The Last Kingdom sc-1

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I’m nothing,” I admitted. “But I want to be in Northumbria to take back my father’s fortress.”

  “Ragnar will do that for you?”

  “He might do it. His father would have done it, I think.”

  “And if you get back your fortress,” he asked, “will you be lord of it? Lord of your own land? Or will the Danes rule you?”

  “The Danes will rule.”

  “So you settle to be a slave, eh? Yes, lord, no, lord, let me hold your prick while you piss all over me, lord?”

  “And what happens if I stay here?” I asked sourly.

  “You’ll lead men,” he said.

  I laughed at that. “Alfred has lords enough to serve him.”

  Leofric shook his head. “He doesn’t. He has some good warlords, true, but he needs more. I told him, that day on the boat when he let the bastards escape, I told him to send me ashore and give me men. He refused.” He beat the table with a massive fist. “I told him I’m a proper warrior, but still the bastard refused me!”

  So that, I thought, was what the argument had been about. “Why did he refuse you?” I asked.

  “Because I can’t read,” Leofric snarled, “and I’m not learning now! I tried once, and it makes no damn sense to me. And I’m not a lord, am I? Not even a thegn. I’m just a slave’s son who happens to know how to kill the king’s enemies, but that’s not good enough for Alfred. He says I can assist”—he said that word as if it soured his tongue—“one of his ealdormen, but I can’t lead men because I can’t read, and I can’t learn to read.”

  “I can,” I said, or the drink said.

  “You take a long time to understand things, earsling,” Leofric said with a grin. “You’re a damned lord, and you can read, can’t you?”

  “No, not really. A bit. Short words.”

  “But you can learn?”

  I thought about it. “I can learn.”

  “And we have twelve ships’ crews,” he said, “looking for employment, so we give them to Alfred and we say that Lord Earsling is their leader and he gives you a book and you read out the pretty words, then you and I take the bastards to war and do some proper damage to your beloved Danes.”

  I did not say yes, nor did I say no, because I was not sure what I wanted. What worried me was that I found myself agreeing with whatever the last person suggested I did; when I had been with Ragnar I had wanted to follow him, and now I was seduced by Leofric’s vision of the future. I had no certainty, so instead of saying yes or no I went back to the palace and I found Merewenna, and discovered she was indeed the maid who had caused Alfred’s tears on the night that I had eavesdropped on him in the Mercian camp outside Snotengaham, and I did know what I wanted to do with her, and I did not cry afterward.

  And next day, at Leofric’s urging, we rode to Cippanhamm.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Isuppose, if you are reading this, that you have learned your letters, which probably means that some damned monk or priest rapped your knuckles, cuffed you around the head, or worse. Not that they did that to me, of course, for I was no longer a child, but I endured their sniggers as I struggled with letters. It was mostly Beocca who taught me, complaining all the while that I was taking him from his real work, which was the making of a life of Swithun, who had been Bishop of Winchester when Alfred was a child, and Beocca was writing the bishop’s life. Another priest was translating the book into Latin, Beocca’s mastery of that tongue not being good enough for the task, and the pages were being sent to Rome in hopes that Swithun would be named a saint. Alfred took a great interest in the book, forever coming to Beocca’s room and asking whether he knew that Swithun had once preached the gospel to a trout or chanted a psalm to a seagull, and Beocca would write the stories in a state of great excitement, and then, when Alfred was gone, reluctantly return to whatever text he was forcing me to decipher. “Read it aloud,” he would say, then protest wildly. “No, no, no! Forli an is to suffer shipwreck! This is a life of Saint Paul, Uhtred, and the apostle suffered shipwreck! Not the word you read at all!”

  I looked at it again. “It’s not forlegnis?”

  “Of course it’s not!” he said, going red with indignation. “That word means…” He paused, realizing that he was not teaching me English, but how to read it.

  “Prostitute,” I said, “I know what it means. I even know what they charge. There’s a redhead in Chad’s tavern who…”

  “Forli an,” he interrupted me, “the word is forli an.Read on.”

