The Last Kingdom Series Books 1–8: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, The Lords of the North, Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings, The Pagan Lord, The Empty Throne

‘He will, my lord, he will.’

‘But not by waiting,’ Alfred said, and now there was a sudden hardness in his voice that made Beocca draw away from him. Alfred stood, towering over the priest. ‘We should attack them!’

‘Burghred knows his business,’ Beocca said soothingly, ‘and so does your brother. The pagans will starve, my lord, if that is God’s will.’

So I had my answer, and it was that the English were not planning an assault, but rather hoped to starve Snotengaham into surrender. I dared not carry that answer straight back to the town, not while Beocca and Alfred were so close to me, and so I stayed and listened as Beocca prayed with the prince and then, when Alfred was calm, the two moved back to the tent and went inside.

And I went back. It took a long time, but no one saw me. I was a true sceadugengan that night, moving among the shadows like a spectre, climbing the hill to the town until I could run the last hundred paces and I called Ragnar’s name and the gate creaked open and I was back in Snotengaham.

Ragnar took me to see Ubba when the sun rose and, to my surprise, Weland was there, Weland the snake, and he gave me a sour look, though not so sour as the scowl on Ubba’s dark face. ‘So what did you do?’ he growled.

‘I saw no ladders …’ I began.

‘What did you do?’ Ubba snarled, and so I told my tale from the beginning, how I had crossed the fields and had thought I was being followed, and had dodged like a hare, then gone through the barricade and spoken to the sentry. Ubba stopped me there and looked at Weland. ‘Well?’

Weland nodded. ‘I saw him through the barricade, lord, heard him speak to a man.’

So Weland had followed me? I looked at Ragnar who shrugged. ‘My lord Ubba wanted a second man to go,’ he explained, ‘and Weland offered.’

Weland gave me a smile, the kind of smile the devil might give a bishop entering hell. ‘I could not get through the barrier, lord,’ he told Ubba.

‘But you saw the boy go through?’

‘And heard him speak to the sentry, lord, though what he said I could not tell.’

‘Did you see ladders?’ Ubba asked Weland.

‘No, lord, but I only skirted the fence.’

Ubba stared at Weland, making him uncomfortable, then transferred his dark eyes to me and made me uncomfortable. ‘So you got through the barrier,’ he said, ‘so what did you see?’ I told him how I had found the large tent, and of the conversation I had overheard, how Alfred had wept because he had sinned, and how he had wanted to attack the town and how the priest had said that God would starve the Danes if that was his will, and Ubba believed me because he reckoned a boy could not make up the story of the servant girl and the prince.

Besides, I was amused, and it showed. Alfred, I thought, was a pious weakling, a weeping penitent, a pathetic nothing, and even Ubba smiled as I described the sobbing prince and the earnest priest. ‘So,’ Ubba asked me, ‘no ladders?’

‘I saw none, lord.’

He stared at me with that fearsomely bearded face and then, to my astonishment, he took off one of his arm rings and tossed it to me. ‘You’re right,’ he told Ragnar, ‘he is a Dane.’

‘He’s a good boy,’ Ragnar said.

‘Sometimes the mongrel you find in the field turns out to be useful,’ Ubba said, then beckoned to an old man who had been sitting on a stool in the room’s corner.

The old man was called Storri and, like Ravn, he was a skald, but also a sorcerer and Ubba would do nothing without his advice, and now, without saying a word, Storri took a sheaf of thin white sticks, each the length of a man’s hand, and he held them just above the floor, muttered a prayer to Odin, then let them go. They made a small clattering noise as they fell, and then Storri leaned forward to look at the pattern they made.

They were runesticks. Many Danes consulted the runesticks, but Storri’s skill at reading the signs was famous, and Ubba was a man so riddled with superstition that he would do nothing unless he believed the gods were on his side. ‘Well?’ he asked impatiently.

Storri ignored Ubba, instead he stared at the score of sticks, seeing if he could detect a rune letter or a significant pattern in their random scatter. He moved around the small pile, still peering, then nodded slowly. ‘It could not be better,’ he said.

‘The boy told the truth?’

‘The boy told the truth,’ Storri said, ‘but the sticks talk of today, not of last night, and they tell me all is well.’

‘Good.’ Ubba stood and took his sword from a peg on the wall. ‘No ladders,’ he said to Ragnar, ‘so no assault. We shall go.’

They had been worried that the Mercians and West Saxons would launch an attack on the walls while they made a raid across the river. The southern bank was lightly garrisoned by the besiegers, holding little more than a cordon of men to deter forage parties crossing the Trente, but that afternoon Ubba led six ships across the river and attacked those Mercians, and the runesticks had not lied, for no Danes died and they brought back horses, weapons, armour and prisoners.

Twenty prisoners.

The Mercians had beheaded two of our men, so now Ubba killed twenty of theirs, and did it in their sight so they could see his revenge. The headless bodies were thrown into the ditch in front of the wall and the twenty heads were stuck on spears and mounted above the northern gate.

‘In war,’ Ragnar told me, ‘be ruthless.’

‘Why did you send Weland to follow me?’ I asked him, hurt.

‘Because Ubba insisted on it,’ he said.

‘Because you didn’t trust me?’

‘Because Ubba trusts no one except Storri,’ he said. ‘And I trust you, Uhtred.’

The heads above Snotengaham’s gate were pecked by birds till they were nothing but skulls with hanks of hair that stirred in the summer wind. The Mercians and the West Saxons still did not attack. The sun shone. The river rippled prettily past the town where the ships were drawn up on the bank.

Ravn, though he was blind, liked to come to the ramparts where he would demand that I describe all I could see. Nothing changes, I would say, the enemy are still behind their hedge of felled trees, there are clouds above the distant hills, a hawk hunts, the wind ripples the grass, the swifts are gathering in groups, nothing changes, and tell me about the runesticks, I begged him.

‘The sticks!’ he laughed.

‘Do they work?’

He thought about it. ‘If you can read them, yes. I was good at reading the runes before I lost my eyes.’

‘So they do work,’ I said eagerly.

Ravn gestured towards the landscape he could not see. ‘Out there, Uhtred,’ he said, ‘there are a dozen signs from the gods, and if you know the signs then you know what the gods want. The runesticks give the same message, but I have noticed one thing.’ He paused and I had to prompt him, and he sighed as though he knew he should not say more. But he did. ‘The signs are best read by a clever man,’ he went on, ‘and Storri is clever. I dare say I am no fool.’

I did not really understand what he was saying. ‘But Storri is always right?’

‘Storri is cautious. He won’t take risks, and Ubba, though he doesn’t know it, likes that.’

‘But the sticks are messages from the gods?’

‘The wind is a message from the gods,’ Ravn said, ‘as is the flight of a bird, the fall of a feather, the rise of a fish, the shape of a cloud, the cry of a vixen, all are messages, but in the end, Uhtred, the gods speak in only one place.’ He tapped my head. ‘There.’

I still did not understand and was obscurely disappointed. ‘Could I read the sticks?’

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘but it would be sensible to wait till you’re older. What are you now?’

‘Eleven,’ I said, tempted to say twelve.

‘Maybe you’d best wait a year or two before reading the sticks. Wait till you’re old enough to marry, four or five years from now?’