable yard and threw up all the ale I had just drunk. I drank some more, slept badly, woke to hear rain seething on the stable roof, and then vomited again.

  “Why don’t we just ride to Mercia?” I suggested to Leofric. The king had lent us horses and I did not mind stealing them.

  “What do we do there?”

  “Find men?” I suggested. “Fight?”

  “Don’t be daft, earsling,” Leofric said. “We want the fleet. And if you don’t marry the ugly sow, I don’t get to command it.”

  “I command it,” I said.

  “But only if you marry,” Leofric said, “and then you’ll command the fleet and I’ll command you.”

  Father Willibald arrived then. He had slept in the monastery next door to the tavern and had come to make sure I was ready, and looked alarmed at my ragged condition. “What’s that mark on your face?” he asked.

  “Bastard hit me last night,” I said, “I was drunk. So was he, but I was more drunk. Take my advice, father. Never get into a fight when you’re badly drunk.”

  I drank more ale for breakfast. Willibald insisted I wear my best tunic, which was not saying much for it was stained, crumpled, and torn. I would have preferred to wear my coat of mail, but Willibald said that was inappropriate for a church, and I suppose he was right, and I let him brush me down and try to dab the worst stains out of the wool. I tied my hair with a leather lace, strapped on Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting, which again Willibald said I should not wear in a holy place, but I insisted on keeping the weapons, and then, a doomed man, I went to the cathedral with Willibald and Leofric.

  It was raining as if the heavens were being drained of all their water. Rain bounced in the streets, flowed in streams down the gutters, and leaked through the cathedral’s thatch. A brisk cold wind was coming from the east and it found every crack in the cathedral’s wooden walls so that the candles on the altars flickered and some blew out. It was a small church, not much bigger than Ragnar’s burned hall, and it must have been built on a Roman foundation for the floor was made of flagstones that were now being puddled by rainwater. The bishop was already there, two other priests fussed with the guttering candles on the high altar, and then Ealdorman Odda arrived with my bride.

  Who took one look at me and burst into tears.

  What was I expecting? A woman who looked like a sow, I suppose, a woman with a pox-scarred face and a sour expression and haunches like an ox. No one expects to love a wife, not if they marry for land or position, and I was marrying for land and she was marrying because she had no choice, and there really is no point in making too much of a fuss about it, because that is the way the world works. My job was to take her land, work it, make money, and Mildrith’s duty was to give me sons and make sure there was food and ale on my table. Such is the holy sacrament of marriage.

  I did not want to marry her. By rights, as an ealdorman of Northumbria, I could expect to marry a daughter of the nobility, a daughter who would bring much more land than twelve hilly hides in Defnascir. I might have expected to marry a daughter who could increase Bebbanburg’s holdings and power, but that was plainly not going to happen, so I was marrying a girl of ignoble birth who would now be known as Lady Mildrith and she might have shown some gratitude for that, but instead she cried and even tried to pull away from Ealdorman Odda.

  He probably sympathized with her, but the bride-price had been paid, and so she was brought to the altar and the bishop, who had come back from Cippanhamm with a streaming cold, duly made us man and wife. “And may the blessing of God the Father,” he said, “God the son, and God the Holy Ghost be on your union.” He was about to say amen, but instead sneezed mightily.

  “Amen,” Willibald said. No one else spoke.

  So Mildrith was mine.

  Odda the Younger watched as we left the church and he probably thought I did not see him, but I did, and I marked him down. I knew why he was watching.

  For the truth of it, which surprised me, was that Mildrith was desirable. That word does not do her justice, but it is so very hard to remember a face from long ago. Sometimes, in a dream, I see her, and she is real then, but when I am awake and try to summon her face I cannot do it. I remember she had clear, pale skin, that her lower lip jutted out too much, that her eyes were very blue and her hair the same gold as mine. She was tall, which she disliked, thinking it made her unwomanly, and had a nervous expression, as though she constantly feared disaster, and that can be very attractive in a woman and I confess I found her attractive. That did surprise me, indeed it astonished me, for such a woman should have long been married. She was almost seventeen years old, and by that age most women have already given birth to three or four children or else been killed in the attempt, but as we rode to her holdings that lay to the west of the river Uisc’s mouth, I heard some of her tale. She was being drawn in a cart by two oxen that Willibald had insisted garlanding with flowers. Leofric, Willibald, and I rode alongside the cart, and Willibald asked her questions and she answered him readily enough for he was a priest and a kind man.

