The Last Kingdom Series Books 1-3: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, The Lords of the North

‘Lucky?’

‘That my father didn’t kill you at Eoferwic.’

‘I was lucky,’ I agreed.

‘But he was always a good judge of men,’ he said, passing me a pot of ale. He perched on the roof ridge and gazed across the valley. ‘He likes it here.’

‘It’s a good place. What about Ireland?’

He grinned. ‘Bog and rock, Uhtred, and the skraelings are vicious.’ The skraelings were the natives. ‘But they fight well! And there’s silver there, and the more they fight the more silver we get. Are you going to drink all that ale, or do I get some?’

I handed him back the pot and watched as the ale ran down his beard as he drained it. ‘I like Ireland well enough,’ he said when he had finished, ‘but I won’t stay there. I’ll come back here. Find land in Wessex. Raise a family. Get fat.’

‘Why don’t you come back now?’

‘Because Ivar wants me there, and Ivar’s a good lord.’

‘He frightens me.’

‘A good lord should be frightening.’

‘Your father isn’t.’

‘Not to you, but what about the men he kills? Would you want to face Earl Ragnar the Fearless in a shield wall?’

‘No.’

‘So he is frightening,’ he said, grinning. ‘Go and take Wessex,’ he said, ‘and find the land that will make me fat.’

We finished the thatch, and then I had to go up into the woods because Ealdwulf had an insatiable appetite for charcoal which is the only substance that burns hot enough to melt iron. He had shown a dozen of Ragnar’s men how to produce it, but Brida and I were his best workers and we spent much time among the trees. The charcoal heaps needed constant attention and, as each would burn for at least three days, Brida and I would often spend all night beside such a pile, watching for a tell-tale wisp of smoke coming from the bracken and turf covering the burn. Such smoke betrayed that the fire inside was too hot and we would have to scramble over the warm heap to stuff the crack with earth and so cool the fire deep inside the pile.

We burned alder when we could get it, for that was the wood Ealdwulf preferred, and the art of it was to char the alder logs, but not let them burst into flame. For every four logs we put into a pile we would get one back, while the rest vanished to leave the lightweight, deep black, dirty charcoal. It could take a week to make the pile. The alder was carefully stacked in a shallow pit, and a hole was left in the stack’s centre which we filled with charcoal from the previous burn. Then we would put a layer of bracken over the whole thing, cover that with thick turves and, when all was done, put fire down the central hole and, when we were sure the charcoal was alight, stuff the hole tight. Now the silent, dark fire had to be controlled. We would open gaps at the base of the pit to let a little air in, but if the wind changed then the air holes had to be stuffed and others made. It was tedious work, and Ealdwulf’s appetite for charcoal seemed unlimited, but I enjoyed it. To be all night in the dark, beside the warm burn, was to be a sceadugengan, and besides, I was with Brida and we had become more than friends.

She lost her first baby up beside the charcoal burn. She had not even known she was pregnant, but one night she was assailed with cramps and spear-like pains, and I wanted to go and fetch Sigrid, but Brida would not let me. She told me she knew what was happening, but I was scared helpless by her agony and I shuddered in fear throughout the dark until, just before dawn, she gave birth to a tiny dead baby boy. We buried it with its afterbirth, and Brida stumbled back to the homestead where Sigrid was alarmed by her appearance and gave her a broth of leeks and sheep brains and made her stay at home. Sigrid must have suspected what had happened for she was sharp with me for a few days and she told Ragnar it was time Brida was married. Brida was certainly of age, being thirteen, and there were a dozen young Danish warriors in Synningthwait who were in need of wives, but Ragnar declared that Brida brought his men luck and he wanted her to ride with us when we attacked Wessex.

‘And when will that be?’ Sigrid asked.

‘Next year,’ Ragnar suggested, ‘or the year after. No longer.’

‘And then?’

‘Then England is no more,’ Ragnar said. ‘It will all be ours.’ The last of the four kingdoms would have fallen and England would be Daneland and we would all be Danes or slaves or dead.

We celebrated the Yule feast and Ragnar the Younger won every competition in Synningthwait, he hurled rocks farther than anyone, wrestled men to the ground and even drank his father into insensibility. Then followed the dark months, the long winter, and in spring, when the gales had subsided, Ragnar the Younger had to leave and we had a melancholy feast on the eve of his going, and next morning he led his men away from the hall, going down the track in a grey drizzle. Ragnar watched his son all the way down into the valley and when he turned back to his newly-built hall he had tears in his eyes. ‘He’s a good man,’ he told me.

‘I liked him,’ I said truthfully, and I did, and many years later, when I met him again, I still liked him.

