The Last Kingdom Series Books 1–8: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, The Lords of the North, Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings, The Pagan Lord, The Empty Throne

‘I thought you believed he was sleeping?’

‘He does sleep,’ she said fervently. ‘He sleeps in his grave with his warriors.’ She gazed at the distant hill that seemed to glow because it had been caught by the day’s last errant shaft of sunlight spearing from the west beneath the furnace of glowing clouds. ‘Arthur,’ she said in a whisper. ‘He was the greatest king who ever lived. He had a magic sword.’ She told me tales of Arthur, how he had pulled his sword from a stone, and how he had led the greatest warriors to battle, and I thought that his enemies had been us, the English Saxons, yet Avalon was now in England, and I wondered if, in a few years, the Saxons would recall their lost kings and claim they were great and all the while the Danes would rule us. When the sun vanished Iseult was singing softly in her own tongue, but she told me the song was about Arthur and how he had placed a ladder against the moon and netted a swathe of stars to make a cloak for his queen, Guinevere. Her voice carried us across the twilit water, sliding between reeds, and behind us the fires of the Danish ship-guards faded in the encroaching dark and far off a dog howled and the wind sighed cold and a spattering of rain shivered the black mere.

Iseult stopped singing as Brant loomed. ‘There’s going to be a great fight,’ she said softly and her words took me by surprise and I thought she was still thinking of Arthur and imagining that the sleeping king would erupt from his earthy bed in gouts of soil and steel. ‘A fight by a hill,’ she went on, ‘a steep hill, and there will be a white horse and the slope will run with blood and the Danes will run from the Sais.’

The Sais were us, the Saxons. ‘You dreamed this?’ I asked.

‘I dreamed it,’ she said.

‘So it is true?’

‘It is fate,’ she said, and I believed her, and just then the bow of the punt scraped on the island’s shore.

It was pitch dark, but there were fish-smoking fires on the beach, and by their dying light we found our way to Elwide’s house. It was made of alder logs thatched with reeds and I found Alfred sitting by the central hearth where he stared absently into the flames. Elwide, the two soldiers and the marshman were all skinning eels at the hut’s further end where three of the widow’s children were plaiting willow withies into traps and the fourth was gutting a big pike.

I crouched by the fire, wanting its warmth to bring life to my frozen legs.

Alfred blinked as though he was surprised to see me. ‘The Danes?’ he asked.

‘Gone inland,’ I said. ‘Left sixty or seventy men as ship-guards.’ I crouched by the fire, shivering, wondering if I would ever be warm again.

‘There’s food here,’ Alfred said vaguely.

‘Good,’ I said, ‘because we’re starving.’

‘No, I mean there’s food in the marshes,’ he said. ‘Enough food to feed an army. We can raid them, Uhtred, gather men and raid them. But that isn’t enough. I have been thinking. All day, I’ve been thinking.’ He looked better now, less pained, and I suspected he had wanted time to think and had found it in this stinking hovel. ‘I’m not going to run away,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m not going to Frankia.’

‘Good,’ I said, though I was so cold I was not really listening to him.

‘We’re going to stay here,’ he said, ‘raise an army, and take Wessex back.’

‘Good,’ I said again. I could smell burning. The hearth was surrounded by flat stones and Elwide had put a dozen oat bannocks on the stones to cook and the edges nearest the flames were blackening. I moved one of them, but Alfred frowned and gestured for me to stop for fear of distracting him. ‘The problem,’ he said, ‘is that I cannot afford to fight a small war.’

I did not see what other war he could fight, but kept silent.

‘The longer the Danes stay here,’ he said, ‘the firmer their grip. Men will start giving Guthrum their allegiance. I can’t have that.’

‘No, lord.’

‘So they have to be defeated.’ He spoke grimly. ‘Not beaten, Uhtred, but defeated!’

I thought of Iseult’s dream, but said nothing, then I thought how often Alfred had made peace with the Danes instead of fighting them, and still I said nothing.

