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

We looked like a trading ship drifting along the Wessex shore in hope that no one on the northern side of the estuary would see us.

But they had seen us.

And a sea-wolf was stalking us.

She was rowing to our north, slanting south and eastwards, waiting for us to turn and try to escape upriver against the tide. She was perhaps a mile away and I could see the short black upright line of her stemhead, which ended in a beast’s head. She was in no hurry. Her shipmaster could see we were not rowing and he would take that inactivity as a sign of panic. He would think we were discussing what to do. His own oar banks were dipping slow, but every stroke surged that distant boat forward to cut off our seaward escape.

Finan, who was manning one of the stern oars of our ship, glanced over his shoulder. ‘Crew of fifty?’ he suggested.

‘Maybe more,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘How many more?’

‘Could be seventy?’ I guessed.

We numbered forty-three, and all but fifteen of us were hidden in the place where the ship would normally have carried goods. Those hidden men were covered by an old sail, making it look as though we carried salt or grain, some cargo that needed to be protected from any rain or spray. ‘Be a rare fight if it’s seventy,’ Finan said with relish.

‘Won’t be any fight at all,’ I said, ‘because they won’t be ready for us,’ and that was true. We looked like an easy victim, a handful of men on a tubby ship, and the sea-wolf would come alongside and a dozen men would leap aboard while the rest of the crew just watched the slaughter. That, at least, was what I hoped. The watching crew would be armed, of course, but they would not be expecting battle, and my men were more than ready.

‘Remember,’ I called loudly so the men beneath the sail would hear me, ‘we kill them all!’

‘Even women?’ Finan asked.

‘Not women,’ I said. I doubted there would be women aboard the far ship.

Sihtric was crouching beside me and now squinted up. ‘Why kill them all, lord?’

‘So they learn to fear us,’ I said.

The gold in the sky was brightening and fading. The sun was above the cloud bank and the sea shimmered with its new brilliance. The reflected image of the enemy was long on the light-flickering, slow-moving water.

‘Steorbord oars!’ I called, ‘back water. Clumsy now!’

The oarsmen grinned as they deliberately churned the water with clumsy strokes that slowly turned our prow upriver so that it appeared as though we were trying to escape. The sensible thing for us to have done, had we been as innocent and vulnerable as we looked, would have been to row to the southern shore, ground the boat and run for our lives, but instead we turned and started rowing against tide and current. Our oars clashed, making us look like incompetent, scared fools.

‘He’s taken the bait,’ I said to our rowers, though, because our bows now pointed westwards, they could see for themselves that the enemy had started rowing hard. The Viking was coming straight for us, her oar banks rising and falling like wings and the white water swelling and shrinking at her stem as each blade-beat surged the ship.

We kept feigning panic. Our oars banged into each other so that we did little except stir the water around our clumsy hull. Two gulls circled our stubby mast, their cries sad in the limpid morning. Far to the west, where the sky was darkened by the smoke of Lundene that lay beyond the horizon, I could just see a tiny dark streak, which I knew to be the mast of another ship. She was coming towards us, and I knew the enemy ship would have seen her too and would be wondering whether she was friend or foe.

Not that it mattered, for it would take the enemy only five minutes to capture our small, under-manned cargo ship and it would be the best part of an hour before the ebbing tide and steady rowing could bring that western ship to where we struggled. The Viking boat came on fast, her oars working in lovely unison, but the ship’s speed meant that her oarsmen would be tired as well as unprepared by the time she reached us. Her beast-head, proud on her high stem, was an eagle with an open beak painted red as if the bird had just ripped bloody flesh from a victim, while beneath the carved head a dozen armed men were crowded on the bow platform. They were the men supposed to board and kill us.

Twenty oars a side made forty men. The boarding party added a dozen, though it was hard to count the men who were crowded so close together, and two men stood beside the steering-oar. ‘Between fifty and sixty,’ I called aloud. The enemy rowers were not in mail. They did not expect to fight, and most would have their swords at their feet and their shields stacked in the bilge.

‘Stop oars!’ I called. ‘Rowers, get up!’

The eagle-prowed ship was close now. I could hear the creak of her oar tholes, the splash of her blades and the hiss of the sea at her cutwater. I could see bright axe blades, the helmeted faces of the men who thought they would kill us, and the anxiety on the steersman’s face as he attempted to lay his bows directly on ours. My rowers were milling about, feigning panic. The Viking oarsmen gave a last heave and I heard their shipmaster order them to cease rowing and ship oars. She ran on towards us, water sliding away from her stem and she was very close now, close enough to smell, and the men on her bow platform hefted their shields as the steersman aimed her bows to slide along our flank. Her oars were drawn inboard as she swooped to her kill.

