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

A roar sounded from Ludd’s Gate and I knew it had been swung open and that men were streaming down the road that led to the Fleot. Æthelred, if he was still readying his assault, would see them coming and have a choice to make. He could stand and fight in the new Saxon town, or else run. I hoped he would stand. I did not like him, but I never saw a lack of courage in him. I did see a great deal of stupidity, which suggested he would probably welcome a fight.

It took a long time for Sigefrid’s men to get through the gate. I watched from the shadows at the courtyard’s entrance and reckoned at least four hundred men were leaving the city. Æthelred had over three hundred good troops, most of them from Alfred’s household, but the rest of his force was from the fyrd and would never stand against a hard, savage attack. The advantage lay with Sigefrid whose men were warm, rested and fed, while Æthelred’s troops had stumbled through the night and would be tired.

‘The sooner we do it,’ I said to no one in particular, ‘the better.’

‘Go now, then?’ Pyrlig suggested.

‘We just walk to the gate!’ I shouted to my men. ‘You don’t run! Look as if you belong here!’

Which is what we did.

And so, with a stroll down a Lundene street, that bitter fight began.

There were no more than thirty men left at Ludd’s Gate. Some were sentries posted to guard the archway, but most were idlers who had climbed to the rampart to watch Sigefrid’s sally. A big man with one leg was climbing the uneven stone steps on his crutches. He stopped halfway and turned to watch our approach. ‘If you hurry, lord,’ he shouted to me, ‘you can join them!’

He called me lord because he saw a lord. He saw a warrior lord.

A handful of men could go to war as I did. They were chieftains, earls, kings, lords; the men who had killed enough other men to amass the fortune needed to buy mail, helmet and weapons. And not just any mail. My coat was of Frankish make and would cost a man more than the price of a warship. Sihtric had polished the metal with sand so that it shone like silver. The hem of the coat was at my knees and was hung with thirty-eight hammers of Thor; some made of bone, some of ivory, some of silver, but all had once hung about the necks of brave enemies I had killed in battle, and I wore the amulets so that when I came to the corpse-hall the former owners would know me, greet me and drink ale with me.

I wore a cloak of wool dyed black on which Gisela had embroidered a white lightning flash that ran from my neck to my heels. The cloak could be an encumbrance in battle, but I wore it now, for it made me look larger, and I was already taller and broader than most men. Thor’s hammer hung at my neck, and that alone was a poor thing, a miserable amulet made of iron that rusted constantly, and all the scraping and cleaning had worn it thin and misshapen over the years, but I had taken that little iron hammer with my fists when I was a boy and I loved it. I wear it to this day.

My helmet was a glorious thing, polished to an eye-blinding shine, inlaid with silver and crested with a silver wolf’s head. The face-plates were decorated with silver spirals. That helmet alone told an enemy I was a man of substance. If a man killed me and took that helmet he would be instantly rich, but my enemies would rather have taken my arm rings, which, like the Danes, I wore over my mail sleeves. My rings were silver and gold, and there were so many that some had to be worn above my elbows. They spoke of men killed and wealth hoarded. My boots were of thick leather and had iron plates sewn around them to deflect the spear thrust that comes under the shield. The shield itself, rimmed with iron, was painted with a wolf’s head, my badge, and at my left hip hung Serpent-Breath and at my right Wasp-Sting, and I strode towards the gate with the sun rising behind me to throw my long shadow on the filth-strewn street.

I was a warlord in my glory, I had come to kill, and no one at the gate knew it.

They saw us coming, but assumed we were Danes. Most of the enemy were on the high rampart, but five were standing in the open gate and all were watching Sigefrid’s force that streamed down the brief steep slope to the Fleot. The Saxon settlement was not far beyond and I hoped Æthelred was still there. ‘Steapa,’ I called, still far enough from the gate so that no one there could hear me speak English, ‘take your men and kill those turds in the archway.’

Steapa’s skull face grinned. ‘You want me to close the gate?’ he asked.

‘Leave it open,’ I said. I wanted to lure Sigefrid back to prevent his hardened men getting among Æthelred’s fyrd, and if the gate were open Sigefrid would be more inclined to attack us.

The gate was built between two massive stone bastions, each with its own stairway and I remembered how, when I was a child, Father Beocca had once described the Christian heaven to me. It would have crystal stairs, he had claimed, and enthusiastically described a great flight of glassy steps climbing to a white-hung throne of gold where his god sat. Angels would surround that throne, each brighter than the sun, while the saints, as he had called the dead Christians, would cluster about the stairs and sing. It sounded dull then and still does. ‘In the next world,’ I told Pyrlig, ‘we will all be gods.’

He looked at me with surprise, wondering where that statement had come from. ‘We will be with God,’ he corrected me.

‘In your heaven, maybe,’ I said, ‘but not in mine.’

‘There is only one heaven, Lord Uhtred.’

‘Then let mine be that one heaven,’ I said, and I knew at that moment that my truth was the truth, and that Pyrlig, Alfred and all the other Christians were wrong. They were wrong. We did not go towards the light, we slid from it. We went to chaos. We went to death and to death’s heaven, and I began to shout as we drew nearer the enemy. ‘A heaven for men! A heaven for warriors! A heaven where swords shine! A heaven for brave men! A heaven of savagery! A heaven of corpse-gods! A heaven of death!’

They all stared at me, friend and enemy alike. They stared and they thought me mad, and perhaps I was mad as I climbed the right-hand stairway where the man on crutches gazed at me. I kicked one of his crutches away so that he fell. The crutch clattered down the stairs and one of my men booted it back to the ground. ‘Death’s heaven!’ I screamed, and every man on the rampart had his eyes on me and still they thought I was a friend because I shouted my weird war cry in Danish.

