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

‘He dribbles.’ She tried to demonstrate and managed to spit onto Serpent-Breath. She rubbed the blade. ‘Is Iseult an aglæcwif?’

‘Of course not. She made Edward better.’

‘Jesus did that, and Jesus sent me a baby sister.’ She scowled because all her efforts had made no impression on the nick in Serpent-Breath.

‘Iseult is a good woman,’ I said.

‘She’s learning to read. I can read.’

‘You can?’

‘Almost. If she reads then she can be a Christian. I’d like to be an aglæcwif.’

‘You would?’ I asked, surprised.

For answer she growled at me and crooked a small hand so that her fingers looked like claws. Then she laughed. ‘Are those Danes?’ She had seen some horsemen coming from the south.

‘That’s Wiglaf,’ I said.

‘He’s nice.’

I sent her back to Æthelingæg on Wiglaf’s horse and I thought of what she had said and wondered, for the thousandth time, why I was among Christians who believed I was an offence to their god. They called my gods dwolgods, which meant false gods, so that made me Uhtredærwe, living with an aglæcwif and worshipping dwolgods. I flaunted it, though, always wearing my hammer amulet openly, and that night Alfred, as ever, flinched when he saw it. He had summoned me to his hall where I found him bent over a tafl board. He was playing against Beocca, who had the larger set of pieces. It seems a simple game, tafl, where one player has a king and a dozen other pieces, and the other has double the pieces, but no king, and then you move the pieces about the chequered board until one or other player has all his wooden pieces surrounded. I had no patience for it, but Alfred was fond of the game, though when I arrived he seemed to be losing and so was relieved to see me. ‘I want you to go to Defnascir,’ he said.

‘Of course, lord.’

‘I fear your king is threatened, lord,’ Beocca said happily.

‘Never mind,’ Alfred said irritably. ‘You’re to go to Defnascir,’ he said, turning back to me, ‘but Iseult must stay here.’

I bridled at that. ‘She’s to be a hostage again?’ I asked.

‘I need her medicines,’ Alfred said.

‘Even though they’re made by an aglæcwif?’

He gave me a sharp look. ‘She is a healer,’ he said, ‘and that means she is God’s instrument, and with God’s help she will come to the truth. Besides, you must travel fast and don’t need a woman for company. You will go to Defnascir and find Svein, and once you’ve found him you will instruct Odda the Younger to raise the fyrd. Tell him Svein must be driven from the shire, and once Odda has achieved that, he is to come here with his household troops. He commands my bodyguard, he should be here.’

‘You want me to give Odda orders?’ I asked, partly in surprise, partly with scorn.

‘I do,’ Alfred said, ‘and I order you to make your peace with him.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I replied.

He heard the sarcasm in my voice. ‘We are all Saxons, Uhtred, and now, more than ever, is the time to heal our wounds.’

Beocca, realising that defeating Alfred at tafl would not help the king’s mood, was taking the pieces from the board. ‘A house divided against itself,’ he interjected, ‘will be destroyed. Saint Matthew said that.’

‘Praise God for that truth,’ Alfred said, ‘and we must be rid of Svein.’ That was a greater truth. Alfred wanted to march against Guthrum after Easter, but he could scarcely do that if Svein’s forces were behind him. ‘You find Svein,’ the king told me, ‘and Steapa will accompany you.’

‘Steapa!’

‘He knows the country,’ Alfred said, ‘and I have told him he is to obey you.’

‘It’s best that two of you go,’ Beocca said earnestly. ‘Remember that Joshua sent two spies against Jericho.’

‘You’re delivering me to my enemies,’ I said bitterly, though when I thought about it I decided that using me as a spy made sense. The Danes in Defnascir would be looking out for Alfred’s scouts, but I could speak the enemy’s language and could pass for one of them and so I was safer than anyone else in Alfred’s force. As for Steapa, he was from Defnascir, he knew the country and he was Odda’s sworn man, so he was best suited for carrying a message to the ealdorman.

And so the two of us rode south from Æthelingæg on a day of driving rain.

Steapa did not like me and I did not like him and so we had nothing to say to each other except when I suggested what path we take, and he never disagreed. We kept close to the large road, the road the Romans had made, though I went cautiously for such roads were much used by Danish bands seeking forage or plunder. This was also the route Svein must take if he marched to join Guthrum, but we saw no Danes. We saw no Saxons either. Every village and farm on the road had been pillaged and burned so that we journeyed through a land of the dead.

