The Last Kingdom

I was watching my father’s wedge, the central wedge, the one just in front of the wolf’s head banner, and I saw the closely touching shields vanish into the ditch that lay in front of the earthen wall and I knew my father was perilously close to death and I urged him to win, to kill, to give the name Uhtred of Bebbanburg even more renown, and then I saw the shield wedge emerge from the ditch and, like a monstrous beast, crawl up the face of the wall.

‘The advantage they have,’ Beocca said in the patient voice he used for teaching, ‘is that the enemy’s feet are easy targets when you come from below.’ I think he was trying to reassure himself, but I believed him anyway, and it must have been true for my father’s formation, first up the wall, did not seem to be checked when they met the enemy’s shield wall. I could see nothing now except the flash of blades rising and falling, and I could hear that sound, the real music of battle, the chop of iron on wood, iron on iron, yet the wedge was still moving. Like a boar’s razor-sharp tusk it had pierced the Danish shield wall and was moving forward, and though the Danes wrapped around the wedge, it seemed our men were winning for they pressed forward across the earthen bank, and the soldiers behind must have sensed that Ealdorman Uhtred had brought them victory for they suddenly cheered and surged to help the beleaguered wedge.

‘God be praised,’ Beocca said, for the Danes were fleeing. One moment they had formed a thick shield wall, bristling with weapons, and now they were vanishing into the city and our army, with the relief of men whose lives have been spared, charged after them.

‘Slowly, now,’ Beocca said, walking his horse forward and leading mine by the bridle.

The Danes had gone. Instead the earthen wall was black with our men who were scrambling through the gap in the city’s ramparts, then down the bank’s farther side into the streets and alleyways beyond. The three flags, my father’s wolf head, Ælla’s war axe and Osbert’s cross, were inside Eoferwic. I could hear men cheering and I kicked my horse, forcing her out of Beocca’s grasp. ‘Come back!’ he shouted, but though he followed me he did not try to drag me away. We had won, God had given us victory and I wanted to be close enough to smell the slaughter.

Neither of us could get into the city because the gap in the palisade was choked with our men, but I kicked the horse again and she forced her way into the press. Some men protested at what I was doing, then they saw the gilt-bronze circle on my helmet and knew I was nobly born and so they tried to help me through, while Beocca, stranded at the back of the crowd, shouted that I should not get too far ahead of him. ‘Catch up!’ I called back to him.

Then he shouted again, but this time his voice was frantic, terrified, and I turned to see Danes streaming across the field where our army had advanced. It was a horde of Danes who must have sallied from the city’s northern gate to cut off our retreat, and they must have known we would retreat, because it seemed they could build walls after all, and had built them across the streets inside the city, then feigned flight from the ramparts to draw us into their killing ground and now they sprang the trap. Some of the Danes who came from the city were mounted, most were on foot, and Beocca panicked. I do not blame him. The Danes like killing Christian priests and Beocca must have seen death, did not desire martyrdom, and so he turned his horse and kicked it hard and it galloped away beside the river and the Danes, not caring about the fate of one man where so many were trapped, let him go.

It is a truth that in most armies the timid men and those with the feeblest weapons are at the back. The brave go to the front, the weak seek the rear, so if you can get to the back of an enemy army you will have a massacre.

I am an old man now and it has been my fate to see panic flicker through many armies. That panic is worse than the terror of sheep penned in a cleft and being assaulted by wolves, more frantic than the writhing of salmon caught in a net and dragged to the air. The sound of it must tear the heavens apart, but to the Danes, that day, it was the sweet sound of victory and to us it was death.

