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

‘That’s ruled by the Danes.’

‘But your uncle lives there.’

‘My uncle?’

‘Your mother’s brother!’ He was astonished that I did not know my own family. ‘He’s Ealdorman Æthelwulf, if he still lives.’

‘My father never talked about my mother,’ I said.

‘Because he loved her. She was a beauty, your mother, a piece of gold, and she died giving birth to you.’

‘Æthelwulf,’ I said.

‘If he lives.’

But why go to Æthelwulf when I had Ragnar? Æthelwulf was family, of course, but I had never met him and I doubted he even remembered my existence, and I had no desire to find him, and even less desire to learn my letters in Wessex, so I would stay with Ragnar. I said as much to Ealdwulf. ‘He’s teaching me to fight,’ I said.

‘Learn from the best, eh?’ Ealdwulf said grudgingly. ‘That’s how you become a good smith. Learn from the best.’

Ealdwulf was a good smith and, despite himself, he came to like Ragnar for Ragnar was generous and he appreciated good workmanship. A smithy was added onto our home near Synningthwait and Ragnar paid good silver for a forge, an anvil, and for the great hammers, tongs and files that Ealdwulf needed. It was late winter before all was ready, and then ore was purchased from Eoferwic and our valley echoed to the clang of iron on iron, and even on the coldest days the smithy was warm and men gathered there to exchange stories or to tell riddles. Ealdwulf was a great man for riddles and I would translate for him as he baffled Ragnar’s Danes. Most of his riddles were about men and women and what they did together and those were easy enough to guess, but I liked the complicated ones. My father and mother gave me up for dead, one riddle began, then a loyal kinswoman wrapped and protected me, and I killed all her children, but she still loved me and fed me until I rose above the dwelling houses of men and so left her. I could not guess that one, nor could any of the Danes, and Ealdwulf refused to give me the answer even when I begged him and it was only when I told the riddle to Brida that I learned the solution. ‘A cuckoo, of course,’ she said instantly. She was right, of course.

By spring the forge needed to be larger, and all that summer Ealdwulf made metal for swords, spears, axes and spades. I asked him once if he minded working for the Danes and he just shrugged. ‘I worked for them in Bebbanburg,’ he said, ‘because your uncle does their bidding.’

‘But there are no Danes in Bebbanburg?’

‘None,’ he admitted, ‘but they visit and are made welcome. Your uncle pays them tribute.’ He stopped suddenly, interrupted by a shout of what I thought was pure rage.

I ran out of the smithy to see Ragnar standing in front of the house while, approaching up the track, was a crowd of men led by a mounted warrior. And such a warrior. He had a mail coat, a fine helmet hanging from the saddle, a bright-painted shield, a long sword and arms thick with rings. He was a young man with long fair hair and a thick gold beard, and he roared back at Ragnar like a rutting stag, then Ragnar ran towards him and I half thought the young man would draw the sword and kick at his horse, but instead he dismounted and ran uphill and, when the two met, they embraced and thumped each other’s backs and Ragnar, when he turned towards us, had a smile that would have lit the darkest crypt of hell. ‘My son!’ he shouted up at me, ‘my son!’

It was Ragnar the Younger, come from Ireland with a ship’s crew and, though he did not know me, he embraced me, lifting me off the ground, whirled his sister around, thumped Rorik, kissed his mother, shouted at the servants, scattered gifts of silver chain links, and petted the hounds. A feast was ordered, and that night he gave us his news, saying he now commanded his own ship, that he had come for a few months only and that Ivar wanted him back in Ireland by the spring. He was so like his father, and I liked him immediately, and the house was always happy when Ragnar the Younger was there. Some of his men lodged with us, and that autumn they cut trees and added a proper hall to the house, a hall fit for an earl with big beams and a high gable on which a boar’s skull was nailed.

‘You were lucky,’ he told me one day. We were thatching the new roof, laying down the thick rye straw and combing it flat.

‘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.