The Last Kingdom

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Ah.” Ælswith leaned back in her chair, her sharp face showing the look of satisfaction some people assume when they have caught a liar telling an untruth.

  “But I was taught to call him uncle,” Brida went on, surprising me, for I thought she had found herself in an impossible quandary and was confessing the lie, but instead, I realized, she was embroidering it. “My mother was called Hild and she had no husband but she insisted I call King Edmund uncle,” she spoke in a small, frightened voice, “and he liked that.”

  “He liked it?” Ælswith snapped. “Why?”

  “Because,” Brida said, and then blushed, and how she made herself blush I do not know, but she lowered her eyes, reddened, and looked as if she were about to burst into tears.

  “Ah,” Ælswith said again, catching on to the girl’s meaning and blushing herself. “So he was your…” She did not finish, not wanting to accuse the dead and holy King Edmund of having fathered a bastard on some woman called Hild.

  “Yes,” Brida said, and actually started crying. I stared up at the hall’s smoke-blackened rafters and tried not to laugh. “He was ever so kind to me,” Brida sobbed, “and the nasty Danes killed him!”

  Ælswith plainly believed Brida. Folk usually do believe the worst in other folk, and the saintly King Edmund was now revealed as a secret womanizer, though that did not stop him eventually becoming a saint, but it did condemn Brida because Ælswith now proposed that she be sent to some nunnery in southern Wessex. Brida might have royal blood, but it was plainly tainted by sin, so Ælswith wanted her locked away for life. “Yes,” Brida agreed meekly, and I had to pretend I was choking in the smoke. Then Ælswith presented us both with crucifixes. She had two ready, both of silver, but she whispered to one of the nuns and a small wooden one was substituted for one of the silver crucifixes and that one was presented to Brida while I received a silver one which I obediently hung about my neck. I kissed mine, which impressed Ælswith, and Brida hurriedly imitated me, but nothing she could do now would impress Alfred’s wife. Brida was a self-condemned bastard.

  Alfred returned from Baum after nightfall and I had to accompany him to church where the prayers and praises went on forever. Four monks chanted, their droning voices half sending me to sleep, and afterward, for it did eventually end, I was invited to join Alfred for a meal. Beocca impressed on me that this was an honor, that not many folk were asked to eat with the king, but I had eaten with Danish chieftains who never seemed to mind who shared their table so long as they did not spit in the gruel, so I was not flattered. I was hungry, though. I could have eaten a whole roasted ox and I was impatient as we ceremonially washed our hands in basins of water held by the servants and then as we stood by our stools and chairs as Alfred and Ælswith were conducted to the table. A bishop allowed the food to cool as he said an interminable prayer asking God to bless what we were about to eat, and then at last we sat, but what a disappointment that supper was! No pork, no beef, no mutton, not a thing a man might want to eat, but only curds, leeks, soft eggs, bread, diluted ale, and barley boiled into a gelid broth as palatable as frogspawn. Alfred kept saying how good it was, but in the end he did confess that he was afflicted with terrible pains in his belly and that this paplike diet kept the agony at bay.

  “The king is a martyr to meat,” Beocca explained to me. He was one of the three priests at the high table, another of whom was a bishop who had no teeth and mashed his bread into the broth with a candlestick, and there were also two ealdormen and, of course, Ælswith who did much of the talking. She was opposing the notion of allowing the Danes to stay in Readingum, but in the end Alfred said he had no choice and that it was a small concession to make for peace, and that ended the discussion. Ælswith did rejoice that her husband had negotiated the release of all the young hostages held by Halfdan’s army, which Alfred had insisted on for he feared those young ones would be led away from the true church. He looked at me as he spoke about that, but I took little notice, being far more interested in one of the servants who was a young girl, perhaps four or five years older than me, who was startlingly pretty with a mass of black-ringleted hair and I wondered if she was the girl who Alfred kept close so he could thank God for giving him the strength to resist temptation. Later, much later, I discovered she was the same girl. Her name was Merewenna and I thanked God, in time, for not resisting temptation with her, but that lies far ahead in my tale, and for now I was at Alfred’s disposal or, rather, at Ælswith’s.

