The Last Kingdom (24 page)

We planned 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.

I woke Brida and we were both still. Nihtgenga growled softly until Brida whispered that he should be quiet.

Men were moving in the dark, and some were coming to the charcoal pile and we slipped away into the blackness under the trees. We could both move like shadows and Nihtgenga would make no sound without Brida’s permission. We had gone uphill because the voices were downhill, and we crouched in utter darkness and heard men moving around the charcoal pile, and then there was the crack of flint and iron and a small flame sprung up. Whoever it was searched for the folk they reckoned would be watching the charcoal, but they did not find us, and after a while they moved downhill and we followed.

Dawn was just leeching the eastern sky with a wolf-gray edge. There was frost on the leaves and a small wind. “We should get to Ragnar,” I whispered.

“We can’t,” Brida said, and she was right, for there were scores of men in the trees and they were between us and the hall, and we were much too far away to shout a warning to Ragnar, and so we tried to go around the strangers, hurrying along the hill’s ridge so we could drop down to the forge where Ealdwulf slept, but before we had gone halfway the fires burst into life.

That dawn is seared on my memory, burnt there by the flames of a hall-burning. There was nothing we could do except watch. Kjartan and Sven had come to our valley with over a hundred men and now they attacked Ragnar by setting fire to the thatch of his hall. I could see Kjartan and his son, standing amid the flaming torches that lit the space in front of the door, and as folk came from the hall they were struck by spears or arrows so that a pile of bodies grew in the firelight, which became ever brighter as the thatch flared and finally burst into a tumultuous blaze that outshone the light of the gray dawn. We could hear people and animals screaming inside. Some men burst from the hall with weapons in hand, but they were cut down by the soldiers who surrounded the hall, men at every door or window, men who killed the fugitives, though not all of them. The younger women were pushed aside under guard, and Thyra was given to Sven who struck her hard on the head and left her huddled at his feet as he helped kill her family.

I did not see Ravn, Ragnar, or Sigrid die, though die they did, and I suspect they were burned in the hall when the roof collapsed in a roaring gout of flame, smoke, and wild sparks. Ealdwulf also died and I was in tears. I wanted to draw Serpent-Breath and rush into those men around the flames, but Brida held me down, and then she whispered to me that Kjartan and Sven would surely search the nearby woods for any survivors, and she persuaded me to pull back into the lightening trees. Dawn was a sullen iron band across the sky and the sun cloud-hidden in shame as we stumbled uphill to find shelter among some fallen rocks deep in the high wood.

All that day the smoke rose from Ragnar’s hall, and the next night there was a glow above the tangled black branches of the trees, and the next morning there were still wisps of smoke coming from the valley where we had been happy. We crept closer, both of us hungry, to see Kjartan and his men raking through the embers.

They pulled out lumps and twists of melted iron, a mail coat fused into a crumpled horror, silver welded into chunks, and they took whatever they found that could be sold or used again. At times they appeared frustrated, as if they had not found enough treasure, though they took enough. A wagon carried Ealdwulf’s tools and anvil down the valley. Thyra had a rope put around her neck, was placed on a horse and led away by one-eyed Sven. Kjartan pissed on a heap of glowing cinders, then laughed as one of his men said something. By afternoon they were gone.

I was sixteen and no longer a child.

And Ragnar, my lord, who had made me his son, was dead.

The bodies were still in the ashes, though it was impossible to tell who was who, or even to tell men from women for the heat had shrunk the dead so they all looked like children and the children like babies. Those who had died outside the hall were recognizable and I found Ealdwulf there, and Anwend, both stripped naked. I looked for Ragnar, but could not identify him. I wondered why he had not burst from the hall, sword in hand, and decided he knew he was going to die and did not want to give his enemy the satisfaction of seeing it.

We found food in one of the storage pits that Kjartan’s men had missed as they searched the hall. We had to shift hot charred pieces of timber to uncover the pit, and the bread, cheese, and meat had all been soured by smoke and ash, but we ate. Neither of us spoke. At dusk some English folk came cautiously to the hall and stared at the destruction. They were wary of me, thinking of me as a Dane, and they dropped to their knees as I approached. They were the lucky ones, for Kjartan had slaughtered every Northumbrian in Synningth-wait, down to the last baby, and had loudly blamed them for the hall-burning. Men must have known it was his doing, but his savagery at Synningthwait confused things and, in time, many folk came to believe that the English had attacked Ragnar and Kjartan had taken revenge for their attack. But these English had escaped his swords. “You will come back in the morning,” I told them, “and bury the dead.”

