Sword of Kings

Also by Bernard Cornwell

The Sharpe series

About the Publisher

PLACE NAMES (#u83d52f60-1848-5b11-b7fd-71ecd3ceb922)

The spelling of place names in Anglo-Saxon England was an uncertain business, with no consistency and no agreement even about the name itself. Thus London was variously rendered as Lundonia, Lundenberg, Lundenne, Lundene, Lundenwic, Lundenceaster and Lundres. Doubtless some readers will prefer other versions of the names listed below, but I have usually employed whichever spelling is cited in either the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names or the Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names for the years nearest or contained within Alfred’s reign, AD 871–899, but even that solution is not foolproof. Hayling Island, in 956, was written as both Heilincigae and Hæglingaiggæ. Nor have I been consistent myself; I have preferred the modern form Northumbria to Norðhymbralond to avoid the suggestion that the boundaries of the ancient kingdom coincide with those of the modern county. So this list of places mentioned in the book is, like the spellings themselves, capricious.

Map (#u83d52f60-1848-5b11-b7fd-71ecd3ceb922)

PART ONE (#u83d52f60-1848-5b11-b7fd-71ecd3ceb922)

A Fool’s Errand (#u83d52f60-1848-5b11-b7fd-71ecd3ceb922)

One (#u83d52f60-1848-5b11-b7fd-71ecd3ceb922)

Gydene was missing.

She was not the first of my ships to vanish. The savage sea is vast and ships are small and Gydene, which simply meant ‘goddess’, was smaller than most. She had been built at Grimesbi on the Humbre and had been named Haligwæter. She had fished for a year before I bought her and, because I wanted no ship named Holy Water in my fleet, I paid a virgin one shilling to piss in her bilge, renamed her Gydene, and gave her to the fisherfolk of Bebbanburg. They cast their nets far offshore and, when Gydene did not return on a day when the wind was brisk, the sky grey, and the waves were crashing white and high on the rocks of the Farnea Islands, we assumed she had been overwhelmed and had given Bebbanburg’s small village six widows and almost three times as many orphans. Maybe I should have left her name alone, all seamen know that you risk fate by changing a ship’s name, though they know equally well that a virgin’s piss averts that fate. Yet the gods can be as cruel as the sea.

Then Egil Skallagrimmrson came from his land that I had granted to him, land that formed the border of my territory and Constantin of Scotland’s realm, and Egil came by sea as he always did and there was a corpse in the belly of Banamaðr, his serpent-ship. ‘Washed ashore in the Tuede,’ he told me, ‘he’s yours, isn’t he?’

‘The Tuede?’ I asked.

‘Southern shore. Found him on a mudbank. The gulls found him first.’

‘I can see.’

‘He was one of yours, wasn’t he?’

‘He was,’ I said. The dead man’s name was Haggar Bentson, a fisherman, helmsman of the Gydene, a big man, too fond of ale, scarred from too many brawls, a bully, a wife-beater, and a good sailor.

‘Wasn’t drowned, was he?’ Egil remarked.

‘No.’

‘And the gulls didn’t kill him,’ Egil sounded amused.

‘No,’ I said, ‘the gulls didn’t kill him.’ Instead Haggar had been hacked to death. His corpse was naked and fish-white, except for the hands and what was left of his face. Great wounds had been slashed across his belly, chest and thighs, the savage cuts washed clean by the sea.

Egil touched a boot against a gaping wound that had riven Haggar’s chest from the shoulder to the breastbone. ‘I’d say that was the axe blow that killed him,’ he said, ‘but someone cut off his balls first.’

‘I noticed that.’

Egil stooped to the corpse and forced the lower jaw down. Egil Skallagrimmrson was a strong man, but it still took an effort to open Haggar’s mouth. The bone made a cracking sound and Egil straightened. ‘Took his teeth too,’ he said.

‘And his eyes.’

‘That might have been the gulls. Partial to an eyeball, they are.’

‘But they left his tongue,’ I said. ‘Poor bastard.’

‘Miserable way to die,’ Egil agreed, then turned to look at the harbour entrance. ‘Only two reasons I can think of to torture a man before you kill him.’

‘Two?’

‘To enjoy themselves? Maybe he insulted them.’ he shrugged. ‘The other is to make him talk. Why else leave his tongue?’

