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

Destiny is all. And now, looking back, I see the pattern of my life’s journey. It began in Bebbanburg and took me south, ever southwards, until I reached the farthest coast of England and could go no further and still hear my own language. That was my childhood’s journey. As a man I have gone the other way, ever northwards, carrying sword and spear and axe to clear the path back to where I began. Destiny. The spinners favour me, or at least they have spared me, and for a time they made me a sailor.

I took my mail coat and helmet in the year 874, the same year that King Burghred fled to Rome, and Alfred expected Guthrum to come in the following spring, but he did not, nor in the summer, and so Wessex was spared an invasion in 875. Guthrum should have come, but he was a cautious man, ever expecting the worst, and he spent a full eighteen months raising the greatest army of Danes that had ever been seen in England. It dwarfed the Great Army that had marched to Readingum, and it was an army that should have finished Wessex and granted Guthrum’s dream of slaughtering the last Englishman in England. Guthrum’s host did come in time and when that time came the three spinners cut England’s threads one by one until she dangled by a wisp, but that story must wait and I mention it now only to explain why we were given time to prepare ourselves.

And I was given to Heahengel. So help me, that was the ship’s name. It means Archangel. She was not mine, of course, she had a shipmaster called Werferth who had commanded a tubby boat that had traded across the sea before he was persuaded to steer Heahengel, and her warriors were led by a grim old beast called Leofric. And me? I was the turd in the butter-churn.

I was not needed. All Alfred’s flattering words about me teaching his sailors how to fight were just that, mere words. But he had persuaded me to join his fleet, and I had promised him a year, and here I was in Hamtun which was a fine port at the head of a long arm of the sea. Alfred had ordered twelve ships made, and their maker was a shipwright who had been an oarsman on a Danish boat before escaping in Frankia and making his way back to England. There was not much about ship fighting that he did not know, and nothing I could teach anyone, but ship fighting is a very simple affair. A ship is a scrap of land afloat. So a ship fight is a land fight at sea. Bang your boat alongside the enemy, make a shield wall, and kill the other crew. But our shipwright, who was a cunning man, had worked out that a larger ship gave its crew an advantage because it could hold more men and its sides, being higher, would serve as a wall, and so he had built twelve big ships which at first looked odd to me for they had no beast-heads at their prows or sterns, though they did all have crucifixes nailed to their masts. The whole fleet was commanded by Ealdorman Hacca, who was brother to the Ealdorman of Hamptonscir, and the only thing he said when I arrived was to advise me to wrap my mail coat in an oiled sack so it would not rust. After that he gave me to Leofric.

‘Show me your hands,’ Leofric ordered. I did and he sneered. ‘You’ll have blisters soon, Earsling.’

That was his favourite word, earsling. It means arseling. That was me, though sometimes he called me Endwerc, which means a pain in the arse, and he made me an oarsman, one of the sixteen on the bæcbord, which is the left-hand side of the ship as you look forward. The other side is the steorbord, for it is on that side that the steering oar is rigged. We had sixty warriors aboard, thirty-two rowed at a time unless the sail could be hoisted, and we had Werferth at the steering oar and Leofric snarling up and down telling us to pull harder.

All autumn and winter we rowed up and down Hamtun’s wide channel and beyond in the Solente, which is the sea south of the island called Wiht, and we fought the tide and wind, hammering Heahengel through short, cold waves until we had become a crew and could make her leap across the sea and, to my surprise, I found that Heahengel was a fast ship. I had thought that, being so much bigger, she would be slower than the Danish ships, but she was fast, very fast, and Leofric was turning her into a lethal weapon.

He did not like me and though he called me Earsling and Endwerc I did not face him down because I would have died. He was a short, wide man, muscled like an ox, with a scarred face, a quick temper and a sword so battered that its blade was slim as a knife. Not that he cared, for his preferred weapon was the axe. He knew I was an Ealdorman, but did not care, nor did he care that I had once served on a Danish boat. ‘The only thing the Danes can teach us, Earsling,’ he told me, ‘is how to die.’

He did not like me, but I liked him. At night, when we filled one of Hamtun’s taverns, I would sit near him to listen to his few words which were usually scornful, even about our own ships. ‘Twelve,’ he snarled, ‘and how many can the Danes bring?’

No one answered.

‘Two hundred?’ he suggested. ‘And we have twelve?’

Brida beguiled him one night into talking about his fights, all of them ashore, and he talked of Æsc’s Hill, how the Danish shield wall had been broken by a man with an axe, and it was obviously Leofric himself who had done that, and he told how the man had held the axe halfway up its shaft because that made it quicker to recover from the blow, though it diminished the force of the weapon, and how the man had used his shield to hold off the enemy on his left, killed the one in front then the one to the right, and then had slipped his hand down the axe handle to start swinging it in terrible, flashing strokes that carved through the Danish lines. He saw me listening and gave me his usual sneer. ‘Been in a shield wall, Earsling?’

I held up one finger.

‘He broke the enemy shield wall,’ Brida said. She and I lived in the tavern stables and Leofric liked Brida though he refused to allow her on board Heahengel because he reckoned a woman brought ill-luck to a ship. ‘He broke the wall,’ Brida said, ‘I saw it.’

He gazed at me, not sure whether to believe her. I said nothing. ‘Who were you fighting,’ he asked after a pause, ‘nuns?’

‘Welshmen,’ Brida said.

‘Oh, Welshmen! Hell, they die easy,’ he said, which was not true, but it let him keep his scorn of me, and next day, when we had a practice fight with wooden staves instead of real weapons, he made sure he opposed me and he beat me to the ground as if I were a yapping dog, opening a cut on my skull and leaving me dazed. ‘I’m not a Welshman, Earsling,’ he said. I liked Leofric a lot.

