The Last Kingdom sc-1

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Spare me, God,” I heard him say, “spare me. I am a sinner.” He vomited then, though he did not sound drunk, and after he had spewed up he moaned. I sensed he was a young man. Then a flap of the tent lifted and a wash of candlelight spilled across the grass. I froze, still as a log, and saw that it was indeed a young man who was so miserable, and then also saw, to my astonishment, that the person who had lifted the tent flap was Father Beocca. I had thought it a coincidence that there should be two priests with that name, but it was no coincidence at all. It was indeed redhaired, crosseyed Beocca and he was here, in Mercia.

  “My lord,” Beocca said, dropping the flap and casting darkness over the young man.

  “I am a sinner, father,” the man said. He had stopped sobbing, perhaps because he did not want Beocca to see such evidence of weakness, but his voice was full of sadness. “I am a grievous sinner.”

  “We are all sinners, my lord.”

  “A grievous sinner,” the young man repeated, ignoring Beocca’s solace. “And I am married!”

  “Salvation lies in remorse, my lord.”

  “Then, God knows, I should be redeemed for my remorse would fill the sky.” He lifted his head to stare at the stars. “The flesh, father,” he groaned, “the flesh.”

  Beocca walked toward me, stopped, and turned. He was almost close enough for me to touch, but he had no idea I was there. “God sends temptation to test us, my lord,” he said quietly.

  “He sends women to test us,” the young man said harshly, “and we fail, and then he sends the Danes to punish us for our failure.”

  “His way is hard,” Beocca said, “and no one has ever doubted it.”

  The young man, still kneeling, bowed his head. “I should never have married, father. I should have joined the church. Gone to a monastery.”

  “And God would have found a great servant in you, my lord, but he had other plans for you. If your brother dies…”

  “Pray God he does not! What sort of king would I be?”

  “God’s king, my lord.”

  So that, I thought, was Alfred. That was the very first time I ever saw him or heard his voice and he never knew. I lay in the grass, listening, as Beocca consoled the prince for yielding to temptation. It seemed Alfred had humped a servant girl and, immediately afterward, had been overcome by physical pain and what he called spiritual torment.

  “What you must do, my lord,” Beocca said, “is bring the girl into your service.”

  “No!” Alfred protested.

  A harp began to play in the tent and both men checked to listen, then Beocca crouched by the unhappy prince and put a hand on his shoulder. “Bring the girl into your service,” Beocca repeated, “and resist her. Lay that tribute before God, let him see your strength, and he will reward you. Thank God for tempting you, lord, and praise him when you resist the temptation.”

  “God will kill me,” Alfred said bitterly. “I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Not after Osferth.” Osferth? The name meant nothing to me. Later, much later, I discovered Osferth was Alfred’s bastard son, whelped on another servant girl. “I prayed to be spared the temptation,” Alfred went on, “and to be afflicted with pain as a reminder, and as a distraction, and God in his mercy made me sick, but still I yielded. I am the most miserable of sinners.”

  “We are all sinners,” Beocca said, his good hand still on Alfred’s shoulder, “and we are all fallen short of the glory of God.”

  “None has fallen as far as me,” Alfred moaned.

  “God sees your remorse,” Beocca said, “and he will lift you up. Welcome the temptation, lord,” he went on urgently, “welcome it, resist it, and give thanks to God when you succeed. And God will reward you, lord, he will reward you.”

  “By removing the Danes?” Alfred asked bitterly.

  “He will, my lord, he will.”

  “But not by waiting,” Alfred said, and now there was a sudden hardness in his voice that made Beocca draw away from him. Alfred stood, towering over the priest. “We should attack them!”

  “Burghred knows his business,” Beocca said soothingly, “and so does your brother. The pagans will starve, my lord, if that is God’s will.”

  So I had my answer, and it was that the English were not planning an assault, but rather hoped to starve Snotengaham into surrender. I dared not carry that answer straight back to the town, not while Beocca and Alfred were so close to me, and so I stayed and listened as Beocca prayed with the prince and then, when Alfred was calm, the two moved back to the tent and went inside. And I went back. It took a long time, but no one saw me. I was a true sceadugengan that night, moving among the shadows like a specter, climbing the hill to the town until I could run the last hundred paces and I called Ragnar’s name and the gate creaked open and I was back in Snotengaham. Ragnar took me to see Ubba when the sun rose and, to my surprise, Weland was there, Weland the snake, and he gave me a sour look, though not so sour as the scowl on Ubba’s dark face. “So what did you do?” he growled.

  “I saw no ladders…” I began.

  “What did you do?” Ubba snarled, and so I told my tale from the beginning, how I had crossed the fields and had thought I was being followed, and had dodged like a hare, then gone through the barricade and spoken to the sentry. Ubba stopped me there and looked at Weland. “Well?”

  Weland nodded. “I saw him through the barricade, lord, heard him speak to a man.”

  So Weland had followed me? I looked at Ragnar, who shrugged. “My lord Ubba wanted a second man to go,” he explained, “and Weland offered.”

