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

‘You stayed all night at sea?’

‘Lord Æthelred ordered it,’ Steapa said.

‘Brave,’ I commented.

‘It was a calm night,’ Steapa said dismissively, ‘and at first light we found their ships. Sixteen ships.’ He stopped abruptly. He was a taciturn man and found it difficult to speak more than a few words together.

‘Beached?’ I asked.

‘They were anchored,’ he said.

That suggested the Danes had wanted their vessels to be ready at any state of the tide, but it also meant the ships could not be defended because their crews had been mostly ashore where they were throwing up earth walls to make a camp. Æthelred’s fleet had made short work of the few men aboard the enemy vessels, and then the great rope-wrapped stones that served as anchors had been hauled up and the sixteen ships were towed to the northern bank and beached there. ‘He was going to keep them there,’ Steapa explained, ‘till he was finished, then bring them back.’

‘Finished?’ I asked.

‘He wanted to kill all the pagans before we left,’ Steapa said, and explained how Æthelred’s fleet had marauded up the Sture and its adjacent river, the Arwan, landing men along the banks to burn Danish halls, slaughter Danish cattle and, when they could, to kill Danes. The Saxon raiders had caused panic. Folk had fled inland, but Gunnkel, left shipless in his encampment at the mouth of the Sture, had not panicked.

‘You didn’t attack the camp?’ I asked Steapa.

‘Lord Æthelred said it was too well protected.’

‘I thought you said it was unfinished?’

Steapa shrugged. ‘They hadn’t built the palisade,’ he said, ‘at least on one side, so we could have got in and killed them, but we’d have lost a lot of our own men too.’

‘True,’ I admitted.

‘So we attacked farms instead,’ Steapa went on, and while Æthelred’s men raided the Danish settlements, Gunnkel had sent messengers southwards to the other rivers of the East Anglian coast. There, on those riverbanks, were other Viking encampments. Gunnkel was summoning reinforcements.

‘I told Lord Æthelred to leave,’ Steapa said gloomily, ‘I told him on the second day. I said we’d stayed long enough.’

‘He wouldn’t listen to you?’

‘He called me a fool,’ Steapa said with a shrug. Æthelred had wanted plunder, and so he had stayed in the Sture and his men brought him anything they could find of value, from cooking pots to reaping knives. ‘He found some silver,’ Steapa said, ‘but not much.’

And while Æthelred stayed to enrich himself, the sea-wolves gathered.

Danish ships came from the south. Sigefrid’s ships had sailed from Beamfleot, joining other boats that rowed from the mouths of the Colaun, the Hwealf and the Pant. I had passed those rivers often enough and imagined the lean fast boats sliding out through the mudbanks on the ebbing tides, with their high prows fiercely decorated with beasts and their hulls filled with vengeful men, shields and weapons.

The Danish ships gathered off the island of Horseg, south of the Sture in the wide bay that is haunted by wildfowl. Then, on a grey morning, under a summer rainstorm that blew in from the sea, and on a flooding tide made stronger by a full moon, thirty-eight ships came from the ocean to enter the Sture.

‘It was a Sunday,’ Steapa said, ‘and the Lord Æthelred insisted we listen to a sermon.’

‘Alfred will be pleased to hear that,’ I said sarcastically.

‘It was on the beach,’ Steapa said, ‘where the Danish boats were grounded.’

‘Why there?’

‘Because the priests wanted to drive the evil spirits from the boats,’ he said, and told me how the beast-heads from the captured ships had been stacked in a great pile on the sand. Driftwood had been packed around them, along with straw from a nearby thatch, and then, to loud prayers from the priests, the heap had been set alight. Dragons and eagles, ravens and wolves had burned, their flames leaping high, and the smoke of the great fire must have blown inland as the rain spat and hissed on the burning wood. The priests had prayed and chanted, crowing their victory over the pagans, and no one had noticed the dark shapes coming through the seawards drizzle.

I can only imagine the fear, the flight and the slaughter. Danes leaping ashore. Sword-Danes, spear-Danes, axe-Danes. The only reason so many men had escaped was that so many were dying. The Danes had started their killing, and found so many men to kill that they could not reach those who fled to the ships. Other Danish boats were attacking the Saxon fleet, but Rodbora