  Those weeks were strange. I was a warrior now, a man, yet in Beocca’s room it seemed I was a child again as I struggled with the black letters crawling across the cracked parchments. I learned from the lives of the saints, and in the end Beocca could not resist letting me read some of his own growing life of Swithun. He waited for my praise, but instead I shuddered. “Couldn’t we find something more interesting?” I asked him.

  “More interesting?” Beocca’s good eye stared at me reproachfully.

  “Something about war,” I suggested, “about the Danes. About shields and spears and swords.”

  He grimaced. “I dread to think of such writings! There are some poems.” He grimaced again and evidently decided against telling me about the belligerent poems. “But this,” he tapped the parchment,

  “this will give you inspiration.”

  “Inspiration! How Swithun mended some broken eggs?”

  “It was a saintly act,” Beocca chided me. “The woman was old and poor, the eggs were all she had to sell, and she tripped and broke them. She faced starvation! The saint made the eggs whole again and, God be praised, she sold them.”

  “But why didn’t Swithun just give her money,” I demanded, “or take her back to his house and give her a proper meal?”

  “It is a miracle,” Beocca insisted, “a demonstration of God’s power!”

  “I’d like to see a miracle,” I said, remembering King Edmund’s death.

  “That is a weakness in you,” Beocca said sternly. “You must have faith. Miracles make belief easy, which is why you should never pray for one. Much better to find God through faith than through miracles.”

  “Then why have miracles?”

  “Oh, read on, Uhtred,” the poor man said tiredly, “for God’s sake, read on.”

  I read on. But life in Cippanhamm was not all reading. Alfred hunted at least twice a week, though it was not hunting as I had known it in the north. He never pursued boar, preferring to shoot at stags with a bow. The prey was driven to him by beaters, and if a stag did not appear swiftly he would get bored and go back to his books. In truth I think he only went hunting because it was expected of a king, not because he enjoyed it, but he did endure it. I loved it, of course. I killed wolves, stags, foxes, and boars, and it was on one of those boar hunts that I met Æthelwold. Æthelwold was Alfred’s oldest nephew, the boy who should have succeeded his father, King Æthelred, though he was no longer a boy for he was only a month or so younger than me, and in many ways he was like me, except that he had been sheltered by his father and by Alfred and so had never killed a man or even fought in a battle. He was tall, well built, strong, and as wild as an unbroken colt. He had long dark hair, his family’s narrow face, and strong eyes that caught the attention of serving girls. All girls, really. He hunted with me and with Leofric, drank with us, whored with us when he could escape the priests who were his guardians, and constantly complained about his uncle, though those complaints were only spoken to me, never to Leofric whom Æthelwold feared. “He stole the crown,” Æthelwold said of Alfred.

  “The witan thought you were too young,” I pointed out.

  “I’m not young now, am I?” he asked indignantly. “So Alfred should step aside.”

  I toasted that idea with a pot of ale, but said nothing.

  “They won’t even let me fight!” Æthelwold said bitterly. “He says I ought to become a priest. The stupid bastard.” He drank some ale before giving me a serious look. “Talk to him, Uhtred.”<
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  “What am I to say? That you don’t want to be a priest?”

  “He knows that. No, tell him I’ll fight with you and Leofric.”

  I thought about that for a short while, then shook my head. “It won’t do any good.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” I said, “he fears you making a name for yourself.”

  Æthelwold frowned at me. “A name?” he asked, puzzled.

  “If you become a famous warrior,” I said, knowing I was right, “men will follow you. You’re already a prince, which is dangerous enough, but Alfred won’t want you to become a famous warrior prince, will he?”

  “The pious bastard,” Æthelwold said. He pushed his long black hair off his face and gazed moodily at Eanflæd, the redhead who was given a room in the tavern and brought it a deal of business. “God, she’s pretty,” he said. “He was caught humping a nun once.”

  “Alfred was? A nun?”

  “That’s what I was told. And he was always after girls. Couldn’t keep his breeches buttoned! Now the priests have got hold of him. What I ought to do,” he went on gloomily, “is slit the bastard’s gizzard.”