  “Uhtred must learn to read,” she said. What business it was of hers I did not know, but no one disputed her statement.

  “Amen,” Beocca said.

  “The monks at Winburnan can teach him,” she suggested.

  “A very good idea, my lady,” Beocca said, and the toothless bishop nodded and dribbled his approval.

  “Abbot Hewald is a very diligent teacher,” Ælswith said. In truth Abbot Hewald was one of those bastards who would rather whip the young than teach them, but doubtless that was what Ælswith meant.

  “I rather think,” Alfred put in, “that young Uhtred’s ambition is to be a warrior.”

  “In time, if God wills it, he will be” Ælswith said, “but what use is a soldier who cannot read God’s word?”

  “Amen,” Beocca said.

  “No use at all,” Alfred agreed. I thought teaching a soldier to read was about as much use as teaching a dog to dance, but said nothing, though Alfred sensed my skepticism. “Why is it good for a soldier to read, Uhtred?” he demanded of me.

  “It is good for everyone to read,” I said dutifully, earning a smile from Beocca.

  “A soldier who reads,” Alfred said patiently, “is a soldier who can read orders, a soldier who will know what his king wants. Suppose you are in Northumbria, Uhtred, and I am in Wessex. How else will you know my will?”

  That was breathtaking, though I was too young to realize it at the time. If I was in Northumbria and he was in Wessex, then I was none of his damned business, but of course Alfred was already thinking ahead, far ahead, to a time when there would be one English kingdom and one English king. I just gaped at him and he smiled at me. “So Winburnan it is, young man,” he said, “and the sooner you are there, the better.”

  “The sooner?” Ælswith knew nothing of this suggested haste and was sharply suspicious.

  “The Danes, my dear,” Alfred explained, “will look for both children. If they discover they are here they may well demand their return.”

  “But all hostages are to be freed,” Ælswith objected. “You said so yourself.”

  “Was Uhtred a hostage?” Alfred asked softly, staring at me. “Or was he in danger of becoming a Dane?” He left the questions hanging, and I did not try to answer them. “We must make you into a true Englishman,” Alfred said, “so you must go south in the morning. You and the girl.”

  “The girl doesn’t matter,” Ælswith said dismissively. Brida had been sent to eat with the kitchen slaves.

  “If the Danes discover she’s Edmund’s bastard,” one of the ealdormen observed, “they’ll use her to destroy his reputation.”

  “She never told them that,” I piped up, “because she thought they might mock him.”

  “There’s some good in her then,” Ælswith said grudgingly. She helped herself to one of the soft-boiled eggs. “But what will you do,” she demanded of her husband, “if the Danes accuse you of rescuing the children?”

  “I shall lie, of course,” Alfred said. Ælswith blinked at him, but the bishop mumbled that the lie would be for God and so forgivable.

  I had no intention of going to Winburnan. That was not because I was suddenly avid to be a Dane, but it had everything to do with Serpent-Breath. I loved that sword, and I had left it with Ragnar’s servants, and I wanted her back before my life took whatever path the spinners required of me and, to be sure, I had no wish to give up life with Ragnar for the scant joys of a monastery and a teacher. Brida, I knew, wished to go back to the Danes, and it was Alfred’s sensible ins
istence that we be removed from Baum as soon as possible that gave us our opportunity.

  We were sent away the next morning, before dawn, going south into a hilly country and escorted by a dozen warriors who resented the job of taking two children deep into the heartland of Wessex. I was given a horse, Brida was provided with a mule, and a young priest called Willibald was officially put in charge of delivering Brida to a nunnery and me to Abbot Hewald. Father Willibald was a nice man with an easy smile and a kind manner. He could imitate bird calls and made us laugh by inventing a conversation between a quarrelsome fieldfare with its chack-chack call and a soaring skylark, then he made us guess what birds he was imitating, and that entertainment, mixed in with some harmless riddles, took us to a settlement high above a soft-flowing river in the heavily wooded countryside. The soldiers insisted on stopping there because they said the horses needed a rest. “They really need ale,” Willibald told us, and shrugged as if it was understandable.