I tried to escape. God knows I panicked too. I had seen Beocca racing away beside the riverside willows and I managed to turn the mare, but then one of our own men snatched at me, presumably wanting my horse, and I had the wit to draw my short sword and hack blindly at him as I kicked back my heels, but all I achieved was to ride out of the panicked mass into the path of the Danes, and all around me men were screaming and the Danish axes and swords were chopping and swinging. The grim work, the blood feast, the song of the blade, they call it, and perhaps I was saved for a moment because I was the only one in our army who was on horseback and a score of the Danes were also mounted and perhaps they mistook me for one of their own, but then one of those Danes called to me in a language I did not speak and I looked at him and saw his long hair, unhelmeted, his long fair hair and his silver-coloured mail and the wide grin on his wild face and I recognised him as the man who had killed my brother and, like the fool I was, I screamed at him. A standard-bearer was just behind the long-haired Dane, flaunting an eagle’s wing on a long pole. Tears were blurring my sight, and perhaps the battle madness came onto me because, despite my panic, I rode at the long-haired Dane and struck at him with my small sword, and his sword parried mine, and my feeble blade bent like a herring’s spine. It just bent and he drew back his own sword for the killing stroke, saw my pathetic bent blade and began to laugh. I was pissing myself, he was laughing, and I beat at him again with the useless sword and still he laughed, and then he leaned over, plucked the weapon from my hand and threw it away. He picked me up then. I was screaming and hitting at him, but he thought it all so very funny, and he draped me belly down on the saddle in front of him and then he spurred into the chaos to continue the killing.

And that was how I met Ragnar, Ragnar the Fearless, my brother’s killer and the man whose head was supposed to grace a pole on Bebbanburg’s ramparts, Earl Ragnar.

PART ONE (#ulink_7ae6c264-19af-5a7b-b2b4-31e69c52e768)

A Pagan Childhood (#ulink_7ae6c264-19af-5a7b-b2b4-31e69c52e768)

One (#ulink_a27c8b1a-5c8e-55ce-ac85-ae03fa6fa635)

The Danes were clever that day. They had made new walls inside the city, invited our men into the streets, trapped them between the new walls, surrounded them and killed them. They did not kill all the Northumbrian army, for even the fiercest warriors tire of slaughter and, besides, the Danes made much money from slavery. Most of the slaves taken in England were sold to farmers in the wild northern isles, or to Ireland, or sent back across the sea to the Danish lands, but some, I learned, were taken to the big slave markets in Frankia and a few were shipped south to a place where there was no winter and where men with faces the colour of scorched wood would pay good money for men and even better money for young women.

But they killed enough of us. They killed Ælla and they killed Osbert and they killed my father. Ælla and my father were fortunate, for they died in battle, swords in their hands, but Osbert was captured and he was tortured that night as the Danes feasted in a city stinking of blood. Some of the victors guarded the walls, others celebrated in the captured houses, but most gathered in the hall of Northumbria’s defeated king where Ragnar took me. I did not know why he took me there, I half expected to be killed or, at best, sold into slavery, but Ragnar made me sit with his men and put a roasted goose leg, half a loaf of bread and a pot of ale in front of me, then cuffed me cheerfully round the head.

The other Danes ignored me at first. They were too busy getting drunk and cheering the fights which broke out once they were drunk, but the loudest cheers came when the captured Osbert was forced to fight against a young warrior who had extraordinary skill with a sword. He danced round the king, then chopped off his left hand before slitting his belly with a sweeping cut and, because Osbert was a heavy man, his guts spilled out like eels slithering from a ruptured sack. Some of the Danes were weak with laughter after that. The king took a long time to die, and while he cried for relief, the Danes crucified a captured priest who had fought against them in the battle. They were intrigued and repelled by our religion, and they were angry when the priest’s hands pulled free of the nails and some claimed it was impossible to kill a man that way, and they argued that point drunkenly, then tried to nail the priest to the hall’s timber walls a second time until, bored with it, one of their warriors slammed a spear into the priest’s chest, crushing his ribs and mangling his heart.

A handful of them turned on me once the priest was dead and, because I had worn a helmet with a gilt-bronze circlet, they thought I must be a king’s son and they put me in a robe and a man climbed onto the table to piss on me, and just then a huge voice bellowed at them to stop and Ragnar bullied his way through the crowd. He snatched the robe from me and harangued the men, telling them I knew not what, but whatever he said made them stop and Ragnar then put an arm round my shoulders and took me to a dais at the side of the hall and gestured I should climb up to it. An old man was eating alone there. He was blind, both eyes milky white and had a deep-lined face framed by grey hair as long as Ragnar’s. He heard me clamber up and asked a question, and Ragnar answered and then walked away.

‘You must be hungry, boy,’ the old man said in English.

