Читать книгу The Last Kingdom Series Books 1-6 - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 22

I settled in southern Mercia. I found another uncle, this one called Ealdorman Æthelred, son of Æthelred, brother of Æthelwulf, father of Æthelred, and brother to another Æthelred who had been the father of Ælswith who was married to Alfred, and Ealdorman Æthelred, with his confusing family, grudgingly acknowledged me as a nephew, though the welcome became slightly warmer when I presented him with two gold coins and swore on a crucifix that it was all the money I possessed. He assumed Brida was my lover, in which he was right, and thereafter he ignored her.

The journey south was wearisome, as all winter journeys are. For a time we sheltered at an upland homestead near Meslach and the folk there took us for outlaws. We arrived at their hovel in an evening of sleet and wind, both of us half frozen, and we paid for food and shelter with a few links from the chain of the silver crucifix Ælswith had given me, and in the night the two eldest sons came to collect the rest of our silver, but Brida and I were awake, half expecting such an attempt, and I had Serpent-Breath and Brida had Wasp-Sting and we threatened to geld both boys. The family was friendly after that, or at least scared into docility, believing me when I told them that Brida was a sorceress. They were pagans, some of the many English heretics left in the high hills, and they had no idea that the Danes were swarming over England. They lived far from any village, grunted prayers to Thor and Odin, and sheltered us for six weeks and we worked for our keep by chopping wood, helping their ewes give birth and then standing guard over the sheep pens to keep the wolves at bay.

In early spring we moved on. We avoided Hreapandune, for that was where Burghred kept his court, the same court to which the hapless Egbert of Northumbria had fled, and there were many Danes settled around the town. I did not fear Danes, I could talk to them in their own tongue, knew their jests and even liked them, but if word got back to Eoferwic that Uhtred of Bebbanburg still lived then I feared Kjartan would put a reward on my head. So I asked at every settlement about Ealdorman Æthelwulf who had died fighting the Danes at Readingum, and I learned he had lived at a place called Deoraby, but that the Danes had taken his lands, and his younger brother had gone to Cirrenceastre that lay in the far southern parts of Mercia, very close to the West Saxon border, and that was good because the Danes were thickest in Mercia’s north, and so we went to Cirrenceastre and found it was another Roman town, well walled with stone and timber, and that Æthelwulf’s brother, Æthelred, was now Ealdorman and lord of the place.

We arrived when he sat in court and we waited in his hall among the petitioners and oath-takers. We watched as two men were flogged and a third branded on the face and sent into outlawry for cattle-thieving, and then a steward brought us forward, thinking we had come to seek redress for a grievance, and the steward told us to bow, and I refused and the man tried to make me bend at the waist and I struck him in the face, and that got Æthelred’s attention. He was a tall man, well over forty years old, almost hairless except for a huge beard, and as gloomy as Guthrum. When I struck the steward he beckoned to his guards who were lolling at the hall’s edges. ‘Who are you?’ he growled at me.

‘I am the Ealdorman Uhtred,’ I said, and the title stilled the guards and made the steward back nervously away. ‘I am the son of Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I went on, ‘and of Æthelgifu, his wife. I am your nephew.’

He stared at me. I must have looked a wreck for I was travel-stained and long-haired and ragged, but I had two swords and monstrous pride. ‘You are Æthelgifu’s boy?’ he asked.

‘Your sister’s son,’ I said, and even then I was not certain this was the right family, but it was, and Ealdorman Æthelred made the sign of the cross in memory of his younger sister, whom he hardly remembered, and waved the guards back to the hall’s sides and asked me what I wanted.

‘Shelter,’ I said, and he nodded grudgingly. I told him I had been a prisoner of the Danes ever since my father’s death, and he accepted that willingly enough, but in truth he was not very interested in me, indeed my arrival was a nuisance for we were two more mouths to feed, but family imposes obligation, and Ealdorman Æthelred met his. He also tried to have me killed.

His lands, which stretched to the River Sæfern in the west, were being raided by Britons from Wales. The Welsh were old enemies, the ones who had tried to stop our ancestors from taking England, indeed their name for England is Lloegyr, which means the Lost Lands, and they were forever raiding or thinking of raiding or singing songs about raiding, and they had a great hero called Arthur who was supposed to be sleeping in his grave and one day he was going to rise up and lead the Welsh to a great victory over the English and so take back the Lost Lands, though so far that has not happened.

About a month after I arrived Æthelred heard that a Welsh war-band had crossed the Sæfern and were taking cattle from his lands near Fromtun and he rode to clear them out. He went westwards with fifty men, but ordered the chief of his household troops, a warrior called Tatwine, to block their retreat near the ancient Roman town of Gleawecestre. He gave Tatwine a force of twenty men that included me. ‘You’re a big lad,’ Æthelred said to me before he left, ‘have you ever fought in a shield wall?’

I hesitated, wanting to lie, but decided that poking a sword between men’s legs at Readingum was not the same thing. ‘No, lord,’ I said.

‘Time you learned. That sword must be good for something, where did you get it?’