‘Them?’ I asked. ‘The Scots?’

Egil looked back to the mangled corpse. ‘He must have annoyed someone, but the Scots have been quiet lately. Doesn’t seem like them.’ He shrugged. ‘Could be something personal. Another fisherman he angered?’

‘No other bodies?’ I asked. There had been six men and two boys in the Gydene’s crew. ‘No wreckage?’

‘Just this poor bastard so far. But the others could be out there, still floating.’

There was little more to say or do. If the Scots had not captured Gydene then I assumed it was either a Norse raider or else a Frisian ship using the early summer weather to enrich herself with the Gydene’s catch of herring, cod, and haddock. Whoever it was, the Gydene was gone, and I suspected her surviving crew had been put on their captor’s rowing benches and that suspicion turned to near certainty when, two days after Egil brought me the corpse, the Gydene herself washed ashore north of Lindisfarena. She was a dismasted hulk, barely afloat as the waves heaved her onto the sands. No more bodies appeared, just the wreck, which we left on the sands, certain that the storms of autumn would break her up.

A week after the Gydene lurched brokenly ashore another fishing boat vanished, and this one on a windless day as calm as any the gods ever made. The lost ship had been called the Swealwe and, like Haggar, her master had liked to cast nets far out to sea, and the first I knew of the Swallow’s disappearance was when three widows came to Bebbanburg, led by their gap-toothed village priest who was named Father Gadd. He bobbed his head. ‘There was …’ he began.

‘Was what?’ I asked, resisting the urge to imitate the hissing noise the priest made because of his missing teeth.

Father Gadd was nervous, and no wonder. I had heard that he preached sermons that lamented that his village’s overlord was a pagan, but his courage had fled now that he was face to face with that pagan.

‘Bolgar Haruldson, lord. He’s the—’

‘I know who Bolgar is,’ I interrupted. He was another fisherman.

‘He saw two ships on the horizon, lord. On the day the Swealwe vanished.’

‘There are many ships,’ I said, ‘trading ships. It would be strange if he didn’t see ships.’

‘Bolgar says they headed north, then south.’

The nervous fool was not making much sense, but in the end I understood what he was trying to say. The Swealwe had rowed out to sea, and Bolgar, an experienced man, saw where she vanished beyond the horizon. He then saw the masthead of the two ships go towards the Swealwe, pause for some time, then turn back. The Swealwe had been beneath the horizon and the only visible sign of her meeting with the mysterious ships was their masts going north, pausing, then going south, and that did not sound like the movement of any trading ship. ‘You should have brought Bolgar to me,’ I said, then gave the three widows silver and the priest two pennies for bringing me the news.

‘What news?’ Finan asked me that evening.

We were sitting on the bench outside Bebbanburg’s hall, staring across the eastern ramparts to the moon’s wrinkling reflection on the wide sea. From inside the hall came the sounds of men singing, of men laughing. They were my warriors, all but for the score who watched from our high walls. A small east wind brought the smell of the sea. It was a quiet night and Bebbanburg’s lands had been peaceful ever since we had crossed the hills and defeated Sköll in his high fortress a year before. After that grisly fight we had thought the Norsemen were beaten and that the western part of Northumbria was cowed, but travellers brought news across the high passes that still the Northmen came, their dragon-boats landing on our western coasts, their warriors finding land, but no Norseman called himself king as Sköll had done, and none crossed the hills to disturb Bebbanburg’s pastures, and so there was peace of a sort. Constantin of Alba, which some men call Scotland, was at war with the Norse of Strath Clota, led by a king called Owain, and Owain left us alone and Constantin wanted peace with us until he could defeat Owain’s Norsemen. It was what my father had called ‘a Scottish peace’, meaning that there were constant and savage cattle raids, but there are always cattle raids, and we always retaliated by striking into the Scottish valleys to bring back livestock. We stole just as many as they stole, and it would have been much simpler to have had no raids, but in times of peace young men must be taught the ways of war.

‘The news,’ I told Finan, ‘is that there are raiders out there,’ I nodded at the sea, ‘and they’ve plucked two of our ships.’

‘There are always raiders.’

‘I don’t like these,’ I said.

Finan, my closest friend, an Irishman who fought with the passion of his race and the skill of the gods, laughed. ‘Got a stench in your nostril?’