“Yes, lord.”

“You will be rewarded,” I promised them, thinking I would have to surrender one of my precious arm rings.

“Yes, lord,” one of them repeated, and then I asked them if they knew why this had happened and they looked nervous, but finally one said he had been told that Earl Ragnar was planning a revolt against Ricsig. One of the Englishmen who served Kjartan had told him that when he went down to their hovels to find ale. He had also told them to hide themselves before Kjartan slaughtered the valley’s inhabitants.

“You know who I am?” I asked the man.

“The Lord Uhtred, lord.”

“Tell no man I’m alive,” I said and he just stared at me. Kjartan, I decided, must think that I was dead, that I was one of the shrunken charred bodies in the hall, and while Kjartan did not care about me, Sven did, and I did not want him hunting me. “And return in the morning,” I went on, “and you will have silver.”

There is a thing called the blood feud. All societies have them, even the West Saxons have them, despite their vaunted piety. Kill a member of my family and I shall kill one of yours, and so it goes on, generation after generation or until one family is all dead, and Kjartan had just wished a blood feud on himself. I did not know how, I did not know where, I could not know when, but I would revenge Ragnar. I swore it that night.

And I became rich that night. Brida waited until the English folk were gone and then she led me to the burned remnants of Ealdwulf’s forge and she showed me the vast piece of scorched elm, a section of a tree’s trunk, that had held Ealdwulf’s anvil. “We must move that,” she said.

It took both of us to tip over that monstrous piece of elm, and beneath it was nothing but earth, but Brida told me to dig there and, for want of other tools, I used Wasp-Sting and had only gone down a handbreadth when I struck metal. Gold. Real gold. Coins and small lumps. The coins were strange, incised with a writing I had never seen before, neither Danish runes nor English letters, but something weird that I later learned came from the people far away who live in the desert and worship a god called Allah who I think must be a god of fire because
al,
in our English tongue, means burning. There are so many gods, but those folk who worshipped Allah made good coin and that night we unearthed forty-eight of them, and as much again in loose gold, and Brida told me she had watched Ragnar and Ealdwulf bury the hoard one night. There was gold, silver pennies, and four pieces of jet, and doubtless this was the treasure Kjartan had expected to find, for he knew Ragnar was wealthy, but Ragnar had hidden it well. All men hide a reserve of wealth for the day when disaster comes. I have buried hoards in my time, and even forgot where one was and perhaps, years from now, some lucky man will find it. That hoard, Ragnar’s hoard, belonged to his eldest son, but Ragnar, it was strange to think he was just Ragnar now, no longer Ragnar the Younger, was far away in Ireland and I doubted he was even alive, for Kjartan would surely have sent men to kill him. But alive or dead he was not here and so we took the hoard.

“What do we do?” Brida asked that night. We were back in the woods.

I already knew what we would do; perhaps I had always known. I am an Englishman of England, but I had been a Dane while Ragnar was alive for Ragnar loved me and cared for me and called me his son, but Ragnar was dead and I had no other friends among the Danes. I had no friends among the English, for that matter, except for Brida, of course, and unless I counted Beocca who was certainly fond of me in a complicated way, but the English were my folk and I think I had known that ever since the moment at Æsc’s Hill where for the first time I saw Englishmen beat Danes. I had felt pride then. Destiny is all, and the spinners touched me at Æsc’s Hill, and now, at last, I would respond to their touch.

“We go south,” I said.

“To a nunnery?” Brida asked, thinking of Ælswith and her bitter ambitions.

“No.” I had no wish to join Alfred and learn to read and bruise my knees with praying. “I have relatives in Mercia.” I said. I had never met them, knew nothing of them, but they were family and family has its obligations, and the Danish hold on Mercia was looser than elsewhere and perhaps I could find a home and I would not be a burden because I carried gold.

I had said I knew what I would do, but that is not wholly true. The truth is that I was in a well of misery, tempted to despair, and with tears ever close to my eyes. I wanted life to go on as before, to have Ragnar as my father, to feast and to laugh. But destiny grips us and, the next morning, in a soft winter rain, we buried the dead, paid silver coins, and then walked southward. We were a boy on the edge of being a grown man, a girl, and a dog, and we were going to nowhere.

