The Last Kingdom

by Bernard Cornwell

  We reckoned we were safe in Bebbanburg for it had never fallen to an enemy’s assault, yet my father and uncle were still worried that the Danes had returned to Northumbria. “They’re looking for food,” my father said. “The hungry bastards want to land, steal some cattle, then sail away.”

  I remembered my uncle’s words, how the ships had been at the mouth of the Tine trading furs for dried fish, so how could they be hungry? But I said nothing. I was ten years old and what did I know of Danes?

  I did know that they were savages, pagans and terrible. I knew that for two generations before I was born their ships had raided our coasts. I knew that Father Beocca, my father’s clerk and our mass priest, prayed every Sunday to spare us from the fury of the Northmen, but that fury had passed me by. No Danes had come to our land since I had been born, but my father had fought them often enough and that night, as we waited for my brother to return, he spoke of his old enemy. They came, he said, from northern lands where ice and mist prevailed, they worshipped the old gods, the same ones we had worshipped before the light of Christ came to bless us, and when they had first come to Northumbria, he told me, fiery dragons had whipped across the northern sky, great bolts of lightning had scarred the hills, and the sea had been churned by whirlwinds.

  “They are sent by God,” Gytha said timidly, “to punish us.”

  “Punish us for what?” my father demanded savagely.

  “For our sins,” Gytha said, making the sign of the cross.

  “Our sins be damned,” my father snarled. “They come here because they’re hungry.” He was irritated by my stepmother’s piety, and he refused to give up his wolf’s head banner that proclaimed our family’s descent from Woden, the ancient Saxon god of battles. The wolf, Ealdwulf the smith had told me, was one of Woden’s three favored beasts, the others being the eagle and the raven. My mother wanted our banner to show the cross, but my father was proud of his ancestors, though he rarely talked about Woden. Even at ten years old I understood that a good Christian should not boast of being spawned by a pagan god, but I also liked the idea of being a god’s descendant and Ealdwulf often told me tales of Woden, how he had rewarded our people by giving us the land we called England, and how he had once thrown a war spear clear around the moon, and how his shield could darken the midsummer sky, and how he could reap all the corn in the world with one stroke of his great sword. I liked those tales. They were better than my stepmother’s stories of Cuthbert’s miracles. Christians, it seemed to me, were forever weeping and I did not think Woden’s worshippers cried much.

  We waited in the hall. It was, indeed it still is, a great wooden hall, strongly thatched and stout beamed, with a harp on a dais and a stone hearth in the center of the floor. It took a dozen slaves a day to keep that great fire going, dragging the wood along the causeway and up through the gates, and at summer’s end we would make a log pile bigger than the church just as a winter store. At the edges of the hall were timber platforms, filled with rammed earth and layered with woolen rugs, and it was on those platforms that we lived, up above the drafts. The hounds stayed on the bracken-strewn floor below, where lesser men could eat at the year’s four great feasts.

  There was no feast that night, just bread and cheese and ale, and my father waited for my brother and wondered aloud if the Danes were restless again. “They usually come for food and plunder,” he told me, “but in some places they’ve stayed and taken land.”

  “You think they want our land?” I asked.

  “They’ll take any land,” he said irritably. He was always irritated by my questions, but that night he was worried and so he talked on. “Their own land is stone and ice, and they have giants threatening them.”

  I wanted him to tell me more about the giants, but he brooded instead. “Our ancestors,” he went on after a while, “took this land. They took it and made it and held it. We do not give up what our ancestors gave us. They came across the sea and they fought here, and they built here and they’re buried here. This is our land, mixed with our blood, strengthened with our bone. Ours.” He was angry, but he was often angry. He glowered at me, as if wondering whether I was strong enough to hold this land of Northumbria that our ancestors had won with sword and spear and blood and slaughter.

