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

‘The reward for your death will be the weight of his newborn child in silver,’ Weland said, ‘and the child should be born by now. And he’s impatient for your death, your uncle is. I almost managed to track you down that night outside Snotengaham, and almost hit you with an arrow last winter, but you ducked. Not this time, but it will be quick, boy. Your uncle said to make it quick, so kneel down, boy, just kneel.’ He swept the blade left and right, his wrist whippy so the sword hissed. ‘I haven’t given her a name yet,’ he said. ‘Perhaps after this she’ll be known as Orphan-Killer.’

I feinted right, went left, but he was quick as a stoat and he blocked me, and I knew I was cornered, and he knew it too and smiled. ‘I’ll make it quick,’ he said, ‘I promise.’

Then the first roof tile hit his helmet. It could not have hurt much, but the unexpected blow jarred him backwards and confused him, and the second tile hit his waist and the third smacked him on the shoulder, and Brida shouted from the roof. ‘Back through the house!’ I ran, the lunging sword missing me by inches, and I twisted through the door, ran over the fish-drawn chariot, through a second door, another door, saw an open window and dove through, and Brida jumped down from the roof and together we ran for the nearby woods.

Weland followed me, but he abandoned the pursuit when we vanished in the trees. Instead he went south, on his own, fleeing what he knew Ragnar would do to him, and for some reason I was in tears by the time I found Ragnar again. Why did I cry? I do not know, unless it was the confirmation that Bebbanburg was gone, that my beloved refuge was occupied by an enemy, and an enemy who, by now, might have a son.

Brida received an arm ring, and Ragnar let it be known that if any man touched her he, Ragnar, would personally geld that man with a mallet and a plank-splitter. She rode home on Weland’s horse.

And next day the enemy came.

Ravn had sailed with us, blind though he was, and I was required to be his eyes so I described how the East Anglian army was forming on a low ridge of dry land to the south of our camp. ‘How many banners?’ he asked me.

‘Twenty-three,’ I said, after a pause to count them.

‘Showing?’

‘Mostly crosses,’ I said, ‘and some saints.’

‘He’s a very pious man, King Edmund,’ Ravn said, ‘he even tried to persuade me to become a Christian.’ He chuckled at the memory. We were sitting on the prow of one of the beached ships, Ravn in a chair, Brida and I at his feet, and the Mercian twins, Ceolnoth and Ceolberht on his far side. They were the sons of Bishop Æthelbrid of Snotengaham and they were hostages even though their father had welcomed the Danish army, but, as Ravn said, taking the bishop’s sons hostage would keep the man honest. There were dozens of other such hostages from Mercia and Northumbria, all sons of prominent men, and all under sentence of death if their fathers caused trouble. There were other Englishmen in the army, serving as soldiers and, if it were not for the language they spoke, they would have been indistinguishable from the Danes. Most of them were either outlaws or masterless men, but all were savage fighters, exactly the kind of men the English needed to face their enemy, but now those men were fighting for the Danes against King Edmund. ‘And he’s a fool,’ Ravn said scornfully.

‘A fool?’ I asked.

‘He gave us shelter during the winter before we attacked Eoferwic,’ Ravn explained, ‘and we had to promise not to kill any of his churchmen.’ He laughed softly. ‘What a very silly condition. If their god was any use then we couldn’t have killed them anyway.’

‘Why did he give you shelter?’

‘Because it was easier than fighting us,’ Ravn said. He was using English because the other three children did not understand Danish, though Brida was learning quickly. She had a mind like a fox, quick and sly. Ravn smiled. ‘The silly King Edmund believed we would go away in the springtime and not come back, yet here we are.’

‘He shouldn’t have done it,’ one of the twins put in. I could not tell them apart, but was annoyed by them for they were fierce Mercian patriots, despite their father’s change of allegiance. They were ten years old and forever upbraiding me for loving the Danes.

‘Of course he shouldn’t have done it,’ Ravn agreed mildly.

‘He should have attacked you!’ Ceolnoth or Ceolberht said.

‘He would have lost if he had,’ Ravn said, ‘we made a camp, protected it with walls, and stayed there. And he paid us money to make no trouble.’

‘I saw King Edmund once,’ Brida put in.

‘Where was that, child?’ Ravn asked.

‘He came to the monastery to pray,’ she said, ‘and he farted when he knelt down.’

‘No doubt their god appreciated the tribute,’ Ravn said loftily, frowning because the twins were now making farting noises.

‘Were the Romans Christians?’ I asked him, remembering my curiosity at the Roman farm.

‘Not always,’ Ravn said. ‘They had their own gods once, but they gave them up to become Christians and after that they knew nothing but defeat. Where are our men?’

‘Still in the marsh,’ I said.

Ubba had hoped to stay in the camp and so force Edmund’s army to attack along the narrow neck of land and die on our short earthen wall, but instead the English had remained south of the treacherous lowland and were inviting us to attack them. Ubba was tempted. He had made Storri cast the runesticks and rumour said that the result was uncertain, and that fed Ubba’s caution. He was a fearsome fighter, but always wary when it came to picking a fight, but the runesticks had not predicted disaster and so he had taken the army out into the marsh where it now stood on whatever patches of drier land it could find, and from where two tracks led up to the low ridge. Ubba’s banner, the famous raven on its three-sided cloth, was midway between the two paths, both of which were strongly guarded by East Anglian shield walls, and any attack up either path would mean that a few of our men would have to attack a lot of theirs, and Ubba must have been having second thoughts for he was hesitating. I described all that to Ravn.

‘It doesn’t do,’ he told me, ‘to lose men, even if we win.’

‘But if we kill lots of theirs?’ I asked.