I smiled behind my twin face-plates, then drew Serpent-Breath. Beneath me, out of my sight, Steapa and his men had begun their killing.

Not ten minutes before I had been in a waking dream, and now the madness had come. I should have waited for my men to climb the stairs and form a shield wall, but some impulse drove me forward. I was screaming still, but screaming my own name now, and Serpent-Breath was singing her hunger-song and I was a lord of war.

The happiness of battle. The ecstasy. It is not just deceiving an enemy, but feeling like a god. I had once tried to explain it to Gisela and she had touched my face with her long fingers and smiled. ‘It’s better than this?’ she had asked.

‘The same,’ I had said.

But it is not the same. In battle a man risks all to gain reputation. In bed he risks nothing. The joy is comparable, but the joy of a woman is fleeting, while reputation is for ever. Men die, women die, all die, but reputation lives after a man, and that was why I screamed my name as Serpent-Breath took her first soul. He was a tall man with a battered helmet and a long-bladed spear that he instinctively thrust at me and, just as instinctively, I turned his lunge away with my shield and put Serpent-Breath into his throat. There was a man to my right and I shoulder-charged him, driving him down, and stamped on his groin while my shield took a sword swing from my left. I stepped over the man whose groin I had pulped and the rampart’s protective wall was on my right now, where I wanted it, and ahead of me was the enemy.

I drove into them. ‘Uhtred!’ I was shouting, ‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg!’

I was inviting death. By attacking alone I let the enemy get behind me, but at that moment I was immortal. Time had slowed so that the enemy moved like snails and I was fast as the lightning on my cloak. I was shouting still as Serpent-Breath lunged into a man’s eye, driving hard till the bone of his socket stopped her thrust, and then I swept her left to slam down a sword coming at my face, and my shield lifted to take an axe blow, and Serpent-Breath dropped and I pushed her hard forward to pierce the leather jerkin of the man whose sword I had parried. I twisted her so the blade would not be seized by his belly while she gouged his blood and guts, and then I stepped left and rammed the iron boss of the shield at the axeman.

He staggered back. Serpent-Breath came from the swordsman’s belly and flew wide right to crash against another sword. I followed her, still screaming, and saw the terror on that enemy’s face, and terror on an enemy breeds cruelty. ‘Uhtred,’ I shouted, and stared at him, and he saw death coming, and he tried to back from me, but other men came behind to block his retreat and I was smiling as I slashed Serpent-Breath across his face. Blood sprayed in the dawn, and the backswing sliced his throat and two men pushed past him and I parried one with the sword and the other with my shield.

Those two men were no fools. They came with their shields touching and their only ambition was to push me back against the rampart and hold me there, pinned by their shields, so that I could not use Serpent-Breath. And once they had trapped me they would let other men come to jab me with blades until I lost too much blood to stand. Those two knew how to kill me, and they came to do it.

But I was laughing. I was laughing because I knew what they planned, and they seemed so slow and I rammed my own shield forward to crash against theirs and they thought they had trapped me because I could not hope to push two men away. They crouched behind their shields and heaved forward and I just stepped back, snatching my own shield backwards so that they stumbled forward as my resistance vanished. Their shields were slightly lowered as they stumbled and Serpent-Breath flickered like a viper’s tongue so that her bloodied tip smashed into the forehead of the man on my left. I felt his thick bone break, saw his eyes glaze, heard the crash of his dropped shield, and I swept her to the right and the second man parried. He rammed his shield at me, hoping to unbalance me, but just then there was a mighty shout from my left. ‘Christ Jesus and Alfred!’ It was Father Pyrlig, and behind him the wide bastion was now swarming with my men. ‘You damned heathen fool,’ Pyrlig shouted at me.

I laughed. Pyrlig’s sword cut into my opponent’s arm, and Serpent-Breath beat down his shield. I remember he looked at me then. He had a fine helmet with raven wings fixed to its sides. His beard was golden, his eyes blue, and in those eyes was the knowledge of his imminent death as he tried to lift his sword with a wounded arm.

‘Hold tight to your sword,’ I told him. He nodded.

Pyrlig killed him, though I did not see it. I was moving past the man to attack the remaining enemy and beside me Clapa was swinging a huge axe so violently that he was as much a danger to our side as to the enemy, but no enemy wanted to face the two of us. They were fleeing along the ramparts and the gate was ours.

I leaned on the low outer wall and immediately stood upright because the stones shifted under my weight. The masonry was crumbling. I slapped the loose stonework and laughed aloud for joy. Sihtric grinned at me. He had a bloodied sword. ‘Any amulets, lord?’ he asked.

‘That one,’ I pointed to the man whose helmet was decorated with raven wings, ‘he died well, I’ll take his.’

Sihtric stooped to find the man’s hammer-image. Beyond him Osferth was staring at the half-dozen dead men who lay in splats of blood across the stones. He was carrying a spear that had a reddened tip. ‘You killed someone?’ I asked him.

He looked at me wide-eyed, then nodded. ‘Yes, lord.’

‘Good,’ I said and jerked my head towards the sprawling corpses. ‘Which one?’

‘It wasn’t here, lord,’ he said. He seemed puzzled for a moment, then looked back at the steps we had climbed. ‘It was over there, lord.’

‘On the steps?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

I stared at him long enough to make him uncomfortable. ‘Tell me,’ I said at last, ‘did he threaten you?’

‘He was an enemy, lord.’

‘What did he do,’ I asked, ‘wave his one crutch at you?’

‘He,’ Osferth began, then appeared to run out of words. He stared down at a man I had killed, then frowned. ‘Lord?’

‘Yes?’

‘You told us it was death to leave the shield wall.’

I stooped to clean Serpent-Breath’s blade on a dead man’s cloak. ‘So?’