The Last Kingdom

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Show me your hands,” Leofric ordered. I did and he sneered. “You’ll have blisters soon, earsling.”

  That was his favorite word, earsling. It means “arseling.” That was me, though sometimes he called me Endwerc, which means a pain in the arse, and he made me an oarsman, one of the sixteen on the bæcbord, which is the left-hand side of the ship as you look forward. The other side is the steorbord, for it is on that side that the steering oar is rigged. We had sixty warriors aboard, thirty-two rowed at a time unless the sail could be hoisted, and we had Werferth at the steering oar and Leofric snarling up and down telling us to pull harder.

  All autumn and winter we rowed up and down Hamtun’s wide channel and beyond in the Solente, which is the sea south of the island called Wiht, and we fought the tide and wind, hammering Heahengel through short, cold waves until we had become a crew and could make her leap across the sea. To my surprise, I found that Heahengel was a fast ship. I had thought that, being so much bigger, she would be slower than the Danish ships, but she was fast, very fast, and Leofric was turning her into a lethal weapon.

  He did not like me and though he called me earsling and Endwerc I did not face him down because I would have died. He was a short, wide man, muscled like an ox, with a scarred face, a quick temper, and a sword so battered that its blade was slim as a knife. Not that he cared, for his preferred weapon was the ax. He knew I was an ealdorman, but did not care, nor did he care that I had once served on a Danish boat. “The only thing the Danes can teach us, earsling,” he told me, “is how to die.”

  He did not like me, but I liked him. At night, when we filled one of Hamtun’s taverns, I would sit near him to listen to his few words, which were usually scornful, even about our own ships. “Twelve,” he snarled, “and how many can the Danes bring?”

  No one answered.

  “Two hundred?” he suggested. “And we have twelve?”

  Brida beguiled him one night into talking about his fights, all of them ashore, and he talked of Æsc’s Hill, how the Danish shield wall had been broken by a man with an ax, and it was obviously Leofric himself who had done that, and he told how the man had held the ax halfway up its shaft because that made it quicker to recover from the blow, though it diminished the force of the weapon, and how the man had used his shield to hold off the enemy on his left, killed the one in front, then the one to the right, and then had slipped his hand down the ax handle to start swinging it in terrible, flashing strokes that carved through the Danish lines. He saw me listening and gave me his usual sneer. “Been in a shield wall, earsling?”

  I held up one finger.

  “He broke the enemy shield wall,” Brida said. She and I lived in the tavern stables and Leofric liked Brida though he refused to allow her on board Heahengel because he reckoned a woman brought ill luck to a ship. “He broke the wall,” Brida said. “I saw it.”

  He gazed at me, not sure whether to believe her. I said nothing. “Who were you fighting,” he asked after a pause, “nuns?”

  “Welshmen,” Brida said.

  “Oh, Welshmen! Hell, they die easy,” he said, which was not true, but it let him keep his scorn of me, and the next day, when we had a practice fight with wooden staves instead of real weapons, he made sure he opposed me and he beat me to the ground as if I was a yapping dog, opening a cut on my skull and leaving me dazed. “I’m not a Welshman, earsling,” he said. I liked Leofric a lot.

  The year turned. I became eighteen years old. The great Danish army did not come, but their ships did. The Danes were being Vikings again, and their dragon ships came in ones and twos to harry the West Saxon coast, to raid and to rape and to burn and to kill, but this year Alfred had his own ships ready.

  So we went to sea.

  EIGHT

  We spent the spring, summer, and autumn of the year 875 rowing up and down Wessex’s south coast. We were divided into four flotillas, and Leofric commanded Heahengel, Ceruphin, and Cristenlic, which meant Archangel, Cherubim, and Christian. Alfred had chosen the names. Hacca, who led the whole fleet, sailed in the Evangelista, which soon acquired the reputation of being an unlucky ship, though her real ill fortune was to have Hacca on board. He was a nice enough man, generous with his silver, but he hated ships, hated the sea, and wanted nothing more than to be a warrior on dry land, which meant that Evangelista was always on Hamtun’s hard undergoing repairs.