‘In spring,’ he went on, ‘they’ll have new men and they’ll spread through Wessex until, by summer’s end, there’ll be no Wessex. So we have to do two things.’ He was not so much telling me as just thinking aloud. ‘First,’ he held out one long finger, ‘we have to stop them from dispersing their armies. They have to fight us here. They have to be kept together so they can’t send small bands across the country and take estates.’ That made sense. Right now, from what we heard from the land beyond the swamp, the Danes were raiding all across Wessex, but they were going fast, snatching what plunder they could before other men could take it, but in a few weeks they would start looking for places to live. By keeping their attention on the swamp Alfred hoped to stop that process. ‘And while they look at us,’ he said, ‘the fyrd must be gathered.’

I stared at him. I had supposed he would stay in the swamp until the Danes either overwhelmed us or we gained enough strength to take back a shire, and then another shire, a process of years, but his vision was much grander. He would assemble the army of Wessex under the Danish noses and take everything back at once. It was like a game of dice and he had decided to take everything he had, little as it was, and risk it all on one throw. ‘We shall make them fight a great battle,’ he said grimly, ‘and with God’s help we shall destroy them.’

There was a sudden scream. Alfred, as if startled from a reverie, looked up, but too late, because Elwide was standing over him, screaming that he had burned the oatcakes. ‘I told you to watch them!’ she shouted and, in her fury, she slapped the king with a skinned eel. The blow made a wet sound as it struck and had enough force to knock Alfred sideways. The two soldiers jumped up, hands going to their swords, but I waved them back as Elwide snatched the burned cakes from the stones. ‘I told you to watch them!’ she shrieked, and Alfred lay where he had fallen and I thought he was crying, but then I saw he was laughing. He was helpless with laughter, weeping with laughter, as happy as ever I saw him.

Because he had a plan to take back his kingdom.

Æthelingæg’s garrison now had seventy-three men. Alfred moved there with his family, and sent six of Leofric’s men to Brant armed with axes and orders to make a beacon. He was at his best in those days, calm and confident, the panic and despair of the first weeks of January swept away by his irrational belief that he would regain his kingdom before summer touched the land. He was immensely cheered too by the arrival of Father Beocca who came limping from the landing stage, face beaming, to fall prostrate at the king’s feet. ‘You live, lord!’ Beocca said, clutching the king’s ankles, ‘God be praised, you live!’

Alfred raised him and embraced him, and both men wept and next day, a Sunday, Beocca preached a sermon which I could not help hearing because the service was held in the open air, under a clear cold sky, and Æthelingæg’s island was too small to escape the priest’s voice. Beocca said how David, King of Israel, had been forced to flee his enemies, how he had taken refuge in the cave of Adullam, and how God had led him back into Israel and to the defeat of his enemies. ‘This is our Adullam!’ Beocca said, waving his good hand at Æthelingæg’s thatched roofs, ‘and this is our David!’ he pointed to the king, ‘and God will lead us to victory!’

‘It’s a pity, father,’ I said to Beocca afterwards, ‘that you weren’t this belligerent two months ago.’

‘I rejoice,’ he said loftily, ‘to find you in the king’s good graces.’

‘He’s discovered the value,’ I said, ‘of murderous bastards like me, so perhaps he’ll learn to distrust the advice of snivelling bastards like you who told him the Danes could be defeated by prayer.’

He sniffed at that insult, then looked disapprovingly at Iseult. ‘You have news of your wife?’

‘None.’

Beocca had some news, though none of Mildrith. He had fled south in front of the invading Danes, getting as far as Dornwaraceaster in Thornsæta where he had found refuge with some monks. The Danes had come, but the monks had received warning of their approach and had hidden in an ancient fort that lay near the town. The Danes had sacked Dornwaraceaster, taking silver, coins and women, then they had moved eastwards and shortly after that Huppa, the Ealdorman of Thornsæta, had come to the town with fifty warriors. Huppa had set the monks and townspeople to mending the old Roman walls. ‘The folk there are safe for the moment,’ Beocca told me, ‘but there is not sufficient food if the Danes return and lay siege.’ Then Beocca had heard that Alfred was in the great swamps and Beocca had travelled alone, though on his last day of walking he had met six soldiers going to Alfred and so he had finished his journey with them. He brought no news of Wulfhere, but he had been told that Odda the Younger was somewhere on the upper reaches of the Uisc in an ancient fort built by the old people. Beocca had seen no Danes on his journey. ‘They raid everywhere,’ he said gloomily, ‘but God be praised we saw none of them.’

