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

The old city once had wharves and quays, but they had long rotted so that the waterfront east of the bridge was a treacherous place of rotted pilings and broken piers that stabbed the river like shattered teeth. The new city, like the old, was on the river’s northern bank, but was built on a low hill to the west, a half-mile upstream from the old, and had a shingle beach sloping up to the houses that ran along the riverside road. I have never seen a beach so foul, so stinking of carcasses and shit, so covered in rubbish, so stark with the slimy ribs of abandoned ships and loud with squalling gulls, but that was where our boats had to go and that meant we first had to negotiate the bridge.

The gods alone know how the Romans had built such a thing. A man could walk from one side of Eoferwic to the other and he would still not have walked the length of Lundene’s bridge, though in that year of 871 the bridge was broken and it was no longer possible to walk its full length. Two arches in the centre had long fallen in, though the old Roman piers that had supported the missing roadway were still there and the river foamed treacherously as its water seethed past the broken piers. To make the bridge the Romans had sunk pilings into the Temes’s bed, then into the tangle of foetid marshes on the southern bank, and the pilings were so close together that the water heaped up on their farther side, then fell through the gaps in a glistening rush. To reach the dirty beach by the new city we would have to shoot one of the two gaps, but neither was wide enough to let a ship through with its oars extended. ‘It will be interesting,’ Ragnar said drily.

‘Can we do it?’ I asked.

‘They did it,’ he said, pointing at ships beached upstream of the bridge, ‘so we can.’ We had anchored, waiting for the rest of the fleet to catch up. ‘The Franks,’ Ragnar went on, ‘have been making bridges like this on all their rivers. You know why they do it?’

‘To get across?’ I guessed. It seemed an obvious answer.

‘To stop us getting upriver,’ Ragnar said. ‘If I ruled Lundene I’d repair that bridge, so let’s be grateful the English couldn’t be bothered.’

We shot the gap in the bridge by waiting for the heart of the rising tide. The tide flows strongest halfway between its ebb and the flood, and that brought a surge of water that diminished the flow of the current cascading between the piers. In that short time we might get seven or eight ships through the gap and it was done by rowing at full speed towards the gap and, at the very last minute, raising the oar blades so they would clear the rotted piers, and the momentum of the ship should then carry her through. Not every ship made it on the first try. I watched two slew back, thump against a pier with the crash of breaking blades, then drift back downstream with crews of cursing men, but the Wind-Viper made it, almost coming to a stop just beyond the bridge, but we managed to get the frontmost oars in the water, hauled, and inch by inch we crept away from the sucking gap, then men from two ships anchored upstream managed to cast us lines and they hauled us away from the bridge until suddenly we were in slack water and could row her to the beach.

On the southern bank, beyond the dark marshes, where trees grew on low hills, horsemen watched us. They were West Saxons, and they would be counting ships to estimate the size of the Great Army. That was what Halfdan called it, the Great Army of the Danes come to take all of England, but so far we were anything but great. We would wait in Lundene to let more ships come and for more men to march down the long Roman roads from the north. Wessex could wait awhile as the Danes assembled.

And, as we waited, Brida, Rorik and I explored Lundene. Rorik had been sick again, and Sigrid had been reluctant to let him travel with his father, but Rorik pleaded with his mother to let him go, Ragnar assured her that the sea voyage would mend all the boy’s ills, and so he was here. He was pale, but not sickly, and he was as excited as I was to see the city. Ragnar made me leave my arm rings and Serpent-Breath behind for, he said, the city was full of thieves. We wandered the newer part first, going through malodorous alleys where the houses were full of men working leather, beating at bronze or forging iron. Women sat at looms, a flock of sheep was being slaughtered in a yard, and there were shops selling pottery, salt, live eels, bread, cloth, weapons, any imaginable thing. Church bells set up a hideous clamour at every prayer time or whenever a corpse was carried for burial in the city’s graveyards. Packs of dogs roamed the streets, red kites roosted everywhere, and smoke lay like a fog over the thatch that had all turned a dull black. I saw a wagon so loaded with thatching reed that the wagon itself was hidden by its heap of sagging reeds that scraped on the road and ripped and tore against the buildings on either side of the street as two slaves goaded and whipped the bleeding oxen. Men shouted at the slaves that the load was too big, but they went on whipping, and then a fight broke out when the wagon tore down a great piece of rotted roof. There were beggars everywhere; blind children, women without legs, a man with a weeping ulcer on his cheek. There were folk speaking languages I had never heard, folk in strange costumes who had come across the sea, and in the old city, which we explored the next day, I saw two men with skin the colour of chestnuts and Ravn told me later they came from Blaland, though he was not certain where that was. They wore thick robes, had curved swords, and were talking to a slave dealer whose premises were full of captured English folk who would be shipped to the mysterious Blaland. The dealer called to us. ‘You three belong to anyone?’ He was only half joking.

