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

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Look at him,’ I said. The boy frowned, not understanding, but obediently looked at Oswi who was lit by the flames of the small fire. Aldwyn saw a warrior with a trimmed beard, a fine mail coat, and a sword belt thick with embroidery and small silver panels. ‘Tell him who you are, Oswi,’ I commanded, ‘and what you were.’

  ‘I’m a warrior of Northumbria,’ Oswi said proudly, ‘but I was once like you, boy. I lived in this cellar, I stole my food and I ran from the slavers like you do. Then I met my lord and he became my gold-giver.’

  Aldwyn looked back to me. ‘You are really a lord?’

  I ignored the question. ‘How old are you, Aldwyn?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, lord. Twelve?’

  ‘You lead these boys and girls?’

  He nodded. ‘I look after them, lord.’

  ‘Are you cruel?’ I asked.

  ‘Cruel?’ he frowned.

  ‘Are you cruel?’ I asked again.

  He still seemed puzzled by that question and, instead of answering, glanced at his companions. It was one of the girls who responded. ‘He can hurt us, lord,’ she said, ‘but only when we do something wrong.’

  ‘If you serve me,’ I said, ‘I will be a gold-giver to you all. And yes, Aldwyn, I am a lord. I am a great lord. I have land, I have ships, and I have men. And in time I will drive the enemy from this city and the streets will run with their blood and the dogs will gnaw their flesh and the birds will feast on their eyes.’

  ‘Yes, lord,’ he whispered.

  And I hoped I had told him the truth.

  Spearhafoc was gone, the stone wharf was empty, and no corpses lay on the terrace.

  My new troops brought me the news, or rather Aldwyn and his younger brother went as my scouts and came back bubbling with happiness at a successful mission. Father Oda had tried to warn me against employing them, saying that the temptation for them to betray us was too great, but I had seen the hunger in Aldwyn’s young eyes. It was not a hunger for treachery, nor for the satisfaction of greed, but a hunger to belong, to be valued. They returned.

  ‘There were soldiers there, lord,’ Aldwyn said excitedly.

  ‘What was on their shields?’

  ‘A bird, lord.’ These were city children and would not know a crow from a kittiwake, but I assumed the bird, whatever it might have been, was a symbol from East Anglia.

  ‘And no corpses?’

  ‘None, lord. No blood either.’

  That was a sensible observation. ‘How close did you get?’

  ‘We went inside the house, lord! We said we were beggars.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘One hit me around the head, lord, and told me to piss off.’

  ‘So you pissed off?’

  ‘Yes, lord,’ he grinned.

  I gave him silver and promised him gold if he continued to serve me. So Spearhafoc was gone, which was a relief, but there was always the chance that an East Anglian fleet had been waiting in the sea reach of the Temes to reinforce the men who had captured the city, and that fleet could have captured Berg and my ship. I touched my hammer amulet, said a silent prayer to the gods, and tried to plan a future, but could see no hope beyond the immediate need to find food and ale.

  ‘We steal,’ Aldwyn said when I asked him how his small band fed themselves.

  ‘You can’t steal enough food for us,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to buy.’

  ‘They know us in the markets, lord,’ Aldwyn said gloomily. ‘They chase us away.’

  ‘And the best markets,’ one of the girls said, ‘are outside the city.’ She meant in the sprawling Saxon-built town to the west of the Roman walls. Folk preferred living there, far from the ghosts of Lundene.

  ‘What do you need?’ Father Oda asked me.

  ‘Ale, bread, cheese, smoked fish. Anything.’

  ‘I will go,’ Benedetta said.

  I shook my head. ‘It’s not safe for a woman yet. Maybe tomorrow, when things calm down.’

  ‘She’ll be safe in the company of a priest,’ Father Oda remarked.

  I looked at him. The only light in the cellar came from a crack in the roof that also served as the smoke-hole. ‘But we only have a fire at night, lord,’ Aldwyn had told me, ‘and no one has ever noticed the smoke.’

  ‘You can’t go, father,’ I told Oda.

  He bristled. ‘Why not?’

  ‘They know you, father,’ I said, ‘you’re from East Anglia.’

  ‘I’ve grown a beard since then,’ he said calmly. It was a short beard, neatly cropped. ‘You either starve or let us go,’ he went on. ‘And if they take me captive? What can they do?’