  Her father, she said, had left her land and debts, and the debts were greater than the value of the land. Leofric sniggered when he heard the word debts. I said nothing, but just stared doggedly ahead.

  The trouble, Mildrith said, had begun when her father had granted a tenth of his holdings as ælmesæcer, which is land devoted to the church. The church does not own it, but has the right to all that the land yields, whether in crops or cattle, and her father had made the grant, Mildrith explained, because all his children except her had died and he wanted to find favor with God. I suspected he had wanted to find favor with Alfred, for in Wessex an ambitious man was well advised to look after the church if he wanted the king to look after him.

  But then the Danes had raided, cattle had been slaughtered, a harvest failed, and the church took her father to law for failing to provide the land’s promised yield. Wessex, I discovered, was very devoted to the law, and all the men of law are priests, every last one of them, which means that the law is the church, and when Mildrith’s father died the law had decreed that he owed the church a huge sum, quite beyond his ability to pay, and Alfred, who had the power to lift the debt, refused to do so. What this meant was that any man who married Mildrith married the debt, and no man had been willing to take that burden until a Northumbrian fool wandered into the trap like a drunk staggering downhill.

  Leofric was laughing. Willibald looked worried.

  “So what is the debt?” I asked.

  “Two thousand shillings, lord,” Mildrith said in a very small voice.

  Leofric almost choked laughing and I could have cheerfully killed him on the spot.

  “And it increases yearly?” Willibald asked shrewdly.

  “Yes,” Mildrith said, refusing to meet my eyes. A more sensible man would have explored Mildrith’s circumstances before the marriage contract was made, but I had just seen marriage as a route to the fleet. So now I had the fleet, I had the debt, and I had the girl, and I also had a new enemy, Odda the Younger, who had plainly wanted Mildrith for himself, though his father, wisely, had refused to saddle his family with the crippling debt, nor, I suspected, did he want his son to marry beneath him.

  There is a hierarchy among men. Beocca liked to tell me it reflected the hierarchy of heaven, and perhaps it does, but I know nothing of that, but I do know how men are ranked. At the top is the king, and beneath him are his sons, and then come the ealdormen who are the chief nobles of the land and without land a man cannot be noble, though I was, because I have never abandoned my claim to Bebbanburg. The king and his ealdormen are the power of a kingdom, the men who hold great lands and raise the armi
es, and beneath them are the lesser nobles, usually called reeves, and they are responsible for law in a lord’s land, though a man can cease to be a reeve if he displeases his lord. The reeves are drawn from the ranks of thegns, who are wealthy men who can lead followers to war, but who lack the wide holdings of noblemen like Odda or my father. Beneath the thegns are the ceorls, who are all free men, but if a ceorl loses his livelihood then he could well become a slave, which is the bottom of the dung heap. Slaves can be, and often are, freed, though unless a slave’s lord gives him land or money he will soon be a slave again. Mildrith’s father had been a thegn, and Odda had made him a reeve, responsible for keeping the peace in a wide swath of southern Defnascir, but he had also been a thegn of insufficient land, whose foolishness had diminished the little he possessed, and so he had left Mildrith impoverished, which made her unsuitable as a wife for an ealdorman’s son, though she was reckoned good enough for an exiled lord from Northumbria. In truth she was just another pawn on Alfred’s chessboard and he had only given her to me so that I became responsible for paying the church a vast sum.