I
settled in southern Mercia. I found another uncle, this one called Ealdorman Æthelred, son of Æthelred, brother of Æthelwulf, father of Æthelred, and brother to another Æthelred who had been the father of Ælswith who was married to Alfred, and Ealdorman Æthelred, with his confusing family, grudgingly acknowledged me as a nephew, though the welcome became slightly warmer when I presented him with two gold coins and swore on a crucifix that it was all the money I possessed. He assumed Brida was my lover, in which he was right, and thereafter he ignored her.

The journey south was wearisome, as all winter journeys are. For a time we sheltered at an upland homestead near Meslach and the folk there took us for outlaws. We arrived at their hovel in an evening of sleet and wind, both of us half frozen, and we paid for food and shelter with a few links from the chain of the silver crucifix Ælswith had given me, and in the night the two eldest sons came to collect the rest of our silver, but Brida and I were awake, half expecting such an attempt, and I had Serpent-Breath and Brida had Wasp-Sting and we threatened to geld both boys. The family was friendly after that, or at least scared into docility, believing me when I told them that Brida was a sorceress. They were pagans, some of the many English heretics left in the high hills, and they had no idea that the Danes were swarming over England. They lived far from any village, grunted prayers to Thor and Odin, and sheltered us for six weeks. We worked for our keep by chopping wood, helping their ewes give birth, and then standing guard over the sheep pens to keep the wolves at bay.

In early spring we moved on. We avoided Hreapandune, for that was where Burghred kept his court, the same court to which the hapless Egbert of Northumbria had fled, and there were many Danes settled around the town. I did not fear Danes, I could talk to them in their own tongue, knew their jests, and even liked them, but if word got back to Eoferwic that Uhtred of Bebbanburg still lived then I feared Kjartan would put a reward on my head. So I asked at every settlement about Ealdorman Æthelwulf who had died fighting the Danes at Readingum, and I learned he had lived at a place called Deoraby, but that the Danes had taken his lands, and his younger brother had gone to Cirrenceastre, which lay in the far southern parts of Mercia, very close to the West Saxon border, and that was good because the Danes were thickest in Mercia’s north, and so we went to Cirrenceastre and found it was another Roman town, well walled with stone and timber, and that Æthelwulf’s brother, Æthelred, was now ealdorman and lord of the place.

We arrived when he sat in court and we waited in his hall among the petitioners and oath-takers. We watched as two men were flogged and a third branded on the face and sent into outlawry for cattle-thieving, and then a steward brought us forward, thinking we had come to seek redress for a grievance, and the steward told us to bow, and I refused and the man tried to make me bend at the waist and I struck him in the face, and that got Æthelred’s attention. He was a tall man, well over forty years old, almost hairless except for a huge beard, and as gloomy as Guthrum. When I struck the steward he beckoned to his guards who were lolling at the hall’s edges. “Who are you?” he growled at me.

“I am the ealdorman Uhtred,” I said, and the title stilled the guards and made the steward back nervously away. “I am the son of Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I went on, “and of Æthelgifu, his wife. I am your nephew.”

He stared at me. I must have looked a wreck for I was travel stained and long haired and ragged, but I had two swords and monstrous pride. “You are Æthelgifu’s boy?” he asked.

“Your sister’s son,” I said, and even then I was not certain this was the right family, but it was, and Ealdorman Æthelred made the sign of the cross in memory of his younger sister, whom he hardly remembered, and waved the guards back to the hall’s sides and asked me what I wanted.

“Shelter,” I said, and he nodded grudgingly. I told him I had been a prisoner of the Danes ever since my father’s death, and he accepted that willingly enough, but in truth he was not very interested in me; indeed my arrival was a nuisance for we were two more mouths to feed, but family imposes obligation, and Ealdorman Æthelred met his. He also tried to have me killed.

His lands, which stretched to the river Sæfern in the west, were being raided by Britons from Wales. The Welsh were old enemies, the ones who had tried to stop our ancestors from taking England; indeed their name for England is Lloegyr, which means the Lost Lands, and they were forever raiding or thinking of raiding or singing songs about raiding, and they had a great hero called Arthur who was supposed to be sleeping in his grave and one day he was going to rise up and lead the Welsh to a great victory over the English and so take back the Lost Lands, though so far that has not happened.