  “Say that to anyone but me,” I said, “and you’ll be hanged.”

  “I could run off and join the Danes,” he suggested.

  “You could,” I said, “and they’d welcome you.”

  “Then use me?” he asked, showing that he was not entirely a fool. I nodded. “You’ll be like Egbert or Burghred, or that new man in Mercia.”

  “Ceolwulf.”

  “King at their pleasure,” I said. Ceolwulf, a Mercian ealdorman, had been named king of his country now that Burghred was on his knees in Rome, but Ceolwulf was no more a real king than Burghred had been. He issued coins, of course, and he administered justice, but everyone knew there were Danes in his council chamber and he dared do nothing that would earn their wrath. “So is that what you want?” I asked. “To run off to the Danes and be useful to them?”

  He shook his head. “No.” He traced a pattern on the table with spilled ale. “Better to do nothing,” he suggested.

  “Nothing?”

  “If I do nothing,” he said earnestly, “then the bastard might die. He’s always ill! He can’t live long, can he? And his son is just a baby. So if he dies I’ll be king! Oh, sweet Jesus!” This blasphemy was uttered because two priests had entered the tavern, both of them in Æthelwold’s entourage, though they were more like jailers than courtiers and they had come to find him and take him off to his bed. Beocca did not approve of my friendship with Æthelwold. “He’s a foolish creature,” he warned me.

  “So am I, or so you tell me.”

  “Then you don’t need your foolishness encouraged, do you? Now let us read about how the holy Swithun built the town’s East Gate.”

  By the Feast of the Epiphany I could read as well as a clever twelveyearold, or so Beocca said, and that was good enough for Alfred who did not, after all, require me to read theological texts, but only to decipher his orders, should he ever decide to give me any, and that, of course, was the heart of the matter. Leofric and I wanted to command troops, to which end I had endured Beocca’s teaching and had come to appreciate the holy Swithun’s skill with trout, seagulls, and broken eggs, but the granting of those troops depended on the king, and in truth there were not many troops to command. The West Saxon army was in two parts. The first and smaller part was composed of the king’s own men, his retainers who guarded him and his family. They did nothing else because they were professional warriors, but they were not many and neither Leofric nor I wanted anything to do with them because joining the household guard would mean staying in close proximity to Alfred, which, in turn, would mean going to church.

  The second part of the army, and by far the largest, was the fyrd, and that, in turn, was divided among the shires. Each shire, under its ealdorman and reeve, was responsible for raising the fyrd that was supposedly composed of every ablebodied man within the shire boundary. That could raise a vast number of men. Hamptonscir, for example, could easily put three thousand men under arms, and there were nine shires in Wessex capable of summoning similar numbers. Yet, apart from the troops who served the ealdormen, the fyrd was mostly composed of farmers. Some had a shield of sorts, spears and axes were plentiful enough, but swords and armor were in short supply, and worse, the fyrd was always reluctant to march beyond its shire borders, and even more reluctant to serve when there was work to be done on the farm. At Æsc’s Hill, the one battle the West Saxons had won against the Danes, it had been the household troops who had gained the victory. Divided between Alfred and his brother, they had spearheaded the fighting while the fyrd, as it usually did, looked menacing, but only became engaged when the real soldiers had already won the fight. The fyrd, in brief, was about as much use as a hole in a boat’s bottom, but that was where Leofric could expect to find men. Except there were those ships’ crews getting drunk in Hamtun’s winter taverns and those were the men Leofric wanted, and to get them he had to persuade Alfred to relieve Hacca of their command, and luckily for us Hacca himself came to Cippanhamm and pleaded to be released from the fleet. He prayed daily, he told Alfred, never to see the ocean again. “I get seasick, lord.”

  Alfred was always sympathetic to men who suffered sickness because he was so often ill himself, and he must have known that Hacca was an inadequate commander of ships, but Alfred’s problem was how to replace him. To which end he summoned four bishops, two abbots, and a priest to advise him, and I learned from Beocca that they were all praying about the new appointment. “Do something!” Leofric snarled at me.

