The Last Kingdom (The Saxon Stories, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

They were called Vikings when they were raiders, but Danes or pagans when they were traders,

Beocca, in turn, was devoted to my father who had freed him from slavery and provided him with his education. My father could have worshipped the devil and Beocca, I think, would have turned a blind eye.

Only the gods tell him what to do, and you should beware of men who take their orders from the gods.

“You can’t live somewhere,” he told me, “if the people don’t want you to be there. They can kill our cattle or poison our streams, and we would never know who did it. You either slaughter them all or learn to live with them.”

“A leader leads,” Ragnar said, “and you can’t ask men to risk death if you’re not willing to risk it yourself.”

“and God knows we shall need soldiers, though I pray daily that the Danes will come to a knowledge of Christ and so discover their sins and be led to end their wicked ways. Prayer is the answer,” he said vehemently, “prayer and fasting and obedience, and if God answers our prayers, Uhtred, then we shall need no soldiers, but a kingdom always has need of good priests. I wanted that office for myself, but God disposed otherwise. There is no higher calling than the priestly service. I might be a prince, but in God’s eyes I am a worm while Beocca is a jewel beyond price!”

“They want to ransom me,” I said, “so they can teach me to read and write, and then make me into a priest.” “A priest? Like the squinty little bastard with the red hair?” “Just like him.” Ragnar laughed. “Maybe I should ransom you. It would be a punishment for telling lies about me.” “Please don’t,” I said fervently, and at that moment I wondered why I had ever wanted to go back to the English side. To exchange Ragnar’s freedom for Alfred’s earnest piety seemed a miserable fate to me. Besides, I was learning to despise the English. They would not fight, they prayed instead of sharpening their swords, and it was no wonder the Danes were taking their land.

Burghred, weary of unending defeat, weakly agreed to every outrageous demand, and in return he was allowed to stay as King of Mercia, but that was all. The Danes were to take his fortresses and garrison them, and they were free to take Mercian estates as they wished, and Burghred’s fyrd was to fight for the Danes if they demanded it, and Burghred, moreover, was to pay a vast price in silver for this privilege of losing his kingdom while keeping his throne. Æthelred and Alfred, having no part to play in the discussions, and seeing that their ally had collapsed like a pricked bladder, left on the second day, riding south with what remained of their army, and thus Mercia fell. First Northumbria, then Mercia. In just two years half of England was gone and the Danes were only just beginning.

I had begun to think I would never fight for England because by the time I was old enough to fight there would be no England. So I decided I would be a Dane. Of course I was confused, but I did not spend much time worrying about my confusion. Instead, as I approached twelve years old, I began my proper education.

To be a Viking was to be a raider, and Ragnar had not conducted a shipborne raid in many years. He had become an invader instead, a settler,

It was then that I first saw Brida.

she was among the captured women and, as the Danes began dividing those captives among themselves, an older woman pushed the child forward as if giving her to the Vikings. Brida snatched up a piece of wood and turned on the woman and beat at her, driving her back, screaming that she was a sour-faced bitch, a dried up hank of gristle, and the older woman tripped and fell into a patch of nettles where Brida went on thrashing her. Ragnar was laughing, but eventually pulled the child away and, because he loved anyone with

spirit,

Start your killers young, before their consciences are grown. Start them young and they will be lethal.

as I drank my ale, I thought of myself as a Dane. Not English, not anymore. I was a Dane and I had been given a perfect childhood, perfect, at least, to the ideas of a boy. I was raised among men, I was free, I ran wild, I was encumbered by no laws, I was troubled by no priests, I was encouraged to violence, and I was rarely alone. And it was that, that I was rarely alone, which kept me alive.

Ragnar had taken a strong liking to her, probably because she treated him defiantly and because she alone did not weep when she was captured. She was an orphan and had been living in the house of her aunt, the woman whom she had beaten and whom she hated, and within days

Brida was happier among the Danes than she had ever been among her own people.

“He brought me in here,” she said. “The abbot did?” “And told me to take my clothes off.” “The abbot did?” I asked again. “I ran away,” she said in a very matter-of-fact tone, “and my aunt beat me. She said I should have pleased him and he’d have rewarded us.”

An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.

We would all be rich. So we went to war.

The poets, when they speak of war, talk of the shield wall, they talk of the spears and arrows flying, of the blade beating on the shield, of the heroes who fall and the spoils of the victors, but I was to discover that war was really about food. About feeding men and horses. About finding food. The army that eats wins.

Why did I fight for the Danes? All lives have questions, and that one still haunts me, though in truth there was no mystery. To my young mind the alternative was to be sitting in some monastery learning to read, and give a boy a choice like that and he would fight for the devil rather than scratch on a tile or make marks on a clay tablet. And there was Ragnar, whom I loved,

I already knew what we would do; perhaps I had always known. I am an Englishman of England, but I had been a Dane while Ragnar was alive for Ragnar loved me and cared for me and called me his son, but Ragnar was dead and I had no other friends among the Danes. I had no friends among the English, for that matter, except for Brida, of course, and unless I counted Beocca who was certainly fond of me in a complicated way, but the English were my folk and I think I had known that ever since the moment at Æsc’s Hill where for the first time I saw Englishmen beat Danes. I had felt pride then. Destiny is all, and the spinners touched me at Æsc’s Hill, and now, at last, I would respond to their touch.