‘It was my father’s, lord,’ I lied, for I did not want to explain that I had not been a prisoner of the Danes, nor that the sword had been a gift, for Æthelred would have expected me to give it to him. ‘It is the only thing of my father’s I have,’ I added pathetically, and he grunted, waved me away, and told Tatwine to put me in the shield wall if it came to a fight.

I know that because Tatwine told me so when everything was over. Tatwine was a huge man, as tall as me, with a chest like a blacksmith and thick arms on which he made marks with ink and a needle. The marks were just blotches, but he boasted that each one was a man he had killed in battle, and I once tried to count them, but gave up at thirty-eight. His sleeves hid the rest. He was not happy to have me in his band of warriors, and even less happy when Brida insisted on accompanying me, but I told him she had sworn an oath to my father never to leave my side and that she was a cunning woman who knew spells that would confuse the enemy, and he believed both lies and probably thought that once I was dead his men could have their joy of Brida while he took Serpent-Breath back to Æthelred.

The Welsh had crossed the Sæfern high up, then turned south into the lush water meadows where cattle grew fat. They liked to come in fast and go out fast, before the Mercians could gather forces, but Æthelred had heard of their coming in good time and, as he rode west, Tatwine led us north to the bridge across the Sæfern that was the quickest route home to Wales.

The raiders came straight into that trap. We arrived at the bridge at dusk, slept in a field, were awake before dawn and, just as the sun rose, saw the Welshmen and their stolen cattle coming towards us. They made an effort to ride further north, but their horses were tired, ours were fresh, and they realised there was no escape and so they returned to the bridge. We did the same and, dismounted, formed the shield wall. The Welsh made their wall. There were twenty-eight of them, all savage-looking men with shaggy hair and long beards and tattered coats, but their weapons looked well cared for and their shields were stout.

Tatwine spoke some of their language and he told them that if they surrendered now they would be treated mercifully by his lord. Their only response was to howl at us, and one of them turned around, lowered his breeches, and showed us his dirty backside, which passed as a Welsh insult.

Nothing happened then. They were in their shield wall on the road, and our shield wall blocked the bridge, and they shouted insults and Tatwine forbade our men to shout back, and once or twice it seemed as if the Welsh were going to run to their horses and try to escape by galloping northwards, but every time they hinted at such a move, Tatwine ordered the servants to bring up our horses, and the Welsh understood that we would pursue and overtake them and so they went back to the shield wall and jeered at us for not assaulting them. Tatwine was not such a fool. The Welshmen outnumbered us which meant that they could overlap us, but by staying on the bridge our flanks were protected by its Roman parapets and he wanted them to come at us there. He placed me in the centre of the line, and then stood behind me. I understood later that he was ready to step into my place when I fell. I had an old shield with a loose handle loaned to me by my uncle.

Tatwine again tried to persuade them to surrender, promising that only half of them would be put to death, but as the other half would all lose a hand and an eye, it was not a tempting offer. Still they waited, and might have waited until nightfall had not some local people come along and one of them had a bow and some arrows, and he began shooting at the Welsh who, by now, had been drinking steadily through the morning. Tatwine had given us all some ale, but not much.

I was nervous. More than nervous, I was terrified. I had no armour, while the rest of Tatwine’s men were in mail or good leather. Tatwine had a helmet, I had hair. I expected to die, but I remembered my lessons and slung Serpent-Breath on my back, strapping her sword belt around my throat. A sword is much quicker to draw over the shoulder, and I expected to begin the fight with Wasp-Sting. My throat was dry, a muscle in my right leg quivered, my belly felt sour, but entwined with that fear was excitement. This was what life had led to, a shield wall, and if I survived this then I would be a warrior.

The arrows flew one after the other, mostly thumping into shields, but one lucky shaft slid past a shield and sank into a man’s chest and he fell back, and suddenly the Welsh leader lost patience and gave a great scream. And they charged.

It was a small shield wall, not a great battle. A cattle skirmish, not a clash of armies, but it was my first shield wall, and I instinctively rattled my shield against my neighbours’ shields, to make sure they touched, and I lowered Wasp-Sting, meaning to bring her up under the rim, and I crouched slightly to receive the charge, and the Welsh were howling like madmen, a noise meant to scare us, but I was too intent on doing what I had been taught to be distracted by the howls.

‘Now!’ Tatwine shouted and we all lunged our shields forward and there was a blow on mine like Ealdwulf’s hammer thumping the anvil, and I was aware of an axe swinging overhead to split my skull and I ducked, raising the shield, and stabbed Wasp-Sting up into the man’s groin. She went smooth and true, just as Toki had taught me, and that groin-stroke is a wicked blow, one of the killer strikes, and the man screamed a terrible scream, just like a woman in childbirth, and the short sword was stuck in his body, blood pouring down her hilt and the axe tumbled down my back as I straightened. I drew Serpent-Breath across my left shoulder and swung at the man attacking my right-hand neighbour. It was a good stroke, straight into the skull, and I ripped her back, letting Ealdwulf’s edge do its work, and the man with Wasp-Sting in his crotch was under my feet so I stamped on his face. I was shouting now, shouting in Danish, shouting their deaths, and it was all suddenly easy, and I stepped over my first victim to finish off the second, and that meant I had broken our shield wall, which did not matter because Tatwine was there to guard the space. I was in the Welsh space now, but with two dead men beside me, and a third man turned on me, sword coming in a great scything stroke that I met with the shield boss and, as he tried to cover his body with his own shield, I lunged Serpent-Breath into his throat, ripped her out, swung her all the way around and she clanged against a shield behind me, and I turned, all savagery and anger now, and I charged a fourth man, throwing him down with my weight, and he began to shout for mercy and received none.

