The Last Kingdom sc-1 Page 13

  Which is precisely what happened. Ivar fought him, shield wall against shield wall, and we knew none of it until the first East Anglian fugitives came streaming eastward to find another shield wall waiting for them. They scattered rather than fight us, we advanced, and from the few prisoners we took we discovered that Ivar had beaten them easily. That was confirmed next day when the first horsemen from Ivar’s forces reached us.

  King Edmund fled southward. East Anglia was a big country, he could easily have found refuge in a fortress, or else he could have gone to Wessex, but instead he put his faith in God and took shelter in a small monastery at Dic. The monastery was lost in the wetlands and perhaps he believed he would never be found there, or else, as I heard, one of the monks promised him that God would shroud the monastery in a perpetual fog in which the pagans would get lost, but the fog never came and the Danes arrived instead.

  Ivar, Ubba, and their brother, Halfdan, rode to Dic, taking half their army, while the other half set about pacifying East Anglia, which meant raping, burning, and killing until the people submitted, which most did swiftly enough. East Anglia, in short, fell as easily as Mercia, and the only bad news for the Danes was that there had been unrest in Northumbria. Rumors spoke of some kind of revolt, Danes had been killed, and Ivar wanted that rising quenched, but he dared not leave East Anglia so soon after capturing it, so at Dic he made a proposal to King Edmund that would leave Edmund as king just as Burghred still ruled over Mercia.

  The meeting was held in the monastery’s church, which was a surprisingly large hall made of timber and thatch, but with great leather panels hanging on the walls. The panels were painted with gaudy scenes. One of the pictures showed naked folk tumbling down to hell where a massive serpent with a fanged mouth swallowed them up. “CorpseRipper,” Ragnar said with a shudder.

  “CorpseRipper?”

  “A serpent that waits in Niflheim,” he explained, touching his hammer amulet. Niflheim, I knew, was a kind of Norse hell, but unlike the Christian hell Niflheim was icy cold. “CorpseRipper feeds on the dead,” Ragnar went on, “but he also gnaws at the tree of life. He wants to kill the whole world and bring time to an end.” He touched his hammer again.

  Another panel, behind the altar, showed Christ on the cross, and next to it was a third painted leather panel that fascinated Ivar. A man, naked but for a loincloth, had been tied to a stake and was being used as a target by archers. At least a score of arrows had punctured his white flesh, but he still had a saintly expression and a secret smile as though, despite his troubles, he was quite enjoying himself. “Who is that?” Ivar wanted to know.

  “The blessed Saint Sebastian.” King Edmund was seated in front of the altar, and his interpreter provided the answer. Ivar, skull eyes staring at the painting, wanted to know the whole story, and Edmund recounted how the blessed Saint Sebastian, a Roman soldier, had refused to renounce his faith and so the emperor had ordered him shot to death with arrows. “Yet he lived!” Edmund said eagerly.

  “He lived because God protected him and God be praised for that mercy.”

  “He lived?” Ivar asked suspiciously.

  “So the emperor had him clubbed to death instead,” the interpreter finished the tale.

  “So he didn’t live?”

  “He went to heaven,” King Edmund said, “so he lived.”

  Ubba intervened, wanting to have the concept of heaven explained to him, and Edmund eagerly sketched its delights, but Ubba spat in derision when he realized that the Christian heaven was Valhalla without any of the amusements. “And Christians want to go to heaven?” he asked in disbelief.

  “Of course,” the interpreter said.

  Ubba sneered. He and his two brothers were attended by as many Danish warriors as could cram themselves into the church, while King Edmund had an entourage of two priests and six monks who all listened as Ivar proposed his settlement. King Edmund could live, he could rule in East Anglia, but the chief fortresses were to be garrisoned by Danes, and Danes were to be granted whatever land they required, except for royal land. Edmund would be expected to provide horses for the Danish army, coin and food for the Danish warriors, and his fyrd, what was left of it, would march under Danish orders. Edmund had no sons, but his chief men, those who lived, had sons who would become hostages to ensure that the East Anglians kept the terms Ivar proposed.

  “And if I say no?” Edmund asked.

  Ivar was amused by that. “We take the land anyway.”

  The king consulted his priests and monks. Edmund was a tall, spare man, bald as an egg though he was only about thirty years old. He had protruding eyes, a pursed mouth, and a perpetual frown. He was wearing a white tunic that made him look like a priest himself. “What of God’s church?” he finally asked Ivar.

  “What of it?”