  ‘Kill you, father,’ Finan said.

  A flicker of a smile touched the priest’s face. ‘My lord Uhtred is known as the priest-killer, not Lord Æthelhelm.’

  ‘What will they do to you?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Either ignore me or, more likely, send me to Lord Æthelhelm. He is angry with me.’

  ‘You! Why?’

  ‘Because I served him once,’ Father Oda said calmly. ‘I was one of his confessors. But I left his service.’

  I stared at him in surprise. When I had first met Father Oda he had been in the company of Osferth, an ally of Æthelstan’s, and now I discovered he had been in Æthelhelm’s service.

  ‘Why did you leave?’ Finan asked.

  ‘He demanded we all give an oath to Prince Ælfweard, and in conscience I could not do so. Ælfweard is a cruel, unnatural boy.’

  ‘And King of Wessex now,’ Finan added.

  ‘Which is why Lord Uhtred is here,’ Oda went on, still calm. ‘Soon the priest-killer will be a killer of kings too.’ He looked away from me to Oswi. ‘You will come with us, but no mail coat, no weapons. I am a priest, the lady Benedetta will say she is my wife, and you are our servant, and we go to buy food and ale for the brethren of Saint Erkenwald.’ I knew there was a monastery dedicated to Saint Erkenwald in the east of the city. ‘You, boy,’ Father Oda pointed at Aldwyn, ‘will follow us as far as the city gate and come back here if you see we are in trouble with the guards. And you, lord,’ he smiled at me, ‘will give us money.’

  I always carried a pouch of coins, a heavy pouch, though I suspected it would lighten fast unless I could devise a way of escaping the city. I gave Father Oda a handful of silver shillings. I was hesitant to allow Benedetta to go with him, but as Oda pointed out the presence of a woman and a priest would allay suspicions. ‘They are looking for warriors, lord,’ Oda said, ‘not for married couples.’

  ‘It’s still dangerous for a woman,’ I insisted.

  ‘And only men may face danger?’ Benedetta challenged me.

  ‘She will come to no harm,’ Oda said firmly. ‘If any man offends her I will threaten him with the eternal furnaces of hell and the endless torments of Satan.’

  I had been raised with those threats hanging over me and, despite my belief in the older gods, I still felt a shiver of fear. I touched the hammer. ‘Go, then,’ I said, and so they did and returned safely three hours later with three sacks of food and two small barrels of ale.

  ‘No one followed them, lord,’ Aldwyn told us.

  ‘There was no trouble,’ Oda reported with his usual calm. ‘I talked to the commander of the gate and he tells me there are now four hundred men in the city and more are coming.’

  ‘By sea?’ I asked, fearing for Spearhafoc.

  ‘He did not say. Lord Æthelhelm is not here, nor is King Ælfweard. Those two remain in Wintanceaster as far as he knows. The new garrison is commanded by Lord Varin.’

  ‘Who we saw yesterday.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘It was good to breathe proper air,’ Benedetta said wistfully.

  She was surely right because the stench of the cesspit was overwhelming. I was sitting on the damp floor, leaning my head against the dank bricks, and I thought that Jarl Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg, had come to this. I was a fugitive in a Lundene cellar leading a handful of warriors,
one priest, a royal slave, and a band of ragged children. I touched the hammer hanging at my neck and closed my eyes. ‘We have to leave this damned city,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘The walls are guarded,’ Father Oda warned me.

  I opened my eyes to look at him. ‘Four hundred men, you say. It’s not enough.’

  ‘No?’ Benedetta looked surprised.

  ‘Lundene’s wall must be near two miles round?’ I said, looking at Finan, who nodded agreement. ‘And that doesn’t count the river wall,’ I went on. ‘Four hundred men can’t defend two miles of wall. You’d need two and a half thousand men to fight off any attack.’

  ‘But four hundred men can guard the gates,’ Finan said quietly.

  ‘But not the river wall. Too many gaps in that.’

  ‘Reinforcements are coming,’ Father Oda reminded me, ‘and there’s more.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘No one can move in the streets after sunset,’ he said. ‘Varin sent men to announce that edict. Folk must stay indoors until sunrise.’