The joy of it. The sword joy. I was dancing with joy, joy seething in me, the battle joy that Ragnar had so often spoken of, the warrior joy. If a man has not known it, then he is no man. It was no battle, that, no proper slaughter, just a thief-killing, but it was my first fight and the gods had moved in me, had given my arm speed and my shield strength, and when it was done, and when I danced in the blood of the dead, I knew I was good. Knew I was more than good. I could have conquered the world at that moment and my only regret was that Ragnar had not seen me, but then I thought he might be watching from Valhalla and I raised Serpent-Breath to the clouds and shouted his name. I have seen other young men come from their first fights with that same joy, and I have buried them after their next battle. The young are fools and I was young. But I was good.

The cattle thieves were finished. Twelve were dead or so badly wounded as to be near death and the others had fled. We caught them easily enough and, one by one, we killed them, and afterwards I went back to the man whose shield had kissed mine when the walls clashed and I had to put my right foot into his bloody crotch to drag Wasp-Sting free of his clinging flesh, and at that moment all I wanted was more enemies to kill.

‘Where did you learn to fight, boy?’ Tatwine asked me.

I turned on him as though he were an enemy, pride flaring in my face and Wasp-Sting twitching as if she were hungry for blood. ‘I am an Ealdorman of Northumbria,’ I told him.

He paused, wary of me, then nodded. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said, then reached forward and felt the muscles of my right arm. ‘Where did you learn to fight?’ he asked, leaving off the insulting ‘boy’.

‘I watched the Danes.’

‘Watched,’ he said tonelessly. He looked into my eyes, then grinned and embraced me. ‘God love me,’ he said, ‘but you’re a savage one. Your first shield wall?’

‘My first,’ I admitted.

‘But not your last, I dare say, not your last.’

He was right about that.

I have sounded immodest, but I have told the truth. These days I employ poets to sing my praises, but only because that is what a lord is supposed to do, though I often wonder why a man should get paid for mere words. These word-stringers make nothing, grow nothing, kill no enemies, catch no fish and raise no cattle. They just take silver in exchange for words, which are free anyway. It is a clever trick, but in truth they are about as much use as priests.

I did fight well, that is no lie, but I had spent my growing years dreaming of little else, and I was young, and the young are reckless in battle, and I was strong and quick, and the enemy were tired. We left their severed heads on the bridge parapets as a greeting for other Britons coming to visit their Lost Lands, then we rode south to meet Æthelred who was doubtless disappointed to find me alive and still hungry, but he accepted Tatwine’s verdict that I could be useful as a fighter.

Not that there would be much battle, except against outlaws and cattle thieves. Æthelred would have liked to fight the Danes because he fretted under their rule, but he feared their revenge and so took care not to offend them. That was easy enough, for Danish rule was light in our part of Mercia, but every few weeks some Danes would come to Cirrenceastre and demand cattle or food or silver and he had little choice but to pay. In truth he did not look north to the impotent King Burghred as his lord, but south to Wessex, and had I possessed any intelligence in those days I would have understood that Alfred was extending his influence over those southern parts of Mercia. The influence was not obvious, no West Saxon soldiers patrolled the country, but Alfred’s messengers were forever riding and talking to the chief men, persuading them to bring their warriors south if the Danes attacked Wessex again.

I should have been wary of those West Saxon envoys, but I was too caught up in the intrigues of Æthelred’s household to pay them any notice. The Ealdorman did not like me much, but his eldest son, also called Æthelred, detested me. He was a year younger than I, but very conscious of his dignity and a great hater of the Danes. He was also a great hater of Brida, mainly because he tried to hump her and got a knee in the groin for his trouble, and after that she was put to work in Ealdorman Æthelred’s kitchens and she warned me, the very first day, not to touch the gruel. I did not, but the rest of the table all suffered from liquid bowels for the next two days thanks to the elderberries and iris root she had added to the pot. The younger Æthelred and I were forever quarrelling, though he was more careful after I beat him with my fists the day I found him whipping Brida’s dog.

I was a nuisance to my uncle. I was too young, too big, too loud, too proud, too undisciplined, but I was also a family member and a lord, and so Ealdorman Æthelred endured me and was happy to let me chase Welsh raiders with Tatwine. We almost always failed to catch them.

I came back from one such pursuit late at night and let a servant rub down the horse while I went to find food and instead, of all people, discovered Father Willibald in the hall where he was sitting close to the embers of the fire. I did not recognise him at first, nor did he know me when I walked in all sweaty with a leather coat, long boots, a shield and two swords. I just saw a figure by the fire. ‘Anything to eat there?’ I asked, hoping I would not have to light a tallow candle and grope through the servants sleeping in the kitchen.

