The Last Kingdom

‘Everyone looks old to the young,’ Ravn said. ‘That must be King Egbert.’

‘King Egbert?’ I had never heard of such a person.

‘He was Ealdorman Egbert,’ Ravn explained, ‘but he made his peace with us in the winter and we have rewarded him by making him king here in Northumbria. He is king, but we are the lords of the land.’ He chuckled, and young as I was I understood the treachery involved. Ealdorman Egbert held estates to the south of our kingdom and was what my father had been in the north, a great power, and the Danes had suborned him, kept him from the fight, and now he would be called king, yet it was plain that he would be a king on a short leash. ‘If you are to live,’ Ravn said to me, ‘then it would be wise to pay your respects to Egbert.’

‘Live?’ I blurted out the word. I had somehow thought that having survived the battle then of course I would live. I was a child, someone else’s responsibility, but Ravn’s words hammered home my reality. I should never have confessed my rank, I thought. Better to be a living slave than a dead Ealdorman.

‘I think you’ll live,’ Ravn said. ‘Ragnar likes you and Ragnar gets what he wants. He says you attacked him?’

‘I did, yes.’

‘He would have enjoyed that. A boy who attacks Earl Ragnar? That must be some boy, eh? Too good a boy to waste on death he says, but then my son always had a regrettably sentimental side. I would have chopped your head off, but here you are, alive, and I think it would be wise if you were to bow to Egbert.’

Now, I think, looking back so far into my past, I have probably changed that night’s events. There was a feast, Ivar and Ubba were there, Egbert was trying to look like a king, Ravn was kind to me, but I am sure I was more confused and far more frightened than I have made it sound. Yet in other ways my memories of the feast are very precise. Watch and learn, my father had told me, and Ravn made me watch, and I did learn. I learned about treachery, especially when Ragnar, summoned by Ravn, took me by the collar and led me to the high dais where, after a surly gesture of permission from Ivar, I was allowed to approach the table. ‘Lord King,’ I squeaked, then knelt so that a surprised Egbert had to lean forward to see me. ‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I had been coached by Ravn in what I should say, ‘and I seek your lordly protection.’

That produced silence, except for the mutter of the interpreter talking to Ivar. Then Ubba awoke, looked startled for a few heartbeats as if he were not sure where he was, then he stared at me and I felt my flesh shrivel for I had never seen a face so malevolent. He had dark eyes and they were full of hate and I wanted the earth to swallow me. He said nothing, just gazed at me and touched a hammer-shaped amulet hanging at his neck. Ubba had his brother’s thin face, but instead of fair hair drawn back against the skull, he had bushy black hair and a thick beard that was dotted with scraps of food. Then he yawned and it was like staring into a beast’s maw. The interpreter spoke to Ivar who said something and the interpreter, in turn, talked to Egbert who tried to look stern. ‘Your father,’ he said, ‘chose to fight us.’

‘And is dead,’ I answered, tears in my eyes, and I wanted to say something more, but nothing would come, and instead I just snivelled like an infant and I could feel Ubba’s scorn like the heat of a fire. I cuffed angrily at my nose.

‘We shall decide your fate,’ Egbert said loftily, and I was dismissed.

I went back to Ravn who insisted I tell him what had happened, and he smiled when I described Ubba’s malevolent silence. ‘He’s a frightening man,’ Ravn agreed, ‘to my certain knowledge he’s killed sixteen men in single combat, and dozens more in battle, but only when the auguries are good, otherwise he won’t fight.’

‘The auguries?’

‘Ubba is a very superstitious young man,’ Ravn said, ‘but also a dangerous one. If I give you one piece of advice, young Uhtred, it is never, never, to fight Ubba. Even Ragnar would fear to do that and my son fears little.’

‘And Ivar?’ I asked, ‘would your son fight Ivar?’

‘The boneless one?’ Ravn considered the question. ‘He too is frightening, for he has no pity, but he does possess sense. Besides, Ragnar serves Ivar if he serves anyone, and they’re friends, so they would not fight. But Ubba? Only the gods tell him what to do, and you should beware of men who take their orders from the gods. Cut me some of the crackling, boy. I particularly like pork crackling.’