  He was a spider, I thought sourly, a priestly black spider spinning sticky webs, and I thought I had been so clever when I talked to him in the hall at Cippanhamm. In truth I could have prayed openly to Thor before pissing on the relics of Alfred’s altar and he would still have given me the fleet because he knew the fleet would have little to do in the coming war, and he had only wanted to trap me for his future ambitions in the north of England. So now I was trapped, and the bastard Ealdorman Odda had carefully let me walk into the trap.

  The thought of Defnascir’s ealdorman prompted a question from me. “What bride-price did Odda give you?” I asked Mildrith.

  “Fifteen shillings, lord.”

  “Fifteen shillings?” I asked, shocked.

  “Yes, lord.”

  “The cheap bastard,” I said.

  “Cut the rest out of him,” Leofric snarled. A pair of very blue eyes looked at him, then at me, then vanished under the cloak again.

  Her twelve hides of land, that were now mine, lay in the hills above the river Uisc’s sea reach, in a place called Oxton, which simply means a farm where oxen are kept. It was a shieling, as the Danes would say, a farmstead, and the house had a thatch so overgrown with moss and grass that it looked like an earth mound. There was no hall, and a nobleman needs a hall in which to feed his followers, but it did have a cattle shed and a pig shed and land enough to support sixteen slaves and five families of tenants, all of whom were summoned to greet me, as well as half a dozen household servants, most of whom were also slaves, and they welcomed Mildrith fondly for, since her father’s death, she had been living in the household of Ealdorman Odda’s wife while the farmstead was managed by a man called Oswald who looked about as trustworthy as a stoat.

  That night we made a meal of peas, leeks, stale bread, and sour ale, and that was my first marriage feast in my own house, which was also a house under threat of debt. The next morning it had stopped raining and I breakfasted on more stale bread and sour ale, and then walked with Mildrith to a hilltop from where I could stare down at the wide sea reach that lay across the land like the flattened gray blade of an ax. “Where do these folk go,” I asked, meaning her slaves and tenants, “when the Danes come?”

  “Into the hills, lord.”

  “My name is Uhtred.”

  “Into the hills, Uhtred.”

  “You won’t go into the hills,” I said firmly.

  “I won’t?” Her eyes widened in alarm.

  “You will come with me to Hamtun,” I said, “and we shall have a house there so long as I command the fleet.”

  She nodded, plainly nervous, and then I took her hand, opened it, and poured in thirty-three shillings, so many coins that they spilled onto her lap. “Yours, wife,” I said.

  And so she was. My wife. And that same day we left, going eastward, man and wife.

  The story hurries now. It quickens like a stream coming to a fall in the hills and, like a cascade foaming down jumbled rocks, it gets angry and violent, confused even. For it was in that year, 876, that the Danes made their greatest effort yet to rid England of its last kingdom, and the onslaught was huge, savage, and sudden.

  Guthrum the Unlucky led the assault. He had been living in Grantaceaster, calling himself King of East Anglia, and Alfred, I think, assumed he would have good warning if Guthrum’s army left that place, but the West Saxon spies failed and the warnings did not come, and the Danish army was all mounted on horses, and Alfred’s troops were in the wrong place and Guthrum led his men south across the Temes and clear across all Wessex to capture a great fortress on the south coast. That fortress was called Werham and it lay not very far west of Hamtun, though between us and it lay a vast stretch of inland sea called the Poole. Guthrum’s army assaulted Werham, captured it, raped the nuns in Werham’s nunnery, and did it all before Alfred could react. Once inside the fortress Guthrum was protected by two rivers, one to the north of the town and the other to the south. To the east was the wide placid Poole and a massive wall and ditch guarded the only approach from the west.

  There was nothing the fleet could do. As soon as we heard that the Danes were in Werham, we readied ourselves for sea, but no sooner had we reached the open water than we saw their fleet and that ended our ambitions.

  I have never seen so many ships. Guthrum had marched across Wessex with close to a thousand horsemen, but now the rest of his army came by sea and their ships darkened the water. There were hundreds of boats. Men later said three hundred and fifty, though I think there were fewer, but certainly there were more than two hundred. Ship after ship, dragon prow after serpent head, oars churning the dark sea white, a fleet going to battle, and all we could do was slink back into Hamtun and pray that the Danes did not sail up Hamtun Water to slaughter us.