About a month after I arrived Æthelred heard that a Welsh war-band had crossed the Sæfern and was taking cattle from his lands near Fromtun and he rode to clear them out. He went southward with fifty men, but ordered the chief of his household troops, a warrior called Tatwine, to block their retreat near the ancient Roman town of Gleawecestre. He gave Tatwine a force of twenty men that included me. “You’re a big lad,” Æthelred said to me before he left. “Have you ever fought in a shield wall?”

I hesitated, wanting to lie, but decided that poking a sword between men’s legs at Readingum was not the same thing. “No, lord,” I said.

“Time you learned. That sword must be good for something. Where did you get it?”

“It was my father’s, lord,” I lied, for I did not want to explain that I had not been a prisoner of the Danes, nor that the sword had been a gift, for Æthelred would have expected me to give it to him. “It is the only thing of my father’s I have,” I added pathetically, and he grunted, waved me away, and told Tatwine to put me in the shield wall if it came to a fight.

I know that because Tatwine told me so when everything was over. Tatwine was a huge man, as tall as me, with a chest like a blacksmith’s and thick arms on which he made marks with ink and a needle. The marks were just blotches, but he boasted that each one was a man he had killed in battle, and I once tried to count them, but gave up at thirty-eight. His sleeves hid the rest. He was not happy to have me in his band of warriors, and even less happy when Brida insisted on accompanying me, but I told him she had sworn an oath to my father never to leave my side and that she was a cunning woman who knew spells that would confuse the enemy, and he believed both lies and probably thought that once I was dead his men could have their joy of Brida while he took Serpent-Breath back to Æthelred.

The Welsh had crossed the Sæfern high up, then turned south into the lush water meadows where cattle grew fat. They liked to come in fast and go out fast, before the Mercians could gather forces, but Æthelred had heard of their coming in good time and, as he rode south, Tatwine led us north to the bridge across the Sæfern, which was the quickest route home to Wales.

The raiders came straight into that trap. We arrived at the bridge at dusk, slept in a field, were awake before dawn, and, just as the sun rose, saw the Welshmen and their stolen cattle coming toward us. They made an effort to ride farther north, but their horses were tired, ours were fresh, and they realized there was no escape and so they returned to the bridge. We did the same and, dismounted, formed the shield wall. The Welsh made their wall. There were twenty-eight of them, all savage-looking men with shaggy hair and long beards and tattered coats, but their weapons looked well cared for and their shields were stout.

Tatwine spoke some of their language and he told them that if they surrendered now they would be treated mercifully by his lord. Their only response was to howl at us, and one of them turned around, lowered his breeches, and showed us his dirty backside, which passed as a Welsh insult.

Nothing happened then. They were in their shield wall on the road, and our shield wall blocked the bridge, and they shouted insults and Tatwine forbade our men to shout back, and once or twice it seemed as if the Welsh were going to run to their horses and try to escape by galloping northward, but every time they hinted at such a move, Tatwine ordered the servants to bring up our horses, and the Welsh understood that we would pursue and overtake them and so they went back to the shield wall and jeered at us for not assaulting them. Tatwine was not such a fool. The Welshmen outnumbered us, which meant that they could overlap us, but by staying on the bridge our flanks were protected by its Roman parapets and he wanted them to come at us there. He placed me in the center of the line, and then stood behind me. I understood later that he was ready to step into my place when I fell. I had an old shield with a loose handle loaned to me by my uncle.

Tatwine again tried to persuade them to surrender, promising that only half of them would be put to death, but as the other half would all lose a hand and an eye, it was not a tempting offer. Still they waited, and might have waited until nightfall had not some local people come along and one of them had a bow and some arrows, and he began shooting at the Welsh who, by now, had been drinking steadily through the morning. Tatwine had given us all some ale, but not much.

I was nervous. More than nervous, I was terrified. I had no armor, while the rest of Tatwine’s men were in mail or good leather. Tatwine had a helmet, I had hair. I expected to die, but I remembered my lessons and slung Serpent-Breath on my back, strapping her sword belt around my throat. A sword is much quicker to draw over the shoulder, and I expected to begin the fight with Wasp-Sting. My throat was dry, a muscle in my right leg quivered, my belly felt sour, but entwined with that fear was excitement. This was what life had led to, a shield wall, and if I survived this then I would be a warrior.