The year turned. I became eighteen years old. The great Danish army did not come, but their ships did. The Danes were being Vikings again, and their dragon ships came in ones and twos to harry the West Saxon coast, to raid and to rape and to burn and to kill, but this year Alfred had his own ships ready.

So we went to sea.

Eight (#ulink_1edcce72-c71e-5864-8afa-a39ee42e61e9)

We spent the spring, summer and autumn of the year 875 rowing up and down Wessex’s south coast. We were divided into four flotillas, and Leofric commanded Heahengel, Ceruphin and Cristenlic which meant Archangel, Cherubim and Christian. Alfred had chosen the names. Hacca, who led the whole fleet, sailed in the Evangelista which soon acquired the reputation of being an unlucky ship, though her real ill fortune was to have Hacca on board. He was a nice enough man, generous with his silver, but he hated ships, hated the sea, and wanted nothing more than to be a warrior on dry land, which meant that Evangelista was always on Hamtun’s hard undergoing repairs.

But not the Heahengel. I tugged that oar till my body ached and my hands were hard as oak, but the rowing put muscle on me, so much muscle. I was big now, big, tall and strong, and cocky and belligerent as well. I wanted nothing more than to try Heahengel against some Danish ship, yet our first encounter was a disaster. We were off the coast of Suth Seaxa, a marvellous coast of rearing white cliffs, and Ceruphin and Cristenlic had gone far out to sea while we slid inshore hoping to attract a Viking ship that would pursue us into an ambush sprung by the other two craft. The trap worked, only the Viking was better than us. He was smaller, much smaller, and we pursued him against the falling tide, gaining on him with every dip of our oars, but then he saw Ceruphin and Cristenlic slamming in from the south, their oar blades flashing back the sunlight and their bow waves seething white, and the Danish shipmaster turned his craft as if she had been mounted on a spindle and, with the strong tide now helping him, dashed back at us.

‘Turn into him!’ Leofric roared at Werferth who was at the steering oar, but instead Werferth turned away, not wanting to bring on a collision, and I saw the oars of the Danish ship slide into their holes as she neared us and then she ran down our steorbord flank, snapping our oars one by one, the impact throwing the oar shafts back into our rowers with enough force to break some men’s ribs, and then the Danish archers, they had four or five aboard, began loosing their arrows. One went into Werferth’s neck and there was blood pouring down the steering deck and Leofric was bellowing in impotent rage as the Danes, oars slid out again, sped safely away down the fast ebbing tide. They jeered as we wallowed in the waves.

‘Have you steered a boat, Earsling?’ Leofric asked me, pulling the dying Werferth aside.

‘Yes.’

‘Then steer this one.’ We limped home with only half our proper oars, and we learned two lessons. One was to carry spare oars and the second was to carry archers, except that Ealdorman Freola, who commanded the fyrd of Hamptonscir, said he could spare no bowmen, that he had too few as it was, and that the ships had already consumed too many of his other warriors, and besides, he said, we should not need archers. Hacca, his brother, told us not to make a fuss. ‘Just throw spears,’ he advised Leofric.

‘I want archers,’ Leofric insisted.

‘There are none!’ Hacca said, spreading his hands.

Father Willibald wanted to write a letter to Alfred. ‘He will listen to me,’ he said.

‘So you write to him,’ Leofric said sourly, ‘and what happens then?’

‘He will send archers, of course!’ Father Willibald said brightly.

‘The letter,’ Leofric said, ‘goes to his damn clerks, who are all priests, and they put it in a pile, and the pile gets read slowly, and when Alfred finally sees it he asks for advice, and two damned bishops have their say, and Alfred writes back wanting to know more, and by then it’s Candlemas and we’re all dead with Danish arrows in our backs.’ He glared at Willibald and I began to like Leofric even more. He saw me grinning. ‘What’s so funny, Endwerc?’ he demanded.

‘I can get you archers,’ I said.

‘How?’

With one piece of Ragnar’s gold, which we displayed in Hamtun’s marketplace and said that the gold coin, with its weird writing, would go to the best archer to win a competition that would be held one week hence. That coin was worth more than most men could earn in a year and Leofric was curious how I had come by it, but I refused to tell him. Instead I set up targets and word spread through the countryside that rich gold was to be had with cheap arrows, and over forty men arrived to test their skill and we simply marched the best twelve on board Heahengel and another ten each to Ceruphin and Cristenlic, then took them to sea. Our twelve protested, of course, but Leofric snarled at them and they all suddenly decided they wanted nothing better than to sail the Wessex coast with him. ‘For something that dribbled out of a goat’s backside,’ Leofric told me, ‘you’re not completely useless.’

‘There’ll be trouble when we get back,’ I warned him.

‘Of course there’ll be trouble,’ he agreed, ‘trouble from the shire reeve, from the Ealdorman, from the bishop and from the whole damned lot of them.’ He laughed suddenly, a very rare occurrence. ‘So let’s kill some Danes first.’

We did. And by chance it was the same ship that had shamed us, and she tried the same trick again, but this time I turned Heahengel into her and our bows smashed into her quarter and our twelve archers were loosing shafts into her crew. Heahengel had ridden up over the other ship, half sinking her and pinning her down, and Leofric led a charge over the prow, and there was blood thickening the water in the Viking bilge. Two of our men managed to tie the ships together which meant I could leave the steering oar and, without bothering to put on either helmet or mail coat, I jumped aboard with Serpent-Breath and joined the fight. There were shields clashing in the wide midships, spears jabbing, swords and axes swinging, arrows flighting overhead, men screaming, men dying, the rage of battle, the joy of blade song and it was all over before Ceruphin