  “Your men have desecrated God’s altars, slaughtered his servants, defiled his image, and stolen his tribute!” The king was angry now. One of his hands was clenched on the arm of his chair that was set in front of the altar, while the other hand was a fist that beat time with his accusations.

  “Your god cannot look after himself?” Ubba enquired.

  “Our god is a mighty god,” Edmund declared, “the creator of the world, yet he also allows evil to exist to test us.”

  “Amen,” one of the priests murmured as Ivar’s interpreter translated the words.

  “He brought you,” the king spat, “pagans from the north! Jeremiah foretold this!”

  “Jeremiah?” Ivar asked, quite lost now.

  One of the monks had a book, the first I had seen in many years, and he unwrapped its leather cover, paged through the stiff leaves, and gave it to the king who reached into a pocket and took out a small ivory pointer that he used to indicate the words he wanted.“Quia malum ego,” he thundered, the pale pointer moving along the lines,“adduco ab aquilone et contritionem magnam!”

  He stopped there, glaring at Ivar, and some of the Danes, impressed by the forcefulness of the king’s words, even though none of them understood a single one of them, touched their hammer charms. The priests around Edmund looked reproachfully at us. A sparrow flew in through a high window and perched for a moment on an arm of the high wooden cross that stood on the altar. Ivar’s dread face showed no reaction to Jeremiah’s words and it finally dawned on the East Anglian interpreter, who was one of the priests, that the king’s impassioned reading had meant nothing to any of us. “For I will bring evil from the north,” he translated, “and great destruction.”

  “It is in the book!” Edmund said fiercely, giving the volume back to the monk.

  “You can keep your church,” Ivar said carelessly.

  “It is not enough!” Edmund said. He stood up to give his next words more force. “I will rule here,” he went on, “and I will suffer your presence if I must, and I will provide you with horses, food, coin, and hostages, but only if you, and all of your men, submit to God. You must be baptized!”

  That word was lost on the Danish interpreter, and on the king’s, and finally Ubba looked to me for help.

  “You have to stand in a barrel of water,” I said, remembering how Beocca had baptized me after my brother’s death, “and they pour more water over you.”

  “They want to wash me?” Ubba asked, astonished.

  I shrugged. “That’s what they do, lord.”

  “You will become Christians!” Edmund said, then shot me an irritated look. “We can baptize in the river, boy. Barrels are not necessary.”

  “They want to wash you in the river,” I explained to Ivar and Ubba, and the Danes laughed. Ivar thought about it. Standing in a river for a few minutes was not such a bad thing, especially if it meant he could hurry back to quell whatever trouble afflicted Northumbria. “I can go on worshipping Odin once I’m washed?” he asked.

  “Of course not!” Edmund said angrily. “There is only one god!”

  “There are many gods,” Ivar snapped back, “many! Everyone knows that.”

  �
��There is only one god, and you must serve him.”

  “But we’re winning,” Ivar explained patiently, almost as if he talked to a child, “which means our gods are beating your one god.”

  The king shuddered at this awful heresy. “Your gods are false gods,” he said. “They are turds of the devil, they are evil things who will bring darkness to the world, while our god is great, he is all powerful, he is magnificent.”

  “Show me,” Ivar said.

  Those two words brought silence. The king, his priests, and his monks all stared at Ivar in evident puzzlement.

  “Prove it,” Ivar said, and his Danes murmured their support of the idea. King Edmund blinked, evidently lost for inspiration, then had a sudden idea and pointed at the leather panel on which was painted Saint Sebastian’s experience of being an archer’s target. “Our god spared the blessed Saint Sebastian from death by arrows,” Edmund said, “which is proof enough, is it not?”

  “But the man still died,” Ivar pointed out.

  “Only because that was God’s will.”

  Ivar thought about that. “So would your god protect you from my arrows?” He asked.

  “If it is his will, yes.”

  “So let’s try,” Ivar proposed. “We shall shoot arrows at you, and if you survive then we’ll all be washed.”

  Edmund stared at the Dane, wondering if he was serious, then looked nervous when he saw that Ivar was not joking. The king opened his mouth, found he had nothing to say, and closed it again, then one of his tonsured monks murmured to him and he must have been trying to persuade the king that God was suggesting this ordeal in order to extend his church, and that a miracle would result, and the Danes would become Christians and we would all be friends and end up singing together on the high platform in heaven. The king did not look entirely convinced by this argument, if that was indeed what the monk was proposing, but the Danes wanted to attempt the miracle now and it was no longer up to Edmund to accept or refuse the trial.