  But not the Heahengel. I tugged that oar till my body ached and my hands were hard as oak, but the rowing put muscle on me, so much muscle. I was big now, big, tall, and strong, and cocky and belligerent as well. I wanted nothing more than to try Heahengel against some Danish ship, yet our first encounter was a disaster. We were off the coast of Suth Seaxa, a marvelous coast of rearing white cliffs, and Ceruphin and Cristenlic had gone far out to sea while we slid inshore hoping to attract a Viking ship that would pursue us into an ambush sprung by the other two craft. The trap worked, only the Viking was better than us. He was smaller, much smaller, and we pursued him against the falling tide, gaining on him with every dip of our oars, but then he saw Ceruphin and Cristenlic slamming in from the south, their oar blades flashing back the sunlight and their bow waves seething white, and the Danish shipmaster turned his craft as if she had been mounted on a spindle and, with the strong tide now helping him, dashed back at us.

  “Turn into him!” Leofric roared at Werferth who was at the steering oar, but instead Werferth turned away, not wanting to bring on a collision, and I saw the oars of the Danish ship slide into their holes as she neared us and then she ran down our steorbord flank, snapping our oars one by one, the impact throwing the oar shafts back into our rowers with enough force to break some men’s ribs, and then the Danish archers—they had four or five aboard—began loosing their arrows. One went into Werferth’s neck and there was blood pouring down the steering deck and Leofric was bellowing in impotent rage as the Dane, oars slid out again, sped safely away down the fast ebbing tide. They jeered as we wallowed in the waves.

  “Have you steered a boat, earsling?” Leofric asked me, pulling the dying Werferth aside.

  “Yes.”

  “Then steer this one.” We limped home with only half our proper oars, and we learned two lessons. One was to carry spare oars and the second was to carry archers, except that Ealdorman Freola, who commanded the fyrd of Hamptonscir, said he could spare no bowmen, that he had too few as it was, and that the ships had already consumed too many of his other warriors, and besides, he said, we should not need archers. Hacca, his brother, told us not to make a fuss. “Just throw spears,” he advised Leofric.

  “I want archers,” Leofric insisted.

  “There are none!” Hacca said, spreading his hands.

  Father Willibald wanted to write a letter to Alfred. “He will listen to me,” he said.

  “So you write to him,” Leofric said sourly, “and what happens then?”

  “He will send archers, of course!” Father Willibald said brightly.

  “The letter,” Leofric said, “goes to his damn clerks, who are all priests, and they put it in a pile, and the pile gets read slowly, and when Alfred finally sees it he asks for advice, and two damned bishops have their say, and Alfred writes back wanting to know more, and by then it’s Candlemas and we’re all dead with Danish arrows in our backs.” He glared at Willibald and I began to like Leofric even more. He saw me grinning. “What’s so funny, Endwerc?” he demanded.

  “I can get you archers,” I said.

  “How?”

  With one piece of Ragnar’s gold, which we displayed in Hamtun’s marketplace and said that the gold coin, with its weird writing, would go to the best archer to win a competition that would be held one week hence. That coin was worth more than most men could earn in a year and Leofric was curious how I had come by it, but I refused to tell him. Instead I set up targets and word spread through the countryside that rich gold was to be had with cheap arrows, and over forty men arrived to test their skill and we simply marched the best
twelve on board Heahengel and another ten each to Ceruphin and Cristenlic, then took them to sea. Our twelve protested, of course, but Leofric snarled at them and they all suddenly decided they wanted nothing better than to sail the Wessex coast with him. “For something that dribbled out of a goat’s backside,” Leofric told me, “you’re not completely useless.”

  “There’ll be trouble when we get back,” I warned him.

  “Of course there’ll be trouble,” he agreed, “trouble from the shire reeve, from the ealdorman, from the bishop, and from the whole damned lot of them.” He laughed suddenly, a very rare occurrence. “So let’s kill some Danes first.”