  It was a warm day. The horses were hobbled outside the hall, the soldiers got their ale, bread, and cheese, then sat in a circle and threw dice and grumbled, leaving us to Willibald’s supervision, but the young priest stretched out on a half-collapsed haystack and fell asleep in the sunlight. I looked at Brida, she looked at me, and it was as simple as that. We crept along the side of the hall, circled an enormous dung heap, dodged through some pigs that rooted in a field, wriggled through a hedge, and then we were in woodland where we both started to laugh. “My mother insisted I call him uncle,” Brida said in her small voice, “and the nasty Danes killed him,” and we both thought that was the funniest thing we had ever heard, and then we came to our senses and hurried northward.

  It was a long time before the soldiers searched for us, and later they brought hunting dogs from the hall where they had purchased ale, but by then we had waded up a stream, changed direction again, found higher ground, and hidden ourselves. They did not find us, though all afternoon we could hear the hounds baying in the valley. They must have been searching the riverbank, thinking we had gone there, but we were safe and alone and high.

  They searched for two days, never coming close, and on the third day we saw Alfred’s royal cavalcade riding south on the road under the hill. The meeting at Baum was over, and that meant the Danes were retreating to Readingum and neither of us had any idea how to reach Readingum, but we knew we had traveled west to reach Baum, so that was a start, and we knew we had to find the river Temes, and our only two problems were food and the need to avoid being caught.

  That was a good time. We stole milk from the udders of cows and goats. We had no weapons, but we fashioned cudgels from fallen branches and used them to threaten some poor old man who was patiently digging a ditch and had a small sack with bread and pease pudding for his meal, and we stole that, and we caught fish with our hands, a trick that Brida taught me, and we lived in the woods. I wore my hammer amulet again. Brida had thrown away her wooden crucifix, but I kept the silver one for it was valuable.

  After a few days we began traveling by night. We were both frightened at first, for the night is when the sceadugengan stir from their hiding places, but we became good at traversing the darkness. We skirted farms, following the stars, and we learned how to move without noise, how to be shadows. One night something large and growling came close and we heard it shifting, pawing the ground, and we both beat at the leaf mold with our cudgels and yelped and the thing went away. A boar? Perhaps. Or perhaps one of the shapeless, nameless sceadugengan that curdle dreams.

  We had to cross a range of high, bare hills where we managed to steal a lamb before the shepherd’s dogs even knew we were there. We lit a fire in the woods north of the hills and cooked the meat, and the next night we found the river. We did not know what river, but it was wide, it flowed beneath deep trees, and nearby was a settlement where we saw a small round boat made of bent willow sticks covered with goatskin. That night we stole the boat and let it carry us downstream, past settlements, under bridges, ever going east.

  We did not know it, but the river was the Temes, and so we came safe to Readingum.

  Rorik had died. He had been sick for so long, but there were times when he had seemed to recover, but whatever illness carried him away had done so swiftly and Brida and I reached Readingum on the day that his body was burned. Ragnar, in tears, stood by the pyre and watched as the flames consumed his son. A sword, a bridle, a hammer amulet, and a model ship had been placed on the fire, and after it was done the melted metal was placed with the ashes in a great pot that Ragnar buried close to the Temes. “You are my second son now,” he told me that night, and then remembered Brida, “and you are my daughter.” He embraced us both, then got drunk. The next morning he wanted to ride out and kill West Saxons, but Ravn and Halfdan restrained him.

  The truce was holding. Brida and I had only been gone a little over three weeks and already the first silver was coming to Readingum, along with fodder and food. Alfred, it seemed, was a man of his word and Ragnar was a man of grief. “How will I tell Sigrid?” he wanted to know.

  “It is bad for a man to have only one son,” Ravn told me, “almost as bad as having none. I had three, but only Ragnar lives. Now only his eldest lives.” Ragnar the Younger was still in Ireland.

  “He can have another son,” Brida said.

  “Not from Sigrid,” Ravn said. “But he could take a second wife, I suppose. It is sometimes done.”

  Ragnar had given me back Serpent-Breath, and another arm ring. He gave a ring to Brida too, and he took some consolation from the story of our escape. We had to tell it to Halfdan and to Guthrum the Unlucky, who stared at us dark-eyed as we described the meal with Alfred, and Alfred’s plans to educate me, and even grief-stricken Ragnar laughed when Brida retold the story of how she had claimed to be King Edmund’s bastard.

