Sword of Kings (The Last Kingdom Series, Book 12)

by Bernard Cornwell

  My men laughed at the old joke. They were happy because they were sailing north. North to home, north to safety. We would soon be in sight of the estuary’s further shore, the vast mud expanse where the East Saxons had settled. Then, if this wind held, we would sail up the East Anglian coast and so to the wilder shores of Bebbanburg.

  Except Æthelstan’s men were in Lundene. For a few moments I was tempted to ignore that news. What did it matter to me if Æthelstan’s men had captured Lundene? I was going home to Bebbanburg, but Æthelstan’s forces were in Lundene?

  ‘You saw Æthelstan’s men?’ I asked the two prisoners.

  ‘We did,’ Halldor answered, ‘and they have no right to be there!’

  ‘Lundene is part of Mercia,’ I said.

  ‘Not since King Alfred’s day,’ the Dane insisted.

  Which was probably true. Alfred had made certain that his West Saxon troops garrisoned Lundene and, despite Mercia’s legal claim to the city, it had been effectively ruled from Wintanceaster ever since. But Æthelstan had acted fast. Eadgifu had been right; he must have had troops north of the city, waiting for his orders, and those troops now separated Wessex from East Anglia. ‘Was there fighting?’ I asked.

  ‘None,’ Halldor sounded disappointed.

  ‘The garrison wasn’t strong, lord,’ the priest explained, ‘and the Mercians came suddenly and in great numbers. We were not expecting them.’

  ‘That was treachery!’ Halldor snarled.

  ‘Or cleverness,’ I said. ‘So where is Æthelhelm now?’

  Both men shrugged. ‘He’s probably still in Wintanceaster, lord,’ Halldor said grudgingly.

  That made sense. Wintanceaster was the capital of Wessex and in the heartland of Æthelhelm’s lavish estates. I had no doubt that Ælfweard was there too, hungry for the Witan to announce that he was truly king. Edward’s body, escorted by his own household troops, would be travelling south to Wintanceaster so he could be buried beside his father, and that funeral would assemble the West Saxon lords whose troops Æthelhelm would need. And Æthelstan, wherever he was, would be sending messengers to the Mercian lords demanding warriors to preserve his Mercian throne. In brief, both Æthelhelm and Æthelstan would be gathering the forces necessary to unpick Edward’s division of his kingdoms, but at least Æthelstan had shown forethought and sense in capturing Lundene before Æthelhelm could reinforce the city’s small garrison.

  ‘Is King Æthelstan in Lundene?’ I asked Halldor.

  Again he grimaced at the word ‘king’, but made no comment on it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘But you’re quite sure his men are?’

  He nodded unwillingly. By now the coast of East Seax was in sight, a low, dull brown streak of mud topped with a fringe of summer green. The few trees were small and wind-bent, the mud speckled with the white of seabirds. The tide would soon be ebbing, which made any landfall on that coast treacherous. We could be stranded on a falling tide for hours, yet I was determined to nose Spearhafoc into the shore. I pointed ahead. ‘That’s Fughelness,’ I told the two prisoners. ‘There’s little there except sand, mud, and birds. And soon you too, because I’m putting you ashore there.’ Fughelness was a bleak place, windswept and barren, locked in by tidal creeks, marshes and mudbanks. It would take Halldor and the priest the rest of the day to find a way to firmer ground, and then more time to work their way back to Wintanceaster if that was, indeed, where Æthelhelm was.

  We lowered the sail as we neared the shore, and then, using a dozen oars, nosed our way gently through small breaking waves until Spearhafoc’s cutwater slid onto mud. ‘It would be easier to kill them,’ Awyrgan said as Berg, grinning, prodded the two captives off the bows towards the water.

  ‘Why would I kill them?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re enemies.’

  ‘They’re helpless enemies,’ I said, ‘and I don’t kill the helpless.’

  He looked at me defiantly. ‘And what about the priests you killed?’

  I wanted to kill Awyrgan at that moment. ‘Anger leads to savagery,’ I said curtly, ‘and to stupidity.’ He must have felt my anger because he backed away. The priest was protesting that jumping into the water would give him a fever, but every moment we waited the wind was nudging Spearhafoc further onto the mud. ‘Get rid of him!’ I called to Berg.

