The Last Kingdom (7 page)

“Half naked,” Sven muttered, and for his pains took a thump on the head from his father.

“A game,” Kjartan appealed to Ragnar, “just a game, lord.”

“No boy plays such games with my daughter,” Ragnar said. I had rarely seen him angry, but he was angry now, grim and hard, no trace of the bighearted man who could make a hall echo with laughter. He dismounted and drew his sword, his battle blade called Heart-Breaker, and he held the tip toward Kjartan. “Well?” he asked. “Do you dispute my right?”

“No, lord,” Kjartan said, “but he is a good boy, strong and a hard worker, and he will serve you well.”

“And he has seen things he should not see,” Ragnar said, and he tossed Heart-Breaker into the air so that her long blade turned in the sun and he caught her by the hilt as she dropped, but now he was holding her backward, as if she were a dagger rather than a sword. “Uhtred!” Ragnar called, making me jump. “He says she was only half naked. Is that true?”

“Yes, lord.”

“Then only half a punishment,” Ragnar said, and he drove the sword forward, hilt first, straight into Sven’s face. The hilts of our swords are heavy, sometimes decorated with precious things, but however pretty they appear, the hilts are still brutal lumps of metal, and Heart-Breaker’s hilt, banded with silver, crushed Sven’s right eye. Crushed it to jelly, blinding it instantly, and Ragnar spat at him then slid his blade back into its fleece-lined scabbard.

Sven was crouching, whimpering, his hands clasped over his ruined eye.

“It is over,” Ragnar said to Kjartan.

Kjartan hesitated. He was angry, shamed, and unhappy, but he could not win a trial of strength with Earl Ragnar and so, at last, he nodded. “It is over,” he agreed.

“And you no longer serve me,” Ragnar said coldly.

We rode home.

The hard winter came, the brooks froze, snow drifted to fill the streambeds, and the world was cold, silent, and white. Wolves came to the edge of the woods and the midday sun was pale, as though its strength had been leeched away by the north wind.

Ragnar rewarded me with a silver arm ring, the first I ever received, while Kjartan was sent away with his family. He would no longer command one of Ragnar’s ships and he would no longer receive a share of Ragnar’s generosity, for now he was a man without a lord and he went to Eoferwic where he joined the garrison holding the town. It was not a prestigious job, any Dane with ambition would rather serve a lord like Ragnar who could make him rich, while the men guarding Eoferwic were denied any chance of plunder. Their task was to watch across the flat fields outside the city and to make certain that King Egbert fomented no trouble, but I was relieved that Sven was gone, and absurdly pleased with my arm ring. The Danes loved arm rings. The more a man possessed, the more he was regarded, for the rings came from success. Ragnar had rings of silver and rings of gold, rings carved as dragons and rings inlaid with glittering stones. When he moved you could hear the rings clinking. The rings could be used as money if there were no coins. I remember watching a Dane take off an arm ring and hack it to shreds with an ax, then offer a merchant scraps of the ring until the scales showed he had paid sufficient silver. That was down in the bigger valley, in a large village where most of Ragnar’s younger men had settled and where traders brought goods from Eoferwic. The incoming Danes had found a small English settlement in the valley, but they needed more space for new houses and to make it they had burned down a grove of hazels, and that was what Ragnar called the place, Synningthwait, which meant the place cleared by fire. Doubtless the village had an English name, but it was already being forgotten.

“We’re in England to stay now,” Ragnar told me as we went home one day after buying supplies in Synningthwait. The road was a track pounded in the snow and our horses picked a careful path between the drifts through which the black twigs of the hedge tops just showed. I was leading the two pack horses laden with their precious bags of salt and asking Ragnar my usual questions; where swallows went in winter, why elves gave us hiccups, and why Ivar was called the Boneless. “Because he’s so thin, of course,” Ragnar said, “so that he looks as if you could roll him up like a cloak.”

“Why doesn’t Ubba have a nickname?”

“He does. He’s called Ubba the Horrible.” He laughed, because he had made the nickname up, and I laughed because I was happy. Ragnar liked my company and, with my long fair hair, men mistook me for his son and I liked that. Rorik should have been with us, but he was sick that day, and the women were plucking herbs and chanting spells. “He’s often sick,” Ragnar said, “not like Ragnar” he meant his eldest son who helped hold on to Ivar’s lands in Ireland. “Ragnar’s built like an ox,” he went on, “never gets sick! He’s like you, Uhtred.” He smiled, thinking of his eldest son, whom he missed. “He’ll take land and thrive. But Rorik? Perhaps I shall have to give him this land. He can’t go back to Denmark.”