The arrows flew one after the other, mostly thumping into shields, but one lucky shaft slid past a shield and sank into a man’s chest and he fell back, and suddenly the Welsh leader lost patience and gave a great scream. And they charged.

It was a small shield wall, not a great battle. A cattle skirmish, not a clash of armies, but it was my first shield wall, and I instinctively rattled my shield against my neighbors’ shields, to make sure they touched, and I lowered Wasp-Sting, meaning to bring her up under the rim, and I crouched slightly to receive the charge, and the Welsh were howling like madmen, a noise meant to scare us, but I was too intent on doing what I had been taught to be distracted by the howls.

“Now!” Tatwine shouted and we all lunged our shields forward and there was a blow on mine like Ealdwulf’s hammer thumping the anvil, and I was aware of an ax swinging overhead to split my skull and I ducked, raising the shield, and stabbed Wasp-Sting up into the man’s groin. She went smooth and true, just as Toki had taught me, and that groin stroke is a wicked blow, one of the killer strikes, and the man screamed a terrible scream, just like a woman in childbirth, and the short sword was stuck in his body, blood pouring down her hilt and the ax tumbled down my back as I straightened. I drew Serpent-Breath across my left shoulder and swung at the man attacking my right-hand neighbor. It was a good stroke, straight into the skull, and I ripped her back, letting Ealdwulf’s edge do its work, and the man with Wasp-Sting in his crotch was under my feet so I stamped on his face. I was shouting now, shouting in Danish, shouting their deaths, and it was all suddenly easy, and I stepped over my first victim to finish off the second, and that meant I had broken our shield wall, which did not matter because Tatwine was there to guard the space. I was in the Welsh space now, but with two dead men beside me, and a third man turned on me, sword coming in a great scything stroke that I met with the shield boss and, as he tried to cover his body with his own shield, I lunged Serpent-Breath into his throat, ripped her out, swung her all the way around, and she clanged against a shield behind me, and I turned, all savagery and anger now, and I charged a fourth man, throwing him down with my weight, and he began to shout for mercy and received none.

The joy of it. The sword joy. I was dancing with joy, joy seething in me, the battle joy that Ragnar had so often spoken of, the warrior joy. If a man has not known it, then he is no man. It was no battle, that, no proper slaughter, just a thief-killing, but it was my first fight and the gods had moved in me, had given my arm speed and my shield strength, and when it was done, and when I danced in the blood of the dead, I knew I was good. Knew I was more than good. I could have conquered the world at that moment and my only regret was that Ragnar had not seen me, but then I thought he might be watching from Valhalla and I raised Serpent-Breath to the clouds and shouted his name. I have seen other young men come from their first fights with that same joy, and I have buried them after their next battle. The young are fools and I was young. But I was good.

The cattle thieves were finished. Twelve were dead or so badly wounded as to be near death and the others had fled. We caught them easily enough and, one by one, we killed them, and afterward I went back to the man whose shield had kissed mine when the walls clashed and I had to put my right foot into his bloody crotch to drag Wasp-Sting free of his clinging flesh, and at that moment all I wanted was more enemies to kill.

“Where did you learn to fight, boy?” Tatwine asked me.

I turned on him as though he was an enemy, pride flaring in my face and Wasp-Sting twitching as if she was hungry for blood. “I am an ealdorman of Northumbria,” I told him.

He paused, wary of me, then nodded. “Yes, lord,” he said, then reached forward and felt the muscles of my right arm. “Where did you learn to fight?” he asked, leaving off the insulting “boy.”

“I watched the Danes.”

“Watched,” he said tonelessly. He looked into my eyes, then grinned and embraced me. “God love me,” he said, “but you’re a savage one. Your first shield wall?”

“My first,” I admitted.

“But not your last, I dare say, not your last.”

He was right about that.

I have sounded immodest, but I have told the truth. These days I employ poets to sing my praises, but only because that is what a lord is supposed to do, though I often wonder why a man should get paid for mere words. These word-stringers make nothing, grow nothing, kill no enemies, catch no fish, and raise no cattle. They just take silver in exchange for words, which are free anyway. It is a clever trick, but in truth they are about as much use as priests.