  We slept after a while, or at least I slept. I think my father paced the ramparts, but by dawn he was back in the hall and it was then I was woken by the horn at the High Gate and I stumbled off the platform and out into the morning’s first light. There was dew on the grass, a sea eagle circling overhead, and my father’s hounds streaming from the hall door in answer to the horn’s call. I saw my father running down to the Low Gate and I followed him until I could wriggle my way through the men who were crowding onto the earthen rampart to stare along the causeway.

  Horsemen were coming from the south. There were a dozen of them, their horses’ hooves sparkling with the dew. My brother’s horse was in the lead. It was a brindled stallion, wild-eyed and with a curious gait. It threw its forelegs out as it cantered and no one could mistake that horse, but it was not Uhtred who rode it. The man astride the saddle had long, long hair the color of pale gold, hair that tossed like the horses’ tails as he rode. He wore mail, had a flapping scabbard at his side and an ax slung across one shoulder, and I was certain he was the same man who had danced the oar shafts the previous day. His companions were in leather or wool and as they neared the fortress the long-haired man signaled that they should curb their horses as he rode ahead alone. He came within bowshot, though none of us on the rampart put an arrow on the string, then he pulled the horse to a stop and looked up at the gate. He stared all along the line of men, a mocking expression on his face, then he bowed, threw something on the path, and wheeled the horse away. He kicked his heels and the horse sped back and his ragged men joined him to gallop south.

  What he had thrown onto the path was my brother’s severed head. It was brought to my father who stared at it a long time, but betrayed no feelings. He did not cry, he did not grimace, he did not scowl, he just looked at his eldest son’s head and then he looked at me. “From this day on,” he said, “your name is Uhtred.”

  Which is how I was named.

  Father Beocca insisted that I should be baptized again, or else heaven would not know who I was when I arrived with the name Uhtred. I protested, but Gytha wanted it and my father cared more for her contentment than for mine, and so a barrel was carried into the church and half filled with seawater and Father Beocca stood me in the barrel and ladled water over my hair. “Receive your servant Uhtred,” he intoned, “into the holy company of the saints and into the ranks of the most bright angels.” I hope the saints and angels are warmer than I was that day, and after the baptism was done Gytha wept for me, though why I did not know. She might have done better to weep for my brother.

  We found out what had happened to him. The three Danish ships had put into the mouth of the river Alne where there was a small settlement of fishermen and their families. Those folk had prudently fled inland, though a handful stayed and watched the river mouth from woods on higher ground and they said my brother had come at nightfall and seen the Vikings torching the houses. They were called Vikings when they were raiders, but Danes or pagans when they were traders, and these men had been burning and plundering so were reckoned to be Vikings. There had seemed very few of them in the settlement, most were on their ships, and my brother decided to ride down to the cottages and kill those few, but of course it was a trap. The Danes had seen his horsemen coming and had hidden a ship’s crew north of the village, and those forty men closed behind my brother’s party and killed them all. My father claimed his eldest son’s death must have been quick, which was a consolation to him, but of course it was not a quick death for he lived long enough for the Danes to discover who he was, or else why would they have brought his head back to Bebbanburg? The fishermen said they tried to warn my brother, but I doubt they did. Men say such things so that they are not blamed for disaster, but wh
ether my brother was warned or not, he still died and the Danes took thirteen fine swords, thirteen good horses, a coat of mail, a helmet, and my old name.

  But that was not the end of it. A fleeting visit by three ships was no great event, but a week after my brother’s death we heard that a great Danish fleet had rowed up the rivers to capture Eoferwic. They had won that victory on All Saints Day, which made Gytha weep for it suggested God had abandoned us, but there was also good news for it seemed that my old namesake, King Osbert, had made an alliance with his rival, the would-be King Ælla, and they had agreed to put aside their rivalry, join forces, and take Eoferwic back. That sounds simple, but of course it took time. Messengers rode, advisers confused, priests prayed, and it was not till Christmas that Osbert and Ælla sealed their peace with oaths, and then they summoned my father’s men, but of course we could not march in winter. The Danes were in Eoferwic and we left them there until the early spring when news came that the Northumbrian army would gather outside the city and, to my joy, my father decreed that I would ride south with him.