I cannot remember now how long I was in Eoferwic. I was put to work, that I do remember. My fine clothes were stripped from me and given to some Danish boy, and in their place I was given a flea-ridden shift of tattered wool that I belted with a piece of rope. I cooked Ravn’s meals for a few days, then the other Danish ships arrived and proved to hold mostly women and children, the families of the victorious army, and it was then I understood that these Danes had come to stay in Northumbria. Ravn’s wife arrived, a big woman called Gudrun with a laugh that could have felled an ox, and she chivvied me away from the cooking fire that she now tended with Ragnar’s wife, who was called Sigrid and whose hair reached to her waist and was the colour of sunlight reflecting off gold. She and Ragnar had two sons and a daughter. Sigrid had given birth to eight children, but only those three had lived. Rorik, his second son, was a year younger than me and on the very first day I met him he picked a fight, coming at me in a whirl of fists and feet, but I put him on his back and was throttling the breath out of him when Ragnar picked us both up, crashed our heads together and told us to be friends. Ragnar’s eldest son, also called Ragnar, was eighteen, already a man, and I did not meet him then for he was in Ireland where he was learning to fight and to kill so he could become an Earl like his father. In time I did meet Ragnar the Younger who was very similar to his father; always cheerful, boisterously happy, enthusiastic about whatever needed to be done, and friendly to anyone who paid him respect.

Like all the other children I had work to keep me busy. There was always firewood and water to be fetched, and I spent two days helping to burn the green muck from the hull of a beached ship, and I enjoyed that even though I got into a dozen fights with Danish boys, all of them bigger than me, and I lived with black eyes, bruised knuckles, sprained wrists, and loosened teeth. My worst enemy was a boy called Sven who was two years older than me and very big for his age with a round, vacant face, a slack jaw, and a vicious temper. He was the son of one of Ragnar’s shipmasters, a man called Kjartan. Ragnar owned three ships, he commanded one, Kjartan the second and a tall, weather-hardened man named Egil steered the third. Kjartan and Egil were also warriors, of course, and as shipmasters they led their crews into battle and so were reckoned important men, their arms heavy with rings, and Kjartan’s son Sven took an instant dislike to me. He called me English scum, a goat-turd and dog-breath, and because he was older and bigger he could beat me fairly easily, but I was also making friends and, luckily for me, Sven disliked Rorik almost as much as he hated me, and the two of us could just thrash him together and after a while Sven avoided me unless he was sure I was alone. So apart from Sven it was a good summer. I never had quite enough to eat, I was never clean, Ragnar made us laugh and I was rarely unhappy.

Ragnar was often absent, for much of the Danish army spent that summer riding the length and breadth of Northumbria to quell the last shreds of resistance, but I heard little news, and no news of Bebbanburg. It seemed the Danes were winning, for every few days another English thegn would come to Eoferwic and kneel to Egbert, who now lived in the palace of Northumbria’s king, though it was a palace that had been stripped of anything useful by the victors. The gap in the city wall had been repaired in a day, the same day that a score of us dug a great hole in the field where our army had fled in panic. We filled the hole with the rotting corpses of the Northumbrian dead. I knew some of them. I suppose my father was among them, but I did not see him. Nor, looking back, did I miss him. He had always been a morose man, expecting the worst, and not fond of children.

The worst job I was given was painting shields. We first had to boil down some cattle hides to make size, a thick glue, that we stirred into a powder we had made from crushing copper ore with big stone pestles, and the result was a viscous blue paste that had to be smeared on the newly-made shields. For days afterwards I had blue hands and arms, but our shields were hung on a ship and looked splendid. Every Danish ship had a strake running down each side from which the shields could hang, overlapping as though they were being held in the shield wall, and these shields were for Ubba’s craft, the same ship I had burned and scraped clean. Ubba, it seemed, planned to leave, and wanted his ship to be beautiful. She had a beast on her prow, a prow that curved like a swan’s breast from the waterline, then jutted forward. The beast, half dragon and half worm, was the topmost part, and the whole beast-head could be lifted off its stem and stowed in the bilge. ‘We lift the beast-heads off,’ Ragnar explained to me, ‘so they don’t frighten the spirits.’ I had learned some of the Danish language by then.

