The Last Kingdom (40 page)

“Forward!” I shouted.

“Wessex!” Leofric bellowed. “Wessex!” He was hacking with his ax, chopping men to the ground, leading the
Heahengel
’s crew away from the fiery ships.

The Danes were going backward, trying to escape us, and we could choose our victims; Serpent-Breath was lethal that day. Hammer a shield forward, strike a man off balance, thrust the blade forward, push him down, stab into the throat, find the next man. I pushed a Dane into the smoldering remnants of a campfire, killed him while he screamed, and some Danes were now fleeing to their unburned ships, pushing them into the flooding tide, but Ubba was still fighting. Ubba was shouting at his men to form a new shield wall, to protect the boats, and such was Ubba’s hard will, such his searing anger, that the new shield wall held. We hit it hard, hammered it with sword and ax and spear, but again there was no space, just the heaving, grunting, breath-stinking struggle, only this time it was the Danes who stepped back, pace by pace, as Odda’s men joined mine to wrap around the Danes and hammer them with iron.

But Ubba was holding. Holding his rearguard firm, holding them under the raven banner. In every moment that he held us off another ship was pushed away from the river’s bank. All he wanted to achieve now was to save men and ships, to let a part of his army escape, to let them get away from this press of shield and blade. Six Danish ships were already rowing out to the Sæfern sea, and more were filling with men. I screamed at my troops to break through, to kill them, but there was no space to kill, only blood-slicked ground and blades stabbing under shields, and men heaving at the opposing wall, and the wounded crawling away from the back of our line.

And then, with a roar of fury, Ubba hacked into our line with his great war ax. I remembered how he had done that in the fight beside the Gewæsc, how he had seemed to disappear into the ranks of the enemy only to kill them, and his huge blade was whirling again, making space, and our line went back and the Danes followed Ubba who seemed determined to win this battle on his own and to make a name that would never be forgotten among the annals of the Northmen. The battle madness was on him, the runesticks were forgotten, and Ubba Lothbrokson was making his legend. Another man went down, crushed by the ax, and Ubba bellowed defiance, the Danes stepped forward behind him, and now Ubba threatened to pierce our line clean through. I shoved backward, going through my men, and went to where Ubba fought. There I shouted his name, called him the son of a goat, a turd of men, and he turned, eyes wild, and saw me.

“You bastard whelp,” he snarled, and the men in front of me ducked aside as he came forward, mail coat drenched in blood, a part of his shield missing, his helmet dented and his ax blade red.

“Yesterday,” I said, “I saw a raven fall.”

“You bastard liar,” he said, and the ax came around and I caught it on the shield and it was like being struck by a charging bull. He wrenched the ax free and a great sliver of wood was torn away to let the new daylight through the broken shield.

“A raven,” I said, “fell from a clear sky.”

“You whore’s pup,” he said and the ax came again, and again the shield took it and I staggered back, the rent in the shield widening.

“It called your name as it fell,” I said.

“English filth,” he shouted and swung a third time, but this time I stepped back and flicked Serpent-Breath out in an attempt to cut off his ax hand, but he was fast, snake fast, and he pulled back just in time.

“Ravn told me I would kill you,” I said. “He foretold it. In a dream by Odin’s pit, among the blood, he saw the raven banner fall.”

“Liar!” he screamed and came at me, trying to throw me down with weight and brute force. I met him, shield boss to shield boss, and I held him, swinging Serpent-Breath at his head. But the blow glanced off his helmet and I leaped back a heartbeat before the ax swung where my legs had been, lunged forward, and took him clean on the chest with Serpent-Breath’s point. But I did not have any force in the blow and his mail took the lunge and stopped it, and he swung the ax up, trying to gut me from crotch to chest, but my ragged shield stopped his blow, and we both stepped back.

“Three brothers,” I said, “and you alone of them live. Give my regards to Ivar and to Halfdan. Say that Uhtred Ragnarson sent you to join them.”