‘To Earl Ragnar,’ Brida said, ‘who would love to pay you a visit.’

‘Give his lordship my respects,’ the dealer said, then spat, and eyed us as we walked away.

The buildings of the old city were extraordinary. They were Roman work, high and stout, and even though their walls were broken and their roofs had fallen in they still astonished. Some were three or even four floors high and we chased each other up and down their abandoned stairways. Few English folk lived here, though many Danes were now occupying the houses as the army assembled. Brida said that sensible people would not live in a Roman town because of the ghosts that haunted the old buildings, and maybe she was right though I had seen no ghosts in Eoferwic, but her mention of spectres made us all nervous as we peered down a flight of steps into a dark, pillared cellar.

We stayed in Lundene for weeks and even when Halfdan’s army reached us we did not move west. Mounted bands did ride out to forage, but the Great Army still gathered and some men grumbled we were waiting too long, that the West Saxons were being given precious time to ready themselves, but Halfdan insisted on lingering. The West Saxons sometimes rode close to the city, and twice there were fights between our horsemen and their horsemen, but after a while, as Yule approached, the West Saxons must have decided we would do nothing till winter’s end and their patrols stopped coming close to the city.

‘We’re not waiting for spring,’ Ragnar told me, ‘but for deep winter.’

‘Why?’

‘Because no army marches in winter,’ he said wolfishly, ‘so the West Saxons will all be at home, sitting around their fires and praying to their feeble god. By spring, Uhtred, all England will be ours.’

We all worked that early winter. I hauled firewood, and when I was not hauling logs from the wooded hills north of the city, I was learning the skills of the sword. Ragnar had asked Toki, his new shipmaster, to be my teacher and he was a good one. He watched me rehearse the basic cuts, then told me to forget them. ‘In a shield wall,’ he said, ‘it’s savagery that wins. Skill helps, and cunning is good, but savagery wins. Get one of these,’ he held out a sax with a thick blade, much thicker than my old sax. I despised the sax for it was much shorter than Serpent-Breath and far less beautiful, but Toki wore one beside his proper sword, and he persuaded me that in the shield wall the short, stout blade was better. ‘You’ve no room to swing or hack in a shield wall,’ he said, ‘but you can thrust, and a short blade uses less room in a crowded fight. Crouch and stab, bring it up into their groins.’ He made Brida hold a shield and pretend to be the enemy, and then, with me on his left, he cut at her from above and she instinctively raised the shield. ‘Stop!’ he said, and she froze into stillness. ‘See?’ he told me, pointing at the raised shield, ‘your partner makes the enemy raise their shield, then you can slice into their groin.’ He taught me a dozen other moves, and I practised because I liked it and the more I practised the more muscle I grew and the more skilful I became.

We usually practised in the Roman arena. That is what Toki called it, the arena, though what the word meant neither he nor I had any idea, but it was, in a place of extraordinary things, astonishing. Imagine an open space as large as a field surrounded by a great circle of tiered stone where weeds now grew from the crumbling mortar. The Mercians, I later learned, had held their folkmoots here, but Toki said the Romans had used it for displays of fighting in which men died. Maybe that was another of his fantastic stories, but the arena was huge, unimaginably huge, a thing of mystery, the work of giants, dwarfing us, so big that all the Great Army could have collected inside and there would still have been room for two more armies just as big on the tiered seats.

Yule came, and the winter feast was held and the army vomited in the streets and still we did not march, but shortly afterwards the leaders of the Great Army met in the palace next to the arena. Brida and I, as usual, were required to be Ravn’s eyes and he, as usual, told us what we were seeing.

The meeting was held in the church of the palace, a Roman building with a roof shaped like a half-barrel on which the moon and stars were painted, though the blue and golden paint was peeling and discoloured now. A great fire had been lit in the centre of the church and it was filling the high roof with swirling smoke. Halfdan presided from the altar, and around him were the chief Earls. One was an ugly man with a blunt face, a big brown beard and a finger missing from his left hand. ‘That is Bagseg,’ Ravn told us, ‘and he calls himself a king, though he’s no better than anyone else.’ Bagseg, it seemed, had come from Denmark in the summer, bringing eighteen ships and nearly six hundred men. Next to him was a tall, gloomy man with white hair and a twitching face. ‘Earl Sidroc,’ Ravn told us, ‘and his son must be with him?’

‘Thin man,’ Brida said, ‘with a dripping nose.’

‘Earl Sidroc the Younger. He’s always sniffing. My son is there?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘next to a very fat man who keeps whispering to him and grinning.’

‘Harald!’ Ravn said. ‘I wondered if he would turn up. He’s another king.’

‘Really?’ Brida asked.

‘Well, he calls himself king, and he certainly rules over a few muddy fields and a herd of smelly pigs.’

