Sword of Kings (The Last Kingdom Series, Book 12)

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘We must go, my lady.’

  ‘But my brother!’

  ‘Is talking to Æthelhelm’s men, my lady, and I can’t wait to find out what they decide. Do you wish to wait? You can stay here, and I’ll go.’ There were four women with Eadgifu, I assumed they were her servants or companions, one of whom was holding a small boy, just three or four years old, while two carried babes in arms. There was also a priest who wore a black cloak.

  ‘Lord Uhtred is right, my lady,’ the priest said nervously.

  ‘But my brother has come!’ Eadgifu stared towards Fæfresham as if expecting men with bulls or swords on their shields to come to her rescue.

  ‘And a lot of Ealdorman Æthelhelm’s men have come too,’ I said, ‘and until I know who’s won that battle we must stay with the boat.’

  ‘Can’t we go back?’ Eadgifu pleaded.

  I stared at her. She was undeniably beautiful. She had skin as pale as milk, dark eyebrows and black hair, rich lips and an understandable look of anxiety. ‘Lady,’ I said as patiently as I could, ‘you asked for my help and I’m here. And I don’t help you by taking you back into a town that is full of brawling men, half of whom want to kill your children.’

  ‘I …’ she began, then decided not to speak.

  ‘We go that way,’ I insisted, pointing north. I looked behind and still saw there was no pursuit. ‘Let’s go!’ I shouted.

  Eadgifu kicked her horse alongside mine. ‘Can we wait to find out what happened in Fæfresham?’ she asked.

  ‘We can wait,’ I agreed, ‘but only once we’re aboard my ship.’

  ‘I worry for my brother.’

  ‘And for your husband?’ I asked brutally.

  She made the sign of the cross. ‘Edward is dying. Maybe he’s already dead.’

  ‘And if he is,’ I said, still speaking harshly, ‘Ælfweard is king.’

  ‘He is a rotten soul,’ she spat, ‘an evil creature. The spawn of a devil woman.’

  ‘Who will kill your children in the time it takes to drown a kitten,’ I said, ‘so we must take you somewhere safe.’

  ‘Where is safe?’ The question had come from one of Eadgifu’s women, the only one who was not holding a child. She kicked her horse so that she rode on my left, then asked, ‘Where will we go?’ It was plain that English, which she spoke with a delicate accent, was not her native tongue.

  ‘You are?’ I asked.

  ‘I am Benedetta,’ she said with a dignity that intrigued me.

  The unusual name intrigued me too, for it was neither Saxon nor Danish. ‘Benedetta,’ I repeated it clumsily.

  ‘I am from Lupiae,’ she said proudly and, when I said nothing, ‘you have heard of Lupiae?’

  I must have stared vacantly at her, because Eadgifu answered for me. ‘Benedetta is from Italy!’

  ‘Rome!’ I said.

  ‘Lupiae is far to the south of Rome,’ Benedetta said dismissively.

  ‘Benedetta is my treasured companion,’ Eadgifu explained.

  ‘And evidently a long way from home,’ I remarked.

  ‘Home!’ Benedetta almost spat the word at me. ‘Where is home, Lord Uhtred, when slavers come and take you away?’

  ‘Slavers?’

  ‘Saraceni pigs,’ she said. ‘I was twelve years old. And you have not answered me, Lord Uhtred.’

  I looked at her again and thought this fine, defiant woman was as beautiful as her royal mistress. ‘I haven’t answered you?’

  ‘Where is safe?’

  ‘If Lady Eadgifu’s brother survives,’ I said, ‘then she is free to join him. If not, we go to Bebbanburg.’

  ‘Sigulf will come,’ Eadgifu said confidently, though immediately after speaking she made the sign of the cross.

  ‘I hope so,’ I said awkwardly, and wondered how I would cope with Eadgifu and her companions in Bebbanburg. The fortress was comfortable, but offered nothing like the luxuries of the palaces at Wintanceaster and Lundene. Then there were the rumours of plague in the north, and if Eadgifu and her children were to die in my fortress then men in Wessex would say I had killed them just as they claimed I had killed Æthelhelm the Elder.

  ‘My brother will come,’ Eadgifu interrupted my thoughts, ‘and besides, I cannot go to Bebbanburg.’

  ‘You’ll be safe there, my lady,’ I said.

  ‘My son,’ she said, pointing to the eldest of her children, ‘should be King of Wessex. He cannot be king if we are hiding in Northumbria!’