“Bastard,” he said, and he stepped forward, swinging the ax in a massive sideways blow that was intended to crush my chest, but the battle calm had come on me, and the fear had flown and the joy was there and I rammed the shield sideways to take his ax strike, felt the heavy blade plunge into what was left of the wood, and I let go of the shield’s handle so that the half-broken tangle of metal and wood dangled from his blade, and then I struck at him. Once, twice, both of them huge blows using both hands on Serpent-Breath’s hilt and using all the strength I had taken from the long days at
Heahengel
’s oar. I drove him back, cracked his shield, and he lifted his ax, my shield still cumbering it, and then slipped. He had stepped on the spilled guts of a corpse, and his left food slid sideways. While he was unbalanced, I stabbed Serpent-Breath forward and the blade pierced the mail above the hollow of his elbow and his ax arm dropped, all strength stolen from it. Serpent-Breath flicked back to slash across his mouth, and I was shouting. There was blood in his beard and he knew then, knew he would die, knew he would see his brothers in the corpse hall. He did not give up. He saw death coming and fought it by trying to hammer me with his shield again, but I was too quick, too exultant, and the next stroke was in his neck and he staggered, blood pouring onto his shoulder, more blood trickling between the links of his chain mail, and he looked at me as he tried to stay upright.

“Wait for me in Valhalla, lord,” I said.

He dropped to his knees, still staring at me. He tried to speak, but nothing came and I gave him the killing stroke.

“Now finish them!” Ealdorman Odda shouted, and the men who had been watching the duel screamed in triumph and rushed at the enemy and there was panic now as the Danes tried to reach their boats. Some were throwing down weapons and the cleverest were lying flat, pretending to be dead, and men with sickles were killing men with swords. The women from Cynuit’s summit were in the Danish camp now, killing and plundering.

I knelt by Ubba and closed his nerveless right fist about the handle of his war ax. “Go to Valhalla, lord,” I said. He was not dead yet, but he was dying for my last stroke had pierced deep into his neck, and then he gave a great shudder and there was a croaking noise in his throat and I kept on holding his hand tight to the ax as he died.

A dozen more boats escaped, all crowded with Danes, but the rest of Ubba’s fleet was ours, and while a handful of the enemy fled into the woods where they were hunted down, the remaining Danes were either dead or prisoners, and the Raven banner fell into Odda’s hands, and we had the victory that day, and Willibald, spear point reddened, was dancing with delight.

We took horses, gold, silver, prisoners, women, ships, weapons, and mail. I had fought in the shield wall.

Ealdorman Odda had been wounded, struck on the head by an ax that had pierced his helmet and driven into his skull. He lived, but his eyes were white, his skin pale, his breath shallow, and his head matted with blood. Priests prayed over him in one of the small village houses and I saw him there, but he could not see me, could not speak, perhaps could not hear, but I shoved two of the priests aside, knelt by his bed, and thanked him for taking the fight to the Danes. His son, unwounded, his armor apparently unscratched in the battle, watched me from the darkness of the room’s far corner.

I straightened from his father’s low bed. My back ached and my arms were burning with weariness. “I am going to Cridianton,” I told young Odda.

He shrugged as if he did not care where I went. I ducked under the low door where Leofric waited for me. “Don’t go to Cridianton,” he told me.

“My wife is there,” I said. “My child is there.”

“Alfred is at Exanceaster,” he said.

“So?”

“So the man who takes news of this battle to Exanceaster gets the credit for it,” he said.

“Then you go,” I said.

The Danish prisoners wanted to bury Ubba, but Odda the Younger had ordered the body to be dismembered and its pieces given to the beasts and birds. That had not been done yet, though the great battle-ax that I had put in Ubba’s dying hand was gone, and I regretted that, for I had wanted it, but I wanted Ubba treated decently as well and so I let the prisoners dig their grave. Odda the Younger did not confront me, but let the Danes bury their leader and make a mound over his corpse and thus send Ubba to his brothers in the corpse hall.

And when it was done I rode south with a score of my men, all of us mounted on horses we had taken from the Danes.

I went to my family.

These days, so long after that battle at Cynuit, I employ a harpist. He is an old Welshman, blind, but very skillful, and he often sings tales of his ancestors. He likes to sing of Arthur and Guinevere, of how Arthur slaughtered the English, but he takes care not to let me hear those songs, instead praising me and my battles with outrageous flattery by singing the words of my poets who describe me as Uhtred Strong-Sword or Uhtred Death-Giver or Uhtred the Beneficent. I sometimes see the old blind man smiling to himself as his hands pluck the strings and I have more sympathy with his skepticism than I do with the poets who are a pack of sniveling sycophants.

