The Last Kingdom Series Books 4-6: Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings

‘You? A Christian?’

‘I love my enemies,’ I said.

‘The Danes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t,’ he said bleakly. Steapa’s parents had been slaughtered by Danes. I did not respond. I was thinking of destiny. If the three spinners know our fate, then why do we make oaths? Because if we then break an oath, is it treachery? Or is it fate? ‘So will you fight them tomorrow?’ Steapa asked.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But not in the way Æthelred expects. So I’m disobeying orders, and your orders are to kill me if I do that.’

‘I’ll kill you later,’ Steapa said.

Æthelred had changed our agreed plan without ever suspecting that I had never intended to keep to it anyway. It was too obvious. How else would an army assault a city, except by trying to draw defenders away from the targeted ramparts? Sigefrid would know our first assault was a feint, and he would leave his garrison in place until he was certain he had identified the real threat, and then we would die under his walls and Lundene would remain a stronghold of the Northmen.

So the only way to capture Lundene was by trickery, stealth and by taking a desperate risk. ‘What I’m going to do,’ I told Steapa, ‘is wait for Æthelred to leave the island. Then we go back there, and we take two of the ships. It will be dangerous, very, because we have to go through the bridge’s gap in the dark and ships die there even in daylight. But if we can get through then there is an easy way into the old city.’

‘I thought there was a wall along the river?’

‘There is,’ I said, ‘but it’s broken in one place.’ A Roman had built a great house by the river and had cut a small channel beside his house. The channel pierced the wall, breaking it. I assumed the Roman had been wealthy and he had wanted a place to berth his ship and so he had pulled down a stretch of the river wall to make his channel and that was my way into Lundene.

‘Why didn’t you tell Alfred?’ Steapa asked.

‘Alfred can keep a secret,’ I said, ‘but Æthelred can’t. He would have told someone and within two days the Danes would have known what we planned.’ And that was true. We had spies and they had spies, and if I had revealed my real intentions then Sigefrid and Erik would have blocked the channel with ships and garrisoned the big house beside the river with men. We would have died on the wharves, and we still might die because I did not know that we could find the gap in the bridge, and if we did find it whether we could shoot through that perilous broken space where the river level dropped and the water foamed. If we missed, if one of the ships was just a half oar’s length too far south or north, then it would be swept onto the jagged pilings and men would be tipped into the river and I would not hear them drown because their armour and weapons would drag them under instantly.

Steapa had been thinking, always a slow process, but now he posed a shrewd question. ‘Why not land upriver of the bridge?’ he suggested. ‘There must be gates through the wall?’

‘There are a dozen gates,’ I said, ‘maybe a score, and Sigefrid will have blocked them all, but the last thing he’ll expect is for ships to try and run the gap in the bridge.’

‘Because ships die there?’ Steapa said.

‘Because ships die there,’ I agreed. I had watched it happen once, watched a trading ship run the gap at slack water, and somehow the steersman had veered too far to one side and the broken pilings had ripped the planks from the bottom of his hull. The gap was some forty paces wide and, when the river was calm with neither tide nor wind to churn the water, the gap looked innocent, but it never was. Lundene’s bridge was a killer, and to take Lundene I had to run the bridge.

And if we survived? If we could find the Roman dock and get ashore? Then we would be few and the enemy would be many, and some of us would die in the streets before Æthelred’s force could ever cross the wall. I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt and felt the small silver cross that was embedded there. Hild’s gift. A lover’s gift. ‘Have you heard a cuckoo yet?’ I asked Steapa.

‘Not yet.’

‘It’s time to go,’ I said, ‘unless you want to kill me?’

‘Maybe later,’ Steapa said, ‘but for the moment I’ll fight beside you.’

And we would have a fight. That I knew. And I touched my hammer amulet and sent a prayer into the darkness that I would live to see the child in Gisela’s belly.

Then we went back south.

Osric, who had brought me away from Lundene with Father Pyrlig, was one of our shipmasters, and the other was Ralla, the man who had carried my force to ambush the Danes whose corpses I had hanged beside the river. Ralla had negotiated the gap in Lundene’s bridge more times than he could remember. ‘But never at night,’ he told me that night when we returned to the island.

‘But it can be done?’

‘We’re going to discover that, lord, aren’t we?’

Æthelred had left a hundred men to guard the island where the ships lay and those men were under the command of Egbert, an old warrior whose authority was denoted by a silver chain hanging about his neck, and who challenged me when we unexpectedly returned. He did not trust me and believed I had abandoned my northern attack because I did not want Æthelred to succeed. I needed him to give me men, but the more I pleaded the more he bristled with hostility. My own men were boarding the two ships, wading through the cold water and hauling themselves over the sides. ‘How do I know you’re not just going back to Coccham?’ Egbert asked suspiciously.

‘Steapa!’ I called. ‘Tell Egbert what we’re doing.’

‘Killing Danes,’ Steapa growled from beside a campfire. The flames reflected from his mail coat and from his hard, feral eyes.

‘Give me twenty men,’ I pleaded with Egbert.

He stared at me, then shook his head. ‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘We have to guard the Lady Æthelflaed,’ he said. ‘Those are the Lord Æthelred’s orders. We’re here to guard her.’

‘Then leave twenty men on her ship,’ I said, ‘and give me the rest.’

‘I can’t,’ Egbert insisted doggedly.

I sighed. ‘Tatwine would have given me men,’ I said. Tatwine had been the commander of the household troops for Æthelred’s father. ‘I knew Tatwine,’ I said.

‘I know you did. I remember you.’ Egbert spoke curtly and the hidden message in his tone was that he did not like me. As a young man I had served under Tatwine for a few months, and back then I had been brash, ambitious and arrogant. Egbert plainly thought I was still brash, ambitious and arrogant, and perhaps he was right.

He turned away and I thought he was dismissing me, but instead he watched as a pale and ghostly shape appeared beyond the campfires. It was Æthelflaed, who had evidently seen our return and had waded ashore wrapped in a white cloak to discover what we did. Her hair was unbound and fell in golden tangles over her shoulders. Father Pyrlig was with her.

‘You didn’t go with Æthelred?’ I asked, surprised to see the Welsh priest.

‘His lordship felt he needed no more advice,’ Pyrlig said, ‘so asked me to stay here and pray for him.’

‘He didn’t ask,’ Æthelflaed corrected him, ‘he ordered you to stay and pray for him.’

‘He did,’ Pyrlig said, ‘and as you can see, I am dressed for praying.’ He was in a mail coat and had his swords strapped at his waist. ‘And you?’ he challenged me. ‘I thought you were marching to the city’s north?’

‘We’re going downriver,’ I explained, ‘and attacking Lundene from the wharf.’

‘Can I come?’ Æthelflaed asked instantly.

‘No.’

She smiled at that curt refusal. ‘Does my husband know what you’re doing?’

‘He’ll find out, my lady.’

She smiled again, then walked to my side and pulled my cloak aside to lean against me. She wrapped my dark cloak over her white one. ‘I’m cold,’ she explained to Egbert, whose face showed surprise and indignation at her behaviour.

‘We are old friends,’ I said to Egbert.

‘Very old friends,’ Æthelflaed agreed, and she put an arm around my waist and clung to me. Egbert could not see her arm beneath my cloak. I was aware of her golden hair just beneath my beard, and I could feel her thin body shivering. ‘I think of Uhtred as an uncle,’ she told Egbert.