  I half smiled. ‘Ælfweard will be king,’ I said gently, ‘and Æthelstan will try to be king, so there will be war, my lady. Best to be far away from it.’

  ‘There will be no war,’ she said, ‘because Æthelstan will be king.’

  ‘Æthelstan?’ I asked, surprised. I had thought she would press her son’s claim to the throne over Æthelstan’s. ‘He’ll only be king if he defeats Ælfweard,’ I added.

  ‘Æthelstan will be King of Mercia. My husband,’ she said those last two words with venom in her tone, ‘has made the decision. It is in his will. Ælfweard, horrible boy, will be King of Wessex and of East Anglia, and Æthelstan will be King of Mercia. It is decided.’ I just stared at her, scarce believing what I had heard. ‘They are half-brothers,’ Eadgifu went on, ‘and they each get what they want, so there will be no war.’

  And still I stared. Edward was dividing his kingdom? That was madness. His father’s dream had been to make one kingdom out of four, and Edward had brought that dream so close to reality, yet now he would take an axe to it? And he believed that would bring peace? ‘Truly?’ I asked.

  ‘Truly!’ Eadgifu answered. ‘Æthelstan will rule in Mercia and the nasty pig boy will rule the other two kingdoms until my brother defeats him. Then my Edmund will be king.’

  Madness, I thought again, pure madness. Fate, that malevolent bitch, had surprised me again, and I tried to persuade myself that it was none of my business. Let Ælfweard and Æthelstan fight it out, let the Saxons kill each other in a welter of blood and I would go back north. But the malevolent bitch had still not done with me. Æthelhelm lived, and I had made an oath.

  We rode on.

  Once back in the harbour we piled our captured shields, weapons, and mail in Spearhafoc’s belly. They could all be sold. The ship was floating some three or four feet below the level of the wharf and Eadgifu protested that she could not jump down, nor would she be carried. ‘I am a queen,’ I heard her complain to her Italian companion, ‘not some fishwife.’

  Gerbruht and Folcbald ripped up two long timbers from the wharf and made a crude gangplank, which, after some protests, Eadgifu agreed to use. Her priest escorted her down the perilous slope. Her eldest son, Edmund, followed her down and immediately ran to the heap of captured weapons and dragged out a sword with a blade as long as he was tall. ‘Put it down, boy!’ I called from the wharf.

  ‘You should call him prince,’ the priest reproved me.

  ‘I’ll call him prince when he proves he deserves the title. Put it down!’ Edmund ignored me and tried to swing the blade. ‘Put it down, you little shit!’ I bellowed.

  The boy did not drop the sword, just stared at me with defiance that turned to fear as I jumped down into Spearhafoc’s belly. He began to cry, but Benedetta, the Italian woman, intervened. She stepped in front of me and took the sword from Edmund’s hand. ‘If you are told to drop a sword,’ she said calmly, ‘then you drop it. And do not cry. Your father is a king and maybe you will be a king one day, and kings do not cry.’ She tossed the sword onto the pile of captured weapons. ‘Now say you are sorry to the Lord Uhtred.’

  Edmund looked at me, muttered something I could not hear, then fled to Spearhafoc’s bows where he clung to his mother’s skirts. Eadgifu put an arm around him and glared at me. ‘He meant no harm, Lord Uhtred,’ she said coldly.

  ‘He might have meant no harm,’ I answered harshly, ‘but he could have caused it.’

  ‘He could also have hurt himself, my lady,’ Benedetta said.

  Ea
dgifu nodded at that, she even smiled, and I understood why she had called the Italian woman her treasured companion. There was a confidence in Benedetta that suggested she was Eadgifu’s protector. She was a strong woman, as competent as she was attractive.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to her softly.

  Benedetta, I saw, had a small smile. She caught my eye and the smile stayed. I held her gaze, wondering at her beauty, but then the priest stepped between us. ‘Edmund is a prince,’ he insisted, ‘and should be treated as royalty.’

  ‘And I’m an ealdorman,’ I snarled, ‘and should be treated with respect. And who are you?’

  ‘I’m the prince’s tutor, lord, and the queen’s confessor. Father Aart.’

  ‘Then you must be a busy man,’ I said.

  ‘Busy, lord?’

  ‘I imagine Queen Eadgifu has much to confess,’ I said, and Father Aart blushed and looked away. ‘And is she a queen?’ I demanded. ‘Wessex doesn’t recognise that title.’