  A dozen men shoved the monks and priests aside while more went outside to find bows and arrows. The king, trapped in his defense of God, was kneeling at the altar, praying as hard as any man has ever prayed. The Danes were grinning. I was enjoying it. I think I rather hoped to see a miracle, not because I was a Christian, but because I just wanted to see a miracle. Beocca had often told me about miracles, stressing that they were the real proof of Christianity’s truths, but I had never seen one. No one had ever walked on the water at Bebbanburg and no lepers were healed there and no angels had filled our night skies with blazing glory, but now, perhaps, I would see the power of God that Beocca had forever preached to me. Brida just wanted to see Edmund dead.

  “Are you ready?” Ivar demanded of the king.

  Edmund looked at his priests and monks and I wondered if he was about to suggest that one of them should replace him in this test of God’s power. Then he frowned and looked back to Ivar. “I will accept your proposal,” he said.

  “That we shoot arrows at you?”

  “That I remain king here.”

  “But you want to wash me first.”

  “We can dispense with that,” Edmund said.

  “No,” Ivar said. “You have claimed your god is all powerful, that he is the only god, so I want it proved. If you are right then all of us will be washed. Are we agreed?” This question was asked of the Danes, who roared their approval.

  “Not me,” Ravn said, “I won’t be washed.”

  “We will all be washed!” Ivar snarled, and I realized he truly was interested in the outcome of the test, more interested, indeed, than he was in making a quick and convenient peace with Edmund. All men need the support of their god and Ivar was trying to discover whether he had, all these years, been worshipping at the wrong shrine. “Are you wearing armor?” he asked Edmund.

  “No.”

  “Best to be sure,” Ubba intervened and glanced at the fatal painting. “Strip him,” he ordered. The king and the churchmen protested, but the Danes would not be denied and King Edmund was stripped stark naked. Brida enjoyed that. “He’s puny,” she said. Edmund, the butt of laughter now, did his best to look dignified. The priests and monks were on their knees, praying, while six archers took their stance a dozen paces from Edmund.

  “We are going to find out,” Ivar told us, stilling the laughter, “whether the English god is as powerful as our Danish gods. If he is, and if the king lives, then we shall become Christians, all of us!”

  “Not me,” Ravn said again, but quietly so that Ivar could not hear. “Tell me what happens, Uhtred.”

  It was soon told. Six arrows hit, the king screamed, blood spattered the altar, he fell down, he twitched like a gaffed salmon, and six more arrows thumped home. Edmund twitched some more, and the archers kept on shooting, though their aim was bad because they were half helpless with laughter, and they went on shooting until the king was as full of feathered shafts as a hedgehog has spikes. And he was quite dead by then. He was bloodied, his white skin redlaced, openmouthed, and dead. His god had failed him miserably. Nowadays, of course, that story is never told; instead children learn how brave Saint Edmund stood up to the Danes, demanded their conversion, and was murdered. So now he is a martyr and a saint, warbling happily in heaven, but the truth is that he was a fool and talked himself into martyrdom. The priests and monks wailed, so Ivar ordered them killed as well, then he decreed that Earl Godrim, one of his chiefs, would rule in East Anglia and that Halfdan would savage the country to quench the last sparks of resistance. Godrim and Halfdan would be given a third of the army to keep East Anglia quiet, while the rest of us would return to subdue the unrest in Northumbria. So now East Anglia was gone.

  And Wessex was the last kingdom of England.

  We returned to Northumbria, half rowing and half sailing theWindViper up the gentle coast, then rowing against the rivers’ currents as we traveled up the Humber, then the Ouse, until Eoferwic’s walls came into sight, and there we hauled the ship onto dry land so she would not rot through the winter. Ivar and Ubba returned with us, so that a whole fleet skimmed the river, oars dripping, beastless prows bearing branches of green oak to show we came home victorious. We brought home much treasure. The Danes set much store by treasure. Their men follow their leaders because they know they will be rewarded with silver, and in the taking of three of England’s four kingdoms the Danes had amassed a fortune that was shared among the men and some, a few, decided to take their money back home to Denmark. Most stayed, for the richest kingdom remained undefeated and men reckoned they would all become as wealthy as gods once Wessex fell.

  Ivar and Ubba had come to Eoferwic expecting trouble. They had their shields displayed on the flanks of their ships, but whatever unrest had disturbed Northumbria had not affected the city and King Egbert, who ruled at the pleasure of the Danes, sulkily denied there had been any rising at all. Archbishop Wulfhere said the same. “There is always banditry,” he declared loftily, “and perhaps you heard rumors of it?”

