The Last Kingdom Series Books 1 and 2: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman

‘And a village,’ I added, also pointing south.

To the men on shore we were something from their darkest fears. All they could see was a thicket of masts and the savage carved beasts at the high prows and sterns of our ships. We were an army, brought here by our dragon boats, and they knew what would follow and, as I watched, the three horsemen turned and galloped south.

We went on. Ubba’s ship led the way now, following a twisting shallow channel and I could see Ubba’s sorcerer, Storri, standing in the bows and I guessed he had cast the runes and predicted success. ‘Today,’ Ragnar told me wolfishly, ‘you will learn the Viking way.’

To be a Viking was to be a raider, and Ragnar had not conducted a shipborne raid in many years. He had become an invader instead, a settler, but Ubba’s fleet had come to ravage the coastline and draw the East Anglian army towards the sea while his brother, Ivar, led the land army south from Mercia, and so that early summer I learned the Viking ways. We took the ships to the mainland where Ubba found a stretch of land with a thin neck that could easily be defended and, once our ships were safely drawn onto the beach, we dug an earthwork across the neck as a rampart. Then large parties of men disappeared into the countryside, returning next morning with captured horses and the horses were used to mount another war-band that rode inland as Ragnar led his men on foot along the tangled shoreline.

We came to a village, I never did learn its name, and we burned it to the ground. There was no one there. We burned farmsteads, a church, and marched on, following a road that angled away from the shore, and at dusk we saw a larger village and we hid in a wood, lit no fires, and attacked at dawn.

We came shrieking from the half-light. We were a nightmare in the dawn; men in leather with iron helmets, men with round painted shields, men with axes, swords and spears. The folk in that place had no weapons and no armour, and perhaps they had not even known there were Danes in their countryside for they were not ready for us. They died. A few brave men tried to make a stand by their church, but Ragnar led a charge against them and they were slaughtered where they stood, and Ragnar pushed open the church door to find the small building filled with women and children. The priest was in front of the altar and he cursed Ragnar in Latin as the Dane stalked up the small nave, and the priest was still cursing when Ragnar disembowelled him.

We took a bronze crucifix, a dented silver plate and some coins from the church. We found a dozen good cooking pots in the houses and some shears, sickles and iron spits. We captured cattle, goats, sheep, oxen, eight horses, and sixteen young women. One woman screamed that she could not leave her child and I watched Weland spit the small boy on a spear, then thrust the bloodied corpse into the woman’s arms. Ragnar sent her away, not because he pitied her, but because one person was always spared to carry news of the horror to other places. Folk must fear the Danes, Ragnar said, and then they would be ready to surrender. He gave me a piece of burning wood he had taken from a fire. ‘Burn the thatch, Uhtred,’ he ordered, so I went from house to house, putting fire to the reed thatch. I burned the church and then, just as I approached the last house, a man burst from the door with a three-pronged eel spear that he lunged at me. I twisted aside, avoiding his thrust by luck rather than judgement, and I hurled the burning wood at the man’s face and the flames made him duck as I backed away, and Ragnar threw me a spear, a heavy war spear made for thrusting rather than throwing, and it skidded in the dust in front of me and I understood he was letting me fight as I plucked it up. He would not have let me die, for he had two of his bowmen standing ready with arrows on their strings, but he did not interfere as the man ran at me and lunged again.

I parried, knocking the rusted eel spear aside and stepping back again to give myself room. The man was twice my size and more than twice my weight. He was cursing me, calling me a devil’s bastard, a worm of hell, and he rushed me again and I did what I had learned hunting the boar. I stepped to my left, waited till he levelled the spear, stepped back to the right and thrust.

It was not a clean thrust, nor did I have the weight to hurl him back, but the spear point punctured his belly and then his weight pushed me back as he half snarled and half gasped, and I fell, and he fell on top of me, forced sideways because the spear was in his guts, and he tried to take a grip of my throat, but I wriggled out from beneath him, picked up his own eel spear and rammed it at his throat. There were rivulets of blood on the earth, droplets spraying in the air, and he was jerking and choking, blood bubbling at his ripped throat, and I tried to pull the eel spear back, but the barbs on the points were caught in his gullet, so I ripped the war spear from his belly and tried to stop him jerking by thrusting it down hard into his chest, but it only glanced off his ribs. He was making a terrible noise, and I suppose I was in a panic, and I was unaware that Ragnar and his men were almost helpless with laughter as they watched me try to kill the East Anglian. I did, in the end, or else he just bled to death, but by then I had poked and stabbed and torn him until he looked as though a pack of wolves had set on him.