  No one spoke for a moment. The children were tearing into the bread and cheese that Benedetta had given them. ‘No!’ she cried sternly, stopping their squabbling. ‘You must have manners! Children without manners are worse than animals. You, boy,’ she pointed at Aldwyn, ‘you have a knife and you will cut the food. You will cut it evenly, the same for everyone.’

  ‘Yes, lady,’ he said.

  Finan grinned at the boy’s obedience. ‘You’re thinking,’ he said to me, ‘of stealing a boat?’

  ‘What else? We can’t drop over the wall into the city’s ditch, we won’t fight our way through a gate without starting a pursuit by horsemen, but a boat might serve.’

  ‘They’ll have captured the wharves,’ Finan said, ‘and be guarding them. They’re not fools.’

  ‘There were soldiers on the wharves, lord,’ Aldwyn put in.

  ‘I know where we might find a boat,’ I said, and looked at Benedetta.

  She looked back, her eyes glinting in the cellar’s darkness. ‘You are thinking of Gunnald Gunnaldson?’ she asked.

  ‘You told me his wharves are protected by fences? They’re separate from the other docks?’

  ‘They are,’ she said, ‘but maybe they captured his ships too?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘or maybe not. But I made you a promise.’

  ‘Yes, lord, you did.’ She offered me one of her rare smiles.

  No one else understood what we spoke about, nor did I explain. ‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘we go tomorrow.’

  Because Uhtred, son of Uhtred, the killer of priests and the would-be killer of a king would become a killer of slavers too.

  Aldwyn and his younger brother, who everyone called the Ræt, were my scouts again. They were gone for much of the day, and the longer they stayed away the more nervous I became. I had two men standing guard outside the cellar mouth, concealed there by the mounds of rubble. I joined them at noon to escape the foetid stench of the cesspit and found Benedetta with one of the smaller girls. ‘She’s called Alaina,’ she told me.

  ‘Pretty name,’ I said.

  ‘For a pretty girl,’ Benedetta was cuddling the child, who had very dark hair, frightened eyes, and skin the same light golden colour as Benedetta. I guessed she was seven or eight years old, and I had noticed her in the cellar’s gloom because she was both better dressed and looked to be in better health then the other children. She had also looked more miserable, her eyes red from crying. Benedetta stroked the girl’s hair. ‘She came here just before us!’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  Benedetta nodded. ‘Yesterday, and her mother is like me. From Italy.’ She said something in her own language to Alaina, then looked back to me. ‘A slave.’ She spoke defiantly, as if it were my fault.

  ‘The child’s a slave?’ I asked.

  Benedetta shook her head. ‘No, no. Nor is the mother any more. Her mama is married to one of Merewalh’s men and she left the house to take food to her husband and the other sentries. That’s when the enemy came.’

  ‘The girl was alone?’

  ‘Alone.’ She bent to kiss the child’s hair. ‘Her mother said she would be home soon, but she never came home. And the poor child heard screaming and she ran from the sound. Aldwyn found her and here she is.’

  Alaina stared at me with wide eyes. She looked scared. She saw an older man with a scarred, hard face, a battered mail coat, a gold chain, and a brace of swords at his waist. I smiled at her and she looked away, burying her face in Benedetta’s clothes. ‘Maybe,’ Benedetta said, ‘the two boys are caught?’

  ‘They’re cunning,’ I said, ‘they won’t be caught.’

  ‘Gunnald would like to have them as slaves. Especially the young one. He can sell small boys almost as easily as little girls.’ She leaned down and kissed Alaina’s forehead. ‘And this poor one? She would fetch a good price.’

  ‘The boys will come back,’ I said, touching the hammer and so earning an Italian scowl.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I think,’ I touched the hammer again.

  ‘And what will you do with them?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘What will you do with them!’ she repeated the question aggressively as if to suggest I had wilfully misunderstood it the first time. ‘You take them with you?’

  ‘If they want to come.’

  ‘All of them?’

  I shrugged. I had not really thought about the children’s future. ‘I suppose so. If they want to come.’

  ‘Then what do they do if they come?’

  ‘There’s always a need for servants at Bebbanburg,’ I said. ‘The girls will work in the kitchen, the hall or the dairy. The boys in the stables or armoury.’

  ‘As slaves?’