  We did. And by chance it was the same ship that had shamed us, and she tried the same trick again, but this time I turned Heahengel into her and our bows smashed into her quarter and our twelve archers were loosing shafts into her crew. Heahengel had ridden up over the other ship, half sinking her and pinning her down, and Leofric led a charge over the prow, and there was blood thickening the water in the Viking bilge. Two of our men managed to tie the ships together, which meant I could leave the steering oar and, without bothering to put on either helmet or mail coat, I jumped aboard with Serpent-Breath and joined the fight. There were shields clashing in the wide midships, spears jabbing, swords and axes swinging, arrows flighting overhead, men screaming, men dying, the rage of battle, the joy of blade song, and it was all over before Ceruphin or Cristenlic could join us.

  How I did love it. To be young, to be strong, to have a good sword, and to survive. The Danish crew had been forty-six strong and all but one died, and he only lived because Leofric bellowed that we must take a prisoner. Three of our men died, and six were foully wounded and they probably all died once we got them ashore, but we bailed out the Viking ship and went back to Hamtun with her in tow, and in her blood-drenched belly we found a chest of silver that she had stolen from a monastery on Wiht. Leofric presented a generous amount to the bowmen, so that when we went ashore and were confronted by the reeve, who demanded that we give up the archers, only two of them wanted to go. The rest could see their way to becoming wealthy, and so they stayed.

  The prisoner was called Hroi. His lord, whom we had killed in the battle, had been called Thurkil and he served Guthrum, who was in East Anglia where he now called himself king of that country. “Does he still wear the bone in his hair?” I asked.

  “Yes, lord,” Hroi said. He did not call me lord because I was an ealdorman, for he did not know that. He called me lord because he did not want me to kill him when the questioning was done.

  Hroi did not think Guthrum would attack this year. “He waits for Halfdan,” he told me.

  “And Halfdan’s where?”

  “In Ireland, lord.”

  “Avenging Ivar?”

  “Yes, lord.”

  “You know Kjartan?”

  “I know three men so called, lord.”

  “Kjartan of Northumbria,” I said, “father of Sven.”

  “Earl Kjartan, you mean?”

  “He calls himself an earl now?” I asked.

  “Yes, lord, and he is still in Northumbria.”

  “And Ragnar? Son of Ragnar the Fearless?”

  “Earl Ragnar is with Guthrum, lord, in East Anglia. He has four boats.”

  We chained Hroi and sent him under guard to Wintanceaster for Alfred liked to talk with Danish prisoners. I do not know what happened to him. He was probably hanged or beheaded, for Alfred did not extend Christian mercy to pagan pirates.

  And I thought of Ragnar the Younger, Earl Ragnar now, and wondered if I would meet his boats on the Wessex coast, and wondered too whether Hroi had lied and that Guthrum would invade that summer. I thought he would, for there was much fighting across the island of Britain. The Danes of Mercia had attacked the Britons in north Wales, I never did discover why, and other Danish bands raided across the West Saxon frontier, and I suspected those raids were meant to discover West Saxon weaknesses before Guthrum launched his great army, but no army came and, as the summer reached its height, Alfred felt safe enough to leave his forces in North Wessex to visit the fleet.

  His arrival coincided with news that seven Danish ships had been seen off Heilincigae, an island that lay in shallow waters not far to Hamtun’s east, and the news was confirmed when we saw smoke rising from a pillaged settlement. Only half our ships were in Hamtun, the others were at sea, and one of the six in port, the Evangelista, was on the hard having her bottom scraped. Hacca was nowhere near Hamtun, gone to his brother’s house probably, and he would doubtless be annoyed that he had missed the king’s visit, but Alfred had given us no warning of his arrival, probably because he wanted to see us as we really were, rather than as we would have been had we known he was coming. As soon as he heard about the Danes off Heilincigae he ordered us all to sea and boarded Heahengel along with two of his guards and three priests, one of whom was Beocca who came to stand beside the steering oar.

  “You’ve got bigger, Uhtred,” he said to me, almost reproachfully. I was a good head taller than him now, and much broader in the chest.

  “If you rowed, father,” I said, “you’d get bigger.”

  He giggled. “I can’t imagine myself rowing,” he said, then pointed at my steering oar. “Is that difficult to manage?” he asked.