I did not answer. I was terrified of his blind eyes.

‘Have you vanished?’ he asked, ‘did the dwarves pluck you down to the under-earth?’

‘I’m hungry,’ I admitted.

‘So you are there after all,’ he said, ‘and there’s pork here, and bread, and cheese, and ale. Tell me your name.’

I almost said Osbert, then remembered I was Uhtred. ‘Uhtred,’ I said.

‘An ugly name,’ the old man said, ‘but my son said I was to look after you, so I will, but you must look after me too. Could you cut me some pork?’

‘Your son?’ I asked.

‘Earl Ragnar,’ he said, ‘sometimes called Ragnar the Fearless. Who were they killing in here?’

‘The king,’ I said, ‘and a priest.’

‘Which king?’

‘Osbert.’

‘Did he die well?’

‘No.’

‘Then he shouldn’t have been king.’

‘Are you a king?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘I am Ravn,’ he said, ‘and once I was an earl and a warrior, but now I am blind so I am no use to anyone. They should beat me over the head with a cudgel and send me on my way to the netherworld.’ I said nothing to that because I did not know what to say. ‘But I try to be useful,’ Ravn went on, his hands groping for bread. ‘I speak your language and the language of the Britons and the tongue of the Wends and the speech of the Frisians and that of the Franks. Language is now my trade, boy, because I have become a skald.’

‘A skald?’

‘A scop, you would call me. A poet, a weaver of dreams, a man who makes glory from nothing and dazzles you with its making. And my job now is to tell this day’s tale in such a way that men will never forget our great deeds.’

‘But if you cannot see,’ I asked, ‘how can you tell what happened?’

Ravn laughed at that. ‘Have you heard of Odin? Then you should know that Odin sacrificed one of his own eyes so that he could obtain the gift of poetry. So perhaps I am twice as good a skald as Odin, eh?’

‘I am descended from Woden,’ I said.

‘Are you?’ He seemed impressed, or perhaps he just wanted to be kind. ‘So who are you, Uhtred, descendant of the great Odin?’

‘I am the Ealdorman of Bebbanburg,’ I said, and that reminded me I was fatherless and my defiance crumpled and, to my shame, I began to cry. Ravn ignored me as he listened to the drunken shouts and the songs and the shrieks of the girls who had been captured in our camp and who now provided the warriors with the reward for their victory, and watching their antics took my mind off my sorrow because, in truth, I had never seen such things before though, God be thanked, I took plenty of such rewards myself in times to come.

‘Bebbanburg?’ Ravn said. ‘I was there before you were born. It was twenty years ago.’

‘At Bebbanburg?’

‘Not in the fortress,’ he admitted, ‘it was far too strong. But I was to the north of it, on the island where the monks pray. I killed six men there. Not monks, men. Warriors.’ He smiled to himself, remembering. ‘Now tell me, Ealdorman Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ he went on, ‘what is happening.’

So I became his eyes and I told him of the men dancing, and the men stripping the women of their clothes, and what they then did to the women, but Ravn had no interest in that. ‘What,’ he wanted to know, ‘are Ivar and Ubba doing?’

‘Ivar and Ubba?’

‘They will be on the high platform. Ubba is the shorter and looks like a barrel with a beard, and Ivar is so skinny that he is called Ivar the Boneless. He is so thin that you could press his feet together and shoot him from a bowstring.’

I learned later that Ivar and Ubba were the two oldest of three brothers and the joint leaders of this Danish army. Ubba was asleep, his black-haired head cushioned by his arms that, in turn, were resting on the remnants of his meal, but Ivar the Boneless was awake. He had sunken eyes, a face like a skull, yellow hair drawn back to the nape of his neck, and an expression of sullen malevolence. His arms were thick with the golden rings Danes like to wear to prove their prowess in battle, while a gold chain was coiled around his neck. Two men were talking to him. One, standing just behind Ivar, seemed to whisper into his ear, while the other, a worried-looking man, sat between the two brothers. I described all this to Ravn, who wanted to know what the worried man sitting between Ivar and Ubba looked like.

‘No arm rings,’ I said, ‘a gold circlet around his neck. Brown hair, long beard, quite old.’