The Last Kingdom Series Books 1 and 2: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman

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.’

‘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.’