The Last Kingdom Series Books 1–8: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, The Lords of the North, Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings, The Pagan Lord, The Empty Throne. Bernard Cornwell
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across the swirling water. I ignored them. I was counting ships and saw twenty-four beast-headed boats hauled up on the strip of ground where we had defeated Ubba the year before. Ubba’s burned ships were also there, their black ribs half buried in the sand where the men capered and shouted their insults.
‘How many men can you see?’ I asked Iseult.
There were a few Danes in the half wrecked remnants of the monastery where Svein had killed the monks, but most were by the boats. ‘Just men?’ she asked.
‘Forget the women and children,’ I said. There were scores of women, mostly in the small village that was a little way upstream.
She did not know the English words for the bigger numbers, so she gave me her estimate by opening and closing her fingers six times. ‘Sixty?’ I said, and nodded. ‘At most seventy. And there are twenty-four ships.’ She frowned, not understanding the point I made. ‘Twenty-four ships,’ I said, ‘means an army of what? Eight hundred? Nine hundred men? So those sixty or seventy men are the ship-guards. And the others? Where are the others?’ I asked the question of myself, watching as five of the Danes dragged a small boat to the river’s edge. They planned to row across and capture us, but I did not intend to stay that long. ‘The others,’ I answered my own question, ‘have gone south. They’ve left their women behind and gone raiding. They’re burning, killing, getting rich. They’re raping Defnascir.’
‘They’re coming,’ Iseult said, watching the five men clamber into the small boat.
‘You want me to kill them?’
‘You can?’ She looked hopeful.
‘No,’ I said, ‘so let’s go.’
We started back across the long expanse of mud and sand. It looked smooth, but there were runnels cutting through and the tide had turned and the sea was sliding back into the land with surprising speed. The sun was sinking, tangling with black clouds and the wind pushed the flood up the Sæfern and the water gurgled and shivered as it filled the small creeks. I turned to see that the five Danes had abandoned their chase and gone back to the western bank where their fires looked delicate against the evening’s fading light. ‘I can’t see the boat,’ Iseult said.
‘Over there,’ I said, but I was not certain I was right because the light was dimming and our punt was tied against a background of reeds, and now we were jumping from one dry spot to another, and the tide went on rising and the dry spots shrank and then we were splashing through the water and still the wind drove the tide inland.
The tides are big in the Sæfern. A man could make a house at low tide, and by high it would have vanished beneath the waves. Islands appear at low tide, islands with summits thirty feet above the water, and at the high tide they are gone, and this tide was pushed by the wind and it was coming fast and cold and Iseult began to falter so I picked her up and carried her like a child. I was struggling and the sun was behind the low western clouds and it seemed now that I was wading through an endless chill sea, but then, perhaps because the darkness was falling, or perhaps because Hoder, the blind god of the night, favoured me, I saw the punt straining against its tether.
I dropped Iseult into the boat and hauled myself over the low side. I cut the rope, then collapsed, cold and wet and frightened and let the punt drift on the tide.
‘You must get back to the fire,’ Iseult chided me. I wished I had brought the marshman now for I had to find a route across the swamp and it was a long, cold journey in the day’s last light. Iseult crouched beside me and stared far across the waters to where a hill reared up green and steep against the eastern land. ‘Eanflæd told me that hill is Avalon,’ she said reverently.
‘Avalon?’
‘Where Arthur is buried.’
‘I thought you believed he was sleeping?’
‘He does sleep,’ she said fervently. ‘He sleeps in his grave with his warriors.’ She gazed at the distant hill that seemed to glow because it had been caught by the day’s last errant shaft of sunlight spearing from the west beneath the furnace of glowing clouds. ‘Arthur,’ she said in a whisper. ‘He was the greatest king who ever lived. He had a magic sword.’ She told me tales of Arthur, how he had pulled his sword from a stone, and how he had led the greatest warriors to battle, and I thought that his enemies had been us, the English Saxons, yet Avalon was now in England, and I wondered if, in a few years, the Saxons would recall their lost kings and claim they were great and all the while the Danes would rule us. When the sun vanished Iseult was singing softly in her own tongue, but she told me the song was about Arthur and how he had placed a ladder against the moon and netted a swathe of stars to make a cloak for his queen, Guinevere. Her voice carried us across the twilit water, sliding between reeds, and behind us the fires of the Danish ship-guards faded in the encroaching dark and far off a dog howled and the wind sighed cold and a spattering of rain shivered the black mere.
Iseult stopped singing as Brant loomed. ‘There’s going to be a great fight,’ she said softly and her words took me by surprise and I thought she was still thinking of Arthur and imagining that the sleeping king would erupt from his earthy bed in gouts of soil and steel. ‘A fight by a hill,’ she went on, ‘a steep hill, and there will be a white horse and the slope will run with blood and the Danes will run from the Sais.’
The Sais were us, the Saxons. ‘You dreamed this?’ I asked.
‘I dreamed it,’ she said.
‘So it is true?’
‘It is fate,’ she said, and I believed her, and just then the bow of the punt scraped on the island’s shore.
It was pitch dark, but there were fish-smoking fires on the beach, and by their dying light we found our way to Elwide’s house. It was made of alder logs thatched with reeds and I found Alfred sitting by the central hearth where he stared absently into the flames. Elwide, the two soldiers and the marshman were all skinning eels at the hut’s further end where three of the widow’s children were plaiting willow withies into traps and the fourth was gutting a big pike.
I crouched by the fire, wanting its warmth to bring life to my frozen legs.
Alfred blinked as though he was surprised to see me. ‘The Danes?’ he asked.
‘Gone inland,’ I said. ‘Left sixty or seventy men as ship-guards.’ I crouched by the fire, shivering, wondering if I would ever be warm again.
‘There’s food here,’ Alfred said vaguely.
‘Good,’ I said, ‘because we’re starving.’
‘No, I mean there’s food in the marshes,’ he said. ‘Enough food to feed an army. We can raid them, Uhtred, gather men and raid them. But that isn’t enough. I have been thinking. All day, I’ve been thinking.’ He looked better now, less pained, and I suspected he had wanted time to think and had found it in this stinking hovel. ‘I’m not going to run away,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m not going to Frankia.’
‘Good,’ I said, though I was so cold I was not really listening to him.
‘We’re going to stay here,’ he said, ‘raise an army, and take Wessex back.’
‘Good,’ I said again. I could smell burning. The hearth was surrounded by flat stones and Elwide had put a dozen oat bannocks on the stones to cook and the edges nearest the flames were blackening. I moved one of them, but Alfred frowned and gestured for me to stop for fear of distracting him. ‘The problem,’ he said, ‘is that I cannot afford to fight a small war.’
I did not see what other war he could fight, but kept silent.
‘The longer the Danes stay here,’ he said, ‘the firmer their grip. Men will start giving Guthrum their allegiance. I can’t have that.’
‘No, lord.’
‘So they have to be defeated.’ He spoke grimly. ‘Not beaten, Uhtred, but defeated!’
I thought of Iseult’s