‘Uhtred,’ he said, and I turned and peered through the gloom. Then he whistled like a blackbird and I recognised him. ‘Is that Brida with you?’ the young priest asked.

She was also in leather, with a Welsh sword strapped to her waist. Nihtgenga ran to Willibald, whom he had never met, and allowed himself to be stroked. Tatwine and the other warriors all tramped in, but Willibald ignored them. ‘I hope you’re well, Uhtred?’

‘I’m well, father,’ I said, ‘and you?’

‘I’m very well,’ he said.

He smiled, obviously wanting me to ask why he had come to Æthelred’s hall, but I pretended to be uninterested. ‘You didn’t get into trouble for losing us?’ I asked him instead.

‘The Lady Ælswith was very angry,’ he admitted, ‘but Alfred seemed not to mind. He did chide Father Beocca though.’

‘Beocca? Why?’

‘Because Beocca had persuaded him you wanted to escape the Danes, and Beocca was wrong. Still, no harm done.’ He smiled. ‘And now Alfred has sent me to find you.’

I squatted close to him. It was late summer, but the night was surprisingly chill so I threw another log onto the fire so that sparks flew up and a puff of smoke drifted into the high beams. ‘Alfred sent you,’ I said flatly. ‘He still wants to teach me to read?’

‘He wants to see you, lord.’

I looked at him suspiciously. I called myself a lord, and so I was by birthright, but I was well imbued with the Danish idea that lordship was earned, not given, and I had not earned it yet. Still, Willibald was showing respect. ‘Why does he want to see me?’ I asked.

‘He would talk with you,’ Willibald said, ‘and when the talk is done you are free to come back here or, indeed, go anywhere else you wish.’

Brida brought me some hard bread and cheese. I ate, thinking. ‘What does he want to talk to me about?’ I asked Willibald, ‘God?’

The priest sighed. ‘Alfred has been king for two years, Uhtred, and in those years he has had only two things on his mind. God and the Danes, but I think he knows you cannot help him with the first.’ I smiled. Æthelred’s hounds had woken as Tatwine and his men settled on the high platforms where they would sleep. One of the hounds came to me, hoping for food and I stroked his rough fur and I thought how Ragnar had loved his hounds. Ragnar was in Valhalla now, feasting and roaring and fighting and whoring and drinking, and I hoped there were hounds in the Northmen’s heaven, and boars the size of oxen, and spears sharp as razors. ‘There is only one condition attached to your journey,’ Willibald went on, ‘and that is that Brida is not to come.’

‘Brida’s not to come, eh?’ I repeated.

‘The Lady Ælswith insists on it,’ Willibald said.

‘Insists?’

‘She has a son now,’ Willibald said, ‘God be praised, a fine boy called Edward.’

‘If I were Alfred,’ I said, ‘I’d keep her busy too.’

Willibald smiled. ‘So will you come?’

I touched Brida, who had settled beside me. ‘We’ll come,’ I promised him, and Willibald shook his head at my obstinacy, but did not try to persuade me to leave Brida behind.

Why did I go? Because I was bored. Because my cousin Æthelred disliked me. Because Willibald’s words had suggested that Alfred did not want me to become a scholar, but a warrior. I went because fate determines our lives.

We left in the morning. It was a late summer’s day, a soft rain falling on trees heavy with leaf. At first we rode through Æthelred’s fields, thick with rye and barley and loud with the rattling noise of corncrakes, but after a few miles we were in the wasteland that was the frontier region between Wessex and Mercia. There had been a time when these fields were fertile, when the villages were full and sheep roamed the higher hills, but the Danes had ravaged the area in the summer after their defeat at Æsc’s Hill, and few men had come back to settle the land. Alfred, I knew, wanted folk to come here to plant crops and rear cattle, but the Danes had threatened to kill any man who used the land for they knew as well as Alfred that such men would look to Wessex for protection, that they would become West Saxons and increase the strength of Wessex, and Wessex, as far as the Danes were concerned, existed only because they had yet to take it.

Yet that land was not entirely deserted. A few folk still lived in the villages, and the woods were full of outlaws. We saw none, and that was good for we still had a fair amount of Ragnar’s hoard that Brida carried. Each coin was now wrapped in a scrap of rag so that the frayed leather bag did not clink as she moved.

By day’s end we were well south of that region and into Wessex and the fields were lush again and the villages full. No wonder the Danes yearned for this land.

Alfred was at Wintanceaster, which was the West Saxon capital and a fine town in a rich countryside. The Romans had made Wintanceaster, of course, and Alfred’s palace was mostly Roman, though his father had added a great hall with beautifully carved beams, and Alfred was building a church that was even bigger than the hall, making its walls from stone that were covered with a spider’s web of timber scaffolding when I arrived. There was a market beside the new building and I remember thinking how odd it was to see so many folk without a single Dane among them. The Danes looked like us, but when Danes walked through a market in northern England the crowds parted, men bowed, and there was a hint of fear. None here. Women haggled over apples and bread and cheese and fish, and the only language I heard was the raw accents of Wessex.

