The Last Kingdom sc-1

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Who is it?” Ravn whispered to me.

  “Very tall,” I said, “many arm rings.”

  “Gloomy,” Brida put in, “dressed in black.”

  “Ah! The earl Guthrum,” Ravn said.

  “Guthrum?”

  “Guthrum the Unlucky,” Ravn said.

  “With all those arm rings?”

  “You could give Guthrum the world,” Ravn said, “and he would still believe you had cheated him.”

  “He has a bone hanging in his hair,” Brida said.

  “You must ask him about that,” Ravn said, evidently amused, but he would say no more about the bone, which was a human rib and tipped with gold.

  I learned Guthrum the Unlucky was an earl from Denmark who had been wintering at Beamfleot, a place that lay a good distance east of Lundene on the northern side of the Temes estuary, and once he had greeted the men bunched about the altar, he announced that he had brought fourteen ships upriver. No one applauded. Guthrum, who had the saddest, sourest face I had ever seen, stared at the assembly like a man standing trial and expecting a dire verdict. “We had decided,” Ragnar broke the uncomfortable silence, “to go west.” No such decision had been made, but nor did anyone contradict Ragnar. “Those ships that are already through the bridge,” Ragnar went on, “will take their crews upstream and the rest of the army will march on foot or horseback.”

  “My ships must go upstream,” Guthrum said.

  “They are through the bridge?”

  “They will still go upstream,” Guthrum insisted, thus letting us know that his fleet was below the bridge.

  “It would be better,” Ragnar said, “if we went tomorrow.” In the last few days the whole of the Great Army had assembled in Lundene, marching in from the settlements east and north where some had been quartered, and the longer we waited, the more of the precious food supply would be consumed.

  “My ships go upstream,” Guthrum said flatly.

  “He’s worried,” Ravn whispered to me, “that he can’t carry away the plunder on horseback. He wants his ships so he can fill them with treasure.”

  “Why let him come?” I asked. It was plain no one liked Earl Guthrum, and his arrival seemed as unwelcome as it was inconvenient, but Ravn just shrugged the question off. Guthrum, it seemed, was here, and if he was here he must take part. That still seems incomprehensible to me, just as I still did not understand why Ivar and Ubba were not joining the attack on Wessex. It was true that both men were rich and scarcely needed more riches, but for years they had talked of conquering the West Saxons and now both had simply turned away. Guthrum did not need land or wealth either, but he thought he did, so he came. That was the Danish way. Men served in a campaign if they wished, or else they stayed home, and there was no single authority among the Danes. Halfdan was the Great Army’s ostensible leader, but he did not frighten men as his two older brothers did and so he could do nothing without the agreement of the other chieftains. An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.

  It took two days to get Guthrum’s ships past the bridge. They were beautiful things, those ships, larger than most Danish boats, and each decorated at prow and stern with blackpainted serpent heads. His men, and there were many of them, all wore black. Even their shields were painted black, and while I thought Guthrum to be one of the most miserable men I had ever seen, I had to confess his troops were impressive. We might have lost two days, but we had gained the black warriors. And what was there to fear? The Great Army had gathered, it was midwinter when no one fought so the enemy should not be expecting us, and that enemy was led by a king and a prince more interested in prayer than in fighting. All Wessex lay before us and common report said that Wessex was as rich a country as any in all the world, rivaling Frankia for its treasures, and inhabited by monks and nuns whose houses were stuffed with gold, spilling over with silver, and ripe for slaughter. We would all be rich. So we went to war.

  Ships on the winter Temes. Ships sliding past brittle reeds and leafless willows and bare alders. Wet oar blades shining in the pale sunlight. The prows of our ships bore their beasts to quell the spirits of the land we invaded, and it was good land with rich fields, though all were deserted. There was almost a celebratory air to that brief voyage, a celebration unspoiled by the presence of Guthrum’s dark ships. Men oarwalked, the same feat I had watched Ragnar perform on that faroff day when his three ships had appeared off Bebbanburg. I tried it myself and raised a huge cheer when I fell in. It looked easy to run along the oar bank, leaping from shaft to shaft, but a rower only had to twitch an oar to cause a man to slip and the river water was bitterly cold so that Ragnar made me strip off my wet clothes and wear his bearskin cloak until I was warm. Men sang, the ships forged against the current, the far hills to the north and south slowly closed on the river’s banks and, as evening came, we saw the first horsemen on the southern skyline. Watching us.