There was an empty feeling after Ragnar the Younger had left, but I remember that spring and summer fondly for it was in those long days that Ealdwulf made me a sword. ‘I hope it’s better than my last one,’ I said ungraciously.

‘Your last one?’

‘The one I carried when we attacked Eoferwic,’ I said.

‘That thing! That wasn’t mine. Your father bought it in Berewic, and I told him it was crap, but it was only a short sword. Good for killing ducks, maybe, but not for fighting. What happened to it?’

‘It bent,’ I said, remembering Ragnar laughing at the feeble weapon.

‘Soft iron, boy, soft iron.’

There were two sorts of iron, he told me, the soft and the hard. The hard made the best cutting edge, but it was brittle and a sword made of such iron would snap at the first brutal stroke, while a sword made of the softer metal would bend as my short sword had done. ‘So what we do is use both,’ he told me, and I watched as he made seven iron rods. Three were of the hard iron, and he was not really sure how he made the iron hard, only that the glowing metal had to be laid in the burning charcoal, and if he got it just right then the cooled metal would be hard and unbending. The other four rods were longer, much longer, and they were not exposed to the charcoal for the same length of time, and those four he twisted until each had been turned into a spiral. They were still straight rods, but tightly twisted until they were the same length as the hard iron rods. ‘Why do you do that?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see,’ he said mysteriously, ‘you’ll see.’

He finished with seven rods, each as thick as my thumb. Three were of the hard metal, which Ragnar called steel, while the four softer rods were prettily twisted into their tight spirals. One of the hard rods was longer and slightly thicker than the others, and that one was the sword’s spine and the extra length was the tang onto which the hilt would eventually be riveted. Ealdwulf began by hammering that rod flat so that it looked like a very thin and feeble sword, then he placed the four twisted rods either side of it, two to each side so that they sheathed it, and he welded the last two steel rods on the outside to become the sword’s edges, and it looked grotesque then, a bundle of mismatched rods, but this was when the real work began, the work of heating and hammering, metal glowing red, the black dross twisting as it burned away from the iron, the hammer swinging, sparks flying in the dark forge, the hiss of burning metal plunged into water, the patience as the emerging blade was cooled in a trough of ash shavings. It took days, yet as the hammering and cooling and heating went on I saw how the four twisted rods of soft iron, which were now all melded into the harder steel, had been smoothed into wondrous patterns, repetitive curling patterns that made flat, smoky wisps in the blade. In some lights you could not see the patterns, but in the dusk, or when, in winter, you breathed on the blade, they showed. Serpent breath, Brida called the patterns, and I decided to give the sword that name; Serpent-Breath. Ealdwulf finished the blade by hammering grooves which ran down the centre of each side. He said they helped stop the sword being trapped in an enemy’s flesh. ‘Blood channels,’ he grunted.

The boss of the hilt was of iron, as was the heavy crosspiece, and both were simple, undecorated and big, and when all was done, I shaped two pieces of ash to make the handle. I wanted the sword decorated with silver or gilt bronze, but Ealdwulf refused. ‘It’s a tool, lord,’ he said, ‘just a tool. Something to make your work easier, and no better than my hammer.’ He held the blade up so that it caught the sunlight. ‘And one day,’ he went on, leaning towards me, ‘you will kill Danes with her.’

She was heavy, Serpent-Breath, too heavy for a fourteen-year-old, but I would grow into her. Her point tapered more than Ragnar liked, but that made her well-balanced for it meant there was not much weight at the blade’s outer end. Ragnar liked weight there, for it helped break down enemy shields, but I preferred Serpent-Breath’s agility, given her by Ealdwulf’s skill, and that skill meant she never bent nor cracked, not ever, for I still have her. The ash handles have been replaced, the edges have been nicked by enemy blades, and she is slimmer now because she has been sharpened so often, but she is still beautiful, and sometimes I breathe on her flanks and see the patterns emerge in the blade, the curls and wisps, the blue and silver appearing in the metal like magic, and I remember that spring and summer in the woods of Northumbria and I think of Brida staring at her reflection in the newly-made blade.

And there is magic in Serpent-Breath. Ealdwulf had his own spells that he would not tell me, the spells of the smith, and Brida took the blade into the woods for a whole night and never told me what she did with it, and those were the spells of a woman, and when we made the sacrifice of the pit slaughter, and killed a man, a horse, a ram, a bull and a drake, I asked Ragnar to use Serpent-Breath on the doomed man so that Odin would know she existed and would look well on her. Those are the spells of a pagan and a warrior.

And I think Odin did see her, for she has killed more men than I can ever remember.

It was late summer before Serpent-Breath was finished and then, before autumn brought its sea-churning storms, we went south. It was time to obliterate England, so we sailed towards Wessex.