Brida and I were given quarters in the Roman part of the palace. No one tried to part us this time. We had a small room, limewashed, with a straw mattress, and Willibald said we should wait there, and we did until we got bored with waiting, after which we explored the palace, finding it full of priests and monks. They looked at us strangely, for both of us wore arm rings cut with Danish runes. I was a fool in those days, a clumsy fool, and did not have the courtesy to take the arm rings off. True, some English wore them, especially the warriors, but not in Alfred’s palace. There were plenty of warriors in his household, many of them the great Ealdormen who were Alfred’s courtiers, led his retainers and were rewarded by land, but such men were far outnumbered by priests, and only a handful of men, the trusted bodyguard of the king’s household, were permitted to carry weapons in the palace. In truth it was more like a monastery than a king’s court. In one room there were a dozen monks copying books, their pens scratching busily, and there were three chapels, one of them beside a courtyard that was full of flowers. It was beautiful, that courtyard, buzzing with bees and thick with fragrance. Nihtgenga was just pissing on one of the flowering bushes when a voice spoke behind us. ‘The Romans made the courtyard.’

I turned and saw Alfred. I went on one knee, as a man should when he sees a king, and he waved me up. He was wearing woollen breeches, long boots and a simple linen shirt, and he had no escort, neither guard nor priest. His right sleeve was ink-stained. ‘You are welcome, Uhtred,’ he said.

‘Thank you, lord,’ I said, wondering where his entourage was. I had never seen him without a slew of priests within fawning distance, but he was quite alone that day.

‘And Brida,’ he said, ‘is that your dog?’

‘He is,’ she said defiantly.

‘He looks a fine beast. Come,’ he ushered us through a door into what was evidently his own private chamber. It had a tall desk at which he could stand and write. The desk had four candleholders, though as it was daylight the candles were not lit. A small table held a bowl of water so he could wash the ink off his hands. There was a low bed covered in sheepskins, a stool on which were piled six books and a sheaf of parchments, and a low altar on which was an ivory crucifix and two jewelled reliquaries. The remains of a meal were on the window ledge. He moved the plates, bent to kiss the altar, then sat on the ledge and began sharpening some quills for writing. ‘It is kind of you to come,’ he said mildly. ‘I was going to talk with you after supper tonight, but I saw you in the garden, so thought we could talk now.’ He smiled and I, lout that I was, scowled. Brida squatted by the door with Nihtgenga close to her.

‘Ealdorman Æthelred tells me you are a considerable warrior, Uhtred,’ Alfred said.

‘I’ve been lucky, lord.’

‘Luck is good, or so my own warriors tell me. I have not yet worked out a theology of luck, and perhaps I never will. Can there be luck if God disposes?’ He frowned at me for a few heartbeats, evidently thinking about the apparent contradiction, but then dismissed the problem as an amusement for another day. ‘So I suppose I was wrong to try and encourage you to the priesthood?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with encouragement, lord,’ I said, ‘but I had no wish to be a priest.’

‘So you ran away from me. Why?’

I think he expected me to be embarrassed and to evade his question, but I told him the truth. ‘I went back to fetch my sword,’ I told him. I wished I had Serpent-Breath at that moment, because I hated being without her, but the palace doorkeeper had insisted I give up all my weapons, even the small knife I used for eating.

He nodded seriously, as if that were a good reason. ‘It’s a special sword?’

‘The best in the world, lord.’

He smiled at that, recognising a boy’s misplaced enthusiasm. ‘So you went back to Earl Ragnar?’

I nodded this time, but said nothing.

‘Who did not hold you prisoner, Uhtred,’ he said sternly, ‘indeed he never did, did he? He treated you like a son.’

‘I loved him,’ I blurted out.

He stared at me and I became uncomfortable under his gaze. He had very light eyes that gave you the sense of being judged. ‘Yet in Eoferwic,’ Alfred went on mildly, ‘they are saying you killed him.’

Now it was my time to stare at him. I was angry, confused, astonished and surprised, so confused that I did not know what to say. But why was I so surprised? What else would Kjartan claim? Except, I thought, Kjartan must have thought me dead, or I hoped he thought me dead.

‘They lie,’ Brida said flatly.

‘Do they?’ Alfred asked me, still in a mild voice.

‘They lie,’ I said angrily.

‘I never doubted it,’ he said. He put down his quills and knife and leaned over to the heap of stiff parchments that rested on his pile of books and sifted through them until he found the one he was looking for. He read for a few moments. ‘Kjartan? Is that how it is pronounced?’

‘Kjartan,’ I corrected him, making the ‘j’ sound like a ‘y’.

‘Earl Kjartan now,’ Alfred said, ‘and reckoned to be a great lord. Owner of four ships.’

‘That’s all written down?’ I asked.

‘Whatever I discover of my enemies is written down,’ Alfred said, ‘which is why you are here. To tell me more. Did you know Ivar the Boneless is dead?’

My hand instinctively went to Thor’s hammer, which I wore under my jerkin. ‘No. Dead?’ It astonished me. Such was my awe of Ivar that I suppose I had thought he would live for ever, but Alfred spoke the truth. Ivar the Boneless was dead.

‘He was killed fighting against the Irish,’ Alfred said, ‘and Ragnar’s son has returned to Northumbria with his men. Will he fight Kjartan?’

