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

As we drew closer I could see more Danes in their ships’ rigging. They were watching us, but would not yet be worried for they outnumbered my few forces and the river lay between us and them, but whoever commanded in the Danish camp would also be ordering his men to arm themselves. He would want to be ready for whatever happened, but I also hoped he would be clever. I was laying a trap for him, and for the trap to work he had to do what I wanted him to do, but at first, if he was clever, he would do nothing. He knew we were impotent, separated from him by the Pedredan, and so he was content to watch as we closed on the river’s bank opposite his grounded ships and then slipped and slid down the steep muddy bluff that the ebbing tide had exposed. The river swirled in front of us, grey and cold.

There were close to a hundred Danes watching now. They were on their grounded boats, shouting insults. Some were laughing, for it seemed clear to them that we had walked a long way to achieve nothing, but that was because they did not know Eofer’s skills. I called the big bowman’s niece to my side. ‘What I want your Uncle Eofer to do,’ I explained to the small girl, ‘is kill some of those men.’

‘Kill them?’ She stared up at me with wide eyes.

‘They’re bad men,’ I said, ‘and they want to kill you.’

She nodded solemnly, then took the big man by the hand and led him to the water’s edge where he sank up to his calves in the mud. It was a long way across the river and I wondered, pessimistically, if it was too far for even his massive bow, but Eofer strung the great stave and then waded into the Pedredan until he found a shallow spot which meant he could go even farther into the river and there he took an arrow from his sheaf, put it on the string and hauled it back. He made a grunting noise as he released and I watched the arrow twitch off the cord, then the fledging caught the air and the arrow soared across the stream and plunged into a group of Danes standing on the steering platform of a ship. There was a cry of anger as the arrow cut down. It did not hit any of the group, but Eofer’s next arrow struck a man in his shoulder, and the Danes hurried back from their vantage point by the ship’s sternpost. Eofer, who was compulsively nodding his shaggy head and making small animal noises, turned his aim to another ship. He had extraordinary strength. The distance was too great for any accuracy, but the danger of the long white-fledged arrows drove the Danes back and it was our turn to jeer at them. One of the Danes fetched a bow and tried to shoot back, but his arrow sliced into the river twenty yards short and we taunted them, laughed at them, and capered up and down as Eofer’s arrows slammed into ships’ timbers. Only the one man had been wounded, but we had driven them backwards and that was humiliating to them. I let Eofer loose twenty arrows, then I waded into the river and took hold of his bow. I stood in front of him so the Danes could not see what I was doing.

‘Tell him not to worry,’ I told the girl, and she soothed Eofer, who was frowning at me and trying to remove his bow from my grasp.

I drew a knife and that alarmed him even more. He growled at me, then plucked the bow from my hand. ‘Tell him it’s all right,’ I told the girl, and she soothed her uncle who then let me half sever the woven hemp bowstring. I stepped away from him and pointed at a group of Danes. ‘Kill them,’ I said.

Eofer did not want to draw the bow. Instead he fumbled under his greasy woollen cap and produced a second bowstring, but I shook my head and the small girl persuaded him he must use the half-severed cord and so he pulled it nervously back and, just before it reached the full draw, the string snapped and the arrow span crazily into the sky to float away on the river.

The tide had turned and the water was rising. ‘We go!’ I shouted to my men.

It was now the Danes’ turn to jeer at us. They thought we were retreating because our one bowstring had broken, and so they shouted insults as we clambered back up the muddy bluff, and then I saw two men running along the far beach and I hoped they were carrying the orders I wanted.

They were. The Danes, released from the threat of Eofer’s terrible bow, were going to launch two of their smaller ships. We had stung them, laughed at them and now they would kill us.

All warriors have pride. Pride and rage and ambition are the goads to a reputation, and the Danes did not want us to think we had stung them without being punished for our temerity. They wanted to teach us a lesson. But they also wanted more. Before we left Æthelingæg I had insisted that my men be given every available coat of mail. Egwine, who had stayed behind with the king, had been reluctant to give up his precious armour, but Alfred had ordered it and so sixteen of my men were dressed in chain mail. They looked superb, like an elite group of warriors, and the Danes would win renown if they defeated such a group and captured the precious armour. Leather offers some protection, but chain mail over leather is far better and far more expensive, and by taking sixteen coats of mail to the river’s edge I had given the Danes an irresistible lure.