But I got a third arm ring, and there were grown warriors in Ragnar’s band who only wore three. Rorik was jealous, but he was younger and his father consoled him that his time would come. ‘How does it feel?’ Ragnar asked me.

‘Good,’ I said, and God help me, it did.

It was then that I first saw Brida. She was my age, black-haired, thin as a twig, with big dark eyes and a spirit as wild as a hawk in spring, and she was among the captured women and, as the Danes began dividing those captives amongst themselves, an older woman pushed the child forward as if giving her to the Vikings. Brida snatched up a piece of wood and turned on the woman and beat at her, driving her back, screaming that she was a sour-faced bitch, a dried-up hank of gristle, and the older woman tripped and fell into a patch of nettles where Brida went on thrashing her. Ragnar was laughing, but eventually pulled the child away and, because he loved anyone with spirit, gave her to me. ‘Keep her safe,’ he said, ‘and burn that last house.’

So I did.

And I learned another thing.

Start your killers young, before their consciences are grown. Start them young and they will be lethal.

We took our plunder back to the ships and that night, as I drank my ale, I thought of myself as a Dane. Not English, not any more. I was a Dane and I had been given a perfect childhood, perfect, at least, to the ideas of a boy. I was raised among men, I was free, I ran wild, I was encumbered by no laws, was troubled by no priests, was encouraged to violence, and I was rarely alone.

And it was that, that I was rarely alone, which kept me alive.

Every raid brought more horses, and more horses meant more men could go farther afield and waste more places, steal more silver and take more captives. We had scouts out now, watching for the approach of King Edmund’s army. Edmund ruled East Anglia and, unless he wished to collapse as feebly as Burghred of Mercia, he had to send men against us to preserve his kingdom, and so we watched the roads and waited.

Brida stayed close to me. Ragnar had taken a strong liking to her, probably because she treated him defiantly and because she alone did not weep when she was captured. She was an orphan and had been living in the house of her aunt, the woman whom she had beaten and whom she hated, and within days Brida was happier among the Danes than she had ever been among her own people. She was a slave now, a slave who was supposed to stay in the camp and cook, but one dawn as we went raiding she ran after us and hauled herself up behind my saddle and Ragnar was amused by that and let her come along.

We went far south that day, out of the flat lands where the marshes stretched, and into low wooded hills amongst which were fat farms and a fatter monastery. Brida laughed when Ragnar killed the abbot, and afterwards, as the Danes collected their plunder, she took my hand and led me over a low rise to a farm which had already been plundered by Ragnar’s men. The farm belonged to the monastery and Brida knew the place because her aunt had frequently gone to the monastery to pray. ‘She wanted children,’ Brida said, ‘and only had me.’ Then she pointed at the farm and watched for my reaction.

It was a Roman farm, she told me, though like me she had little idea who the Romans really were, only that they had once lived in England and then had gone. I had seen plenty of their buildings before, there were some in Eoferwic, but those other buildings had crumbled, then been patched with mud and reroofed with thatch, while this farm looked as though the Romans had only just left.

It was astonishing. The walls were of stone, perfectly cut, square and close-mortared, and the roof was of tile, patterned and tight-fitting, and inside the gate was a courtyard surrounded with a pillared walkway and in the largest room was an amazing picture on the floor, made up of thousands of small coloured stones, and I gaped at the leaping fish that were pulling a chariot in which a bearded man stood holding an eel spear like the one I had faced in Brida’s village. Hares surrounded the picture, chasing each other through looping strands of leaves. There had been other pictures painted on the walls, but they had faded or else been discoloured by water that had leaked through the old roof. ‘It was the abbot’s house,’ Brida told me, and she took me into a small room where there was a cot beside which one of the abbot’s servants lay dead in his own blood. ‘He brought me in here,’ she said.

‘The abbot did?’

‘And told me to take my clothes off.’

‘The abbot did?’ I asked again.

‘I ran away,’ she said in a very matter-of-fact tone, ‘and my aunt beat me. She said I should have pleased him and he’d have rewarded us.’