  “What the devil am I supposed to do?”

  “You have friends who are priests! Talk to them. Talk to Alfred, earsling.” He rarely called me that anymore, only when he was angry.

  “He doesn’t like me,” I said. “If I ask him to put us in charge of the fleet, he’ll give it to anyone but us. He’ll give it to a bishop, probably.”

  “Hell!” Leofric said.

  In the end it was Eanflæd who saved us. The redhead was a merry soul and had a particular fondness for Leofric, and she heard us arguing and sat down, slapped her hands on the table to silence us, and then asked what we were fighting about. Then she sneezed because she had a cold.

  “I want this useless earsling,” Leofric jerked his thumb at me, “to be named commander of the fleet, only he’s too young, too ugly, too horrible, and too pagan, and Alfred’s listening to a pack of bishops who’ll end up naming some wizened old fart who doesn’t know his prow from his prick.”

  “Which bishops?” Eanflæd wanted to know.

  “Scireburnan, Wintanceaster, Winburnan, and Exanceaster,” I said. She smiled, sneezed again, and two days later I was summoned to Alfred’s presence. It turned out that the Bishop of Exanceaster was partial to redheads.

  Alfred greeted me in his hall, a fine building with beams, rafters, and a central stone hearth. His guards watched us from the doorway where a group of petitioners waited to see the king, and a huddle of priests prayed at the hall’s other end, but the two of us were alone by the hearth where Alfred paced up and down as he talked. He said he was thinking of appointing me to command the fleet. Just thinking, he stressed. God, he went on, was guiding his choice, but now he must talk with me to see whether God’s advice chimed with his own intuition. He put great store by intuition. He once lectured me about a man’s inner eye and how it could lead us to a higher wisdom, and I dare say he was right, but appointing a fleet commander did not need mystical wisdom, it needed finding a raw fighter willing to kill some Danes. “Tell me,” he went on, “has learning to read bolstered your faith?”

  “Yes, lord,” I said with feigned eagerness.

  “It has?” He sounded dubious.

  “The life of Saint Swithun,” I said, waving a hand as if to suggest it had overwhelmed me, “and the stories of Chad!” I fell silent as if I could not think of praise sufficient for that tedious man.

  �
�The blessed Chad!” Alfred said happily. “You know men and cattle were cured by the dust of his corpse?”

  “A miracle, lord,” I said.

  “It is good to hear you say as much, Uhtred,” Alfred said, “and I rejoice in your faith.”

  ”It gives me great happiness, lord,” I replied with a straight face.

  “Because it is only with faith in God that we shall prevail against the Danes.”

  “Indeed, lord,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, wondering why he did not just name me commander of the fleet and be done with it.

  But he was in a discursive mood. “I remember when I first met you,” he said, “and I was struck by your childlike faith. It was an inspiration to me, Uhtred.”

  “I am glad of it, lord.”

  “And then”—he turned and frowned at me—“I detected a lessening of faith in you.”

  “God tries us, lord,” I said.

  “He does! He does!” He winced suddenly. He was always a sick man. He had collapsed in pain at his wedding, though that might have been the horror of realizing what he was marrying, but in truth he was prone to bouts of sudden griping agony. That, he had told me, was better than his first illness, which had been an affliction of ficus, which is a real endwerc, so painful and bloody that at times he had been unable to sit, and sometimes that ficus came back, but most of the time he suffered from the pains in his belly.

  “God does try us,” he went on, “and I think God was testing you. I would like to think you have survived the trial.”

  “I believe I have, lord,” I said gravely, wishing he would just end this ridiculous conversation.

  “But I still hesitate to name you,” he admitted. “You are young! It is true you have proved your diligence by learning to read and that you are nobly born, but you are more likely to be found in a tavern than in a church. Is that not true?”

  That silenced me, at least for a heartbeat or two, but then I remembered something Beocca had said to me during his interminable lessons and, without thinking, without even really knowing what they meant, I said the words aloud. “The son of man is come eating and drinking,” I said, “and…”