I waited a heartbeat, waited until the enemy could no longer avoid us, then sprang our ambush. ‘Now!’ I shouted.

The sail was dragged away and suddenly our little ship bristled with armed men. I threw off my cloak and Sihtric brought me my helmet and shield. A man shouted a warning on the enemy ship and the steersman threw his weight on his long oar and his vessel turned slightly, but she had turned away too late, and there was a splintering sound as her bows cracked through our oar shafts. ‘Now!’ I shouted again.

Clapa was my man in our bows and he hurled a grapnel to haul the enemy into our embrace. The grapnel slammed over her sheer-strake, Clapa heaved and the impetus of the enemy ship made her swing on the line to crash against our flank. My men immediately swarmed over her side. These were my household troops, trained warriors, dressed in mail and hungry for slaughter, and they leaped among unarmoured oarsmen who were utterly unprepared for a fight. The enemy boarders, the only men armed and keyed for a battle, hesitated as the two ships crashed together. They could have attacked my men who were already killing, but instead their leader shouted at them to jump across onto our ship. He hoped to take my men in the rear, and it was a shrewd enough tactic, but we still had enough men left aboard to thwart them. ‘Kill them all!’ I shouted.

One Dane, I assume he was a Dane, tried to jump onto my platform and I simply banged my shield into him and he disappeared between the ships where his mail took him instantly to the sea’s bed. The other Viking boarders had reached the stern rowers’ benches where they hacked and cursed at my men. I was behind and above them, and only had Sihtric for company, and the two of us could have stayed safe by remaining on the steering platform, but a man does not lead by staying out of a fight. ‘Stay where you are,’ I told Sihtric, and jumped.

I shouted a challenge as I jumped and a tall man turned to face me. He had an eagle’s wing on his helmet, and his mail was fine, and his arms were bright with rings, and his shield was painted with an eagle, and I knew he must be the owner of the enemy ship. He was a Viking lord, fair-bearded and brown-eyed, and he carried a long-handled axe, its blade already reddened, and he swept it at me and I parried with the shield and his axe dropped at the last moment to cut at my ankles and, by the gift of Thor, the ship lurched and the axe lost its force in a rib of the trading ship. He kept my sword lunge away with his shield as he raised the axe again and I shield-charged him, throwing him back with my weight.

He should have fallen, but he staggered back into his own men and so stayed on his feet. I cut at his ankle and Serpent-Breath rasped on metal. His boots were protected as mine were by metal strips. The axe hurtled around and thumped into my shield, and his shield crashed into my sword and I was hurled back by the double blow. I hit the edge of the steering platform with my shoulderblades and he charged me again, trying to drive me down, and I was half aware of Sihtric still standing on the small stern platform and beating a sword at my enemy, but the blade glanced off the Dane’s helmet and wasted itself on the man’s mailed shoulders. He kicked at my feet, knowing I was unbalanced, and I fell.

‘Turd,’ he snarled, then took one backwards step. Behind him his men were dying, but he had time to kill me before he died himself. ‘I am Olaf Eagleclaw,’ he told me proudly, ‘and I will meet you in the corpse-hall.’

‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said, and I was still on the deck as he lifted his axe high.

And Olaf Eagleclaw screamed.

I had fallen on purpose. He was heavier than me, and he had me cornered, and I knew he would go on beating at me and I would be helpless to push him away, and so I had fallen. Sword blades were wasted on his fine mail and on his shining helmet, but now I thrust Serpent-Breath upwards, under the skirt of his mail, up into his unarmoured groin, and I followed her up, ripping the blade into him and through him as the blood drenched the deck between us. He was staring at me, wide-eyed and mouth open, as the axe fell from his hand. I was standing now, still hauling on Serpent-Breath, and he fell away, twitching, and I yanked her out of his body and saw his right hand scrabbling for his axe handle, and I kicked it towards him and watched his fingers curl around the haft before I killed him with a quick thrust into the throat. More blood spilled across the ship’s timbers.

I make that small fight sound easy. It was not. It is true I fell on purpose, but Olaf made me fall, and instead of resisting, I let myself drop. Sometimes, in my old age, I wake shivering in the night as I remember the moments I should have died and did not. That is one of those moments. Perhaps I remember it wrong? Age clouds old things. There must have been the sound of feet scraping on the deck, the grunt of men making a blow, the stench of the filthy bilge, the gasps of wounded men. I remember the fear as I fell, the gut-souring, mind-screaming panic of imminent death. It was but a moment of life, soon gone, a flurry of blows and panic, a fight hardly worth remembering, yet still Olaf Eagleclaw can wake me in the darkness and I lie, listening to the sea beat on the sand, and I know he will be waiting for me in the corpse-hall where he will want to know whether I killed him by pure luck or whether I planned that fatal thrust. He will also remember that I kicked the axe back into his grasp so that he could die with a weapon in his hand, and for that he will thank me.

