The Last Kingdom Series Books 1-3: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, The Lords of the North. Bernard Cornwell
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were fiddled out of their holes, the holes were covered with wooden plugs and the great sweeps stored inboard as the sail cracked, bellied, trapped the wind and drove us southwards. There were eighty-nine ships altogether, a fleet of dragon-headed killers, and they raced each other, calling insults whenever they travelled faster than some other boat. Ragnar leaned on the steering oar, his hair flying in the wind and a smile as broad as the ocean on his face. Seal-hide ropes creaked, the boat seemed to leap up the seas, seethe through their tops and slide in flying spray down their faces. I was frightened at first, for the Wind-Viper bent to that wind, almost dropping her leeward side beneath the great green sea, but then I saw no fear on the other men’s faces and I learned to enjoy the wild ride, whooping with delight when the bow smashed into a heavy sea and the green water flew like an arrow shower down the deck.
‘I love this!’ Ragnar called to me. ‘In Valhalla I hope to find a ship, a sea and a wind!’
The shore was ever in sight, a low green line to our right, sometimes broken by dunes, but never by trees or hills, and as the sun sank we turned towards that land and Ragnar ordered the sail furled and the oars out.
We rowed into a water land, a place of marsh and reed, of bird cries and long-legged herons, of eel traps and ditches, of shallow channels and long meres, and I remembered my father saying the East Anglians were frogs. We were on the edge of their country now, at the place where Mercia ended and East Anglia began in a tangle of water, mud and salt flats. ‘They call it the Gewæsc,’ Ragnar said.
‘You’ve been here?’
‘Two years ago,’ he said. ‘Good country to raid, Uhtred, but treacherous water. Too shallow.’
The Gewæsc was very shallow and Weland was in the Wind-Viper’s bow, weighing the depth with a lump of iron tied to a rope. The oars only dipped if Weland said there was sufficient water and so we crept westwards into the dying light followed by the rest of the fleet. The shadows were long now, the red sun slicing into the open jaws of the dragon, serpent and eagle heads on the ships’ prows. The oars worked slowly, their blades dripping water as they swept forward for the next stroke, and our wake spread in long slow ripples touched red by dying sun-fire.
We anchored that night and slept aboard the ships and in the dawn Ragnar made Rorik and me climb his mast. Ubba’s ship was nearby and he too had men clambering up towards the painted wind-vane at the masthead.
‘What can you see?’ Ragnar called up to us.
‘Three men on horseback,’ Rorik answered, pointing south, ‘watching us.’
‘And a village,’ I added, also pointing south.
To the men on shore we were something from their darkest fears. All they could see was a thicket of masts and the savage carved beasts at the high prows and sterns of our ships. We were an army, brought here by our dragon boats, and they knew what would follow and, as I watched, the three horsemen turned and galloped south.
We went on. Ubba’s ship led the way now, following a twisting shallow channel and I could see Ubba’s sorcerer, Storri, standing in the bows and I guessed he had cast the runes and predicted success. ‘Today,’ Ragnar told me wolfishly, ‘you will learn the Viking way.’
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, but Ubba’s fleet had come to ravage the coastline and draw the East Anglian army towards the sea while his brother, Ivar, led the land army south from Mercia, and so that early summer I learned the Viking ways. We took the ships to the mainland where Ubba found a stretch of land with a thin neck that could easily be defended and, once our ships were safely drawn onto the beach, we dug an earthwork across the neck as a rampart. Then large parties of men disappeared into the countryside, returning next morning with captured horses and the horses were used to mount another war-band that rode inland as Ragnar led his men on foot along the tangled shoreline.
We came to a village, I never did learn its name, and we burned it to the ground. There was no one there. We burned farmsteads, a church, and marched on, following a road that angled away from the shore, and at dusk we saw a larger village and we hid in a wood, lit no fires, and attacked at dawn.
We came shrieking from the half-light. We were a nightmare in the dawn; men in leather with iron helmets, men with round painted shields, men with axes, swords and spears. The folk in that place had no weapons and no armour, and perhaps they had not even known there were Danes in their countryside for they were not ready for us. They died. A few brave men tried to make a stand by their church, but Ragnar led a charge against them and they were slaughtered where they stood, and Ragnar pushed open the church door to find the small building filled with women and children. The priest was in front of the altar and he cursed Ragnar in Latin as the Dane stalked up the small nave, and the priest was still cursing when Ragnar disembowelled him.
We took a bronze crucifix, a dented silver plate and some coins from the church. We found a dozen good cooking pots in the houses and some shears, sickles and iron spits. We captured cattle, goats, sheep, oxen, eight horses, and sixteen young women. One woman screamed that she could not leave her child and I watched Weland spit the small boy on a spear, then thrust the bloodied corpse into the woman’s arms. Ragnar sent her away, not because he pitied her, but because one person was always spared to carry news of the horror to other places. Folk must fear the Danes, Ragnar said, and then they would be ready to surrender. He gave me a piece of burning wood he had taken from a fire. ‘Burn the thatch, Uhtred,’ he ordered, so I went from house to house, putting fire to the reed thatch. I burned the church and then, just as I approached the last house, a man burst from the door with a three-pronged eel spear that he lunged at me. I twisted aside, avoiding his thrust by luck rather than judgement, and I hurled the burning wood at the man’s face and the flames made him duck as I backed away, and Ragnar threw me a spear, a heavy war spear made for thrusting rather than throwing, and it skidded in the dust in front of me and I understood he was letting me fight as I plucked it up. He would not have let me die, for he had two of his bowmen standing ready with arrows on their strings, but he did not interfere as the man ran at me and lunged again.
I parried, knocking the rusted eel spear aside and stepping back again to give myself room. The man was twice my size and more than twice my weight. He was cursing me, calling me a devil’s bastard, a worm of hell, and he rushed me again and I did what I had learned hunting the boar. I stepped to my left, waited till he levelled the spear, stepped back to the right and thrust.
It was not a clean thrust, nor did I have the weight to hurl him back, but the spear point punctured his belly and then his weight pushed me back as he half snarled and half gasped, and I fell, and he fell on top of me, forced sideways because the spear was in his guts, and he tried to take a grip of my throat, but I wriggled out from beneath him, picked up his own eel spear and rammed it at his throat. There were rivulets of blood on the earth, droplets spraying in the air, and he was jerking and choking, blood bubbling at his ripped throat, and I tried to pull the eel spear back, but the barbs on the points were caught in his gullet, so I ripped the war spear from his belly and tried to stop him jerking by thrusting it down hard into his chest, but it only glanced off his ribs. He was making a terrible noise, and I suppose I was in a panic, and I was unaware that Ragnar and his men were almost helpless with laughter as they watched me try to kill the East Anglian. I did, in the end, or else he just bled to death, but by then I had poked and stabbed and torn him until he looked as though a pack of wolves had set on him.
But I got a third arm ring, and there were grown warriors in Ragnar’s band who only wore three. Rorik was jealous, but he was younger and his father consoled him that his time would come. ‘How does it feel?’ Ragnar asked me.
‘Good,’ I said, and God help me, it did.
It was then that I first saw Brida. She was my age, black-haired, thin as a twig, with big dark eyes and a spirit as wild as a hawk in spring, and she was among the captured women and, as the Danes began dividing those captives amongst 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,