‘They have more men, we have few. If we kill a thousand of theirs then they will have another thousand tomorrow, but if we lose a hundred men then we must wait for more ships to replace them.’

‘More ships are coming,’ Brida said.

‘I doubt there will be any more this year,’ Ravn said.

‘No,’ she insisted, ‘now,’ and she pointed and I saw four ships nosing their way through the tangle of low islands and shallow creeks.

‘Tell me,’ Ravn said urgently.

‘Four ships,’ I said, ‘coming from the west.’

‘From the west? Not the east?’

‘From the west,’ I insisted, which meant they were not coming from the sea, but from one of the four rivers which flowed into the Gewæsc.

‘Prows?’ Ravn demanded.

‘No beasts on the prows,’ I said, ‘just plain wooden posts.’

‘Oars?’

‘Ten a side, I think, maybe eleven. But there are far more men than rowers.’

‘English ships!’ Ravn sounded amazed, for other than small fishing craft and some tubby cargo vessels the English had few ships, yet these four were warships, built long and sleek like the Danish ships, and they were creeping through the mazy waterways to attack Ubba’s beached fleet. I could see smoke trickling from the foremost ship and knew they must have a brazier on board and so were planning to burn the Danish boats and thus trap Ubba.

But Ubba had also seen them, and already the Danish army was streaming back towards the camp. The leading English ship began to shoot fire-arrows at the closest Danish boat and, though there was a guard on the boats, that guard was composed of the sick and the lame, and they were not strong enough to defend the ships against a seaborne attack. ‘Boys!’ one of the guards bellowed.

‘Go,’ Ravn told us, ‘go,’ and Brida, who considered herself as good as any boy, came with the twins and me. We jumped down to the beach and ran along the water’s edge to where smoke was thickening above the beached Danish boat. Two English ships were shooting fire-arrows now, while the last two attackers were trying to edge past their companions to reach more of our craft.

Our job was to extinguish the fire while the guards hurled spears at the English crews. I used a shield to scoop up sand that I dumped onto the fire. The English ships were close and I could see they were made of new raw wood. A spear thumped close to me and I picked it up and threw it back, though feebly because it clattered against an oar and fell into the sea. The twins were not trying to put out the fire and I hit one of them and threatened to hit him harder if they did not make an effort, but we were too late to save the first Danish ship which was well ablaze, so we abandoned it and tried to rescue the next one, but a score of fire-arrows slammed into the rowers’ benches, another landed on the furled sail, and two of the boys were dead at the water’s edge. The leading English ship turned to the beach then, its prow thick with men bristling with spears, axes and swords. ‘Edmund!’ they shouted, ‘Edmund!’ The bow grated on the beach and the warriors jumped off to begin slaughtering the Danish ships’ guard. The big axes slammed down and blood spattered up the beach or was sluiced away by the tiny waves which washed the sand. I grabbed Brida’s hand and pulled her away, splashing through a shallow creek where tiny silver fish scattered in alarm. ‘We have to save Ravn!’ I told her.

She was laughing. Brida always enjoyed chaos.

Three of the English ships had beached themselves and their crews were ashore, finishing off the Danish guards. The last ship glided on the falling tide, shooting fire-arrows, but then Ubba’s men were back in the camp and they advanced on the English with a roar. Some men had stayed with the raven banner at the earthen wall to make sure King Edmund’s forces could not swarm over the neck of land to take the camp, but the rest came screaming and vengeful. The Danes love their ships. A ship, they say, is like a woman or a sword, sharp and beautiful, worth dying for, and certainly worth fighting for, and the East Anglians, who had done so well, had now made a mistake for the tide was ebbing and they could not shove their boats off into the small waves. Some of the Danes protected their own unharmed boats by raining throwing axes, spears and arrows at the crew of the single enemy boat afloat, while the rest attacked the Englishmen ashore.

That was a slaughter. That was Danish work. That was a fit fight for the skalds to celebrate. Blood was thick on the tideline, blood slurping with the rise and fall of the small waves, men screaming and falling, and all about them the smoke of the burning boats was whirling so that the hazed sun was red above a sand turned red, and in that smoke the rage of the Danes was terrible. It was then I first saw Ubba fight and marvelled at him, for he was a bringer of death, a grim warrior, a sword-lover. He did not fight in a shield wall, but ran into his enemies, shield slamming one way as his war axe gave death in the other, and it seemed he was indestructible for, at one moment, he was surrounded by East Anglian fighters, but there was a scream of hate, a clash of blade on blade, and Ubba came out of the tangle of men, his blade red, blood in his beard, trampling his enemies into the blood-rich tide, and looking for more men to kill. Ragnar joined him, and Ragnar’s men followed, harvesting an enemy beside the sea, screaming hate at men who had burned their ships, and when the screaming and killing were done we counted sixty-eight English bodies, and some we could not count for they had run into the sea and drowned there, dragged down by the weight of weapons and armour. The sole East Anglian ship to escape was a ship of the dying, its new wooden flanks running with blood. The victorious Danes danced over the corpses they had made, then made a heap of captured weapons. There were thirty Danish dead, and those men were burned on a half-burned ship, another six Danish craft had been destroyed, but Ubba captured the three beached English boats which Ragnar declared to be pieces of shit. ‘It’s astonishing they even floated,’ he said, kicking at a badly caulked strake.

Yet the East Anglians had done well, I thought. They had made mistakes, but they had hurt Danish pride by burning dragon ships, and if King Edmund had attacked the wall protecting the camp he might have turned the slaughter into a massacre of Danes, but King Edmund had not attacked. Instead, as his shipmen died beneath the smoke, he had marched away.

He thought he was facing the Danish army by the sea, only to find that the real attack had come by land. He had just learned that Ivar the Boneless was invading his land.