  “Or perhaps you are deaf,” Ivar snarled, and Ivar was right to be suspicious for, once it was known that the army had returned, messengers came from Ealdorman Ricsig of Dunholm. Dunholm was a great fortress on a high crag that was almost surrounded by the river Wiire, and the crag and the river made Dunholm almost as strong as Bebbanburg. It was ruled by Ricsig who had never drawn his sword against the Danes. When we attacked Eoferwic and my father was killed, Ricsig had claimed to be sick and his men had stayed home, but now he sent servants to tell Ivar that a band of Danes had been slaughtered at Gyruum. That was the site of a famous monastery where a man called Bede wrote a history of the English church that Beocca had always praised to me, saying that when I learned to read properly I could give myself the treat of reading it. I have yet to do so, but I have been to Gyruum and seen where the book was written for Ragnar was asked to take his men there and discover what had happened. It seemed six Danes, all of them masterless men, had gone to Gyruum and demanded to see the monaster
y’s treasury and, when the monks claimed to be penniless, the six had started killing, but the monks had fought back and, as there were over a score of monks, and as they were helped by some men from the town, they succeeded in killing the six Danes who had then been spitted on posts and left to rot on the foreshore. Thus far, as Ragnar admitted, the fault lay with the Danes, but the monks, encouraged by this slaughter, had marched west up the river Tine, and attacked a Danish settlement where there were only a few men, those too old or too sick to travel south with the army, and there they had raped and killed at least a score of women and children, proclaiming that this was now a holy war. More men had joined the makeshift army, but Ealdorman Ricsig, fearing the revenge of the Danes, had sent his own troops to disperse them. He had captured a good number of the rebels, including a dozen monks, who were now held at his fortress above the river at Dunholm. All this we heard from Ricsig’s messengers, then from folk who had survived the massacre, and one of those was a girl the same age as Ragnar’s daughter, and she said the monks had raped her one at a time, and afterward they had forcibly baptized her. She said there had been nuns present as well, women who had urged the men on and had taken part in the slaughter afterward. “Nests of vipers,” Ragnar said. I had never seen him so angry, not even when Sven had exposed himself to Thyra. We dug up some of the Danish dead and all were naked and all were blood spattered. They had all been tortured. A priest was found and made to tell us the names of the chief monasteries and nunneries in Northumbria. Gyruum was one, of course, and just across the river was a large nunnery, while to the south, where the Wiire met the sea, was a second monastery. The house at Streonshall was close to Eoferwic, and that held many nuns, while close to Bebbanburg, on the island that Beocca had always told me was sacred, was the monastery of Lindisfarena. There were many others, but Ragnar was content with the chief places, and he sent men to Ivar and Ubba suggesting that the nuns of Streonshall should be dispersed, and any found to have joined the revolt should be killed. Then he set about Gyruum. Every monk was killed, the buildings that were not made of stone were burned, the treasures, for they did indeed have silver and gold hidden beneath their church, were taken. I remember we discovered a great pile of writings, sheet upon sheet of parchments, all smothered in tight black writing, and I have no idea what the writings were, and now I never will, for they were all burned, and once Gyruum was no more we went south to the monastery at the mouth of the Wiire and we did the same there, and afterward crossed the Tine and obliterated the nunnery on the northern bank. The nuns there, led by their abbess, deliberately scarred their own faces. They knew we were coming and so, to deter rape, cut their cheeks and foreheads and so met us all bloody, screaming, and ugly. Why they did not run away I do not know, but instead they waited for us, cursed us, prayed for heaven’s revenge on us, and died. I never told Alfred that I took part in that famous harrowing of the northern houses. The tale is still told as evidence of Danish ferocity and untrustworthiness, indeed every English child is told the story of the nuns who cut their faces to the bone so that they would be too ugly to rape, though that did not work any more than King Edmund’s prayers had saved him from arrows. I remember one Easter listening to a sermon about the nuns, and it was all I could do not to interrupt and say that it had not happened as the priest described. The priest claimed that the Danes had promised that no monk or nun would ever be hurt in Northumbria, and that was not true, and he claimed that there was no cause for the massacres, which was equally false, and then he told a marvelous tale how the nuns had prayed and God had placed an invisible curtain at the nunnery gate, and the Danes had pushed against the curtain and could not pierce it, and I was wondering why, if the nuns had this invisible shield, they had bothered to scar themselves, but they must have known how the story would end, because the Danes were supposed to have fetched a score of small children from the nearby village and threatened to cut their throats unless the curtain was lifted, which it was.