  ‘She is Queen of Mercia until we hear of her husband’s death,’ he said primly, and he was, indeed, a prim little man with a coronet of wispy brown hair surrounding a bald pate. He noticed the hammer at my neck and grimaced. ‘The queen,’ he continued, still looking at the hammer, ‘wishes that we wait for news from the town.’

  ‘We’ll wait,’ I said.

  ‘And then, lord?’

  ‘If she wishes to go with her brother? She can go. Otherwise she goes with us to Bebbanburg.’ I looked up at the wharf. ‘Gerbruht!’

  ‘Lord?’

  ‘Get rid of those ships!’ I pointed to the three ships that had brought Æthelhelm’s men from Lundene to this muddy harbour. ‘Take what’s useful from them first,’ I called after him.

  We salvaged sealhide ropes, new oars made from larch wood, two barrels of ale, three of salted pork, and a faded banner of the leaping stag. We heaped them all in Spearhafoc, then Gerbruht fetched a metal bucket of embers from the tavern’s hearth and blew the embers to life in the bellies of the three ships. ‘The crosses,’ Father Aart said when he realised what was happening.

  ‘Crosses?’

  ‘On the front of the ships! You can’t burn our Lord’s symbol.’

  I growled in frustration, but recognised his unhappiness. ‘Gerbruht,’ I bellowed, ‘remove the crosses from the prows!’

  All three ships were alight before he and Beornoth managed to knock out the pegs holding the crosses. ‘What do I do with it?’ he asked when the first came loose.

  ‘I don’t care! Float it!’

  He threw the cross overboard, then jumped to help Beornoth loosen the second cross. They freed it, scrambled aft, and escaped the flames just in time, but were too late to save the third cross, and I wondered what kind of omen that was. My men apparently saw nothing sinister because they were cheering. They always enjoyed destruction and they whooped like children as the flames seared up the tarred rigging, then as the fire reached the sails that were furled tight on the yards and they too erupted in flame and smoke. ‘Was that necessary?’ Father Aart asked.

  ‘You want to be pursued by three shiploads of Æthelhelm’s warriors?’ I asked in return.

  ‘No, lord.’

  ‘It was necessary,’ I said, though in truth I doubted that any of the three ships could have caught Spearhafoc. They were typical West Saxon ships, well-made but heavy, brutish to row and sluggish under sail.

  The wind had gone around to the south-west. The evening air was warm, the sky almost cloudless, though now smirched by the pyre of dark smoke from the burning boats. The tide was low, but had turned and the flood had begun. I had moved Spearhafoc well away from the blazing ships and moored her to the most northerly wharf, close to the entrance channel. Fisherfolk watched from their houses, but they stayed well clear both of the fire and of us. They were wary, and with good reason. The sun was low in the west, but the summer days were long and we had two or three hours of daylight left. ‘I won’t stay here overnight, my lady,’ I told Eadgifu.

  ‘We’ll be safe, won’t we?’

  ‘Probably. But we still won’t stay.’

  ‘Where do we go?’

  ‘We’ll find a mooring on Sceapig,’ I said, ‘then if we’ve heard nothing from your brother we go north tomorrow.’ I watched the village through the shimmer of fire. No one had appeared from Fæfresham, so whoever had won the confrontation in the town was evidently staying there. Two ravens flew high above the smoke. They were flying north and I could not have wished for a better sign from the gods.

  ‘Æthelstan might be in Lundene,’ Eadgifu told me.

  I looked at her, struck as ever by her loveliness. ‘Why would he be there, my lady?’

  ‘Lundene belongs to Mercia, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It did once,’ I said. ‘Your husband’s father changed that. It belongs to Wessex now.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ she said, ‘I heard that Æthelstan would garrison Lundene as soon as he heard of my husband’s death.’

  ‘But your husband still lives,’ I said, though whether that was true or not I did not know.

  ‘I pray so,’ she said entirely unconvincingly. ‘Yet surely Prince Æthelstan must have forces near Lundene?’

  She was a cunning bitch, as clever as she was beautiful. I say cunning because her words made absolute sense. If she was right and Edward had divided his kingdom then Æthelstan, who was no fool and who must have heard of the will’s contents, would move quickly to take Lundene and so sever East Anglia from Wessex. And Eadgifu, who well knew of my long friendship with Æthelstan, was trying to persuade me to take her to Lundene rather than to Bebbanburg.

  ‘We don’t know that Æthelstan is in Lundene,’ I said, ‘and we won’t know until after Edward is dead.’

  ‘They say the prince has put his troops just north of Lundene,’ Benedetta said.