“Why not?”

“Denmark is bad land,” Ragnar explained. “It’s either flat and sandy and you can’t grow a fart on that sort of field, or across the water it’s great steep hills with little patches of meadow where you work like a dog and starve.”

“Across the water?” I asked, and he explained that the Danes came from a country that was divided into two parts, and the two parts were surrounded by countless islands, and that the nearer part, from where he came, was very flat and very sandy, and that the other part, which lay to the east across a great sound of water, was where the mountains were. “And there are Svear there, too,” he went on.

“Svear?”

“A tribe. Like us. They worship Thor and Odin, but they speak differently.” He shrugged. “We get along with the Svear, and with the Norse.” The Svear, the Norse, and the Danes were the Northmen, the men who went on Viking expeditions, but it was the Danes who had come to take my land, though I did not say that to Ragnar. I had learned to hide my soul, or perhaps I was confused. Northumbrian or Dane? Which was I? What did I want to be?

“Suppose,” I asked, “that the rest of the English do not want us to stay here.” I used the word
us
deliberately.

He laughed at that. “The English can want what they like! But you saw what happened at Yorvik.” That was how the Danes pronounced Eoferwic. For some reason they found that name difficult, so they said Yorvik instead. “Who was the bravest English fighter at Yorvik?” Ragnar asked. “You! A child! You charged me with that little saxe! It was a gutting knife, not a sword, and you tried to kill me! I almost died laughing.” He leaned over and cuffed me affectionately. “Of course the English don’t want us here,” he went on, “but what can they do? Next year we’ll take Mercia, then East Anglia, and finally Wessex.”

“My father always said Wessex was the strongest kingdom,” I said. My father had said nothing of the sort. Indeed he despised the men of Wessex because he thought them effete and overpious, but I was trying to provoke Ragnar.

I failed. “It’s the richest kingdom,” he said, “but that doesn’t make it strong. Men make a kingdom strong, not gold.” He grinned at me. “We’re the Danes. We don’t lose, we win, and Wessex will fall.”

“It will?”

“It has a new weak king,” he said dismissively, “and if he dies, then his son is a mere child, so perhaps they’d put the new king’s brother on the throne instead. We’d like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the brother is another weakling. He’s called Alfred.”

Alfred. That was the first time I ever heard of Alfred of Wessex. I thought nothing of it at the time. Why should I have?

“Alfred,” Ragnar continued scathingly. “All he cares about is rutting girls, which is good! Don’t tell Sigrid I said that, but there’s nothing wrong with unsheathing the sword when you can, but Alfred spends half his time rutting and the other half praying to his god to forgive him for rutting. How can a god disapprove of a good hump?”

“How do you know about Alfred?” I asked.

“Spies, Uhtred, spies. Traders, mostly. They talk to folk in Wessex, so we know all about King Æthelred and his brother Alfred. And Alfred’s sick as a stoat half the time.” He paused, perhaps thinking of his younger son who was ill. “It’s a weak house,” he went on, “and the West Saxons should get rid of them and put a real man on the throne, except they won’t, and when Wessex falls there will be no more England.”

“Perhaps they’ll find their strong king,” I said.

“No,” Ragnar said firmly. “In Denmark,” he went on, “our kings are the hard men, and if their sons are soft, then a man from another family becomes king, but in England they believe the throne passes through a woman’s legs. So a feeble creature like Alfred could become king just because his father was a king.”

“You have a king in Denmark?”

“A dozen. I could call myself king if I fancied, except Ivar and Ubba might not like it, and no man offends them lightly.”

I rode in silence, listening to the horses’ hooves crunching and squeaking in the snow. I was thinking of Ragnar’s dream, the dream of no more England, of her land given to the Danes. “What happens to me?” I finally blurted out.

“You?” He sounded surprised that I had asked. “What happens to you, Uhtred, is what you make happen. You will grow, you will learn the sword, you will learn the way of the shield wall, you will learn the oar, you will learn to give honor to the gods, and then you will use what you have learned to make your life good or bad.”

