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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Before the Pedredan reaches the sea it makes a great curve through the swamp, a curve that is almost three-quarters of a circle and on the inside of the bank where the curve begins there was another tiny settlement; just a half-dozen hovels built on stilts sunk into a slight rise in the ground. The settlement was called Palfleot, which means ‘the place with the stakes’, for the folk who had once lived there had staked eel and fish traps in the nearby streams, but the Danes had driven those folk away and burned their houses, so that Palfleot was now a place of charred pilings and blackened mud. We landed there, shivering in the dawn. The tide was falling, exposing the great banks of sand and mud across which Iseult and I had struggled, while the wind was coming from the west, cold and fresh, hinting of rain, though for now there was a slanting sunlight throwing long shadows of marram grass and reeds across the marshes. Two swans flew south and I knew they were a message from the gods, but what their message was I could not tell.
The punts pushed away, abandoning us. They were now going north and east, following intricate waterways known only to the marshmen. We stayed for a while in Palfleot, doing nothing in particular, but doing it energetically so that the Danes, a long way off across the great bend in the river, would be sure to see us. We pulled down the blackened timbers and Iseult, who had acute eyesight, watched the place where the Danish ships’ masts showed as scratches against the western clouds. ‘There’s a man up a mast,’ she said after a while, and I stared, saw the man clinging to the mast top and knew we had been spotted. The tide was falling, exposing more mud and sand, and now that I was sure we had been seen we walked across the drying expanse that was cradled by the river’s extravagant bend.
As we drew closer I could see more Danes in their ships’ rigging. They were watching us, but would not yet be worried for they outnumbered my few forces and the river lay between us and them, but whoever commanded in the Danish camp would also be ordering his men to arm themselves. He would want to be ready for whatever happened, but I also hoped he would be clever. I was laying a trap for him, and for the trap to work he had to do what I wanted him to do, but at first, if he was clever, he would do nothing. He knew we were impotent, separated from him by the Pedredan, and so he was content to watch as we closed on the river’s bank opposite his grounded ships and then slipped and slid down the steep muddy bluff that the ebbing tide had exposed. The river swirled in front of us, grey and cold.
There were close to a hundred Danes watching now. They were on their grounded boats, shouting insults. Some were laughing, for it seemed clear to them that we had walked a long way to achieve nothing, but that was because they did not know Eofer’s skills. I called the big bowman’s niece to my side. ‘What I want your Uncle Eofer to do,’ I explained to the small girl, ‘is kill some of those men.’
‘Kill them?’ She stared up at me with wide eyes.
‘They’re bad men,’ I said, ‘and they want to kill you.’
She nodded solemnly, then took the big man by the hand and led him to the water’s edge where he sank up to his calves in the mud. It was a long way across the river and I wondered, pessimistically, if it was too far for even his massive bow, but Eofer strung the great stave and then waded into the Pedredan until he found a shallow spot which meant he could go even farther into the river and there he took an arrow from his sheaf, put it on the string and hauled it back. He made a grunting noise as he released and I watched the arrow twitch off the cord, then the fledging caught the air and the arrow soared across the stream and plunged into a group of Danes standing on the steering platform of a ship. There was a cry of anger as the arrow cut down. It did not hit any of the group, but Eofer’s next arrow struck a man in his shoulder, and the Danes hurried back from their vantage point by the ship’s sternpost. Eofer, who was compulsively nodding his shaggy head and making small animal noises, turned his aim to another ship. He had extraordinary strength. The distance was too great for any accuracy, but the danger of the long white-fledged arrows drove the Danes back and it was our turn to jeer at them. One of the Danes fetched a bow and tried to shoot back, but his arrow sliced into the river twenty yards short and we taunted them, laughed at them, and capered up and down as Eofer’s arrows slammed into ships’ timbers. Only the one man had been wounded, but we had driven them backwards and that was humiliating to them. I let Eofer loose twenty arrows, then I waded into the river and took hold of his bow. I stood in front of him so the Danes could not see what I was doing.
‘Tell him not to worry,’ I told the girl, and she soothed Eofer, who was frowning at me and trying to remove his bow from my grasp.
I drew a knife and that alarmed him even more. He growled at me, then plucked the bow from my hand. ‘Tell him it’s all right,’ I told the girl, and she soothed her uncle who then let me half sever the woven hemp bowstring. I stepped away from him and pointed at a group of Danes. ‘Kill them,’ I said.
Eofer did not want to draw the bow. Instead he fumbled under his greasy woollen cap and produced a second bowstring, but I shook my head and the small girl persuaded him he must use the half-severed cord and so he pulled it nervously back and, just before it reached the full draw, the string snapped and the arrow span crazily into the sky to float away on the river.
The tide had turned and the water was rising. ‘We go!’ I shouted to my men.
It was now the Danes’ turn to jeer at us. They thought we were retreating because our one bowstring had broken, and so they shouted insults as we clambered back up the muddy bluff, and then I saw two men running along the far beach and I hoped they were carrying the orders I wanted.
They were. The Danes, released from the threat of Eofer’s terrible bow, were going to launch two of their smaller ships. We had stung them, laughed at them and now they would kill us.
All warriors have pride. Pride and rage and ambition are the goads to a reputation, and the Danes did not want us to think we had stung them without being punished for our temerity. They wanted to teach us a lesson. But they also wanted more. Before we left Æthelingæg I had insisted that my men be given every available coat of mail. Egwine, who had stayed behind with the king, had been reluctant to give up his precious armour, but Alfred had ordered it and so sixteen of my men were dressed in chain mail. They looked superb, like an elite group of warriors, and the Danes would win renown if they defeated such a group and captured the precious armour. Leather offers some protection, but chain mail over leather is far better and far more expensive, and by taking sixteen coats of mail to the river’s edge I had given the Danes an irresistible lure.
And they snapped at it.
We were going slowly, deliberately seeming to struggle in the soft ground as we headed back towards Palfleot. The Danes were also struggling, shoving their two ships down the riverbank’s thick mud, but at last the boats were launched and then, on the hurrying flood tide, the Danes did what I had hoped they would do.
They did not cross the river. If they had crossed, then they would merely have found themselves on the Pedredan’s eastern bank and we would have been half a mile ahead and out of reach, so instead the commander did what he thought was the clever thing to do. He tried to cut us off. They had seen us land at Palfleot and they reckoned our boats must still be there, and so they rowed their ships up river to find those boats and destroy them.
Except our punts were not at Palfleot. They had been taken north and east, so that they were waiting for us in a reed-fringed dyke, but now was not the time to use them. Instead, as the Danes went ashore at Palfleot, we made a huddle on the sand, watching them, and they thought we were trapped, and now they were on the same side of the river as us and the two ships’ crews outnumbered us by over two to one, and they had all the confidence in the world as they advanced from the burned pilings of Palfleot to kill us in the swamp.
They were doing exactly what I wanted them to do.
And we now retreated. We went back raggedly, sometimes running to open a distance between us and the confident Danes. I counted seventy-six of them and we were only thirty strong because some of my men were with the hidden punts, and the Danes knew we were dead men and they hurried across the sand and creeks, and we had to go faster, ever faster, to keep them away from us. It began to rain, the drops carried on the freshening west wind and I kept looking into the rain