  I let him take it and suggested he turn the boat slightly to the steorbord and his crossed eyes widened in astonishment as he tried to push the oar and the water fought against him. “It needs strength,” I said, taking the oar back.

  “You’re happy, aren’t you?” He made it sound like an accusation.

  “I am, yes.”

  “You weren’t meant to be,” he said.

  “No?”

  “Alfred thought this experience would humble you.”

  I stared at the king who was up in the bows with Leofric, and I remembered the king’s honeyed words about me having something to teach these crews, and I realized he had known I had nothing to contribute, yet he had still given me the helmet and armor. That, I assumed, was so I would give him a year of my life in which he hoped Leofric would knock the arrogance out of my bumptious youthfulness. “Didn’t work, did it?” I said, grinning.

  “He said you must be broken like a horse.”

  “But I’m not a horse, father. I’m a lord of Northumbria. What did he think? That after a year I’d be a meek Christian ready to do his bidding?”

  “Is that such a bad thing?”

  “It’s a bad thing,” I said. “He needs proper men to fight the Danes, not praying lickspittles.”

  Beocca sighed, then made the sign of the cross because poor Father Willibald was feeding the gulls with his vomit. “It’s time you were married, Uhtred,” Beocca said sternly.

  I looked at him in astonishment. “Married! Why do you say that?”

  “You’re old enough,” Beocca said.

  “So are you,” I retorted, “and you’re not married, so why should I be?”

  “I live in hope,” Beocca said. Poor man, he had a squint, a palsied hand, and a face like a sick weasel, which really did not make him a great favorite with women. “But there is a young woman in Defnascir you should look at,” he told me enthusiastically, “a very well born young lady! A charming creature, and…” He paused, evidently having run out of the girl’s qualities, or else because he could not invent any new ones. “Her father was the shire reeve, rest his soul. A lovely girl. Mildrith, she’s called.” He smiled at me expectantly.

  “A reeve’s daughter,” I said flatly. “The king’s reeve? The shire reeve?”

  “Her father was reeve of southern Defnascir,” Beocca said, sliding the man down the social ladder, “but he left Mildrith property. A fair piece of land near Exanceaster.”

  “A reeve’s daughter,” I repeated, “not an ealdorman’s daughter?”

  “She’s sixteen, I believe,” Beocca said, gazing at the shingled beach sliding away to our east.

  “Sixteen,” I said scathingly, “and unmar
ried, which suggests she has a face like a bag of maggots.”

  “That is hardly relevant,” he said crossly.

  “You don’t have to sleep with her,” I said, “and no doubt she’s pious?”

  “She is a devoted Christian, I’m happy to say.”

  “You’ve seen her?” I asked.

  “No,” he admitted, “but Alfred has talked of her.”

  “This is Alfred’s idea?”

  “He likes to see his men settled, to have their roots in the land.”

  “I’m not his man, Father. I’m Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and the lords of Bebbanburg don’t marry pious maggot-faced bitches of low birth.”

  “You should meet her,” he persisted, frowning at me. “Marriage is a wonderful thing, Uhtred, ordained by God for our happiness.”

  “How would you know?”

  “It is,” he insisted weakly.

  “I’m already happy,” I said. “I hump Brida and I kill Danes. Find another man for Mildrith. Why don’t you marry her? Good God, Father, you must be near thirty! If you don’t marry soon you’ll go to your grave a virgin. Are you a virgin?”

  He blushed, but did not answer because Leofric came back to the steering deck with a black scowl. He never looked happy, but he appeared grimmer than ever at that moment and I had an idea that he had been arguing with Alfred, an argument he had plainly lost. Alfred himself followed, a serene look of indifference on his long face. Two of his priests trailed him, carrying parchment, ink, and quills, and I realized notes were being taken. “What would you say, Uhtred, was the most crucial equipment for a ship?” Alfred asked me. One of the priests dipped his quill in the ink in readiness for my answer, then staggered as the ship hit a wave. God knows what his writing looked like that day. “The sail?” Alfred prompted me. “Spears? Archers? Shields? Oars?”