  Berg more or less threw the priest overboard. ‘Wade ashore!’ Berg called. ‘You won’t drown!’

  ‘Pole her off!’ I called, and the men in the bows shoved their oars into the sticky mud and heaved. For a heartbeat Spearhafoc seemed reluctant to move, then to my relief she lurched and slid back into safer, deeper water.

  ‘Same course, lord?’ Gerbruht asked me. ‘Hoist the sail and up the coast?’

  I shook my head. ‘Lundene.’

  ‘Lundene?’

  ‘Oars!’ I shouted.

  We turned west. We were not going home after all, but upriver to Lundene.

  Because King Æthelstan’s troops were there and I had an oath to keep.

  It was a hard row against the wind, against the tide, and against the river’s current, but it would become easier when the tide turned and the flood would carry us upriver. I knew these waters, knew the river, because when Gisela was alive I had commanded the Lundene garrison. I had become fond of the city.

  We passed Caninga, a marshy island on the East Seax shore, beyond which was Beamfleot where, in Alfred’s reign, we had stormed the Danish fort and put a whole army to the sword. I remembered Skade and did not want to remember her. She had died there, killed by the man she had betrayed, while all around them the women screamed and the blood flowed. Finan stared and he too was thinking of the sorceress. ‘Skade,’ he said.

  ‘I remember,’ I said.

  ‘What was her lover’s name?’

  ‘Harald. He killed her.’

  He nodded. ‘And we captured thirty ships.’

  I was still thinking of Skade, remembering. ‘War seemed cleaner then.’

  ‘No, we were younger then, that’s all.’ The two of us were standing in the prow. I could see the hills rising beyond Beamfleot, and I remembered a villager telling me that the god Thor had walked the ridge there. He was a Christian, yet he had seemed proud that Thor had walked his fields.

  We had taken the sparrowhawk’s head from the prow so that to a casual glance we were just another ship rowing upriver to the wharves of Lundene. Low hills of ripening wheat rose beyond the muddy banks. The oars creaked as they pulled. A man stretching a net to catch marsh birds stood from his task to watch us pass. He saw we were a ship of warriors and made the sign of the cross, then bent to his task again. As the estuary narrowed we began passing close to ships coming downriver, their sails bellying in the south-west wind, and we shouted for news as passing ships always do. Were there Mercian troops in Lundene? There were. Was King Æthelstan there? No one could say, and so, still largely ignorant of what happened in Lundene, let alone Wessex, we rowed on towards the wide smear of dark smoke that always hung above the city. The tide had turned and we were using just six rowers on each side to keep the boat’s heading. Berg had the steering-oar now, while Eadgifu, her children and her companions were huddled under the prow platform where Finan and I stood. ‘So it’s over,’ Finan said to me.

  I knew he had been brooding over my sudden decision to go west to Lundene instead of north to Bebbanburg. ‘Over?’ I asked.

  ‘Æthelstan’s men are in Lundene. We join him. We fight a battle. We kill Æthelhelm. We go home.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s my hope.’

  ‘The men are worried.’

  ‘About a battle?’

  ‘About the plague.’ He crossed himself. ‘They have wives and children, so do I.’

  ‘The plague wasn’t at Bebbanburg.’

  ‘It’s in the north. Who knows how far it’s spread?’

  ‘Rumour said it was at Lindcolne,’ I said, ‘but that’s a long way from Bebbanburg.’

  ‘That’s small consolation t
o men worrying about their families.’

  I had been trying to ignore those rumours of the plague. Rumours are just that and most are not true, and the days around a king’s death provoke many rumours, but Sigtryggr had warned me of the sickness in Lindcolne, others had spoken of death in the north, and Finan had been right to remind me. My men wanted to be reunited with their families. They would follow me into battle, they would fight like demons, but a threat to their wives and children was far more important to them than any oath of mine. ‘Tell them,’ I said, ‘that we’ll be home soon.’

  ‘What’s soon?’ Finan demanded.

  ‘Let me find the news in Lundene first,’ I said.

  ‘And what if Æthelstan’s there?’ Finan asked. ‘And what if he wants you to march with him?’

  ‘Then I march,’ I said bleakly, ‘and you can take Spearhafoc home.’

  ‘Me!’ Finan said, sounding alarmed. ‘Not me! Berg can sail her.’