  “He’s too young,” Gytha protested.

  “He is almost eleven,” my father said, “and he must learn to fight.”

  “He would be better served by continuing his lessons,” she said.

  “A dead reader is no use to Bebbanburg,” my father said, “and Uhtred is now the heir so he must learn to fight.”

  That night he made Beocca show me the parchments kept in the church, the parchments that said we owned the land. Beocca had been teaching me to read for two years, but I was a bad pupil and, to Beocca’s despair, I could make neither head nor tail of the writings. Beocca sighed, then told me what was in them. “They describe the land,” he said, “the land your father owns, and they say the land is his by God’s law and by our own law.” And one day, it seemed, the lands would be mine for that night my father dictated a new will in which he said that if he died then Bebbanburg would belong to his son Uhtred, and I would be ealdorman, and all the folk between the rivers Tuede and the Tine would swear allegiance to me. “We were kings here once,” he told me, “and our land was called Bernicia.” He pressed his seal into the red wax, leaving the impression of a wolf’s head.

  “We should be kings again,” Ælfric, my uncle, said.

  “It doesn’t matter what they call us,” my father said curtly, “so long as they obey us,” and then he made Ælfric swear on the comb of Saint Cuthbert that he would respect the new will and acknowledge me as Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Ælfric did so swear. “But it won’t happen,” my father said. “We shall slaughter these Danes like sheep in a fold, and we shall ride back here with plunder and honor.”

  “Pray God,” Ælfric said.

  Ælfric and thirty men would stay at Bebbanburg to guard the fortress and protect the women. He gave me gifts that night; a leather coat that would protect against a sword cut and, best of all, a helmet around which Ealdwulf the smith had fashioned a band of gilt bronze. “So they will know you are a prince,” Ælfric said.

  “He’s not a prince,” my father said, “but an ealdorman’s heir.” Yet he was pleased with his brother’s gifts to me and added two of his own, a short sword and a horse. The sword was an old blade, cut down, with a leather scabbard lined with fleece. It had a chunky hilt, was clumsy, yet that night I slept with the blade under my blanket.

  And next morning, as my stepmother wept on the ramparts of the High Gate, and under a blue, clean sky, we rode to war. Two hundred and fifty men went south, following our banner of the wolf’s head.

  That was in the year 867, and it was the first time I ever went to war.

  And I have never ceased.

  “You will not fight in the shield wall,” my father said.

  “No, Father.”

  “Only men can stand in the shield wall,” he said, “but you will watch, you will learn, and you will discover that the most dangerous stroke is not the sword or ax that you can see, but the one you cannot see, the blade that comes beneath the shields to bite your ankles.”

  He grudgingly gave me much other advice as we followed the long road south. Of the two hundred and fifty men who went to Eoferwic from Bebbanburg, one hundred and twenty were on horseback. Those were my father’s household men or else the wealthier farmers, the ones who could afford some kind of armor and had shields and swords. Most of the men were not wealthy, but they were sworn to my father’s cause, and they marched with sickles, spears, reaping hooks, fish gaffs, and axes. Some carried hunting bows, and all had been ordered to bring a week’s food, which was mostly hard bread, harder cheese, and smoked fish. Many were accompanied by women. My father had ordered that no women were to march south, but he did not send them back, reckoning that the women would follow anyway, and that men fought better when their wives or lovers were watching, and he was confident that those women would see the levy of Northumbria give the Danes a terrible slaughter. He claimed we were the hardest men of England, much harder than the soft Mercians. “Your mother was a Mercian,” he added, but said nothing more. He never talked of her. I knew they had been married less than a year, that she had died giving birth to me, and that she was an ealdorman’s daughter, but as far as my father was concerned she might never have existed. He claimed to despise the Mercians, but not as much as he scorned the coddled West Saxons. “They don’t know hardship in Wessex,” he maintained, but he reserved his severest judgment for the East Anglians. “They live in marshes,” he once told me, “and live like frogs.” We Northumbrians had always hated the East Anglians for long ago they had defeated us in battle, killing Ethelfrith, our king and husband to the Bebba after whom our fortress was named. I was to discover later that the East Anglians had given horses and winter shelter to the Danes who had captured Eoferwic so my father was right to despise them. They were treacherous frogs.