  Weland gave me a smile, the kind of smile the devil might give a bishop entering hell. “I could not get through the barrier, lord,” he told Ubba.

  “But you saw the boy go through?”

  “And heard him speak to the sentry, lord, though what he said I could not tell.”

  “Did you see ladders?” Ubba asked Weland.

  “No, lord, but I only skirted the fence.”

  Ubba stared at Weland, making him uncomfortable, then transferred his dark eyes to me and made me uncomfortable. “So you got through the barrier,” he said. “So what did you see?”I told him how I had found the large tent, and of the conversation I had overheard, how Alfred had wept because he had sinned, and how he had wanted to attack the town and how the priest had said that God would starve the Danes if that was his will, and Ubba believed me because he reckoned a boy could not make up the story of the servant girl and the prince.

  Besides, I was amused, and it showed. Alfred, I thought, was a pious weakling, a weeping penitent, a pathetic nothing, and even Ubba smiled as I described the sobbing prince and the earnest priest. “So,”

  Ubba asked me, “no ladders?”

  “I saw none, lord.”

  He stared at me with that fearsomely bearded face and then, to my astonishment, he took off one of his arm rings and tossed it to me. “You’re right,” he told Ragnar, “he is a Dane.”

  “He’s a good boy,” Ragnar said.

  “Sometimes the mongrel you find in the field turns out to be useful,” Ubba said, then beckoned to an old man who had been sitting on a stool in the room’s corner.

  The old man was called Storri and, like Ravn, he was a skald, but also a sorcerer and Ubba would do nothing without his advice, and now, without saying a word, Storri took a sheaf of thin white sticks, each the length of a man’s hand, and he held them just above the floor, muttered a prayer to Odin, then let them go. They made a small clattering noise as they fell, and then Storri leaned forward to look at the pattern they made.

  They were runesticks. Many Danes consulted the runesticks, but Storri’s skill at reading the signs was famous, and Ubba was a man so riddled with superstition that he would do nothing unless he believed the gods were on his side. “Well?” he asked impatiently.

  Storri ignored Ubba, instead he stared at the score of sticks, seeing if he could detect a rune letter or a significant pattern in their random scatter. He moved around the small pile,
still peering, then nodded slowly. “It could not be better,” he said.

  “The boy told the truth?’

  “The boy told the truth,” Storri said, “but the sticks talk of today, not of last night, and they tell me all is well.”

  “Good.” Ubba stood and took his sword from a peg on the wall. “No ladders,” he said to Ragnar, “so no assault. We shall go.”

  They had been worried that the Mercians and West Saxons would launch an attack on the walls while they made a raid across the river. The southern bank was lightly garrisoned by the besiegers, holding little more than a cordon of men to deter forage parties crossing the Trente, but that afternoon Ubba led six ships across the river and attacked those Mercians, and the runesticks had not lied for no Danes died and they brought back horses, weapons, armor, and prisoners. Twenty prisoners.

  The Mercians had beheaded two of our men, so now Ubba killed twenty of theirs, and did it in their sight so they could see his revenge. The headless bodies were thrown into the ditch in front of the wall and the twenty heads were stuck on spears and mounted above the northern gate.

  “In war,” Ragnar told me, “be ruthless.”

  “Why did you send Weland to follow me?” I asked him, hurt.

  “Because Ubba insisted on it,” he said.

  “Because you didn’t trust me?”

  “Because Ubba trusts no one except Storri,” he said. “And I trust you, Uhtred.”

  The heads above Snotengaham’s gate were pecked by birds till they were nothing but skulls with hanks of hair that stirred in the summer wind. The Mercians and the West Saxons still did not attack. The sun shone. The river rippled prettily past the town where the ships were drawn up on the bank. Ravn, though he was blind, liked to come to the ramparts where he would demand that I describe all I could see. Nothing changes, I would say, the enemy are still behind their hedge of felled trees, there are clouds above the distant hills, a hawk hunts, the wind ripples the grass, the swifts are gathering in groups, nothing changes, and tell me about the runesticks, I begged him.

  “The sticks!” he laughed.

  “Do they work?”

  He thought about it. “If you can read them, yes. I was good at reading the runes before I lost my eyes.”

  “So they do work,” I said eagerly.

  Ravn gestured toward the landscape he could not see. “Out there, Uhtred,” he said, “there are a dozen signs from the gods, and if you know the signs then you know what the gods want. The runesticks give the same message, but I have noticed one thing.” He paused and I had to prompt him, and he sighed as though he knew he should not say more. But he did. “The signs are best read by a clever man,” he went on, “and Storri is clever. I dare say I am no fool.”

  I did not really understand what he was saying. “But Storri is always right?”

  “Storri is cautious. He won’t take risks, and Ubba, though he doesn’t know it, likes that.”

  “But the sticks are messages from the gods?”

  “The wind is a message from the gods,” Ravn said, “as is the flight of a bird, the fall of a feather, the rise of a fish, the shape of a cloud, the cry of a vixen, all are messages, but in the end, Uhtred, the gods speak in only one place.” He tapped my head. “There.”

  I still did not understand and was obscurely disappointed. “Could I read the sticks?”