But in the year 877 I employed no poets and had no harpist. I was a young man who had come dazed and dazzled from the shield wall, and who stank of blood as I rode south. Yet, for some reason, as we threaded the hills and woods of Defnascir, I thought of a harp.

Every lord has a harp in the hall. As a child, before I went to Ragnar, I would sometimes sit by the harp in Bebbanburg’s hall and I was intrigued by how the strings would play themselves. Pluck one string and the others would shiver to give off a tiny music. “Wasting your time, boy?” my father had snarled as I crouched by the harp one day, and I suppose I had been wasting it, but on that spring day in 877 I remembered my childhood’s harp and how its strings would quiver if just one was touched. It was not music, of course, just noise, and scarcely audible noise at that, but after the battle in Pedredan’s valley it seemed to me that my life was made of strings and if I touched one then the others, though separate, would make their sound. I thought of Ragnar the Younger and wondered if he lived, and whether his father’s killer, Kjartan, still lived, and how he would die if he did, and thinking of Ragnar made me remember Brida, and her memory slid on to an image of Mildrith, and that brought to mind Alfred and his bitter wife, Ælswith, and all those separate people were a part of my life, strings strung on the frame of Uhtred, and though they were separate they affected one another and together they would make the music of my life.

Daft thoughts, I told myself. Life is just life. We live, we die, we go to the corpse hall. There is no music, just chance. Fate is relentless.

“What are you thinking?” Leofric asked me. We were riding through a valley that was pink with flowers.

“I thought you were going to Exanceaster,” I said.

“I am, but I’m going to Cridianton first, then taking you on to Exanceaster. So what are you thinking? You look gloomy as a priest.”

“I’m thinking about a harp.”

“A harp!” He laughed. “Your head’s full of rubbish.”

“Touch a harp,” I said, “and it just makes noise, but play it and it makes music.”

“Sweet Christ!” He looked at me with a worried expression. “You’re as bad as Alfred. You think too much.”

He was right. Alfred was obsessed by order, obsessed by the task of marshaling life’s chaos into something that could be controlled. He would do it by the church and by the law, which are much the same thing, but I wanted to see a pattern in the strands of life. In the end I found one, and it had nothing to do with any god, but with people. With the people we love. My harpist is right to smile when he chants that I am Uhtred the Gift-Giver or Uhtred the Avenger or Uhtred the Widow-Maker, for he is old and he has learned what I have learned, that I am really Uhtred the Lonely. We are all lonely and all seek a hand to hold in the darkness. It is not the harp, but the hand that plays it.

“It will give you a headache,” Leofric said, “thinking too much.”

“Earsling,” I said to him.

Mildrith was well. She was safe. She had not been raped. She wept when she saw me, and I took her in my arms and wondered that I was so fond of her, and she said she had thought I was dead and told me she had prayed to her god to spare me, and she took me to the room where our son was in his swaddling clothes and, for the first time, I looked at Uhtred, son of Uhtred, and I prayed that one day he would be the lawful and sole owner of lands that are carefully marked by stones and by dykes, by oaks and by ash, by marsh and by sea. I am still the owner of those lands that were purchased with our family’s blood, and I will take those lands back from the man who stole them from me and I will give them to my sons. For I am Uhtred, Earl Uhtred, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and destiny is everything.

A
lfred, famously, is the only monarch in English history to be accorded the honor of being called “the Great,” and this novel, with the ones that follow, will try to show why he gained that title. I do not want to anticipate those other novels, but broadly, Alfred was responsible for saving Wessex and, ultimately, English society from the Danish assaults, and his son Edward, daughter Æthelflæd, and grandson Æthelstan finished what he began to create, which was, for the first time, a political entity they called Englaland. I intend Uhtred to be involved in the whole story.