  They did not. The fleet sailed on to join Guthrum in Werham, so now a huge Danish army was lodged in southern Wessex, and I remembered Ragnar’s advice to Guthrum. Split their forces, Ragnar had said, and that surely meant another Danish army lay somewhere to the north, just waiting to attack, and when Alfred went to meet that second army, Guthrum would erupt from behind Werham’s walls to attack him in the rear.

  “It’s the end of England,” Leofric said darkly. He was not much given to gloom, but that day he was downcast. Mildrith and I had taken a house in Hamtun, one close to the water, and he ate with us most nights we were in the town. We were still taking the ships out, now in a flotilla of twelve, always in hope of catching some Danish ships unawares, but their raiders only sallied out of the Poole in large numbers, never fewer than thirty ships, and I dared not lose Alfred’s navy in a suicidal attack on such large forces. In the height of the summer a Danish force came to Hamtun’s water, rowing almost to our anchorage, and we lashed our ships together, donned armor, sharpened weapons, and waited for their attack. But they were no more minded for battle than we were. To reach us they would have to negotiate a mud-bordered channel and they could only put two ships abreast in that place and so they were content to jeer at us from the open water and then leave.

  Guthrum waited in Werham and what he waited for, we later learned, was for Halfdan to lead a mixed force of Northmen and Britons out of Wales. Halfdan had been in Ireland, avenging Ivar’s death, and now he was supposed to bring his fleet and army to Wales, assemble a great army there, and lead it across the Sæfern Sea and attack Wessex. But, according to Beocca, God intervened. God or the three spinners. Fate is everything, for news came that Halfdan had died in Ireland, and of the three brothers only Ubba now lived, though he was still in the far wild north. Halfdan had been killed by the Irish, slaughtered along with scores of his men in a vicious battle, and so the Irish saved Wessex that year.

  We knew none of that in Hamtun. We made our impotent forays and waited for news of the second blow that must fall on Wessex, and still it did not come, and then, as the first autumn gales fretted the coast, a messenger came from Alfred,
whose army was camped to the west of Werham, demanding that I go to the king. The messenger was Beocca and I was surprisingly pleased to see him, though annoyed that he gave me the command verbally. “Why did I learn to read,” I demanded of him, “if you don’t bring written orders?”

  “You learned to read, Uhtred,” he said happily, “to improve your mind, of course.” Then he saw Mildrith and his mouth began to open and close like a landed fish. “Is this?” he began, and was struck dumb as a stick.

  “The Lady Mildrith,” I said.

  “Dear lady,” Beocca said, then gulped for air and twitched like a puppy wanting a pat. “I have known Uhtred,” he managed to say to her, “since he was a little child! Since he was just a little child.”

  “He’s a big one now,” Mildrith said, which Beocca thought was a wonderful jest for he giggled immoderately.

  “Why,” I managed to stem his mirth, “am I going to Alfred?”

  “Because Halfdan is dead, God be praised, and no army will come from the north, God be praised, and so Guthrum seeks terms! The discussions have already started, and God be praised for that, too.” He beamed at me as though he was responsible for this rush of good news, and perhaps he was because he went on to say that Halfdan’s death was the result of prayers. “So many prayers, Uhtred. You see the power of prayer?”

  “God be praised indeed,” Mildrith answered instead of me. She was indeed very pious, but no one is perfect. She was also pregnant, but Beocca did not notice and I did not tell him.

  I left Mildrith in Hamtun, and rode with Beocca to the West Saxon army. A dozen of the king’s household troops served as our escort, for the route took us close to the northern shore of the Poole and Danish boats had been raiding that shore before the truce talks opened. “What does Alfred want of me?” I asked Beocca constantly, insisting, despite his denials, that he must have some idea, but he claimed ignorance and in the end I stopped asking.