“I want Bebbanburg,” I said.

“Then you must take it. Perhaps I will help you, but not yet. Before that we go south, and before we go south we must persuade Odin to look on us with favor.”

I still did not understand the Danish way of religion. They took it much less seriously than we English, but the women prayed often enough and once in a while a man would kill a good beast, dedicate it to the gods, and mount its bloody head above his door to show that there would be a feast in Thor or Odin’s honor in his house, but the feast, though it was an act of worship, was always the same as any other drunken feast.

I remember the Yule feast best because that was the week Weland came. He arrived on the coldest day of the winter when the snow was heaped in drifts, and he came on foot with a sword by his side, a bow on his shoulder, and rags on his back and he knelt respectfully outside Ragnar’s house. Sigrid made him come inside and she fed him and gave him ale, but when he had eaten he insisted on going back into the snow and waiting for Ragnar who was up in the hills, hunting.

Weland was a snakelike man, that was my very first thought on seeing him. He reminded me of my uncle Ælfric, slender, sly, and secretive, and I disliked him on sight and I felt a flicker of fear as I watched him prostrate himself in the snow when Ragnar returned. “My name is Weland,” he said, “and I am in need of a lord.”

“You are not a youth,” Ragnar said, “so why do you not have a lord?”

“He died, lord, when his ship sank.”

“Who was he?”

“Snorri, lord.”

“Which Snorri?”

“Son of Eric, son of Grimm, from Birka.”

“And you did not drown?” Ragnar asked as he dismounted and gave me the reins of his horse.

“I was ashore, lord. I was sick.”

“Your family? Your home?”

“I am son of Godfred, lord, from Haithabu.”

“Haithabu!” Ragnar said sourly. “A trader?”

“I am a warrior, lord.”

“So why come to me?”

Weland shrugged. “Men say you are a good lord, a ring-giver, but if you turn me down, lord, I shall try other men.”

“And you can use that sword, Weland Godfredson?”

“As a woman can use her tongue, lord.”

“You’re that good, eh?” Ragnar asked, as ever unable to resist a jest. He gave Weland permission to stay, sending him to Synningthwait to find shelter, and afterward, when I said I did not like Weland, Ragnar just shrugged and said the stranger needed kindness. We were sitting in the house, half choking from the smoke that writhed about the rafters. “There is nothing worse, Uhtred,” Ragnar said, “than for a man to have no lord. No ring-giver,” he added, touching his own arm rings.

“I don’t trust him,” Sigrid put in from the fire where she was making bannocks on a stone. Rorik, recovering from his sickness, was helping her, while Thyra, as ever, was spinning. “I think he’s an outlaw,” Sigrid said.

“He probably is,” Ragnar allowed, “but my ship doesn’t care if its oars are pulled by outlaws.” He reached for a bannock and had his hand slapped away by Sigrid who said the cakes were for Yule.

The Yule feast was the biggest celebration of the year, a whole week of food and ale and mead and fights and laughter and drunken men vomiting in the snow. Ragnar’s men gathered at Synningthwait and there were horse races, wrestling matches, competitions in throwing spears, axes, and rocks, and, my favorite, the tug-of-war where two teams of men or boys tried to pull the other into a cold stream. I saw Weland watching me as I wrestled with a boy a year older than me. Weland already looked more prosperous. His rags were gone and he wore a cloak of fox fur. I got drunk that Yule for the first time, helplessly drunk so that my legs would not work, and I lay moaning with a throbbing head and Ragnar roared with laughter and made me drink more mead until I threw up. Ragnar, of course, won the drinking competition, and Ravn recited a long poem about some ancient hero who killed a monster and then the monster’s mother who was even more fearsome than her son, but I was too drunk to remember much of it.

And after the Yule feast I discovered something new about the Danes and their gods, for Ragnar had ordered a great pit dug in the woods above his house, and Rorik and I helped make the pit in a clearing. We axed through tree roots, shoveled out earth, and still Ragnar wanted it deeper, and he was only satisfied when he could stand in the base of the pit and not see across its lip. A ramp led down into the hole, beside which was a great heap of excavated soil.

The next night all Ragnar’s men, but no women, walked to the pit in the darkness. We boys carried pitch-soaked torches that flamed under the trees, casting flickering shadows that melted into the surrounding darkness. The men were all dressed and armed as though they were going to war.