‘If he knows Kjartan killed his father,’ I said, ‘he’ll disembowel him.’

‘Earl Kjartan has sworn an oath of innocence in the matter,’ Alfred said.

‘Then he lies.’

‘He’s a Dane,’ Alfred said, ‘and the truth is not in them.’ He gave me a sharp look, doubtless for the many lies I had fed him over the years. He stood then and paced the small room. He had said that I was there to tell him about the Danes, but in the next few moments he was the one who did the telling. King Burghred of Mercia, he said, was tired of his Danish overlords and had decided to flee to Rome.

‘Rome?’

‘I was taken there twice as a child,’ he said, ‘and I remember the city as a very untidy place,’ that was said very sternly, ‘but a man feels close to God there, so it is a good place to pray. Burghred is a weak man, but he did his small best to alleviate Danish rule, and once he is gone then we can expect the Danes to fill his land. They will be on our frontier. They will be in Cirrenceastre.’ He looked at me. ‘Kjartan knows you’re alive.’

‘He does?’

‘Of course he does. The Danes have spies, just as we do.’ And Alfred’s spies, I realised, had to be efficient for he knew so much. ‘Does Kjartan care about your life?’ he went on. ‘If you tell the truth about Ragnar’s death, Uhtred, then he does care because you can contradict his lies and if Ragnar learns that truth from you then Kjartan will certainly fear for his life. It is in Kjartan’s interest, therefore, to kill you. I tell you this only so that you may consider whether you wish to return to Cirrenceastre where the Danes have,’ he paused, ‘influence. You will be safer in Wessex, but how long will Wessex last?’ He evidently did not expect an answer, but kept pacing. ‘Ubba has sent men to Mercia, which suggests he will follow. Have you met Ubba?’

‘Many times.’

‘Tell me of him.’

I told him what I knew, told him that Ubba was a great warrior, though very superstitious and that intrigued Alfred who wanted to know all about Storri the sorcerer and about the runesticks, and I told him how Ubba never picked battles for the joy of fighting, but only when the runes said he could win, but that once he fought he did so with a terrible savagery. Alfred wrote it all down, then asked if I had met Halfdan, the youngest brother, and I said I had, but very briefly.

‘Halfdan speaks of avenging Ivar,’ Alfred said, ‘so it’s possible he will not come back to Wessex. Not soon, anyway. But even with Halfdan in Ireland there will be plenty of pagans left to attack us.’ He explained how he had anticipated an attack this year, but the Danes had been disorganised and he did not expect that to last. ‘They will come next year,’ he said, ‘and we think Ubba will lead them.’

‘Or Guthrum,’ I said.

‘I had not forgotten him. He is in East Anglia now.’ He glanced reproachfully at Brida, remembering her tales of Edmund. Brida, quite unworried, just watched him with half-closed eyes. He looked back to me. ‘What do you know of Guthrum?’

Again I talked and again he wrote. He was intrigued about the bone in Guthrum’s hair, and shuddered when I repeated Guthrum’s insistence that every Englishman be killed. ‘A harder job than he thinks,’ Alfred said drily. He laid the pen down and began pacing again. ‘There are different kinds of men,’ he said, ‘and some are to be more feared than others. I feared Ivar the Boneless, for he was cold and thought carefully. Ubba? I don’t know, but I suspect he is dangerous. Halfdan? A brave fool, but with no thoughts in his head. Guthrum? He is the least to be feared.’

‘The least?’ I sounded dubious. Guthrum might be called the Unlucky, but he was a considerable chieftain and led a large force of warriors.

‘He thinks with his heart, Uhtred,’ Alfred said, ‘not his head. You can change a man’s heart, but not his head.’ I remember staring at Alfred then, thinking that he spouted foolishness like a horse pissing, but he was right. Or almost right because he tried to change me, but never succeeded.

A bee drifted through the door, Nihtgenga snapped impotently at it and the bee droned out again. ‘But Guthrum will attack us?’ Alfred asked.

‘He wants to split you,’ I said. ‘One army by land, another by sea, and the Britons from Wales.’

Alfred looked at me gravely. ‘How do you know that?’

So I told him about Guthrum’s visit to Ragnar and the long conversation which I had witnessed, and Alfred’s pen scratched, little flecks of ink spattering from the quill at rough spots on the parchment. ‘What this suggests,’ he spoke as he wrote, ‘is that Ubba will come from Mercia by land and Guthrum by sea from East Anglia.’ He was wrong about that, but it seemed likely at the time. ‘How many ships can Guthrum bring?’

I had no idea. ‘Seventy?’ I suggested, ‘a hundred?’

‘Far more than that,’ Alfred said severely, ‘and I cannot build even twenty ships to oppose them. Have you sailed, Uhtred?’

‘Many times.’

‘With the Danes?’ he asked pedantically.

‘With the Danes,’ I confirmed.

‘What I would like you to do,’ he said, but at that moment a bell tolled somewhere in the palace and he immediately broke off from what he was saying. ‘Prayers,’ he said, putting down his quill, ‘you will come.’ It was not a question, but a command.

‘I have things to do,’ I said, waited a heartbeat, ‘lord.’

