The Last Kingdom (The Saxon Stories, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

“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.”

—Ragnar the Fearless

“What happens to you, Uhtred, is what you make happen. You will grow, you will learn the sword, you will learn the way of the shield wall, you will learn the oar, you will learn to give honor to the gods, and then you will use what you have learned to make your life good or bad.”

—Ragnar the Fearless

When you are young and powerless you dream of possessing mystical strength, and once you are grown and strong you condemn lesser folk to that same dream,

—Utred

Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything.

That was something else I learned, the joy with which the Danes faced battle.

“A sword,” Ragnar said, “is a great tool for discovering the truth.

Ragnar had no respect for folk who cringed and lied. He appreciated an enemy who fought, who showed spirit, but men who were weakly sly like the ones he killed at Gegnesburh’s gate were beneath his contempt, no better than animals.

but nearly all the Danes possessed more than one shield and they hung them all on the wall to make the enemy think our garrison equaled the number of shields.

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

I had promised that, and to a boy promises are solemn things, buttressed by the dread of divine revenge.

—Utred

“In war,” Ragnar told me, “be ruthless.”

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

“They had their own gods once, but they gave them up to become Christians and after that they knew nothing but defeat.

—Ravn speaking of the Romans

He was a fearsome fighter, but always wary when it came to picking a fight,

Ubba the Horrible

It was then I first saw Ubba fight and marveled at him, for he was a bringer of

death, a grim warrior, sword lover. He did not fight in a shield wall, but ran into his enemies, shield slamming one way as his war ax gave death in the other, and it seemed he was indestructible for at one moment he was surrounded by East Anglian fighters, but there was a scream of hate, a clash of blade on blade, and Ubba came out of the tangle of men, his blade red, blood in his beard, trampling his enemies into the blood-rich tide, and looking for more men to kill.

—Ubba the Horrible

“Corpse-Ripper feeds on the dead,” Ragnar went on, “but he also gnaws at the tree of life. He wants to kill the whole world

We celebrated the Yule feast and Ragnar the Younger won every competition in Synningthwait: he hurled rocks farther than anyone, wrestled men to the ground, and even drank his father into insensibility.

Serpent breath, Brida called the patterns, and I decided to give the sword that name: Serpent-Breath.

And there is magic in Serpent-Breath. Ealdwulf had his own spells that he would not tell me, the spells of the smith, and Brida took the blade into the woods for a whole night and never told me what she did with it, and those were the spells of a woman, and when we made the sacrifice of the pit slaughter, and killed a man, a horse, a ram, a bull, and a drake, I asked Ragnar to use Serpent-Breath on the doomed man so that Odin would know she existed

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.

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.

The Reality of War

I like bowmen. They can kill at a great distance and, even if their arrows do not kill, they make an enemy nervous. Advancing into arrows is a blind business, for you must keep your head beneath the rim of the shield, but shooting a bow is a great skill.

With a spear, an ax, or a sword I was lethal, but with a bow I was like most men, useless.

Ravn told me time and again that destiny was everything. Fate rules.

The three

spinners sit at the foot of the tree of life and they make our lives and we are their playthings, and though we think we make our own choices, all our fates are in the spinners’ threads. Destiny is everything, and that day, though I did not kno...

The spinners work and we do their will whether we will it or not.

“You insult me,” he said calmly. “If you wish to take the fortresses, then come and take them.”

but that was a deception. He never smiled as he faced Halfdan, he rarely took those clever brown eyes off his enemy’s face, he pressed his point tediously, and he was always calm, never raising his voice even when the Danes were screaming at him.

—The Great King Alfred

for I thought she had found herself in an impossible quandary and was confessing the lie, but instead, I realized, she was embroidering it.

—Brida

“You are my second son now,” he told me that night, and then remembered Brida, “and you are my daughter.”

—Ragnar the Fearless

“No queen,” I said. “The West Saxons won’t have queens.” Beocca had told me that. “She is merely the king’s wife.”

“and what we should do is send ships with rich gifts for the Britons. If they attack from Wales and Cornwalum then he must divide his army.”

they had never really subdued their conquest, nor did they hold all the fortresses in the conquered land and so revolts flared like heathland fires.

“I shall make you my second son,”

“I shall always favor my eldest,” he went on, meaning Ragnar the Younger, “but you shall still be as a son to me.”

“Uhtred Ragnarson,”

But when we fight in Wessex they have nowhere to go. No place is safe for them. So they must fight, all of them. Fight in Wessex and the enemy is cornered.”

“And a cornered enemy,” Ravn put in, “is dangerous.”

Anwend’s six friends, all warriors of Ragnar, would come back with him for the wedding and they would be the men who would watch Anwend take Thyra to his bed and only when they reported that she was a proper woman would the marriage be deemed to have taken place.

I have learned that most Christians are fearfully suspicious of enjoyment

The truth is that I was in a well of misery, tempted to despair, and with tears ever close to my eyes. I wanted life to go on as before, to have Ragnar as my father, to feast and

to laugh. But

destiny grips...

I have seen other young men come from their first fights with that same

joy, and I have buried them after their next battle. The young are fools and I was young. But I was good.

I have sounded immodest, but I have told the truth.

I looked at him suspiciously. I called myself a lord, and so I was by birthright, but I was well imbued with the Danish idea that lordship was earned, not given, and I had not earned it yet.

I went because fate determines our lives.