  We reached Readingum at dusk. Each of Ragnar’s three ships was loaded with spades, many of them forged by Ealdwulf, and our first task was to start making a wall. As more ships came, more men helped, and by nightfall our camp was protected by a long, straggling earth wall that would have been hardly any obstacle to an attacking force for it was merely a low mound that was easy to cross, but no one did come and assault us, and no Wessex army appeared the next morning and so we were free to make the wall higher and more formidable.

  Readingum was built where the river Kenet flows into the Temes, and so our wall was built between the two rivers. It enclosed the small town that had been abandoned by its inhabitants and provided shelter for most of the ships’ crews. The land army was still out of sight for they had marched along the north bank of the Temes, in Mercian territory, and were seeking a ford, which they found further upstream, so that our wall was virtually finished by the time they marched in. At first we thought it was the West Saxon army coming, but it was Halfdan’s men, marching out of enemy territory they had found deserted. The wall was high now and, because there were deep woods to the south, we had cut trees to make a palisade along its whole length that was about eight hundred paces. In front of the wall we dug a ditch that flooded when we broke through the two rivers’ banks, and across the ditch we were making four bridges guarded by wooden forts. This was our base. From here we could march deep into Wessex, and we needed to for, with so many men and now horses inside the wall, there was a risk of hunger unless we found supplies of grain, hay, and cattle. We had brought barrels of ale and a large amount of flour, salt meat, and dried fish in the ships, but it was astonishing how fast those great heaps diminished. The poets, when they speak of war, talk of the shield wall, they talk of the spears and arrows flying, of the blade beating on the shield, of the heroes who fall and the spoils of the victors, but I was to discover that war was really about food. About feeding men and horses. About finding food. The army that eats wins. And, if you keep horses in a fortress, it is about shoveling dung. Just two days after the land army came to Readingum, we were short of food and the two Sidrocs, father and son, led a large force west into enemy territory to find stores of food for men and horses, and instead they found the fyrd of Berrocscire.

  We learned later that the whole idea of attacking in winter was no surprise to the West Saxons after all. The Danes were good at spying, their merchants exploring the places the warriors would go, but the West Saxons had their own men in Lundene and they knew how many men we were, and when we would march, and they had assembled an army to meet us. They had also sought help from the men of southern Mercia, where Danish rule was lightest, and Berrocscire lay immediately north of the West Saxon border and the men of Berrocscire had crossed the river to help their neighbors and their fyrd was led by an ealdorman called Æthelwulf.

  Was it my uncle? There were many men called Æthelwulf, but how many were ealdormen in Mercia? I admit I felt strange when I heard the name, and I thought of the mother I had never met. In my mind she
was the woman who was ever kind, ever gentle, ever loving, and I thought she must be watching me from somewhere, heaven or Asgard or wherever our souls go in the long darkness, and I knew she would hate that I was with the army that marched against her brother, and so that night I was in a black mood. But so was the Great Army for my uncle, if Æthelwulf was indeed my uncle, had trounced the two earls. Their foraging party had walked into an ambush and the men of Berrocscire had killed twentyone Danes and taken another eight prisoner. The Englishmen had lost a few men themselves, and yielded one prisoner, but they had gained the victory, and it made no difference that the Danes had been outnumbered. The Danes expected to win, and instead they had been chased home without the food we needed. They felt shamed and a shudder went through the army because they did not think mere Englishmen could beat them.

  We were not starving yet, but the horses were desperately short of hay, which, anyway, was not the best food for them, but we had no oats and so forage parties simply cut whatever winter grass we could find beyond our growing wall and the day after Æthelwulf’s victory Rorik, Brida, and I were in one of those groups, slashing at grass with long knives and stuffing sacks with the poor feed, when the army of Wessex came.