‘Is Dornwaraceaster a large place?’ I asked.

‘Large enough. It had three fine churches, three!’

‘A market?’

‘Indeed, it was prosperous before the Danes came.’

‘Yet the Danes didn’t stay there?’

‘Nor were they at Gifle,’ he said, ‘and that’s a goodly place.’

Guthrum had surprised Alfred, defeated the forces at Cippanhamm and driven the king into hiding, but to hold Wessex he needed to take all her walled towns, and if Beocca could walk three days across country and see no Danes then it suggested Guthrum did not have the men to hold all he had taken. He could bring more men from Mercia or East Anglia, but then those places might rise against their weakened Danish overlords, so Guthrum had to be hoping that more ships would come from Denmark. In the meantime, we learned, he had garrisons in Baðum, Readingum, Mærlebeorg and Andefera, and doubtless he held other places, and Alfred suspected, rightly as it turned out, that most of eastern Wessex was in Danish hands, but great stretches of the country were still free of the enemy. Guthrum’s men were making raids into those stretches, but they did not have sufficient force to garrison towns like Wintanceaster, Gifle or Dornwaraceaster. In the early summer, Alfred knew, more ships would bring more Danes, so he had to strike before then, to which end, on the day after Beocca arrived, he summoned a council.

There were now enough men on Æthelingæg for a royal formality to prevail. I no longer found Alfred sitting outside a hut in the evening, but instead had to seek an audience with him. On the Monday of the council he gave orders that a large house was to be made into a church, and the family that lived there was evicted and some of the newly-arrived soldiers were ordered to make a great cross for the gable and to carve new windows in the walls. The council itself met in what had been Haswold’s hall, and Alfred had waited till we were assembled before making his entrance, and we had all stood as he came in and waited as he took one of the two chairs on the newly-made dais. Ælswith sat beside him, her pregnant belly swathed in the silver fur cloak that was still stained with Haswold’s blood.

We were not allowed to sit until the Bishop of Exanceaster said a prayer, and that took time, but at last the king waved us down. There were six priests in the half circle and six warriors. I sat beside Leofric, while the other four soldiers were newly-arrived men who had served in Alfred’s household troops. One of those was a grey-bearded man called Egwine who told me he had led a hundred men at Æsc’s Hill and plainly thought he should now lead all the troops gathered in the swamp. I knew he had urged his case with the king and with Beocca who sat just below the dais at a rickety table on which he was trying to record what was said at the council. Beocca was having difficulties for his ink was ancient and faded, his quill kept splitting and his parchments were wide margins torn from a missal, so he was unhappy, but Alfred liked to reduce arguments to writing.

The king formally thanked the bishop for his prayer, then announced, sensibly enough, that we could not hope to deal with Guthrum until Svein was defeated. Svein was the immediate threat for, though most of his men had gone south to raid Defnascir, he still had the ships with which to enter the swamp. ‘Twenty-four ships,’ Alfred said, raising an eyebrow at me.

‘Twenty-four, lord,’ I confirmed.

‘So, when his men are assembled, he can muster near a thousand men.’ Alfred let that figure linger awhile. Beocca frowned as his split quill spattered ink on his tiny patch of parchment.

‘But a few days ago,’ Alfred went on, ‘there were only seventy ship-guards at the mouth of the Pedredan.’

‘Around seventy,’ I said. ‘There could be more we didn’t see.’

‘Fewer than a hundred, though?’

‘I suspect so, lord.’