  ‘Who’s they?’

  She shrugged. ‘Folk in Lundene say that.’

  ‘A king is dying,’ I said, ‘and whenever a king dies there are rumours and more rumours. Believe nothing you cannot see with your own eyes.’

  ‘But if Æthelstan is in Lundene,’ Eadgifu persisted, ‘you would take me there?’

  I hesitated, then nodded. ‘If he’s there, yes.’

  ‘And he will let my children live?’ she asked. Besides Edmund she had two babies, a boy called Eadred and a girl named Eadburh.

  ‘Æthelstan is not a man to kill children,’ I said, which was not the answer she wanted, ‘but if you have a choice between Ælfweard and Æthelstan, choose Æthelstan.’

  ‘What I want,’ she said angrily, ‘is Ælfweard dead and my son on the throne.’

  ‘With you ruling for him?’ I asked, but she had no answer to that, or at least none that she wanted to speak.

  ‘Lord!’ Immar called. ‘Lord!’ and I turned to see three horsemen appear in the shroud of smoke that drifted from the burning boats. The horsemen saw us and spurred towards us.

  ‘Awyrgan!’ Eadgifu shrieked the name with alarm. She stood and gazed at the men who flogged their tired horses towards our wharf. Behind them came a score of red-cloaked men in pursuit. ‘Awyrgan!’ Eadgifu shouted again, fear for him plain in her voice.

  ‘Gerbruht!’ I called. ‘Cut the forward line!’

  ‘You can’t leave him here,’ Eadgifu screamed at me.

  ‘Cut it!’ I bellowed.

  Gerbruht sliced through the bow line with an axe and I drew Serpent-Breath and moved to the aft line. Eadgifu clutched at my arm. ‘Let me go!’ I snarled, shook her off, then sliced through the sealhide rope. Spearhafoc trembled. The tide was pushing her onto the wharf, but the wind was against the tide and there was just enough wind on the furled sail to float us out into the channel. Beornoth helped by seizing an oar and thrusting against a weed-thick piling. The three horsemen had reached the wharf. They threw themselves from their saddles and ran. I saw the terror on Awyrgan’s face because Æthelhelm’s men were close behind, their horses’ hooves drumming loud on the wharf’s
timbers. ‘Jump!’ I shouted. ‘Jump!’

  They jumped. They made a desperate life-saving leap, and two collapsed sprawling on Spearhafoc’s rowing benches while Awyrgan fell just short, but managed to grasp Spearhafoc’s low midships rail where two of my men took hold of him. The pursuing horsemen reined in and two of them threw spears. One blade thumped into the baulks of timber supporting our mast, the second missed Awyrgan by a finger’s breadth, but the men in Spearhafoc’s bow were using oars to pole her off the channel’s muddy bank and north towards the wider waters of the Swalwan Creek. More spears followed, but all fell short.

  ‘If we’d stayed,’ I told Eadgifu, ‘those horsemen would have rained spears on us. Men would have been wounded, men would have been killed,’

  ‘He almost drowned!’ she said, her eyes on Awyrgan, who was being hauled aboard.

  So that, I thought, was why she had come to Cent? ‘And they’d have aimed their spears at your sons,’ I said.

  She seemed not to hear me, but instead went forward to where the half-drenched Awyrgan was sitting on a bench. I turned and caught Benedetta’s gaze. She held my eyes, as if daring me to speak aloud of what I suspected, and I thought again what a beauty she was. She was older than Eadgifu, but age had added wisdom to beauty. She had a dark skin, which gave her grey-green eyes a striking intensity, a long nose in a slender, grave face, wide lips, and hair as black as Eadgifu’s.

  ‘Where to?’ Gerbruht distracted me. He had come aft and taken the steering-oar.

  The sky was darkening. It was dusk, a long summer dusk, and no time to begin a long voyage. ‘Cross the creek,’ I said, ‘find somewhere to spend the night.’

  ‘And in the morning, lord?’

  ‘We go north, of course.’

  North to Bebbanburg, north to home, and north to where no kings died and no madness ruled.

  We crossed the creek in the dying light and found an inlet that twisted deep into Sceapig’s reeds where we could spend the short summer night. The ships we had set on fire burned bright, throwing lurid shadows on the small harbour, their last flames only extinguished as the first stars showed.

  We could have sailed that evening, but we were tired and the shoals around Sceapig are treacherous and best tackled in daylight. We were safe for the night, we could sleep under the watch of our sentries and there was a hummock of dry ground where we could make a fire.