But the tale begins with Alfred, who was, indeed, a very pious man and frequently sick. A recent theory suggests that he suffered from Crohn’s disease, which causes acute abdominal pains, and from chronic piles, details we can glean from a book written by a man who knew him very well, Bishop Asser, who came into Alfred’s life after the events described in this novel. Currently there is a debate whether Bishop Asser did write that life, or whether it was forged a hundred years after Alfred’s death, and I am utterly unqualified to judge the arguments of the contending academics, but even if it is a forgery, it contains much that has the smack of truth, suggesting that whoever wrote it knew a great deal about Alfred. The author, to be sure, wanted to present Alfred in a glowing light, as warrior, scholar, and Christian, but he does not shy away from his hero’s youthful sins. Alfred, he tells us, “was unable to abstain from carnal desire” until God generously made him sick enough to resist temptation. Whether Alfred did have an illegitimate son, Osferth, is debatable, but it seems very possible.

The biggest challenge Alfred faced was an invasion of England by the Danes. Some readers may be disappointed that those Danes are called Northmen or pagans in the novel, but are rarely described as Vikings. In this I follow the early English writers who suffered from the Danes, and who rarely used the word
Viking,
which, anyway, describes an activity rather than a people or a tribe. To go viking meant to go raiding, and the Danes who fought against England in the ninth century, though undoubtedly raiders, were preeminently invaders and occupiers. Much fanciful imagery has been attached to them, chief of which are the horned helmet, the berserker, and the ghastly execution called the spread-eagle, by which a victim’s ribs were splayed apart to expose the lungs and heart. That seems to have been a later invention, as does the existence of the berserker, the crazed naked warrior who attacked in a mad frenzy. Doubtless there were insanely frenzied warriors, but there is no evidence that lunatic nudists made regular appearances on the battlefield. The same is true of the horned helmet for which there is not a scrap of contemporary evidence. Viking warriors were much too sensible to place a pair of protuberances on their helmets so ideally positioned as to enable an enemy to knock the helmet off. It is a pity to abandon the iconic horned helmets, but alas, they did not exist.

The assault on the church by the Danes is well recorded. The invaders were not Christians and saw no reason to spare churches, monasteries, and nunneries from their attacks, especially as those places often contained considerable treasures. Whether the concerted attack on the northern monastic houses happened is debatable. The source is extremely late, a thirteenth-century chronicle written by Roger of Wendover, but what is certain is that many bishoprics and monasteries did disappear during the Danish assault, and that assault was not a great raid, but a deliberate attempt to eradicate English society and replace it with a Danish state.

Ivar the Boneless, Ubba, Halfdan, Guthrum, the various kings, Alfred’s nephew Æthelwold, Ealdorman Odda, and the ealdormen whose names begin with Æ (a vanished letter, called the ash) all existed. Alfred should properly be spelled Ælfred, but I preferred the usage by which he is known today. It is not certain how King Edmund of East Anglia died, though he was certainly killed by the Danes and in one ancient version the future saint was indeed riddled with arrows like Saint Sebastian. Ragnar and Uhtred are fictional, though a family with Uhtred’s name did hold Bebbanburg (now Bamburgh Castle) later in the Anglo-Saxon period, and as that family are my ancestors, I decided to give them that magical place a little earlier than the records suggest. Most of the major events happened; the assault on York, the siege of Nottingham, the attacks on the four kingdoms, all are recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or in Asser’s life of King Alfred, which together are the major sources for the period.

I used both those sources and also consulted a host of secondary works. Alfred’s life is remarkably well documented for the period, some of that documentation written by Alfred himself, but even so, as Professor James Campbell wrote in an essay on the king, “Arrows of insight have to be winged by the feathers of speculation.” I have feathered lavishly, as historical novelists must, yet as much of the novel as possible is based on real events. Guthrum’s occupation of Wareham, the exchange of hostages and his breaking of the truce, his murder of the hostages and occupation of Exeter all happened, as did the loss of most of his fleet in a great storm off Durlston Head near Swanage. The one large change I have made was to bring Ubba’s death forward by a year, so that, in the next book, Uhtred can be elsewhere, and, persuaded by the arguments in John Peddie’s book,
Alfred, Warrior King,
I placed that action at Cannington in Somerset rather than at the more traditional site of Countisbury Head in north Devon.

Alfred was the king who preserved the idea of England, which his son, daughter, and grandson made explicit. At a time of great danger, when the English kingdoms were perilously near to extinction, he provided a bulwark that allowed the Anglo-Saxon culture to survive. His achievements were greater than that, but his story is far from over, so Uhtred will campaign again.