‘The spirits?’

Ragnar sighed at my ignorance. ‘Every land has its spirits,’ he said, ‘its own little gods, and when we approach our own lands we take off the beast-heads so that the spirits aren’t scared away. How many fights have you had today?’

‘None.’

‘They’re getting frightened of you. What’s that thing around your neck?’

I showed him. It was a crude iron hammer, a miniature hammer the size of a man’s thumb, and the sight of it made him laugh and cuff me around the head. ‘We’ll make a Dane of you yet,’ he said, plainly pleased. The hammer was the sign of Thor, who was a Danish god almost as important as Odin, as they called Woden, and sometimes I wondered if Thor was the more important god, but no one seemed to know or even care very much. There were no priests among the Danes, which I liked, because priests were forever telling us not to do things or trying to teach us to read or demanding that we pray, and life without them was much more pleasant. The Danes, indeed, seemed very casual about their gods, yet almost every one wore Thor’s hammer. I had torn mine from the neck of a boy who had fought me, and I have it to this day.

The stern of Ubba’s ship, which curved and reared as high as the prow, was decorated with a carved eagle’s head, while at her masthead was a wind-vane in the shape of a dragon. The shields were hung on her flanks, though I later learned they were only displayed there for decoration and that once the ship was under way the shields were stored inboard. Just underneath the shields were the oar-holes, each rimmed with leather, fifteen holes on each side. The holes could be stopped with wooden plugs when the ship was under sail so that the craft could lean with the wind and not be swamped. I helped scrub the whole boat clean, but before we scrubbed her she was sunk in the river, just to drown the rats and discourage the fleas, and then we boys scraped every inch of wood and hammered wax-soaked wool into every seam, and at last the ship was ready and that was the day my uncle Ælfric arrived in Eoferwic.

The first I knew of Ælfric’s coming was when Ragnar brought me my own helmet, the one with the gilt-bronze circlet, and a tunic edged with red embroidery, and a pair of shoes. It felt strange to walk in shoes again. ‘Tidy your hair, boy,’ he said, then remembered he had the helmet that he pushed onto my tousled head. ‘Don’t tidy your hair,’ he said, grinning.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked him.

‘To hear a lot of words, boy. To waste our time. You look like a Frankish whore in that robe.’

‘That bad?’

‘That’s good, lad! They have great whores in Frankia; plump, pretty and cheap. Come on.’ He led me from the river. The city was busy, the shops full, the streets crowded with packmules. A herd of small, dark-fleeced sheep was being driven to slaughter, and they were the only obstruction that did not part to make way for Ragnar whose reputation ensured respect, but that reputation was not grim for I saw how the Danes grinned when he greeted them. He might be called Jarl Ragnar, Earl Ragnar, but he was hugely popular, a jester and fighter who blew through fear as though it were a cobweb. He took me to the palace, which was only a large house, part-built by the Romans in stone and part-made more recently in wood and thatch. It was in the Roman part, in a vast room with stone pillars and limewashed walls, that my uncle waited and with him was Father Beocca and a dozen warriors, all of whom I knew, and all of whom had stayed to defend Bebbanburg while my father rode to war.

Beocca’s crossed eyes widened when he saw me. I must have looked very different for I was long-haired, sun-darkened, skinny, taller and wilder. Then there was the hammer amulet about my neck, which he saw for he pointed to his own crucifix, then at my hammer and looked very disapproving. Ælfric and his men scowled at me as though I had let them down, but no one spoke, partly because Ivar’s own guards, all of them tall men, and all of them in mail and helmets and armed with long-shafted war axes, stood across the head of the room where a simple chair, which now counted as Northumbria’s throne, stood on a wooden platform.

King Egbert arrived, and with him was Ivar the Boneless and a dozen men, including Ravn who, I had learned, was a counsellor to Ivar and his brother. With Ravn was a tall man, white-haired and with a long white beard. He was wearing long robes embroidered with crosses and winged angels and I later discovered this was Wulfhere, the Archbishop of Eoferwic who, like Egbert, had given his allegiance to the Danes. The king sat, looking uncomfortable, and then the discussion began.