On the second day Steapa headed westwards. He did not explain the sudden change of direction, but doggedly pushed up into the hills and I followed him because he knew the countryside and I supposed he was taking the small paths that would lead to the high bleakness of Dærentmora. He rode urgently, his hard face grim, and I called to him once that we should take more care in case there were Danish forage parties in the small valleys, but he ignored me. Instead, almost at a gallop, he rode down into one of those small valleys until he came in sight of a farmstead.

Or what had been a farmstead. Now it was wet ashes in a green place. A deep green place where narrow pastures were shadowed by tall trees on which the very first haze of spring was just showing. Flowers were thick along the pasture edges, but there were none where the few small buildings had stood. There were only embers and the black smear of ash in mud, and Steapa, abandoning his horse, walked among the ashes. He had lost his great sword when the Danes captured him at Cippanhamm, so now he carried a huge war axe and he prodded the wide blade into the dark piles.

I rescued his horse, tied both beasts to the scorched trunk of an ash that had once grown by the farmyard, and watched him. I said nothing, for I sensed that one word would release all his fury. He crouched by the skeleton of a dog and just stared at the fire-darkened bones for a few minutes, then reached out and stroked the bared skull. There were tears on Steapa’s face, or perhaps it was the rain that fell softly from low cloud.

A score of people had once lived there. A larger house had stood at the southern end of the settlement and I explored its charred remains, seeing where the Danes had dug down by the old posts to find hidden coins. Steapa watched me. He was by one of the smaller patches of charred timbers and I guessed he had grown up there, in a slave hovel. He did not want me near him, and I pointedly stayed away, wondering if I dared suggest to him that we rode on. But he began digging instead, hacking the damp red soil with his huge war axe and scooping the earth out with bare hands until he had made a shallow grave for the dog. It was a skeleton now. There were still patches of fur on the old bones, but the flesh had been eaten away so that the ribs were scattered, so this had all happened weeks before. Steapa gathered the bones and laid them tenderly in the grave.

That was when the people came. You can ride through a landscape of the dead and see no one, but they will see you. Folk hide when enemies come. They go up into the woods and they wait there, and now three men came from the trees.

‘Steapa,’ I said. He turned on me, furious that I had interrupted him, then saw I was pointing westwards.

He gave a roar of recognition and the three men, who were holding spears, ran towards him. They dropped their weapons and they hugged the huge man, and for a time they all spoke together, but then they calmed down and I took one aside and questioned him. The Danes had come soon after Yule, he told me. They had come suddenly, before anyone was even aware that there were pagans in Defnascir. These men had escaped because they had been felling a beech tree in a nearby wood, and they had heard the slaughter. Since then they had been living in the forests, scared of the Danes who still rode about Defnascir in search of food. They had seen no Saxons.

They had buried the folk of the farm in a pasture to the south, and Steapa went there and knelt in the wet grass. ‘His mother died,’ the man told me. He spoke English with such a strange accent that I continually had to ask him to repeat himself, but I understood those three words. ‘Steapa was good to his mother,’ the man said. ‘He brought her money. She was no slave any more.’

‘His father?’

‘He died long time back. Long time.’

I thought Steapa was going to dig up his mother, so I crossed and stood in front of him. ‘We have a job to do,’ I said.

He looked up at me, his harsh face expressionless.

‘There are Danes to kill,’ I said. ‘The Danes who killed folk here must be killed themselves.’

He nodded abruptly, then stood, towering over me again. He cleaned the blade of his axe and climbed into his saddle. ‘There are Danes to kill,’ he said and, leaving his mother in her cold grave, we went to find them.

Ten (#ulink_552b279c-ecb6-5932-afca-015c9c12003e)

We rode south. We went cautiously, for folk said the Danes were still seen in this part of the shire, though we saw none. Steapa was silent until, in a river meadow, we rode past a ring of stone pillars, one of the mysteries left behind by the old people. Such rings stand all across England and some are huge, though this one was a mere score of lichen-covered stones, none taller than a man, standing in a circle some fifteen paces wide. Steapa glanced at them, then astonished me by speaking. ‘That’s a wedding,’ he said.

‘A wedding?’

‘They were dancing,’ he growled, ‘and the devil turned them to stone.’

‘Why did the devil do that?’ I asked cautiously.