  They must have been encouraged by Æthelwulf’s victory, for now the whole enemy army attacked Readingum. The first I knew of it was the sound of screaming from farther west, then I saw horsemen galloping among our forage parties, hacking down with swords or skewering men with spears, and the three of us just ran, and I heard the hooves behind and snatched a look and saw a man riding at us with a spear and knew one of us must die and I took Brida’s hand to drag her out of his path and just then an arrow shot from Readingum’s wall slapped into the horseman’s face and he twisted away, blood pouring from his cheek, and meanwhile panicking men were piling around the two central bridges and the West Saxon horsemen, seeing it, galloped toward them. The three of us half waded and half swam the ditch, and two men hauled us, wet, muddy, and shivering, up across the wall. It was chaos outside now. The foragers crowding at the ditch’s far side were being hacked down, and then the Wessex infantry appeared, band after band of them emerging from the far woods to fill the fields. I ran back to the house where Ragnar was lodging and found SerpentBreath beneath the cloaks where I hid her, and I strapped her on and ran out to find Ragnar. He had gone north, to the bridge close beside the Temes, and Brida and I caught up with his men there. “You shouldn’t come,” I told Brida. “Stay with Rorik.” Rorik was younger than us and, after getting soaked in the ditch, he had started shivering and feeling sick and I had made him stay behind.

  Brida ignored me. She had equipped herself with a spear and looked excited, though nothing was happening yet. Ragnar was staring over the wall, and more men were assembling at the gate, but Ragnar did not open it to cross the bridge. He did glance back to see how many men he had. “Shields!” he shouted for in their haste some men had come with nothing but swords or axes, and those men now ran to fetch their shields. I had no shield, but nor was I supposed to be there and Ragnar did not see me. What he saw was the end of a slaughter as the West Saxon horsemen chopped into the last of the foragers. A few of the enemy were put down by our arrows, but neither the Danes nor the English had many bowmen. I like bowmen. They can kill at a great distance and, even if their arrows do not kill, they make an enemy nervous. Advancing into arrows is a blind business, for you must keep your head beneath the rim of the shield, but shooting a bow is a great skill. It looks easy, and every child has a bow and some arrows, but a man’s bow, a bow capable of killing a stag at a hundred paces, is a huge thing, carved from yew and needing immense strength to haul, and the arrows fly wild unless a man has practiced constantly, and so we never had more than a handful of archers. I never mastered the bow. With a spear, an ax, or a sword I was lethal, but with a bow I was like most men, useless. I sometimes wonder why we did not stay behind our wall. It was virtually finished, and to reach it the enemy must cross the ditch or file over the four bridges, and they would have been forced to do that under a hail of arrows, spears, and throwing axes. They would surely have failed, but then they might have besieged us behind that wall and so Ragnar decided to attack them. Not just Ragnar. While Ragnar was gathering men at the northern gate, Halfdan had been doing the same at the southern end, and when both believed they had enough men, and while the enemy infantry was still some two hundred paces away, Ragnar ordered the gate opened and led his men through. The West Saxon army, under its great dragon banner, was advancing toward the central bridges, evidently thinking that the slaughter there was a foretaste of more slaughter to come. They had no ladders, so how they thought they would cross the newly made wall I do not know, but sometimes in battle a kind of madness descends and men do things without reason. The men of Wessex had no reason to concentrate on the center of our wall, especially as they could not hope to cross it, but they did, and now our men swarmed from the two flanking gates to attack them from north and south.

  “Shield wall!” Ragnar roared. “Shield wall!”

  You can hear a shield wall being made. The best shields are made of lime, or else of willow, and the wood knocks together as men overlap the shields. Left side of the shield in front of your neighbor’s right side, that way the enemy, most of whom are righthanded, must try to thrust through two layers of wood.

  “Make it tight!” Ragnar called. He was in the center of the shield wall, in front of his ragged eaglewing standard, and he was one of the few men with an expensive helmet, which would mark him to the enemy as a chieftain, a man to be killed. Ragnar still used my father’s helmet, the beautiful one made by Ealdwulf with the faceplate and the inlay of silver. He also wore a mail shirt, again one of the few men to possess such a treasure. Most men were armored in leather.

  The enemy was turning outward to meet us, making their own shield wall, and I saw a group of horsemen galloping up their center behind the dragon banner. I thought I saw Beocca’s red hair among them and that made me certain Alfred was there, probably among a gaggle of blackrobed priests who were doubtless praying for our deaths.