  ‘Berg can sail her,’ I agreed, ‘but you’ll command Berg.’ I knew Finan was no seaman.

  ‘I’ll command nothing!’ he retorted fiercely. ‘I’ll stay with you.’

  ‘You don’t have to—’

  ‘I took an oath to protect you!’ he interrupted me.

  ‘You? I never asked any oath of you!’

  ‘You didn’t,’ he agreed, ‘but I still swore an oath to protect you.’

  ‘When?’ I asked. ‘I don’t remember any such oath.’

  ‘I took it two heartbeats ago,’ he said, ‘and if you can be tied by a stupid oath, so can I.’

  ‘I release you from any oath—’

  Again he interrupted me. ‘Someone has to keep you alive. Seems God gave me the task of keeping you away from barley fields.’

  I touched the hammer and tried to convince myself that I was making the right decision. ‘There are no barley fields in Lundene,’ I told Finan.

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Then we shall live, my friend,’ I said, touching him on the shoulder, ‘we shall live and we’ll go home.’

  I walked to the stern where the lowering sun cast a long rippling shadow behind Spearhafoc. I sat on one of the low steps that led to the steering platform. A swan flew northwards and I idly worried it was an omen that we should also go north, but there were other birds, other omens. Sometimes it is hard to know the will of the gods, and even when we do know we cannot be certain they are not toying with us. I touched the hammer again.

  ‘You believe that has power?’ a voice asked.

  I looked up and saw it was Benedetta, her face shadowed by the hood she wore. ‘I believe the gods have power,’ I answered.

  ‘One god,’ she insisted. I shrugged, too tired to argue. Benedetta stared at the slow passing bank of East Seax. ‘We’re going to Lundene?’ she asked.

  ‘We are.’

  ‘I hate Lundene,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘It’s a lot to hate.’

  ‘When the slavers came …’ she began, then stopped.

  ‘You told me you were twelve?’

  She nodded. ‘I was to be married that summer. To a good man, a fisherman.’

  ‘They killed him too?’

  ‘They killed everyone! Saraceni!’ She spat the word. ‘They killed anyone who fought back or anyone they didn’t want as a slave. They wanted me.’ There was a terrible savagery in the last three words.

  ‘Who are the Saraceni?’ I asked, stumbling over the unfamiliar word.

  ‘Men from across the sea. Some even live in my land! They are not Christian. They are savages!’

  I patted the step beside me. She hesitated, then sat. ‘And you came to Britain?’ I asked, curious.

  She was silent for a while, then shrugged. ‘I was sold,’ she said simply, ‘and taken north, I don’t know where. I was told this is valuable,’ she touched a finger to her skin, which was lightly brushed with a golden darkness, ‘it is valuable in the north where the skin is pale like sour milk and in the north I was sold again. I was still just twelve years old,’ she paused to look at me, ‘and I was already a woman, not a child.’

  Her voice was bitter. I nodded to show I understood.

  ‘A year later,’ she went on, ‘I was sold again. To a Saxon from Lundene. A slave-trader. He paid much money and his name,’ she was speaking so softly that I almost could not hear her, ‘his name was Gunnald.’

  ‘Gunnald,’ I repeated.

  ‘Gunnald Gunnaldson.’ She was gazing at the northern bank where a small village came down to the water. A child waved from a decaying wharf. I watched the oars, dipping, pulling, then rising slowly with water dripping from the long blades. ‘They brought me to Lundene where they sold their slaves,’ Benedetta went on, ‘and both raped me. Father and son, both, but the son was the worst. They would not sell me, they wanted to use me, so I tried to kill myself. It was better than being used by those pigs.’

  She had said the last few words very softly so she could not be overheard by the men on the nearest rowing bench. ‘Kill yourself?’ I asked just as quietly.

  She turned to look at me, then slowly, without a word, pushed back the hood and unwound the grey scarf she always wore about her neck. I saw the scar then, a deep scar across the right side of her slender neck. She let me look for a moment, then replaced the scarf. ‘I did not cut deep enough,’ she said bleakly, ‘but it was enough to make them sell me.’

  ‘To Edward.’

  ‘To his steward. I would work in his kitchens and in his bed, but Queen Eadgifu rescued me, so I serve her now.’

  ‘As a trusted servant.’

