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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still we went back, and still the Danes pursued us, but they were tiring now. A few shouted at us, daring us to stand and fight, but others had no breath to shout, just a savage intent to catch and kill us, but we were slanting eastwards now towards a line of buckthorn and reeds, and there, in a flooding creek, were our punts.
We dropped into the boats, exhausted, and the marshmen poled us back down the creek that was a tributary of the River Bru which barred the northern part of the swamp, and the flat-bottomed craft took us fast south, against the current, hurrying us past the Danes who could only watch from a quarter-mile away and do nothing to stop us, and the farther we went from them, the more isolated they looked in that wide, barren place where the rain fell and the tide seethed as it flowed into the creek beds. The wind-driven water was running deep into the swamp now, a tide made bigger by the full moon, and suddenly the Danes saw their danger and turned back towards Palfleot.
But Palfleot was a long way off, and we had already left the stream and were carrying the punts to a smaller creek, one that ran down to the Pedredan, and that stream took us to where the blackened pilings leaned against the weeping sky, and where the Danes had tied their two ships. The two craft were guarded by only four men, and we came from the punts with a savage shout and drawn swords and the four men ran. The other Danes were still out in the swamp, only now it was not a swamp, but a tidal flat and they were wading through water.
And I had two ships. We hauled the punts aboard, and then the marshmen, divided between the ships, took the oars, and I steered one and Leofric took the other, and we rowed against that big tide towards Cynuit where the Danish ships were now unguarded except for a few men and a crowd of women and children who watched the two ships come and did not know they were crewed by their enemy. They must have wondered why so few oars bit the water, but how could they imagine that forty Saxons would defeat nearly eighty Danes? And so none opposed us as we ran the ships into the bank, and there I led my warriors ashore. ‘You can fight us,’ I shouted at the few ship-guards left, ‘or you can live.’
I was in chain mail, with my new helmet. I was a warlord. I banged Serpent-Breath against the big shield and stalked towards them. ‘Fight if you want!’ I shouted. ‘Come and fight us!’
They did not. They were too few and so they retreated south and could only watch as we burned their ships. It took most of the day to ensure that the ships burned down to their keels, but burn they did, and their fires were a signal to the western part of Wessex that Svein had been defeated. He was not at Cynuit that day, but somewhere to the south, and as the ships burned I watched the wooded hills in fear that he would come with hundreds of men, but he was still far off and the Danes at Cynuit could do nothing to stop us. We burned twenty-three ships, including the White Horse, and the twenty-fourth, which was one of the two we had captured, carried us away as evening fell. We took good plunder from the Danish camp; food, rigging ropes, hides, weapons and shields.
There were a score of Danes stranded on the low island of Palfleot. The rest had died in the rising water. The survivors watched us pass, but did nothing to provoke us, and I did nothing to hurt them. We rowed on towards Æthelingæg and behind us, under a darkening sky, the water sheeted the swamp where white gulls cried above the drowned men and where, in the dusk, two swans flighted northwards, their wings like drumbeats in the sky.
The smoke of the burned boats drifted to the clouds for three days, and on the second day Egwine took the captured ship downstream with forty men and they landed on Palfleot and killed all the surviving Danes, except for six who were taken prisoner, and five of those six were stripped of their armour and lashed to stakes in the river at low tide so that they drowned slowly on the flood. Egwine lost three men in that fight, but brought back mail, shields, helmets, weapons, arm rings and one prisoner who knew nothing except that Svein had ridden towards Exanceaster. That prisoner died on the third day, the day that Alfred had prayers said in thanks to God for our victory. For now we were safe. Svein could not attack us for he had lost his ships, Guthrum had no way of penetrating the swamp and Alfred was pleased with me.
‘The king is pleased with you,’ Beocca told me. Two weeks before, I thought, the king would have told me that himself. He would have sat with me by the water’s edge and talked, but now a court had formed and the king was hedged with priests.
‘He should be pleased,’ I said. I had been practising weapon-craft when Beocca sought me out. We practised every day, using stakes instead of swords, and some men grumbled that they did not need to play at fighting, and those I opposed myself and, when they had been beaten down to the mud, I told them they needed to play more and complain less.
‘He’s pleased with you,’ Beocca said, leading me down the path beside the river, ‘but he thinks you are squeamish.’
‘Me! Squeamish?’
‘For not going to Palfleot and finishing the job.’
‘The job was finished,’ I said. ‘Svein can’t attack us without ships.’
‘But not all the Danes drowned,’ Beocca said.
‘Enough died,’ I said. ‘Do you know what they endured? The terror of trying to outrun the tide?’ I thought of my own anguish in the swamp, the inexorable tide, the cold water spreading and the fear gripping the heart. ‘They had no ships! Why kill stranded men?’
‘Because they are pagans,’ Beocca said, ‘because they are loathed by God and by men, and because they are Danes.’
‘And only a few weeks ago,’ I said, ‘you believed they would become Christians and all our swords would be beaten into ard points to plough fields.’
Beocca shrugged that off. ‘So what will Svein do now?’ he wanted to know.
‘March around the swamp,’ I said, ‘and join Guthrum.’
‘And Guthrum is in Cippanhamm.’ We were fairly certain of that. New men were coming to the swamp and they all brought news. Much of it was rumour, but many had heard that Guthrum had strengthened Cippanhamm’s walls and was wintering there. Large raiding parties still ravaged parts of Wessex, but they avoided the bigger towns in the south of the country where West Saxon garrisons had formed. There was one such garrison at Dornwaraceaster and another at Wintanceaster, and Beocca believed Alfred should go to one of those towns, but Alfred refused, reckoning that Guthrum would immediately besiege him. He would be trapped in a town, but the swamp was too big to be besieged and Guthrum could not hope to penetrate the marshes. ‘You have an uncle in Mercia, don’t you?’ Beocca asked, changing the subject abruptly.
‘Æthelred. He’s my mother’s brother, and an ealdorman.’
He heard the flat tone of my voice. ‘You’re not fond of him?’
‘I hardly know him.’ I had spent some weeks in his house, just long enough to quarrel with his son who was also called Æthelred.
‘Is he a friend of the Danes?’
I shook my head. ‘They suffer him to live and he suffers them.’
‘The king has sent messengers to Mercia,’ Beocca said.
I grimaced. ‘If he wants them to rise against the Danes they won’t. They’ll get killed.’
‘He’d rather they brought men south in the springtime,’ Beocca said and I wondered how a few Mercian warriors were supposed to get past the Danes to join us, but said nothing. ‘We look to the springtime for our salvation,’ Beocca went on, ‘but in the meantime the king would like someone to go to Cippanhamm.’
‘A priest?’ I asked sourly, ‘to talk to Guthrum?’
‘A soldier,’ Beocca said, ‘to gauge their numbers.’
‘So send me,’ I offered.
Beocca nodded, then limped along the riverbank where the willow fish traps had been exposed by the falling tide. ‘It’s so different from Northumbria,’ he said wistfully.
I smiled at that. ‘You miss Bebbanburg?’
‘I would like