And they snapped at it.

We were going slowly, deliberately seeming to struggle in the soft ground as we headed back towards Palfleot. The Danes were also struggling, shoving their two ships down the riverbank’s thick mud, but at last the boats were launched and then, on the hurrying flood tide, the Danes did what I had hoped they would do.

They did not cross the river. If they had crossed, then they would merely have found themselves on the Pedredan’s eastern bank and we would have been half a mile ahead and out of reach, so instead the commander did what he thought was the clever thing to do. He tried to cut us off. They had seen us land at Palfleot and they reckoned our boats must still be there, and so they rowed their ships up river to find those boats and destroy them.

Except our punts were not at Palfleot. They had been taken north and east, so that they were waiting for us in a reed-fringed dyke, but now was not the time to use them. Instead, as the Danes went ashore at Palfleot, we made a huddle on the sand, watching them, and they thought we were trapped, and now they were on the same side of the river as us and the two ships’ crews outnumbered us by over two to one, and they had all the confidence in the world as they advanced from the burned pilings of Palfleot to kill us in the swamp.

They were doing exactly what I wanted them to do.

And we now retreated. We went back raggedly, sometimes running to open a distance between us and the confident Danes. I counted seventy-six of them and we were only thirty strong because some of my men were with the hidden punts, and the Danes knew we were dead men and they hurried across the sand and creeks, and we had to go faster, ever faster, to keep them away from us. It began to rain, the drops carried on the freshening west wind and I kept looking into the rain until at last I saw a silver bar of light glint and spill across the swamp’s edge and knew the incoming tide was beginning its long fast race across the barren flats.

And still we went back, and still the Danes pursued us, but they were tiring now. A few shouted at us, daring us to stand and fight, but others had no breath to shout, just a savage intent to catch and kill us, but we were slanting eastwards now towards a line of buckthorn and reeds, and there, in a flooding creek, were our punts.

We dropped into the boats, exhausted, and the marshmen poled us back down the creek that was a tributary of the River Bru which barred the northern part of the swamp, and the flat-bottomed craft took us fast south, against the current, hurrying us past the Danes who could only watch from a quarter-mile away and do nothing to stop us, and the farther we went from them, the more isolated they looked in that wide, barren place where the rain fell and the tide seethed as it flowed into the creek beds. The wind-driven water was running deep into the swamp now, a tide made bigger by the full moon, and suddenly the Danes saw their danger and turned back towards Palfleot.

But Palfleot was a long way off, and we had already left the stream and were carrying the punts to a smaller creek, one that ran down to the Pedredan, and that stream took us to where the blackened pilings leaned against the weeping sky, and where the Danes had tied their two ships. The two craft were guarded by only four men, and we came from the punts with a savage shout and drawn swords and the four men ran. The other Danes were still out in the swamp, only now it was not a swamp, but a tidal flat and they were wading through water.

And I had two ships. We hauled the punts aboard, and then the marshmen, divided between the ships, took the oars, and I steered one and Leofric took the other, and we rowed against that big tide towards Cynuit where the Danish ships were now unguarded except for a few men and a crowd of women and children who watched the two ships come and did not know they were crewed by their enemy. They must have wondered why so few oars bit the water, but how could they imagine that forty Saxons would defeat nearly eighty Danes? And so none opposed us as we ran the ships into the bank, and there I led my warriors ashore. ‘You can fight us,’ I shouted at the few ship-guards left, ‘or you can live.’

I was in chain mail, with my new helmet. I was a warlord. I banged Serpent-Breath against the big shield and stalked towards them. ‘Fight if you want!’ I shouted. ‘Come and fight us!’

They did not. They were too few and so they retreated south and could only watch as we burned their ships. It took most of the day to ensure that the ships burned down to their keels, but burn they did, and their fires were a signal to the western part of Wessex that Svein had been defeated. He was not at Cynuit that day, but somewhere to the south, and as the ships burned I watched the wooded hills in fear that he would come with hundreds of men, but he was still far off and the Danes at Cynuit could do nothing to stop us. We burned twenty-three ships, including the White Horse, and the twenty-fourth, which was one of the two we had captured, carried us away as evening fell. We took good plunder from the Danish camp; food, rigging ropes, hides, weapons and shields.