  “Of course,” he said, “but it would be sensible to wait till you’re older. What are you now?”

  “Eleven,” I said, tempted to say twelve.

  “Maybe you’d best wait a year or two before reading the sticks. Wait till you’re old enough to marry, four or five years from now?”

  That seemed an unlikely proposition for I had no interest in marriage back then. I was not even interested in girls, though that would change soon enough.

  “Thyra, perhaps?” Ravn suggested.

  “Thyra!” I thought of Ragnar’s daughter as a playmate, not as a wife. Indeed, the very idea of it made me laugh.

  Ravn smiled at my amusement. “Tell me, Uhtred, why we let you live.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When Ragnar captured you,” he said, “he thought you could be ransomed, but he decided to keep you. I thought he was a fool, but he was right.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, meaning it.

  “Because we need the English,” Ravn went on. “We are few, the English are many, despite which we shall take their land, but we can only hold it with the help of Englishmen. A man cannot live in a home that is forever besieged. He needs peace to grow crops and raise cattle, and we need you. When men see that Earl Uhtred is on our side then they won’t fight us. And you must marry a Danish girl so that when your children grow they will be both Dane and English and see no difference.” He paused, contemplating that distant future, then chuckled. “Just make sure they’re not Christians, Uhtred.”

  “They will worship Odin,” I said, again meaning it.

  “Christianity is a soft religion,” Ravn said savagely, “a woman’s creed. It doesn’t ennoble men, it makes them into worms. I hear birds.”

  “Two ravens,” I said, “flying north.”

  “A real message!” he said delightedly. “Huginn and Muminn are going to Odin.”

  Huginn and Muminn were the twin ravens that perched on the god’s shoulders where they whispered into his ear. They did for Odin what I did for Ravn, they watched and told him what they saw. He sent them to fly all over the world and to bring back news, and the news they carried back that day was that the smoke from the Mercian encampment was less thick. Fewer fires were lit at night. Men were leaving that army.

  “Harvesttime,” Ravn said in disgust.

  “Does that matter?”

  “They call their army the fyrd,” he explained, forgetting for a moment that I was English, “and every able man is supposed to serve in the fyrd, but when the harvest ripens they fear hunger in the winter so they go home to cut their rye and barley.”

  “Which we then take?”

  He laughed. “You’re learning, Uhtred.”

  Yet the Mercians and West Saxons still hoped they could starve us and, though they were losing men every day, they did not give up until Ivar loaded a cart with food. He piled cheeses, smoked fish, newly baked bread, salted pork, and a vat of ale onto the cart and, at dawn, a dozen men dragged it toward the English camp. They stopped just out of bow shot and shouted to the enemy sentries that the food was a gift from Ivar the Boneless to King Burghred.

  The next day a Mercian horseman rode toward the town carrying a leafy branch as a sign of truce. The English wanted to talk. “Which means,” Ravn told me, “that we have won.”

  “It does?”

  “When an enemy wants to talk,” he said, “it means he does not want to fight. So we have won.”

  And he was right.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next day we made a pavilion in the valley between the town and the English encampment, stretching two ships’ sails between timber poles, the whole thing supported by sealhide ropes lashed to pegs, and there the English placed three highbacked chairs for King Burghred, King Æthelred, and Prince Alfred, and draped the chairs with rich red cloths. Ivar and Ubba sat on milking stools. Both sides brought thirty or forty men to witness the discussions, which began with an agreement that all weapons were to be piled twenty paces behind the two delegations. I helped carry swords, axes, shields, and spears, then went back to listen.

  Beocca was there and he spotted me. He smiled. I smiled back. He was standing just behind the young man I took to be Alfred, for though I had heard him in the night I had not seen him clearly. He alone among the three English leaders was not crowned with a circlet of gold, though he did have a large, jeweled cloak brooch that Ivar eyed rapaciously. I saw, as Alfred took his seat, that the prince was thin, long legged, restless, pale, and tall. His face was long, his nose long, his beard short, his cheeks hollow, and his mouth pursed. His hair was a nondescript brown, his eyes worried, his
brow creased, his hands fidgety, and his face frowning. He was only nineteen, I later learned, but he looked ten years older. His brother, King Æthelred, was much older, over thirty, and he was also long faced, but burlier and even more anxiouslooking, while Burghred, King of Mercia, was a stubby man, heavy bearded, with a bulging belly and a balding pate.

  Alfred said something to Beocca who produced a sheet of parchment and a quill, which he gave to the prince. Beocca then held a small vial of ink so that Alfred could dip the quill and write.

  “What is he doing?” Ivar asked.

  “He is making notes of our talks,” the English interpreter answered.

  “Notes?”

  “So there is a record, of course.”

  “He has lost his memory?” Ivar asked, while Ubba produced a very small knife and began to clean his fingernails. Ragnar pretended to write on his hand, which amused the Danes.

  “You are Ivar and Ubba?” Alfred asked through his interpreter.

  “They are,” our translator answered. Alfred’s pen scratched, while his brother and brotherinlaw, both kings, seemed content to allow the young prince to question the Danes.