We wandered through the house and I felt a wonder that we could no longer build like this. We knew how to sink posts in the ground and make beams and rafters and roof them with thatch from rye or reed, but the posts rotted, the thatch mouldered, and the houses sagged. In summer our houses were winter dark, and all year they were choked with smoke, and in winter they stank of cattle, yet this house was light and clean and I doubted any cow had ever dunged on the man in his fish-drawn chariot. It was an unsettling thought, that somehow we were sliding back into the smoky dark and that never again would man make something so perfect as this small building. ‘Were the Romans Christians?’ I asked Brida.

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, but I had been thinking that the gods reward those they love and it would have been nice to know which gods had looked after the Romans. I hoped they had worshipped Odin, though these days, I knew, they were Christians because the Pope lived in Rome and Beocca had taught me that the Pope was the chief of all the Christians, and was a very holy man. His name, I remembered, was Nicholas. Brida could not have cared less about the gods of the Romans, instead she knelt to explore a hole in the floor that seemed to lead only to a cellar so shallow that no person could ever get inside. ‘Maybe elves lived there?’ I suggested.

‘Elves live in the woods,’ she insisted. She decided the abbot might have hidden treasures in the space and borrowed my sword so she could widen the hole. It was not a real sword, merely a sax, a very long knife, but Ragnar had given it to me and I wore it proudly.

‘Don’t break the blade,’ I told her, and she stuck her tongue out at me, then began prising the mortar at the hole’s edge while I went back to the courtyard to look at the raised pond that was green and scummy now, but somehow I knew it had once been filled with clear water. A frog crawled onto the small stone island in the centre and I again remembered my father’s verdict on the East Anglians; mere frogs.

Weland came through the gate. He stopped just inside and licked his lips, tongue flickering, then half smiled. ‘Lost your sax, Uhtred?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Ragnar sent me,’ he said, ‘we’re leaving.’

I nodded, said nothing, but knew that Ragnar would have sounded a horn if we were truly ready to leave.

‘So come on, boy,’ he said.

I nodded again, still said nothing.

His dark eyes glanced at the building’s empty windows, then at the pool. ‘Is that a frog,’ he asked, ‘or a toad?’

‘A frog.’

‘In Frankia,’ he said, ‘men say you can eat frogs.’ He walked towards the pool and I moved to stay on the far side from him, keeping the raised stone structure between us. ‘Have you eaten a frog, Uhtred?’

‘No.’

‘Would you like to?’

‘No.’

He put a hand into a leather bag which hung from his sword belt that was strapped over a torn mail coat. He had money now, two arm rings, proper boots, an iron helmet, a long sword and the mail coat which needed mending, but was far better protection than the rags he had worn when he first came to Ragnar’s house. ‘This coin if you catch a frog,’ he said, spinning a silver penny in the air.

‘I don’t want to catch a frog,’ I said sullenly.

‘I do,’ he said, grinning, and he drew the sword, its blade hissing on the scabbard’s wooden throat, and he stepped into the pool, the water not reaching the tops of his boots, and the frog leaped away, plopping into the green scum, and Weland was not looking at the frog, but at me, and I knew he was going to kill me, but for some reason I could not move. I was astonished, and yet I was not astonished. I had never liked him, never trusted him, and I understood that he had been sent to kill me and had only failed because I had always been in company until this moment when I had let Brida lead me away from Ragnar’s band. So Weland had his chance now. He smiled at me, reached the centre of the pool, came closer, raised the sword and I found my feet at last and raced back into the pillared walkway. I did not want to go into the house, for Brida was there, and I knew he would kill her if he found her. He jumped out of the pond and chased me, and I raced down the walkway, around the corner, and he cut me off, and I dodged back, wanting to reach the gateway, but he knew that was what I wanted and he took care to keep between me and my escape. His boots left wet footprints on the Roman flagstones.

‘What’s the matter, Uhtred?’ he asked, ‘frightened of frogs?’

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

‘Not so cocky now, eh? Ealdorman?’ He stalked towards me, sword flashing from side to side. ‘Your uncle sends his regards and trusts you will burn in hell while he lives in Bebbanburg.’

‘You come from …’ I began, but it was obvious Weland was serving Ælfric so I did not bother to finish the question, but instead edged backwards.