There were a score of Danes stranded on the low island of Palfleot. The rest had died in the rising water. The survivors watched us pass, but did nothing to provoke us, and I did nothing to hurt them. We rowed on towards Æthelingæg and behind us, under a darkening sky, the water sheeted the swamp where white gulls cried above the drowned men and where, in the dusk, two swans flighted northwards, their wings like drumbeats in the sky.

The smoke of the burned boats drifted to the clouds for three days, and on the second day Egwine took the captured ship downstream with forty men and they landed on Palfleot and killed all the surviving Danes, except for six who were taken prisoner, and five of those six were stripped of their armour and lashed to stakes in the river at low tide so that they drowned slowly on the flood. Egwine lost three men in that fight, but brought back mail, shields, helmets, weapons, arm rings and one prisoner who knew nothing except that Svein had ridden towards Exanceaster. That prisoner died on the third day, the day that Alfred had prayers said in thanks to God for our victory. For now we were safe. Svein could not attack us for he had lost his ships, Guthrum had no way of penetrating the swamp and Alfred was pleased with me.

‘The king is pleased with you,’ Beocca told me. Two weeks before, I thought, the king would have told me that himself. He would have sat with me by the water’s edge and talked, but now a court had formed and the king was hedged with priests.

‘He should be pleased,’ I said. I had been practising weapon-craft when Beocca sought me out. We practised every day, using stakes instead of swords, and some men grumbled that they did not need to play at fighting, and those I opposed myself and, when they had been beaten down to the mud, I told them they needed to play more and complain less.

‘He’s pleased with you,’ Beocca said, leading me down the path beside the river, ‘but he thinks you are squeamish.’

‘Me! Squeamish?’

‘For not going to Palfleot and finishing the job.’

‘The job was finished,’ I said. ‘Svein can’t attack us without ships.’

‘But not all the Danes drowned,’ Beocca said.

‘Enough died,’ I said. ‘Do you know what they endured? The terror of trying to outrun the tide?’ I thought of my own anguish in the swamp, the inexorable tide, the cold water spreading and the fear gripping the heart. ‘They had no ships! Why kill stranded men?’

‘Because they are pagans,’ Beocca said, ‘because they are loathed by God and by men, and because they are Danes.’

‘And only a few weeks ago,’ I said, ‘you believed they would become Christians and all our swords would be beaten into ard points to plough fields.’

Beocca shrugged that off. ‘So what will Svein do now?’ he wanted to know.

‘March around the swamp,’ I said, ‘and join Guthrum.’

‘And Guthrum is in Cippanhamm.’ We were fairly certain of that. New men were coming to the swamp and they all brought news. Much of it was rumour, but many had heard that Guthrum had strengthened Cippanhamm’s walls and was wintering there. Large raiding parties still ravaged parts of Wessex, but they avoided the bigger towns in the south of the country where West Saxon garrisons had formed. There was one such garrison at Dornwaraceaster and another at Wintanceaster, and Beocca believed Alfred should go to one of those towns, but Alfred refused, reckoning that Guthrum would immediately besiege him. He would be trapped in a town, but the swamp was too big to be besieged and Guthrum could not hope to penetrate the marshes. ‘You have an uncle in Mercia, don’t you?’ Beocca asked, changing the subject abruptly.

‘Æthelred. He’s my mother’s brother, and an ealdorman.’

He heard the flat tone of my voice. ‘You’re not fond of him?’

‘I hardly know him.’ I had spent some weeks in his house, just long enough to quarrel with his son who was also called Æthelred.

‘Is he a friend of the Danes?’

I shook my head. ‘They suffer him to live and he suffers them.’

‘The king has sent messengers to Mercia,’ Beocca said.

I grimaced. ‘If he wants them to rise against the Danes they won’t. They’ll get killed.’

‘He’d rather they brought men south in the springtime,’ Beocca said and I wondered how a few Mercian warriors were supposed to get past the Danes to join us, but said nothing. ‘We look to the springtime for our salvation,’ Beocca went on, ‘but in the meantime the king would like someone to go to Cippanhamm.’

‘A priest?’ I asked sourly, ‘to talk to Guthrum?’

‘A soldier,’ Beocca said, ‘to gauge their numbers.’

‘So send me,’ I offered.