  “This Queen Ælswith,” Halfdan wanted to know, “what is she like?”

  “No queen,” I said. “The West Saxons won’t have queens.” Beocca had told me that. “She is merely the king’s wife.”

  “She is a weasel pretending to be a thrush,” Brida said.

  “Is she pretty?” Guthrum asked.

  “A pinched face,” Brida said, “and piggy eyes and a pursed mouth.”

  “He’ll get no joy there then,” Halfdan said. “Why did he marry her?”

  “Because she’s from Mercia,” Ravn said, “and Alfred would have Mercia on his side.”

  “Mercia belongs to us,” Halfdan growled.

  “But Alfred would take it back,” Ravn said, “and what we should do is send ships with rich gifts for the Britons. If they attack from Wales and Cornwalum then he must divide his army.”

  That was an unfortunate thing to say, for Halfdan still smarted from the memory of dividing his own army at Æsc’s Hill, and he just scowled into his ale. So far as I know he never did send gifts to the Britons, and it would have been a good idea if he had, but he was distracted by his failure to take Wessex, and there were rumors of unrest in both Northumbria and Mercia. The Danes had captured so much of England so quickly that they had never really subdued their conquest, nor did they hold all the fortresses in the conquered land and so revolts flared like heathland fires. They were easily put down, but untended they would spread and become dangerous. It was time, Halfdan said, to stamp on the fires and to cow the conquered English into terrified submission. Once that was done, once Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia were quiet, the attack on Wessex could be resumed.

  The last of Alfred’s silver came and the Danish army released the young hostages, including the Mercian twins, and the rest of us went back to Lundene. Ragnar dug up the pot with his younger son’s ashes and carried it downstream on Wind-Viper. “I shall take it home,” he told me, “and bury him with his own people.”

  We could not travel north that year. It was autumn when we reached Lundene and so we had to wait through the winter, and it was not till spring that Ragnar’s three ships left the Temes and sailed north. I was fifteen
then, and growing fast so that I was suddenly a head taller than most men, and Ragnar made me take the steering oar. He taught me to guide a ship, how to anticipate the buffet of wind or wave, and how to heave on the steering oar before the ship veered. I learned the subtle touch, though at first the ship swayed drunkenly as I put too much pressure on the oar, but in time I came to feel the ship’s will in the long oar’s shaft and learned to love the quiver in the ash as the sleek hull gained her full speed.

  “I shall make you my second son,” Ragnar told me on that voyage.

  I did not know what to say.

  “I shall always favor my eldest,” he went on, meaning Ragnar the Younger, “but you shall still be as a son to me.”

  “I would like that,” I said awkwardly. I gazed at the distant shore that was flecked by the little dun sails of the fishing boats that were fleeing from our ships. “I am honored,” I said.

  “Uhtred Ragnarson,” he said, trying it out, and he must have liked the sound of it for he smiled, but then he thought of Rorik again and the tears came to his eyes and he just stared eastward into the empty sea.

  That night we slept in the mouth of the Humber.

  And two days later came back to Eoferwic.

  The king’s palace had been repaired. It had new shutters on its high windows and the roof was freshly thatched with golden rye straw. The palace’s old Roman walls had been scrubbed so that the lichen was gone from the joints between the stones. Guards stood at the outer gate and, when Ragnar demanded entry, they curtly told him to wait and I thought he would draw his sword, but before his anger could erupt Kjartan appeared. “My lord Ragnar,” he said sourly.

  “Since when does a Dane wait at this gate?” Ragnar demanded.

  “Since I ordered it,” Kjartan retorted, and there was insolence in his voice. He, like the palace, looked prosperous. He wore a cloak of black bear fur, had tall boots, a chain mail tunic, a red leather sword belt, and almost as many arm rings as Ragnar. “No one enters here without my permission,” Kjartan went on, “but of course you are welcome, Earl Ragnar.” He stepped aside to let Ragnar, myself, and three of Ragnar’s men into the big hall where, five years before, my uncle had tried to buy me from Ivar. “I see you still have your English pet,” Kjartan said, looking at me.