The Last Kingdom. Bernard Cornwell
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the sea, but you do not take to the ships and become a fighter. But here in England? Every man is forced to the fight, yet only one in three or maybe only one in four has the belly for it. The rest are farmers who just want to run. We are wolves fighting sheep.’
Watch and learn, my father had said, and I was learning. What else can a boy with an unbroken voice do? One in three men are warriors, remember the Shadow-Walkers, beware the cut beneath the shield, a river can be an army’s road to a kingdom’s heart, watch and learn.
‘And they have a weak king,’ Ravn went on. ‘Burghred, he’s called, and he has no guts for a fight. He will fight, of course, because we shall force him, and he will call on his friends in Wessex to help him, but in his weak heart he knows he cannot win.’
‘How do you know?’ Rorik asked.
Ravn smiled. ‘All winter, boy, our traders have been in Mercia. Selling pelts, selling amber, buying iron ore, buying malt, and they talk and they listen and they come back and they tell us what they heard.’
Kill the traders, I thought.
Why did I think that way? I liked Ragnar. I liked him much more than I had liked my father. I should, by rights, be dead, yet Ragnar had saved me and Ragnar spoilt me and he treated me like a son, and he called me a Dane, and I liked the Danes, yet even at that time I knew I was not a Dane. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg and I clung to the memory of the fortress by the sea, of the birds crying over the breakers, of the puffins whirring across the whitecaps, of the seals on the rocks, of the white water shattering on the cliffs. I remembered the folk of that land, the men who had called my father ‘lord’, but talked to him of cousins they held in common. It was the gossip of neighbours, the comfort of knowing every family within a half-day’s ride, and that was, and is, Bebbanburg to me; home. Ragnar would have given me the fortress if it could be taken, but then it would belong to the Danes and I would be nothing more than their hired man, Ealdorman at their pleasure, no better than King Egbert who was no king but a pampered dog on a short rope, and what the Dane gives, the Dane can take away, and I would hold Bebbanburg by my own effort.
Did I know all that at eleven? Some, I think. It lay in my heart, unformed, unspoken, but hard as a stone. It would be covered over in time, half forgotten and often contradicted, but it was always there. Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything. He would even say it in English, ‘wyrd bið ful ãræd.’
‘What are you thinking?’ Rorik asked me.
‘That it would be nice to swim,’ I said.
The oars dipped and the Wind-Viper glided on into Mercia.
Next day a small force waited in our path. The Mercians had blocked the river with felled trees which did not quite bar the way, but would certainly make it hard for our oarsmen to make progress through the small gap between the tangling branches. There were about a hundred Mercians and they had a score of bowmen and spear-throwers waiting by the blockage, ready to pick off our rowers, while the rest of their men were formed into a shield wall on the eastern bank. Ragnar laughed when he saw them. That was something else I learned, the joy with which the Danes faced battle. Ragnar was whooping with joy as he leaned on the steering oar and ran the ship into the bank, and the ships behind were also grounding themselves while the horsemen who had been keeping pace with us dismounted for battle.
I watched from the Wind-Viper’s prow as the ships’ crews hurried ashore and pulled on leather or mail. What did those Mercians see? They saw young men with wild hair, wild beards and hungry faces. Men who embraced battle like a lover. If the Danes could not fight an enemy, they fought amongst themselves. Most had nothing but monstrous pride, battle-scars and well-sharpened weapons, and with those things they would take whatever they wanted, and that Mercian shield wall did not even stay to contest the fight, but once they saw they would be outnumbered they ran away to the mocking howls of Ragnar’s men who then stripped off their mail and leather and used their axes and the Wind-Viper’s hide-twisted ropes to clear away the fallen trees. It took a few hours to unblock the river, but then we were moving again. That night the ships clustered together on the riverbank, fires were lit ashore, men were posted as sentries and every sleeping warrior kept his weapons beside him, but no one troubled us and at dawn we moved on, soon coming to a town with thick earthen walls and a high palisade. This, Ragnar assumed, was the place the Mercians had failed to defend, but there seemed to be no sign of any soldiers on the wall so he ran the boat ashore again and led his crew towards the town.
The earth walls and timber palisade were both in good condition, and Ragnar marvelled that the town’s garrison had chosen to march downriver to fight us, rather than stay behind their well-tended defences. The Mercian soldiers were plainly gone now, probably fled south, for the gates were open and a dozen townsfolk were kneeling outside the wooden arch and holding out supplicant hands for mercy. Three of the terrified people were monks, their tonsured heads bowed. ‘I hate monks,’ Ragnar said cheerfully. His sword, Heart-Breaker, was in his hand and he swept her naked blade in a hissing arc.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Monks are like ants,’ he said, ‘wriggling about in black, being useless. I hate them. You’ll speak for me, Uhtred. Ask them what place this is?’
I asked and learned that the town was called Gegnesburh.
‘Tell them,’ Ragnar instructed me, ‘that my name is Earl Ragnar, I am called the Fearless and that I eat children when I’m not given food and silver.’
I duly told them. The kneeling men looked up at Ragnar who had unbound his hair which, had they known, was always a sign that he was in a mood for killing. His grinning men made a line behind him, a line heavy with axes, swords, spears, shields and war hammers.
‘What food there is,’ I translated a grey-bearded man’s answer, ‘is yours. But he says there is not much food.’
Ragnar smiled at that, stepped forward and, still smiling, swung Heart-Breaker so that her blade half severed the man’s head. I jumped back, not in alarm, but because I did not want my tunic spattered with his blood. ‘One less mouth to feed,’ Ragnar said cheerfully. ‘Now ask the others how much food there is.’
The grey-bearded man was now red-bearded and he was choking and twitching as he died. His struggles slowly ended and then he just lay, dying, his eyes gazing reprovingly into mine. None of his companions tried to help him, they were too frightened. ‘How much food do you have?’ I demanded.
‘There is food, lord,’ one of the monks said.
‘How much?’ I demanded again.
‘Enough.’
‘He says there’s enough,’ I told Ragnar.
‘A sword,’ Ragnar said, ‘is a great tool for discovering the truth. What about the monk’s church? How much silver does it have?’
The monk gabbled that we could look for ourselves, that we could take whatever we found, that it was all ours, anything we found was ours, all was ours. I translated these panicked statements and Ragnar again smiled. ‘He’s not telling the truth, is he?’
‘Isn’t he?’ I asked.
‘He wants me to look because he knows I won’t find, and that means they’ve hidden their treasure or had it taken away. Ask him if they’ve hidden their silver.’
I did and the monk reddened. ‘We are a poor church,’ he said, ‘with little treasure,’ and he stared wide-eyed as I translated his answer, then he tried to get up and run as Ragnar stepped forward, but he tripped over his robe and Heart-Breaker pierced his spine so that he jerked like a landed fish as he died.
There was silver, of course, and it was buried. Another of the monks told us so, and Ragnar sighed as he cleaned his sword on the dead monk’s robe. ‘They’re such fools,’ he said plaintively. ‘They’d live if they answered truthfully the first time.’
‘But suppose there wasn’t any treasure?’ I asked him.
‘Then they’d tell the truth