“You weren’t meant to be,” he said. “No?” “Alfred thought this experience would humble you.”

I realized he had known I had nothing to contribute, yet he had still given me the helmet and armor. That, I assumed, was so I would give him a year of my life in which he hoped Leofric would knock the arrogance out

of my bumptious youthfulness. “Didn’t work, did it?” I said, grinning. “He said you must be broken like a horse.” “But I’m not a horse, father. I’m a lord of Northumbria. What did he think? That after a year I’d be a meek Christian ready to do his bidding?” “Is that such a bad thing?” “It’s a bad thing,” I said. “He needs proper men to fight the Danes, not praying lickspittles.”

“This is Alfred’s idea?” “He likes to see his men settled, to have their roots in the land.” “I’m not his man, Father. I’m Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and the lords of Bebbanburg don’t marry pious maggot-faced bitches of low birth.” “You should meet her,” he persisted, frowning at me. “Marriage is a wonderful thing, Uhtred, ordained by God for our happiness.” “How would you know?” “It is,” he insisted weakly. “I’m already happy,” I said. “I hump Brida and I kill Danes. Find another man for Mildrith. Why don’t you marry her? Good God, Father, you must be near thirty! If you don’t marry soon you’ll go to your grave a virgin. Are you a virgin?”

“I like them,” I said, ignoring his question, “because they’re not frightened of life.”

“I’m nothing,” I admitted. “But I want to be in Northumbria to take back my father’s fortress.”

“And if you get back your fortress,” he asked, “will you be lord of it? Lord of your own land? Or will the Danes rule you?” “The Danes will rule.” “So you settle to be a slave, eh? Yes, lord, no, lord, let me hold your prick while you piss all over me, lord?” “And what happens if I stay here?” I asked sourly. “You’ll lead men,” he said.

“I told him I’m a proper warrior, but still the bastard refused me!”

“Why did he refuse you?” I asked. “Because I can’t read,” Leofric snarled, “and I’m not learning now! I tried once, and it makes no damn sense to me. And I’m not a lord, am I? Not even a thegn. I’m just a slave’s son who happens to know how to kill the king’s enemies, but that’s not good enough for Alfred. He says I can assist”—he said that word as if it soured his tongue—“one of his ealdormen, but I can’t lead men because I can’t read, and I can’t learn to read.”

“You’re a damned lord, and you can read, can’t you?” “No, not really. A bit. Short words.” “But you can learn?” I thought about it. “I can learn.” “And we have twelve ships’ crews,” he said, “looking for employment, so we give them to Alfred and we say that Lord Earsling is their leader and he gives you a book and you read out the pretty words, then you and I take the bastards to war and do some proper damage to your beloved Danes.”

What worried me was that I found myself agreeing with whatever the last person suggested I did; when I had been with Ragnar I had wanted to follow him, and now I was seduced by Leofric’s vision of the future.

He was a spider, I thought sourly, a priestly black spider spinning sticky webs, and I thought I had been so clever when I talked to him in the hall at Cippanhamm. In truth I could have prayed openly to Thor before pissing on the relics of Alfred’s altar and he would still have given me the fleet because he knew the fleet would have little to do in the coming war, and he had only wanted to trap me for his future ambitions in the north of England. So now I was trapped, and the bastard Ealdorman Odda had carefully let me walk into the trap.

Women. Men fight for them, and that was another lesson to learn. As a child I thought men struggled for land or for mastery, but they fight for women just as much.

War is fought in mystery. The truth can take days to travel, and ahead of truth flies rumor, and it is ever hard to know what is really happening, and the art of it is to pluck the clean bone of fact from the rotting flesh of fear and lies.

The preachers tell us that pride is a great sin, but the preachers are wrong. Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation and the Danes understood that. Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.

Show me a humble warrior and I will see a corpse. Alfred preached humility, he even pretended to it, loving to appear in church with bare feet and prostrating himself before the altar, but he never possessed true humility. He was proud, and men feared him because of it, and men should fear a lord. They should fear his displeasure and fear that his generosity will cease. Reputation makes fear, and pride protects reputation, and I marched north because my pride was endangered.

Wessex could fall for all I cared, my reputation was more important and so we marched,

I knelt by Ubba and closed his nerveless right fist about the handle of his war ax. “Go to Valhalla, lord,” I said.

there was a croaking noise in his throat and I kept on holding his hand tight to the ax as he died.

I had wanted it, but I wanted Ubba treated decently as well and so I let the prisoners dig their grave.

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.

We live, we die, we go to the corpse hall. There is no music, just chance. Fate is relentless.

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 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.

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.