He blinked at me in surprise for he was not used to men opposing his wishes, especially when it came to saying prayers, but I kept a stubborn face and he did not force the issue. There was the slap of sandalled feet on the paved path outside his chamber and he dismissed us as he hurried to join the monks going to their service. A moment later the drone of a chant began, and Brida and I abandoned the palace, going into the town where we discovered a tavern that sold decent ale. I had been offered none by Alfred. The folk there were suspicious of us, partly because of the arm rings with their Danish runes, and partly because of our strange accents, mine from the north and Brida’s from the east, but a sliver of our silver was weighed and trusted, and the wary atmosphere subsided when Father Beocca came in, saw us, and raised his inky hands in welcome. ‘I have been searching high and low for you,’ he said, ‘Alfred wanted you.’

‘He wanted to pray,’ I said.

‘He would have you eat with him.’

I drank some ale. ‘If I live to be a hundred, father,’ I began.

‘I pray you live longer than that,’ Beocca said, ‘I pray you live as long as Methuselah.’

I wondered who that was. ‘If I live to be a hundred,’ I said again, ‘I hope never to eat with Alfred again.’

He shook his head sadly, but agreed to sit with us and take a pot of ale. He reached over and pulled at the leather thong half hidden by my jerkin and so revealed the hammer. He tutted. ‘You lied to me, Uhtred,’ he said sadly. ‘When you ran away from Father Willibald we made enquiries. You were never a prisoner! You were treated as a son!’

‘I was,’ I agreed.

‘But why did you not come to us then? Why did you stay with the Danes?’

I smiled. ‘What would I have learned here?’ I asked. He began to answer, but I stilled him. ‘You would have made me a scholar, father,’ I said, ‘and the Danes made me a warrior. And you will need warriors when they come back.’

Beocca understood that, but he was still sad. He looked at Brida. ‘And you, young lady, I hope you did not lie?’

‘I always tell the truth, father,’ she said in a small voice, ‘always.’

‘That is good,’ he said, then reached over again to hide my amulet. ‘Are you a Christian, Uhtred?’ he asked.

‘You baptised me yourself, father,’ I said evasively.

‘We will not defeat the Danes unless we hold the faith,’ he said earnestly, then smiled, ‘but will you do what Alfred wants?’

‘I don’t know what he wants. He ran off to wear out his knees before he could tell me.’

‘He wants you to serve on one of the ships he’s building,’ he said. I just gaped at him. ‘We’re building ships, Uhtred,’ Beocca went on enthusiastically, ‘ships to fight the Danes, but our sailors are not fighters. They’re, well, sailors! And they’re fishermen, of course, and traders, but we need men who can teach them what the Danes do. Their ships raid our shores incessantly. Two ships come? Three ships? Sometimes more. They land, burn, kill, take slaves and vanish. But with ships we can fight them.’ He punched his withered left hand with his right and winced with the pain. ‘That’s what Alfred wants.’

I glanced at Brida who gave a small shrug as if to say that she thought Beocca was telling the truth.

I thought of the two Æthelreds, younger and older, and their dislike of me. I remembered the joy of a ship on the seas, of the wind tearing at the rigging, of the oars bending and flashing back the sun, of the songs of the rowers, of the heartbeat of the steering-oar, of the seethe of the long green water against the hull. ‘Of course I’ll do it,’ I said.

‘Praise God,’ Beocca said. And why not?

I met Æthelflaed before I left Wintanceaster. She was three or four years old, I suppose, and full of words. She had bright gold hair. She was playing in the garden outside Alfred’s study and I remember she had a rag doll and Alfred played with her and Ælswith worried he was making her too excited. I remember her laugh. She never lost that laugh. Alfred was good with her for he loved his children. Most of the time he was solemn, pious and very self-disciplined, but with small children he became playful and I almost liked him as he teased Æthelflaed by hiding her rag doll behind his back. I also remember how Æthelflaed ran over to Nihtgenga and fondled him and Ælswith called her back. ‘Dirty dog,’ she told her daughter, ‘you’ll get fleas or worse. Come here!’ She gave Brida a very sour look and muttered, ‘Scrætte!’ That means prostitute and Brida pretended not to have heard, as did Alfred. Ælswith ignored me, but I did not mind because Alfred had summoned a palace slave who laid a helmet and a mail coat on the grass. ‘For you, Uhtred,’ Alfred said.

The helmet was bright iron, dented on the crown by the blow of a weapon, polished with sand and vinegar, and with a face-piece in which two eyeholes stared like the pits of a skull. The mail was good, though it had been pierced by a spear or sword where the owner’s heart had been, but it had been expertly repaired by a good smith and it was worth many pieces of silver. ‘They were both taken from a Dane at Æsc’s Hill,’ Alfred told me. Ælswith watched disapprovingly.

‘Lord,’ I said, and went on one knee and kissed his hand.

‘A year’s service,’ he said, ‘is all I ask of you.’

‘You have it, lord,’ I said, and sealed that promise with another kiss on his ink-stained knuckles.