  Father Beocca rode south with us. My father did not much like the priest, but did not want to go to war without a man of God to say prayers. Beocca, in turn, was devoted to my father who had freed him from slavery and provided him with his education. My father could have worshipped the devil and Beocca, I think, would have turned a blind eye. He was young, clean shaven, and extraordinarily ugly, with a fearful squint, a flattened nose, unruly red hair, and a palsied left hand. He was also very clever, though I did not appreciate it then, resenting that he gave me lessons. The poor man had tried so hard to teach me letters, but I mocked his efforts, preferring to get a beating from my father to concentrating on the alphabet.

  We followed the Roman road, crossing their great wall at the Tine, and still going south. The Romans, my father said, had been giants who built wondrous things, but they had gone back to Rome and the giants had died and now the only Romans left were priests, but the giants’ roads were still there and, as we went south, more men joined us until a horde marched on the moors either side of the stony road’s broken surface. The men slept in the open, though my father and his chief retainers would bed for the night in abbeys or barns.

  We also straggled. Even at ten years old I noticed how we straggled. Men had brought liquor with them, or else they stole mead or ale from the villages we passed, and they frequently got drunk and simply collapsed at the roadside and no one seemed to care. “They’ll catch up,” my father said carelessly.

  “It’s not good,” Father Beocca told me.

  “What’s not good?’

  “There should be more discipline. I have read the Roman wars and know there must be discipline.”

  “They’ll catch up,” I said, echoing my father.

  That night we were joined by men from the place called Cetreht where, long ago, we had defeated the Welsh in a great battle. The newcomers sang of the battle, chanting how we had fed the ravens with the foreigners’ blood, and the words cheered my father who told me we were near Eoferwic and that next day we might expect to join Osbert and Ælla, and how the day after that we would feed the ravens again. We were sitting by a fire, one of hundreds of fires that stretched across
the fields. South of us, far off across a flat land, I could see the sky glowing from the light of still more fires and knew they showed where the rest of Northumbria’s army gathered.

  “The raven is Woden’s creature, isn’t it?” I asked nervously.

  My father looked at me sourly. “Who told you that?”

  I shrugged, said nothing.

  “Ealdwulf?” He guessed, knowing that Bebbanburg’s blacksmith, who had stayed at the fortress with Ælfric, was a secret pagan.

  “I just heard it,” I said, hoping I would get away with the evasion without being hit, “and I know we are descended from Woden.”

  “We are,” my father acknowledged, “but we have a new God now.” He stared balefully across the encampment where men were drinking. “Do you know who wins battles, boy?”

  “We do, Father.”

  “The side that is least drunk,” he said, and then, after a pause, “but it helps to be drunk.”

  “Why?”

  “Because a shield wall is an awful place.” He gazed into the fire. “I have been in six shield walls,” he went on, “and prayed every time it would be the last. Your brother, now, he was a man who might have loved the shield wall. He had courage.” He fell silent, thinking, then scowled. “The man who brought his head. I want his head. I want to spit into his dead eyes, then put his skull on a pole above the Low Gate.”

  “You will have it,” I said.

  He sneered at that. “What do you know?” he asked. “I brought you, boy, because you must see battle. Because our men must see that you are here. But you will not fight. You’re like a young dog who watches the old dogs kill the boar, but doesn’t bite. Watch and learn, watch and learn and maybe one day you’ll be useful. But for now you’re nothing but a pup.” He dismissed me with a wave.