They were not there just to discuss me. They talked about which Northumbrian lords were to be trusted, which were to be attacked, what lands were to be granted to Ivar and Ubba, what tribute the Northumbrians must pay, how many horses were to be brought to Eoferwic, how much food was to be given to the army, which ealdormen were to yield hostages, and I sat, bored, until my name was mentioned. I perked up then and heard my uncle propose that I should be ransomed. That was the gist of it, but nothing is ever simple when a score of men decide to argue. For a long time they wrangled over my price, the Danes demanding an impossible payment of three hundred pieces of silver, and Ælfric not wanting to budge from a grudging offer of fifty. I said nothing, but just sat on the broken Roman tiles at the edge of the hall and listened. Three hundred became two seventy-five, fifty became sixty, and so it went on, the numbers edging closer, but still wide apart, and then Ravn, who had been silent, spoke for the first time. ‘The Earl Uhtred,’ he said in Danish, and that was the first time I heard myself described as an Earl, which was a Danish rank, ‘has given his allegiance to King Egbert. In that he has an advantage over you, Ælfric.’

The words were translated and I saw Ælfric’s anger when he was given no title. But nor did he have a title, except the one he had granted to himself, and I learned about that when he spoke softly to Beocca who then spoke up for him. ‘The Ealdorman Ælfric,’ the young priest said, ‘does not believe that a child’s oath is of any significance.’

Had I made an oath? I could not remember doing so, though I had asked for Egbert’s protection, and I was young enough to confuse the two things. Still, it did not much matter, what mattered was that my uncle had usurped Bebbanburg. He was calling himself Ealdorman. I stared at him, shocked, and he looked back at me with pure loathing in his face.

‘It is our belief,’ Ravn said, his blind eyes looking at the roof of the hall that was missing some tiles so that a light rain was spitting through the rafters, ‘that we would be better served by having our own sworn Earl in Bebbanburg, loyal to us, than endure a man whose loyalty we do not know.’

Ælfric could feel the wind changing and he did the obvious thing. He walked to the dais, knelt to Egbert and kissed the king’s outstretched hand and, as a reward, received a blessing from the Archbishop. ‘I will offer a hundred pieces of silver,’ Ælfric said, his allegiance given.

‘Two hundred,’ Ravn said, ‘and a force of thirty Danes to garrison Bebbanburg.’

‘With my allegiance given,’ Ælfric said angrily, ‘you will have no need of Danes in Bebbanburg.’

So Bebbanburg had not fallen and I doubted it could fall. There was no stronger fortress in all Northumbria, and perhaps in all England.

Egbert had not spoken at all, nor did he, but nor had Ivar and it was plain that the tall, thin, ghost-faced Dane was bored with the whole proceedings for he jerked his head at Ragnar who left my side and went to talk privately with his lord. The rest of us waited awkwardly. Ivar and Ragnar were friends, an unlikely friendship for they were very different men, Ivar all savage silence and grim threat, and Ragnar open and loud, yet Ragnar’s eldest son served Ivar and was even now, at eighteen years old, entrusted with the leadership of some of the Danes left in Ireland who were holding onto Ivar’s lands in that island. It was not unusual for eldest sons to serve another lord, Ragnar had two Earls’ sons in his ships’ crews and both might one day expect to inherit wealth and position if they learned how to fight. So Ragnar and Ivar now talked and Ælfric shuffled his feet and kept looking at me, Beocca prayed and King Egbert, having nothing else to do, just tried to look regal.

Ivar finally spoke. ‘The boy is not for sale,’ he announced.

‘Ransom,’ Ravn corrected him gently.

Ælfric looked furious. ‘I came here …’ he began, but Ivar interrupted him.

‘The boy is not for ransom,’ he snarled, then turned and walked from the big chamber. Egbert looked awkward, half rose from his throne, sat again, and Ragnar came and stood beside me.

‘You’re mine,’ he said softly, ‘I just bought you.’

‘Bought me?’

‘My sword’s weight in silver,’ he said.

‘Why?’