I was dazzled. The two pieces of armour were rare and valuable, and I had done nothing to deserve such generosity, unless to behave boorishly is to deserve favours. And Alfred had been generous, though a lord should be generous. That is what a lord is, a giver of rings, and a lord who does not distribute wealth is a lord who will lose the allegiance of his men, yet even so I had not earned the gifts, though I was grateful for them. I was dazzled by them and, for a moment, I thought Alfred a great and good and admirable man.

I should have thought a moment longer. He was generous, of course, but Alfred, unlike his wife, was never grudging with gifts, but why give such valuable armour to a half-fledged youth? Because I was useful to him. Not very useful, but still of use. Alfred sometimes played chess, a game for which I have small patience, but in chess there are pieces of great value and pieces of little worth, and I was one of those. The pieces of great value were the lords of Mercia who, if he could bind them to him, would help Wessex fight the Danes, but he was already looking beyond Mercia into East Anglia and Northumbria and he had no Northumbrian lords in exile except me, and he foresaw a time when he would need a Northumbrian to persuade the northern folk to accept a southern king. If I had been really valuable, if I could have brought him the allegiance of folk nearer his frontier, then he would have given me a noble West Saxon wife, for a woman of high birth is the greatest gift a lord can bestow, but a helmet and a coat of mail were sufficient for the distant idea of Northumbria. I doubt he thought I could deliver that country to him, but he did see that one day I might be useful in its delivery and so he bound me to him with gifts and made the bonds acceptable with flattery. ‘None of my men has fought on shipboard,’ he told me, ‘so they must learn. You might be young, Uhtred, but you have experience which means you know more than they do. So go and teach them.’

Me? Know more than his men? I had sailed in Wind-Viper, that was all, but I had never fought from a ship, though I was not going to tell Alfred that. Instead I accepted his gifts and went south to the coast, and thus he had tucked away a pawn that might one day be useful. To Alfred, of course, the most valuable pieces on the board were his bishops who were supposed to pray the Danes out of England, and no bishop ever went unfed in Wessex, but I could not complain for I had a coat of mail, a helmet of iron, and looked like a warrior. Alfred loaned us horses for our journey and he sent Father Willibald with us, not as a guardian this time, but because he insisted that his new ships’ crews must have a priest to look after their spiritual needs. Poor Willibald. He used to get sick as a dog every time a ripple touched a ship, but he never abandoned his responsibilities, especially towards me. If prayers could make a man into a Christian then I would be a saint ten times over by now.

Destiny is all. And now, looking back, I see the pattern of my life’s journey. It began in Bebbanburg and took me south, ever southwards, until I reached the farthest coast of England and could go no further and still hear my own language. That was my childhood’s journey. As a man I have gone the other way, ever northwards, carrying sword and spear and axe to clear the path back to where I began. Destiny. The spinners favour me, or at least they have spared me, and for a time they made me a sailor.

I took my mail coat and helmet in the year 874, the same year that King Burghred fled to Rome, and Alfred expected Guthrum to come in the following spring, but he did not, nor in the summer, and so Wessex was spared an invasion in 875. Guthrum should have come, but he was a cautious man, ever expecting the worst, and he spent a full eighteen months raising the greatest army of Danes that had ever been seen in England. It dwarfed the Great Army that had marched to Readingum, and it was an army that should have finished Wessex and granted Guthrum’s dream of slaughtering the last Englishman in England. Guthrum’s host did come in time and when that time came the three spinners cut England’s threads one by one until she dangled by a wisp, but that story must wait and I mention it now only to explain why we were given time to prepare ourselves.

And I was given to Heahengel. So help me, that was the ship’s name. It means Archangel. She was not mine, of course, she had a shipmaster called Werferth who had commanded a tubby boat that had traded across the sea before he was persuaded to steer Heahengel, and her warriors were led by a grim old beast called Leofric. And me? I was the turd in the butter-churn.

I was not needed. All Alfred’s flattering words about me teaching his sailors how to fight were just that, mere words. But he had persuaded me to join his fleet, and I had promised him a year, and here I was in Hamtun which was a fine port at the head of a long arm of the sea. Alfred had ordered twelve ships made, and their maker was a shipwright who had been an oarsman on a Danish boat before escaping in Frankia and making his way back to England. There was not much about ship fighting that he did not know, and nothing I could teach anyone, but ship fighting is a very simple affair. A ship is a scrap of land afloat. So a ship fight is a land fight at sea. Bang your boat alongside the enemy, make a shield wall, and kill the other crew. But our shipwright, who was a cunning man, had worked out that a larger ship gave its crew an advantage because it could hold more men and its sides, being higher, would serve as a wall, and so he had built twelve big ships which at first looked odd to me for they had no beast-heads at their prows or sterns, though they did all have crucifixes nailed to their masts. The whole fleet was commanded by Ealdorman Hacca, who was brother to the Ealdorman of Hamptonscir, and the only thing he said when I arrived was to advise me to wrap my mail coat in an oiled sack so it would not rust. After that he gave me to Leofric.

‘Show me your hands,’ Leofric ordered. I did and he sneered. ‘You’ll have blisters soon, Earsling.’

That was his favourite 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 and, 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 axe. 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 axe, and it was obviously Leofric himself who had done that, and he told how the man had held the axe 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 axe 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 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 were 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.