All those men had come from Denmark, and there were others besides. Earl Fraena had brought men from Ireland, and Earl Osbern who had provided the garrison for Lundene while the army gathered, and together these kings and Earls had assembled well over two thousand men.

Osbern and Sidroc proposed crossing the river and striking directly south. This, they argued, would cut Wessex in two and the eastern part, which used to be the Kingdom of Kent, could then be taken quickly. ‘There has to be much treasure in Contwaraburg,’ Sidroc insisted, ‘it’s the central shrine of their religion.’

‘And while we march on their shrine,’ Ragnar said, ‘they will come up behind us. Their power is not in the east, but in the west. Defeat the west and all Wessex falls. We can take Contwaraburg once we’ve beaten the west.’

This was the argument. Either take the easy part of Wessex or else attack their major strongholds that lay to the west, and two merchants were asked to speak. Both men were Danes who had been trading in Readingum only two weeks before. Readingum lay a few miles upriver and was on the edge of Wessex, and they claimed to have heard that King Æthelred and his brother, Alfred, were gathering the shire forces from the west and the two merchants reckoned the enemy army would number at least three thousand.

‘Of whom only three hundred will be proper fighting men,’ Halfdan interjected sarcastically, and was rewarded by the sound of men banging swords or spears against their shields. It was while this noise echoed under the church’s barrel roof that a new group of warriors entered, led by a very tall and very burly man in a black tunic. He looked formidable, clean-shaven, angry and very rich for his black cloak had an enormous brooch of amber mounted in gold, his arms were heavy with golden rings and he wore a golden hammer on a thick golden chain about his neck. The warriors made way for him, his arrival causing silence among the crowd nearest to him, and the silence spread as he walked up the church until the mood, that had been of celebration, suddenly seemed wary.

‘Who is it?’ Ravn whispered to me.

‘Very tall,’ I said, ‘many arm rings.’

‘Gloomy,’ Brida put in, ‘dressed in black.’

‘Ah! The Earl Guthrum,’ Ravn said

‘Guthrum?’

‘Guthrum the Unlucky,’ Ravn said.

‘With all those arm rings?’

‘You could give Guthrum the world,’ Ravn said, ‘and he would still believe you had cheated him.’

‘He has a bone hanging in his hair,’ Brida said.

‘You must ask him about that,’ Ravn said, evidently amused, but he would say no more about the bone, which was evidently a rib and was tipped with gold.

I learned Guthrum the Unlucky was an Earl from Denmark who had been wintering at Beamfleot, a place that lay a good distance east of Lundene on the northern side of the Temes estuary, and once he had greeted the men bunched about the altar he announced that he had brought fourteen ships upriver. No one applauded. Guthrum, who had the saddest, sourest face I had ever seen, stared at the assembly like a man standing trial and expecting a dire verdict. ‘We had decided,’ Ragnar broke the uncomfortable silence, ‘to go west.’ No such decision had been made, but nor did anyone contradict Ragnar. ‘Those ships that are already through the bridge,’ Ragnar went on, ‘will take their crews upstream and the rest of the army will march on foot or horseback.’

‘My ships must go upstream,’ Guthrum said.

‘They are through the bridge?’

‘They will still go upstream,’ Guthrum insisted, thus letting us know that his fleet was below the bridge.

‘It would be better,’ Ragnar said, ‘if we went tomorrow.’ In the last few days the whole of the Great Army had assembled in Lundene, marching in from the settlements east and north where some had been quartered, and the longer we waited, the more of the precious food supply would be consumed.

‘My ships go upstream,’ Guthrum said flatly.

‘He’s worried,’ Ravn whispered to me, ‘that he can’t carry away the plunder on horseback. He wants his ships so he can fill them with treasure.’

‘Why let him come?’ I asked. It was plain no one liked Earl Guthrum, and his arrival seemed as unwelcome as it was inconvenient, but Ravn just shrugged the question off. Guthrum, it seemed, was here, and if he was here he must take part. That still seems incomprehensible to me, just as I still did not understand why Ivar and Ubba were not joining the attack on Wessex. It was true that both men were rich and scarcely needed more riches, but for years they had talked of conquering the West Saxons and now both had simply turned away. Guthrum did not need land or wealth either, but he thought he did, so he came. That was the Danish way. Men served in a campaign if they wished, or else they stayed at home, and there was no single authority among the Danes. Halfdan was the Great Army’s ostensible leader, but he did not frighten men as his two older brothers did and so he could do nothing without the agreement of the other chieftains. An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.

It took two days to get Guthrum’s ships past the bridge. They were beautiful things, those ships, larger than most Danish boats, and each decorated at prow and stern with black painted serpent heads. His men, and there were many of them, all wore black. Even their shields were painted black, and while I thought Guthrum to be one of the most miserable men I had ever seen, I had to confess his troops were impressive. We might have lost two days, but we had gained the black warriors.