The Last Kingdom Series Books 1-3: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, The Lords of the North. Bernard Cornwell
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my father greeted her.
‘God and his saints preserve us,’ Gytha said, crossing herself. I had never known my real mother who had been my father’s second wife and, like his first, had died in childbirth, so both my brother and I, who were really half-brothers, had no mother, but I thought of Gytha as my mother and, on the whole, she was kind to me, kinder indeed than my father, who did not much like children. Gytha wanted me to be a priest, saying that my elder brother would inherit the land and become a warrior to protect it so I must find another life path. She had given my father two sons and a daughter, but none had lived beyond a year.
The three ships were coming closer now. It seemed they had come to inspect Bebbanburg, which did not worry us for the fortress was reckoned impregnable, and so the Danes could stare all they wanted. The nearest ship had twin banks of twelve oars each and, as the ship coasted a hundred paces offshore, a man leaped from the ship’s side and ran down the nearer bank of oars, stepping from one shaft to the next like a dancer, and he did it wearing a mail shirt and holding a sword. We all prayed he would fall, but of course he did not. He had long fair hair, very long, and when he had pranced the full length of the oar bank he turned and ran the shafts again.
‘She was trading at the mouth of the Tine a week ago,’ Ælfric, my father’s brother, said.
‘You know that?’
‘I saw her,’ Ælfric said, ‘I recognise that prow. See how there’s a light-coloured strake on the bend?’ He spat. ‘She didn’t have a dragon’s head then.’
‘They take the beast-heads off when they trade,’ my father said. ‘What were they buying?’
‘Exchanging pelts for salt and dried fish. Said they were merchants from Haithabu.’
‘They’re merchants looking for a fight now,’ my father said, and the Danes on the three ships were indeed challenging us by clashing their spears and swords against their painted shields, but there was little they could do against Bebbanburg and nothing we could do to hurt them, though my father ordered his wolf banner raised. The flag showed a snarling wolf’s head and it was his standard in battle, but there was no wind and so the banner hung limp and its defiance was lost on the pagans who, after a while, became bored with taunting us, settled to their thwarts and rowed off to the south.
‘We must pray,’ my stepmother said. Gytha was much younger than my father. She was a small, plump woman with a mass of fair hair and a great reverence for Saint Cuthbert whom she worshipped because he had worked miracles. In the church beside the hall she kept an ivory comb that was said to have been Cuthbert’s beard-comb, and perhaps it was.
‘We must act,’ my father snarled. He turned away from the battlements. ‘You,’ he spoke to my elder brother, Uhtred. ‘Take a dozen men, ride south. Watch the pagans, but nothing more, you understand? If they land their ships on my ground I want to know where.’
‘Yes, father.’
‘But don’t fight them,’ my father ordered. ‘Just watch the bastards and be back here by nightfall.’
Six other men were sent to rouse the country. Every free man owed military duty and so my father was assembling his army, and by the morrow’s dusk he expected to have close to two hundred men, some armed with axes, spears or reaping hooks, while his retainers, those men who lived with us in Bebbanburg, would be equipped with well-made swords and hefty shields. ‘If the Danes are outnumbered,’ my father told me that night, ‘they won’t fight. They’re like dogs, the Danes. Cowards at heart, but they’re given courage by being in a pack.’ It was dark and my brother had not returned, but no one was unduly anxious about that. Uhtred was capable, if sometimes reckless, and doubtless he would arrive in the small hours and so my father had ordered a beacon lit in the iron becket on top of the High Gate to guide him home.
We reckoned we were safe in Bebbanburg for it had never fallen to an enemy’s assault, yet my father and uncle were still worried that the Danes had returned to Northumbria. ‘They’re looking for food,’ my father said. ‘The hungry bastards want to land, steal some cattle, then sail away.’
I remembered my uncle’s words, how the ships had been at the mouth of the Tine trading furs for dried fish, so how could they be hungry? But I said nothing. I was nine years old and what did I know of Danes?
I did know that they were savages, pagans and terrible. I knew that for two generations before I was born their ships had raided our coasts. I knew that Father Beocca, my father’s clerk and our mass priest, prayed every Sunday to spare us from the fury of the Northmen, but that fury had passed me by. No Danes had come to our land since I had been born, but my father had fought them often enough and that night, as we waited for my brother to return, he spoke of his old enemy. They came, he said, from northern lands where ice and mist prevailed, they worshipped the old gods, the same ones we had worshipped before the light of Christ came to bless us, and when they had first come to Northumbria, he told me, fiery dragons had whipped across the northern sky, great bolts of lightning had scarred the hills and the sea had been churned by whirlwinds.
‘They are sent by God,’ Gytha said timidly, ‘to punish us.’
‘Punish us for what?’ my father demanded savagely.
‘For our sins,’ Gytha said, making the sign of the cross.
‘Our sins be damned,’ my father snarled. ‘They come here because they’re hungry.’ He was irritated by my stepmother’s piety, and he refused to give up his wolf’s head banner that proclaimed our family’s descent from Woden, the ancient Saxon god of battles. The wolf, Ealdwulf the smith had told me, was one of Woden’s three favoured beasts, the others being the eagle and the raven. My mother wanted our banner to show the cross, but my father was proud of his ancestors, though he rarely talked about Woden. Even at nine years old I understood that a good Christian should not boast of being spawned by a pagan god, but I also liked the idea of being a god’s descendant and Ealdwulf often told me tales of Woden, how he had rewarded our people by giving us the land we called England, and how he had once thrown a war spear clear around the moon, and how his shield could darken the midsummer sky and how he could reap all the corn in the world with one stroke of his great sword. I liked those tales. They were better than my stepmother’s stories of Cuthbert’s miracles. Christians, it seemed to me, were forever weeping and I did not think Woden’s worshippers cried much.
We waited in the hall. It was, indeed it still is, a great wooden hall, strongly thatched and stout beamed, with a harp on a dais and a stone hearth in the centre of the floor. It took a dozen slaves a day to keep that great fire going, dragging the wood along the causeway and up through the gates, and at summer’s end we would make a log pile bigger than the church just as a winter store. At the edges of the hall were timber platforms, filled with rammed earth and layered with woollen rugs, and it was on those platforms that we lived, up above the draughts. The hounds stayed on the bracken-strewn floor below, where lesser men could eat at the year’s four great feasts.
There was no feast that night, just bread and cheese and ale, and my father waited for my brother and wondered aloud if the Danes were restless again. ‘They usually come for food and plunder,’ he told me, ‘but in some places they’ve stayed and taken land.’
‘You think they want our land?’ I asked.
‘They’ll take any land,’ he said irritably. He was always irritated by my questions, but that night he was worried and so he talked on. ‘Their own land is stone and ice, and they have giants threatening them.’
I wanted him to tell me more about the giants, but he brooded instead. ‘Our ancestors,’ he went on after a while, ‘took this land. They took it and made it and held it. We do not give up what our ancestors gave us. They came across the sea and they fought here, and they built here and they’re buried here. This is our land, mixed with our blood, strengthened with our bone. Ours.’ He was angry, but he was often angry. He glowered at me, as if wondering whether I was strong enough to hold this land of Northumbria that our ancestors had won with sword and spear and blood and slaughter.
We slept