The Last Kingdom Series Books 4-6: Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings - Bernard Cornwell

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to reinforce the garrison that now readied itself for Æthelred’s assault.

      There was a large sea-going ship moored in the dock where we wanted to land. I could see her clearly because torches blazed on the white wall of the mansion the dock served. The ship was a fine thing, her stem and stern rearing high and proud. There were no beast-heads on the ship, for no Northman would let his carved heads frighten the spirit of a friendly land. A lone man was on board the ship and he watched us approach. ‘Who are you?’ he shouted.

      ‘Ragnar Ragnarson!’ I called back. I heaved him a line woven from walrus hide. ‘Has the fighting started?’

      ‘Not yet, lord,’ he said. He took the line and twisted it around the other ship’s stem. ‘And when it does they’ll get slaughtered!’

      ‘We’re not too late, then?’ I said. I staggered as our ship struck the other, then stepped over the sheer-strakes onto one of the empty rowers’ benches. ‘Whose ship is this?’ I asked the man.

      ‘Sigefrid’s, lord. The Wave-Tamer.’

      ‘She’s beautiful,’ I said, then turned back. ‘Ashore!’ I shouted in English and watched as my men retrieved shields and weapons from the flooded bilge. Osric’s ship came in behind us, low in the water, and I realised she had been half swamped as she shot the bridge’s gap. Men began clambering onto the Wave-Tamer and the Northman who had taken my line saw the crosses hanging from their necks.

      ‘You …’ he began, and found he had nothing more to say. He half turned to run ashore, but I had blocked his escape. There was shock on his face, shock and puzzlement.

      ‘Put your hand on your sword hilt,’ I said, drawing Serpent-Breath.

      ‘Lord,’ he said, as if about to plead for his life, but then he understood his life was ending because I could not leave him alive. I could not let him go, because then he would warn Sigefrid of our arrival, and if I had tied his hands and feet and left him aboard the Wave-Tamer then some other person might have found and released him. He knew all that, and his face changed from puzzlement to defiance and, instead of just gripping his sword’s hilt, he began to pull the weapon free of its scabbard.

      And died.

      Serpent-Breath took him in the throat. Hard and fast. I felt her tip pierce muscle and tough tissue. Saw the blood. Saw his arm falter and the blade drop back into its scabbard, and I reached out with my left hand to grip his sword hand and hold it over his hilt. I made sure that he kept hold of his sword as he died, for then he would be taken to the feasting hall of the dead. I held his hand tight and let him collapse onto my chest where his blood ran down my mail. ‘Go to Odin’s hall,’ I told him softly, ‘and save a place for me.’

      He could not speak. He choked as blood spilled down his windpipe.

      ‘My name is Uhtred,’ I said, ‘and one day I will feast with you in the corpse-hall and we shall laugh together and drink together and be friends.’

      I let his body drop, then knelt and found his amulet, Thor’s hammer, which I cut from his neck with Serpent-Breath. I put the hammer in a pouch, cleaned my sword’s tip on the dead man’s cloak, then slid the blade back into her fleece-lined scabbard. I took my shield from Sihtric, my servant.

      ‘Let’s go ashore,’ I said, ‘and take a city.’

      Because it was time to fight.

       Five

      Then all, suddenly, was quiet.

      Not really quiet, of course. The river hissed where it ran through the bridge, small waves slapped on the boat hulls, the guttering torches on the house wall crackled and I could hear my men’s footsteps as they clambered ashore. Shields and spear butts thumped on ships’ timbers, dogs barked in the city and somewhere a gander was giving its harsh call, but it seemed quiet. Dawn was now a paler yellow, half concealed by dark clouds.

      ‘And now?’ Finan appeared beside me. Steapa loomed beside him, but said nothing.

      ‘We go to the gate,’ I said, ‘Ludd’s Gate.’ But I did not move. I did not want to move. I wanted to be back at Coccham with Gisela. It was not cowardice. Cowardice is always with us, and bravery, the thing that provokes the poets to make their songs about us, is merely the will to overcome the fear. It was tiredness that made me reluctant to move, but not a physical tiredness. I was young then and the wounds of war had yet to sap my strength. I think I was tired of Wessex, tired of fighting for a king I did not like, and, standing on that Lundene wharf, I did not understand why I fought for him. And now, looking back over the years, I wonder if that lassitude was caused by the man I had just killed and whom I had promised to join in Odin’s hall. I believe the men we kill are inseparably joined to us. Their life threads, turned ghostly, are twisted by the Fates around our own thread and their burden stays to haunt us till the sharp blade cuts our life at last. I felt remorse for his death.

      ‘Are you going to sleep?’ Father Pyrlig asked me. He had joined Finan.

      ‘We’re going to the gate,’ I said.

      It seemed like a dream. I was walking, but my mind was somewhere else. This, I thought, was how the dead walked our world, for the dead do come back. Not as Bjorn had pretended to come back, but in the darkest nights, when no one alive can see them, they wander our world. They must, I thought, only half see it, as if the places they knew were veiled in a winter mist, and I wondered if my father was watching me. Why did I think that? I had not been fond of my father, nor he of me, and he had died when I was young, but he had been a warrior. The poets sang of him. And what would he think of me? I was walking through Lundene instead of attacking Bebbanburg, and that was what I should have done. I should have gone north. I should have spent my whole hoard of silver on hiring men and leading them in an assault across Bebbanburg’s neck of land and up across the walls to the high hall where we could make great slaughter. Then I could live in my own home, my father’s home, for ever. I could live near Ragnar and be far from Wessex.

      Except my spies, for I employed a dozen in Northumbria, had told me what my uncle had done to my fortress. He had closed the landside gates. He had taken them away altogether and in their place were ramparts, newly built, high and reinforced with stone, and now, if a man wished to get inside the fortress, he needed to follow a path that led to the northern end of the crag on which the fortress stood. And every step of that path would be under those high walls, under attack, and then, at the northern end, where the sea broke and sucked, there was a small gate. Beyond that gate was a steep path leading to another wall and another gate. Bebbanburg had been sealed, and to take it I would need an army beyond even the reach of my hoarded silver.

      ‘Be lucky!’ a woman’s voice startled me from my thoughts. The folk of the old city were awake and they saw us pass and took us for Danes because I had ordered my men to hide their crosses.

      ‘Kill the Saxon bastards!’ another voice shouted.

      Our footsteps echoed from the high houses that were all at least three storeys tall. Some had beautiful stonework over their bricks and I thought how the world had once been filled with these houses. I remember the first time I ever climbed a Roman staircase, and how odd it felt, and I knew that in times gone by men must have taken such things for granted. Now the world was dung and straw and damp-ridden wood. We had stone masons, of course, but it was quicker to build from wood, and the wood rotted, but no one seemed to care. The whole world rotted as we slid from light into darkness, getting ever nearer to the black chaos in which this middle world would end and the gods would fight and all love and light and laughter would dissolve. ‘Thirty years,’ I said aloud.

      ‘Is that how old you are?’ Father Pyrlig asked me.

      ‘It’s how long a hall lasts,’ I said, ‘unless you keep repairing it. Our world is falling apart, father.’

      ‘My God, you’re gloomy,’ Pyrlig said, amused.

      ‘And

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