Five (#ulink_f780ee1c-888d-52f3-9501-546d427bb77f)

We gathered at Eoferwic where the pathetic King Egbert was forced to inspect the Danes and wish them well. He rode down the riverbank where the boats waited and where the ragged crews lined on the shore and gazed at him scornfully, knowing he was not a real king, and behind him rode Kjartan and Sven, now part of his Danish bodyguard, though I assumed their job was as much to keep Egbert a prisoner as to keep him alive. Sven, a man now, wore a scarf over his missing eye, and he and his father looked far more prosperous. Kjartan wore mail and had a huge war axe slung on his shoulder, while Sven had a long sword, a coat of fox pelts, and two arm rings. ‘They took part in the massacre at Streonshall,’ Ragnar told me. That was the large nunnery near Eoferwic, and it was evident that the men who had taken their revenge on the nuns had made good plunder.

Kjartan, a dozen rings on his arms, looked Ragnar in the eye. ‘I would still serve you,’ he said, though without the humility of the last time he had asked.

‘I have a new shipmaster,’ Ragnar said, and said no more, and Kjartan and Sven rode on, though Sven gave me the evil sign with his left hand.

The new shipmaster was called Toki, a nickname for Thorbjorn, and he was a splendid sailor and a better warrior who told tales of rowing with the Svear into strange lands where no trees grew except birch and where winter covered the land for months. He claimed the folk there ate their own young, worshipped giants and had a third eye at the back of their heads, and some of us believed his tales.

We rowed south on the last of the summer tides, hugging the coast as we always did and spending the nights ashore on East Anglia’s barren coast. We were going towards the River Temes which Ragnar said would take us deep inland to the northern boundary of Wessex.

Ragnar now commanded the fleet. Ivar the Boneless had returned to the lands he had conquered in Ireland, taking a gift of gold from Ragnar to his eldest son, while Ubba was ravaging Dalriada, the land north of Northumbria. ‘Small pickings up there,’ Ragnar said scornfully, but Ubba, like Ivar, had amassed so much treasure in his invasions of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia that he was not minded to gather more from Wessex, though, as I shall tell you in its proper place, Ubba was to change his mind later and come south.

But for the moment Ivar and Ubba were absent and so the main assault on Wessex would be led by Halfdan, the third brother, who was marching his land army out of East Anglia and would meet us somewhere on the Temes. Ragnar was not happy about the change of command, Halfdan, he muttered, was an impetuous fool, too hotheaded, but he cheered up when he remembered my tales of Alfred which confirmed that Wessex was led by men who put their hopes in the Christian god who had been shown to possess no power at all. We had Odin, we had Thor, we had our ships, we were warriors.

After four days we came to the Temes and rowed against its great current as the river slowly narrowed on us. On the first morning that we came to the river only the northern shore, which was East Anglian territory, was visible, but by midday the southern bank, that used to be the Kingdom of Kent and was now a part of Wessex, was a dim line on the horizon. By evening the banks were a half-mile apart, but there was little to see for the river flowed through flat, dull marshland. We used the tide when we could, blistered our hands on the oars when we could not, and so pulled upstream until, for the very first time, I came to Lundene.

I thought Eoferwic was a city, but Eoferwic was a village compared to Lundene. It was a vast place, thick with smoke from cooking fires, and built where Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex met. Burghred of Mercia was Lundene’s lord, so it was Danish land now, and no one opposed us as we came to the astonishing bridge which stretched so far across the wide Temes.

Lundene. I came to love that place. Not as I love Bebbanburg, but there was a life to Lundene that I found nowhere else, because the city was like nowhere else. Alfred once told me that every wickedness under the sun was practised there, and I am glad to say he was right. He prayed for the place, I revelled in it, and I can still remember gawking at the city’s two hills as Ragnar’s ship ghosted against the current to come close to the bridge. It was a grey day and a spiteful rain was pitting the river, yet to me the city seemed to glow with sorcerous light.

It was really two cities built on two hills. The first, to the east, was the old city that the Romans had made, and it was there that the bridge began its span across the wide river and over the marshes on the southern bank. That first city was a place of stone buildings and had a stone wall, a real wall, not earth and wood, but masonry, high and wide, skirted by a ditch. The ditch had filled with rubbish and the wall was broken in places where it had been patched with timber, but so had the city itself where huge Roman buildings were buttressed by thatched wooden shacks where a few Mercians lived, though most were reluctant to make their homes in the old city. One of their kings had built himself a palace within the stone wall, and a great church, its lower half of masonry and upper parts of wood, had been made atop the hill, but most of the folk, as if fearing the Roman ghosts, lived outside the walls, in a new city of wood and thatch that stretched out to the west.