  ‘As a trusted slave.’ She still sounded bitter. ‘I am not free, lord.’ She pulled the hood back over her raven black hair. ‘Do you keep slaves?’ she asked belligerently.

  ‘No,’ I said, which was not strictly true. Bebbanburg had many estates where my household warriors farmed and I knew many of them had slaves, and my father had kept a score in the fortress to cook, clean, sweep, and warm his bed, and some of those were still there, aged now and paid as servants. I had taken no new slaves because my own experience as a slave, when I had been condemned to pull an oar through wintry seas, had soured me against slavery. But then, I thought, I did not need slaves. I had enough men and women to keep the fortress safe, warm and fed, and I had enough silver to reward them. ‘I’ve killed slave-traders,’ I remarked, knowing as I said it that it was only spoken to attract Benedetta’s approval.

  ‘If we go to Lundene,’ she said, ‘you may kill one for me.’

  ‘Gunnald? He’s still there?’

  ‘He was two years ago,’ she answered bleakly. ‘I saw him. He saw me too, and he smiled. It was not a good smile.’

  ‘You saw him? In Lundene?’

  She nodded. ‘King Edward liked to visit. The queen liked it too. She could buy things.’

  ‘King Edward could have arranged Gunnald’s death for you,’ I said.

  She sneered at that. ‘Edward took money from Gunnald. Why kill him? I meant nothing to Edward, rest his soul.’ She made the sign of the cross. ‘What happens to us in Lundene?’

  ‘We meet with Æthelstan, if he’s there.’

  ‘And if he’s not?’

  ‘We go to meet him.’

  ‘And what will he do to us? To my lady? To her children?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said flatly. ‘I’ll tell him you’re under my protection.’

  ‘He will honour that?’ She sounded sceptical.

  ‘I have known King Æthelstan since he was a child,’ I said, ‘and he is an honourable man. He will send you under escort to my home at Bebbanburg while we fight our war.’

  ‘Bebbanburg!’ She pronounced the name in her strange accent. ‘What is at Bebbanburg?’

  ‘Safety. You’ll be under my protection there.’

  ‘Awyrgan says we are wrong to accept a pagan’s protection,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Awyrgan doesn’t have to go with the queen,’ I said.

  I thought she would smile for a heartbeat,
but the impulse left her and she just nodded. ‘He will go with her,’ she said in a tone of disapproval, then turned her large grey-green eyes on me. ‘Are you truly a pagan?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘That is not good,’ she said seriously.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘is Gunnald Gunnaldson a pagan?’

  She did not answer for a long while, then she shook her head abruptly. ‘He wears the cross.’

  ‘Does that make him a better man than me?’

  She hesitated for a brief moment. ‘No,’ she finally admitted.

  ‘Then maybe,’ I said, ‘if he’s still in Lundene, I’ll kill him.’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Let me kill him,’ she said and, almost for the first time since I had met her, Benedetta looked happy. We rowed on.

  We reached Lundene at dusk, a dusk made darker by the city’s canopy of smoke. At least a score of other ships were lumbering upriver, most laden with the food and supplies that a city’s horde of people and horses need, one ship so heavily laden that it looked like a floating hayrick as it rode the flooding tide about the river’s great bends. We passed the smaller settlements built to Lundene’s east; the shipbuilders with their stacks of timber and the smoking pits where they burned pine to make stinking pitch, and the tanners who made a stink all of their own as they cured pelts with shit. Above it all was Lundene’s own thick stench of woodsmoke and sewage. ‘It’s not a river,’ Finan complained, ‘it’s a cesspool.’

  ‘You get used to it,’ I said.

  ‘Who’d want to?’ He looked down at the water flowing past Spearhafoc’s hull. ‘Those are turds!’

  We left the marshy banks for the two low hills of Lundene. It was getting dark now, but there was still just enough light to show three spearmen standing on the high stone rampart of the small Roman bastion that guarded the eastern end of the city. None of the three was wearing a dark red cloak and no leaping stag banners hung against the wall. Nor did the three men show any interest as we passed. The wharves, packed with ships, began just beyond the small fort, and in their centre, still downstream of the great bridge, was the stone wall I knew so well. The wall had been made by the Romans and protected a masonry platform on which they had built a lavish house. I had lived there with Gisela.