  The West Saxon shield wall was longer than ours. It was not only longer, but thicker, because while our wall was backed by three ranks of men, theirs had five or six. Good sense would have dictated that we either stay where we were and let them attack us, or that we retreat back across the bridge and ditch, but more Danes were coming to thicken Ragnar’s ranks and Ragnar himself was in no mood to be sensible. “Just kill them!” he screamed. “Just kill them! Kill them!” And he led the line forward and, without any pause, the Danes gave a great war shout and surged with him. Usually the shield walls spend hours staring at each other, calling out insults, threatening, and working up the courage to that most awful of moments when wood meets wood and blade meets blade, but Ragnar’s blood was fired and he did not care. He just charged.

  That attack made no sense, but Ragnar was furious. He had been offended by Æthelwulf’s victory, and insulted by the way their horsemen had cut down our foragers, and all he wanted to do was hack into the Wessex ranks, and somehow his passion spread through his men so that they howled as they ran forward. There is something terrible about men eager for battle. A heartbeat before the shields clashed our rearmost men threw their spears. Some had three or four spears that they hurled one after the other, launching them over the heads of our front ranks. There were spears coming back, and I plucked one from the turf and hurled it back as hard as I could. I was in the rearmost rank, pushed back there by men who told me to get out of their way, but I advanced with them and Brida, grinning with mischief, came with me. I told her to go back to the town, but she just stuck her tongue out at me and then I heard the hammering crash, the wooden thunder, of shields meeting shields. That was followed by the sound of spears striking limewood, the ringing of blade on blade, but I saw nothing of it because I was not then tall enough, but the shock of the shield walls made the men in front of me reel back, then they were pushing forward again, try
ing to force their own front rank through the West Saxon shields. The righthand side of our wall was bending back where the enemy outflanked us, but our reinforcements were hurrying to that place, and the West Saxons lacked the courage to charge home. Those West Saxons had been at the rear of their advancing army, and the rear is always where the timid men congregate. The real fight was to my front and the noise there was of blows, iron shield boss on shield wood, blades on shields, men’s feet shuffling, the clangor of weapons, and few voices except those wailing in pain or in a sudden scream. Brida dropped onto all fours and wriggled between the legs of the men in front of her, and I saw she was lancing her spear forward to give the blow that comes beneath the shield’s rim. She lunged into a man’s ankle, he stumbled, an ax fell, and there was a gap in the enemy line. Our line bulged forward, and I followed, using SerpentBreath as a spear, jabbing at men’s boots, then Ragnar gave a mighty roar, a shout to stir the gods in the great sky halls of Asgard, and the shout asked for one more great effort. Swords chopped, axes swung, and I could sense the enemy retreating from the fury of the Northmen. Good lord deliver us.

  Blood on the grass now, so much blood that the ground was slick, and there were bodies that had to be stepped over as our shield wall thrust forward, leaving Brida and me behind, and I saw her hands were red because blood had seeped down the long ash shaft of her spear. She licked the blood and gave me a sly smile. Halfdan’s men were fighting on the enemy’s farther side now, their battle noise suddenly louder than ours because the West Saxons were retreating from Ragnar’s attack, but one man, tall and well built, resisted us. He had a mail coat belted with a red leather sword belt and a helmet even more glorious that Ragnar’s, for the Englishman’s helmet had a silver boar modeled on its crown, and I thought for a moment it could be King Æthelred himself, but this man was too tall, and Ragnar shouted at his men to stand aside and he swung his sword at the boarhelmeted enemy who parried with his shield, lunged with his sword, and Ragnar took the blow on his own shield and rammed it forward to crash against the man who stepped back, tripped on a corpse, and Ragnar swung his sword overhand, as if he was killing an ox, and the blade chopped down onto the mail coat as a rush of enemy came to save their lord. A charge of Danes met them, shield on shield, and Ragnar was roaring his victory and stabbing down into the fallen man, and suddenly there were no more Wessex men resisting us, unless they were dead or wounded, and their army was running, their king and their prince both spurring away on horseback surrounded by priests, and we jeered and cursed them, told them they were women, that they fought like girls, that they were cowards.