The Last Kingdom - Bernard Cornwell

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Vikings when they were raiders, but Danes or pagans when they were traders, and these men had been burning and plundering so were reckoned to be Vikings. There had seemed very few of them in the settlement, most were on their ships, and my brother decided to ride down to the cottages and kill those few, but of course it was a trap. The Danes had seen his horsemen coming and had hidden a ship’s crew north of the village, and those forty men closed behind my brother’s party and killed them all. My father claimed his eldest son’s death must have been quick, which was a consolation to him, but of course it was not a quick death for he lived long enough for the Danes to discover who he was, or else why would they have brought his head back to Bebbanburg? The fishermen said they tried to warn my brother, but I doubt they did. Men say such things so that they are not blamed for disaster, but whether my brother was warned or not, he still died and the Danes took thirteen fine swords, thirteen good horses, a coat of mail, a helmet and my old name.

      But that was not the end of it. A fleeting visit by three ships was no great event, but a week after my brother’s death we heard that a great Danish fleet had rowed up the rivers to capture Eoferwic. They had won that victory on All Saints’ Day, which made Gytha weep for it suggested God had abandoned us, but there was also good news for it seemed that my old namesake, King Osbert, had made an alliance with his rival, the would-be King Ælla, and they had agreed to put aside their rivalry, join forces and take Eoferwic back. That sounds simple, but of course it took time. Messengers rode, advisers confused, priests prayed, and it was not till Christmas that Osbert and Ælla sealed their peace with oaths, and then they summoned my father’s men, but of course we could not march in winter. The Danes were in Eoferwic and we left them there until the early spring when news came that the Northumbrian army would gather outside the city and, to my joy, my father decreed that I would ride south with him.

      ‘He’s too young,’ Gytha protested.

      ‘He is almost ten,’ my father said, ‘and he must learn to fight.’

      ‘He would be better served by continuing his lessons,’ she said.

      ‘A dead reader is no use to Bebbanburg,’ my father said, ‘and Uhtred is now the heir so he must learn to fight.’

      That night he made Beocca show me the parchments kept in the church, the parchments that said we owned the land. Beocca had been teaching me to read for two years, but I was a bad pupil and, to Beocca’s despair, I could make neither head nor tail of the writings. Beocca sighed, then told me what was in them. ‘They describe the land,’ he said, ‘the land your father owns, and they say the land is his by God’s law and by our own law.’ And one day, it seemed, the lands would be mine for that night my father dictated a new will in which he said that if he died then Bebbanburg would belong to his son Uhtred, and I would be Ealdorman, and all the folk between the Tuede and the Tine would swear allegiance to me.

      ‘We were kings here once,’ he told me, ‘and our land was called Bernicia.’ He pressed his seal into the red wax, leaving the impression of a wolf’s head.

      ‘We should be kings again,’ Ælfric, my uncle said.

      ‘It doesn’t matter what they call us,’ my father said curtly, ‘so long as they obey us,’ and then he made Ælfric swear on the comb of Saint Cuthbert that he would respect the new will and acknowledge me as Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Ælfric did so swear. ‘But it won’t happen,’ my father said. ‘We shall slaughter these Danes like sheep in a fold, and we shall ride back here with plunder and honour.’

      ‘Pray God,’ Ælfric said.

      Ælfric and thirty men would stay at Bebbanburg to guard the fortress and protect the women. He gave me gifts that night; a leather coat that would protect against a sword cut and, best of all, a helmet around which Ealdwulf the smith had fashioned a band of gilt bronze. ‘So they will know you are a prince,’ Ælfric said.

      ‘He’s not a prince,’ my father said, ‘but an Ealdorman’s heir.’ Yet he was pleased with his brother’s gifts to me and added two of his own, a short sword and a horse. The sword was an old blade, cut down, with a leather scabbard lined with fleece. It had a chunky hilt, was clumsy, yet that night I slept with the blade under my blanket.

      The next morning, as my stepmother wept on the ramparts of the High Gate, and under a blue, clean sky, we rode to war. Two hundred and fifty men went south, following our banner of the wolf’s head.

      That was in the year 867, and it was the first time I ever went to war.

      And I have never ceased.

      ‘You will not fight in the shield wall,’ my father said.

      ‘No, father.’

      ‘Only men can stand in the shield wall,’ he said, ‘but you will watch, you will learn, and you will discover that the most dangerous stroke is not the sword or axe that you can see, but the one you cannot see, the blade that comes beneath the shields to bite your ankles.’

      He grudgingly gave me much other advice as we followed the long road south. Of the two hundred and fifty men who went to Eoferwic from Bebbanburg, one hundred and twenty were on horseback. Those were my father’s household men or else the wealthier farmers, the ones who could afford some kind of armour and had shields and swords. Most of the men were not wealthy, but they were sworn to my father’s cause, and they marched with sickles, spears, reaping hooks, fish gaffs and axes. Some carried hunting bows, and all had been ordered to bring a week’s food which was mostly hard bread, harder cheese and smoked fish. Many were accompanied by women. My father had ordered that no women were to march south, but he did not send them back, reckoning that the women would follow anyway, and that men fought better when their wives or lovers were watching, and he was confident that those women would see the levy of Northumbria give the Danes a terrible slaughter. He claimed we were the hardest men of England, much harder than the soft Mercians. ‘Your mother was a Mercian,’ he added, but said nothing more. He never talked of her. I knew they had been married less than a year, that she had died giving birth to me, and that she was an Ealdorman’s daughter, but as far as my father was concerned she might never have existed. He claimed to despise the Mercians, but not as much as he scorned the coddled West Saxons. ‘They don’t know hardship in Wessex,’ he maintained, but he reserved his severest judgment for the East Anglians. ‘They live in marshes,’ he once told me, ‘and live like frogs.’ We Northumbrians had always hated the East Anglians for long ago they had defeated us in battle, killing Æthelfrith, our king and husband to the Bebba after whom our fortress was named. I was to discover later that the East Anglians had given horses and winter shelter to the Danes who had captured Eoferwic, so my father was right to despise them. They were treacherous frogs.

      Father Beocca rode south with us. My father did not much like the priest, but did not want to go to war without a man of God to say prayers. Beocca, in turn, was devoted to my father who had freed him from slavery and provided him with his education. My father could have worshipped the devil and Beocca, I think, would have turned a blind eye. He was young, clean-shaven and extraordinarily ugly, with a fearful squint, a flattened nose, unruly red hair and a palsied left hand. He was also very clever, though I did not appreciate it then, resenting that he gave me lessons. The poor man had tried so hard to teach me letters, but I mocked his efforts, preferring to get a beating from my father to concentrating on the alphabet.

      We followed the Roman road, crossing their great wall at the Tine, and still going south. The Romans, my father said, had been giants who built wondrous things, but they had gone back to Rome and the giants had died and now the only Romans left were priests, but the giants’ roads were still there and, as we went south, more men joined us until a horde marched on the moors either side of the stony road’s broken surface. The men slept in the open, though my father and his chief retainers would bed for the night in abbeys or barns.

      We also straggled. Even at nine years old I noticed how we straggled. Men had brought liquor with them, or else they stole mead or ale from the villages we passed, and they frequently got drunk and simply collapsed at the roadside and no one seemed to care. ‘They’ll catch up,’ my father said carelessly.

      ‘It’s not good,’ Father Beocca told me.

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