  I shook my head. ‘They will be paid. The girls will grow and be married, the boys become warriors. If they don’t like it they can leave. So no, they won’t be slaves.’

  ‘You will not teach them?’

  ‘Sword-skill, yes.’

  ‘To read!’

  I hesitated. ‘It’s not a very useful skill for most folk. Can you read?’

  ‘A little, not much. I would like to.’

  ‘Then maybe you can teach them what little you know.’

  ‘Then Alaina can read her prayers,’ Benedetta said.

  ‘I can pray!’ Alaina said.

  ‘You speak Ænglisc!’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Of course she does!’ Benedetta said scornfully. ‘Her father is Saxon. We will find her father and her mother? Yes?’

  ‘If we can.’

  Though what we could do, or rather what I hoped we could do, had to wait for Aldwyn and the Ræt to return, which they did in the late afternoon, slithering down the rubbled slope and grinning proudly. I took them into the cellar where Finan and the rest of my men could hear what they had to say.

  ‘There are not many guards on the wharves,’ Aldwyn said. ‘They walk up and down in three groups. Six men in each.’

  ‘With spears and shields,’ the Ræt added.

  ‘The bird on most shields,’ Aldwyn said, ‘and some with just a cross.’

  ‘Not many men for that length of wharves,’ Finan said.

  ‘The slaver’s house is near the bridge,’ Aldwyn said. ‘He has a wharf there, but we couldn’t get there.’

  ‘Which side?’ I asked.

  ‘Towards the sea, lord,’ Aldwyn said.

  ‘We couldn’t reach the wharf,’ the Ræt explained, ‘because there’s a wooden fence.’

  ‘But there was a gap in the wood,’ Aldwyn said, ‘and a ship there.’

  ‘We looked through!’ the Ræt, who I guessed was seven or eight years old, said proudly.

  ‘How big?’ I asked.

  ‘A big gap!’ the Ræt said, and held his grubby hands maybe two finger-widths apart.

  ‘The ship,’ I said patiently.

  ‘The ship? Oh, big, lord,’ Aldwyn said, ‘long!’

  ‘And just one ship?’r />
  ‘Just one.’

  ‘And the entrance from the street?’ I asked.

  ‘A big gate, lord. Big! And men with spears inside.’

  ‘You looked through the gate?’

  ‘We waited till they opened it, lord, and men came out. We could see the guards inside.’

  ‘Big guards,’ the Ræt said open-eyed, ‘three of them.’

  ‘Three guards are nothing, lord,’ Beornoth put in.

  ‘But the noise we make breaking down a big gate will bring the East Anglians,’ I said. ‘It’s close to the bridge and the bastards are thick there.’

  ‘There must be other ships to steal,’ Finan suggested.

  ‘We saw no oars on the other ships, lord,’ Aldwyn said.

  ‘They usually lie between the rowers’ benches,’ I said.

  Aldwyn nodded. ‘That’s where you told us to look and we saw none.’ Which meant, I thought, that the East Anglians had confiscated the oars to stop men escaping. ‘Except in the slave ship,’ Aldwyn added.

  ‘She had oars?’

  ‘I think so, lord.’ He sounded uncertain.

  ‘Like thin logs, lord,’ the Ræt said. ‘I saw them!’

  ‘We need oars,’ I said, and wondered how my few men were to row a big ship downriver. ‘There was a sail?’

  ‘Bundled on the stick, lord, like you said.’ Aldwyn meant the yard. But unless the gods were kind and sent us a westerly wind we would have a hard time taking a stolen ship downriver under sail. We needed oars, and I was relying on the report of an eager boy who was not entirely sure of what he had seen.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ I said. No one spoke. The East Anglians, I thought, could not close down the city for ever. Merchant ships would arrive and others would want to leave, and Æthelhelm would want the riches that customs dues could bring him. That meant there would be more shipping and perhaps, if we waited, a chance would come to seize one of those vessels. Yet I kept going back to the thought of Gunnald the slave-trader. Was that because of the promise I had made to Benedetta? I looked at her long solemn face and just then she looked back to me and our eyes held each other. Her expression did not change and she said nothing. ‘We don’t have a choice,’ I said, ‘we go tonight.’

  ‘Lord Varin has forbidden people to walk the streets at night,’ Father Oda pointed out.