I look forward to seeing him.

By the time Olaf was dead his ship was taken and his crew slaughtered. Finan had led the charge onto the Sea-Eagle. I knew she was called that, for her name was cut in runic letters on her stem-post. ‘It was no fight,’ Finan reported, sounding disgusted.

‘I told you,’ I said.

‘A few of the rowers found weapons,’ he said, dismissing their effort with a shrug. Then he pointed down into the Sea-Eagle’s bilge that was sodden with blood. Five men crouched there, shivering, and Finan saw my questioning look. ‘They’re Saxons, lord,’ he explained why the men still lived.

The five men were fishermen who told me they lived at a place called Fughelness. I hardly understood them. They spoke English, but in such a strange way that it was like a foreign language, yet I understood them to say that Fughelness was a barren island in a waste of marshes and creeks. A place of birds, emptiness, and a few poor folk who lived in the mud by trapping birds, catching eels and netting fish. They said Olaf had captured them a week before and forced them to his rowing benches. There had been eleven of them, but six had died in the fury of Finan’s assault before these survivors had managed to convince my men that they were prisoners, not enemies.

We stripped the enemy of everything, then piled their mail, weapons, arm rings and clothes at the foot of Sea-Eagle’s mast. In time we would divide those spoils. Each man would receive one share, Finan would take three and I would take five. I was supposed to yield one third to Alfred and another third to Bishop Erkenwald, but I rarely gave them the plunder I took in battle.

We threw the naked dead into the trading ship where they made a grisly cargo of blood-spattered bodies. I remember thinking how white those bodies looked, yet how dark their faces were. A cloud of gulls screamed at us, wanting to come down and peck the corpses, but the birds were too nervous of our proximity to dare try. By now the ship that had been coming downtide from the west had reached us. She was a fine fighting ship, her bow crowned with a dragon’s head, her stern showing a wolf’s head and her masthead decorated with a raven wind-vane. She was one of the two warships we had captured in Lundene and Ralla had christened her Sword of the Lord. Alfred would have approved. She slewed to a stop and Ralla, her shipmaster, cupped his hands. ‘Well done!’

‘We lost three men,’ I called back. All three had died in the fight against Olaf’s boarders, and those men we carried aboard Sea-Eagle. I would have dropped them into the sea and let them sink to the sea-god’s embrace, but they were Christians and their friends wanted them carried back to a Christian graveyard in Lundene.

‘You want me to tow her?’ Ralla shouted, gesturing at the trading ship.

I said yes, and there was a pause while he fixed a line to the stem-post of the cargo ship. Then, in consort, we rowed northwards across the estuary of the Temes. The gulls, emboldened now, were plucking at the dead men’s eyes.

It was close to midday and the tide had gone slack. The estuary heaved oily and sluggish under the high sun as we rowed slowly, conserving our strength, sliding across the sun-silvered sea. And slowly, too, the estuary’s northern shore came into view.

Low hills shimmered in the day’s heat. I had rowed that shore before and knew that wooded hills lay beyond a flat shelf of waterlogged land. Ralla, who knew the coast much better than I, guided us, and I memorised the landmarks as we approached. I noted a slightly higher hill, a bluff and a clump of trees, and I knew I would see those things again because we were rowing our ships towards Beamfleot. This was the den of sea-wolves, the sea-serpent’s haunt, Sigefrid’s refuge.

This was also the old kingdom of the East Saxons, a kingdom that had long vanished, though ancient stories said they had once been feared. They had been a sea-people, raiders, but the Angles to their north had conquered them and now this coast was a part of Guthrum’s realm, East Anglia.

It was a lawless coast, far from Guthrum’s capital. Here, in the creeks that dried at low tide, ships could wait and, as the tide rose, they could slip out of their inlets to raid the merchants whose goods were carried up the Temes. This was a pirates’ nest, and here Sigefrid, Erik and Haesten had their camp.

They must have seen us approach, but what did they see? They saw the Sea-Eagle, one of their own ships, and with her another Danish ship, both boats proudly decorated with beast-heads. They saw a third ship, a tubby cargo ship, and would have assumed Olaf was returning from a successful foray. They would have thought Sword of the Lord a Northmen’s ship newly come to England. In short, they saw us, but they suspected nothing.