The Last Kingdom Page 24

  “The best in the world, lord.”

  He smiled at that, recognizing a boy’s misplaced enthusiasm. “So you went back to Earl Ragnar?”

  I nodded this time, but said nothing.

  “Who did not hold you prisoner, Uhtred,” he said sternly. “Indeed he never did, did he? He treated you like a son.”

  “I loved him,” I blurted out.

  He stared at me and I became uncomfortable under his gaze. He had very light eyes that gave you the sense of being judged. “Yet in Eoferwic,” Alfred went on mildly, “they are saying you killed him.”

  Now it was my time to stare at him. I was angry, confused, astonished, and surprised, so confused that I did not know what to say. But why was I so surprised? What else would Kjartan claim? Except, I thought, Kjartan must have thought me dead, or I hoped he thought me dead.

  “They lie,” Brida said flatly.

  “Do they?” Alfred asked me, still in a mild voice.

  “They lie,” I said angrily.

  “I never doubted it,” he said. He put down his quills and knife and leaned over to the heap of stiff parchments that rested on his pile of books and sifted through them until he found the one he was looking for. He read for a few moments. “Kjartan? Is that how it is pronounced?”

  “Kjartan,” I corrected him, making the j sound like a y.

  “Earl Kjartan now,” Alfred said, “and reckoned to be a great lord. Owner of four ships.”

  “That’s all written down?” I asked.

  “Whatever I discover of my enemies is written down,” Alfred said, “which is why you are here. To tell me more. Did you know Ivar the Boneless is dead?”

  My hand instinctively went to Thor’s hammer, which I wore under my jerkin. “No. Dead?” It astonished me. Such was my awe of Ivar that I suppose I had thought he would live forever, but Alfred spoke the truth. Ivar the Boneless was dead.

  “He was killed fighting against the Irish,” Alfred said, “and Ragnar’s son has returned to Northumbria with his men. Will he fight Kjartan?”

  “If he knows Kjartan killed his father,” I said, “he’ll disembowel him.”

  “Earl Kjartan has sworn an oath of innocence in the matter,” Alfred said.

  “Then he lies.”

  “He’s a Dane,” Alfred said, “and the truth is not in them.” He gave me a sharp look, doubtless for the many lies I had fed him over the years. He stood then and paced the small room. He had said that I was there to tell him about the Danes, but in the next few moments he was the one who did the telling. King Burghred of Mercia, he said, was tired of his Danish overlords and had decided to flee to Rome.

  “Rome?”

  “I was taken there twice as a child,” he said, “and I remember the city as a very untidy place”—that was said very sternly—“but a man feels close to God there, so it is a good place to pray. Burghred is a weak man, but he did his small best to alleviate Danish rule, and once he is gone then we can expect the Danes to fill his land. They will be on our frontier. They will be in Cirrenceastre.” He looked at me. “Kjartan knows you’re alive.”

  “He does?”

  “Of course he does. The Danes have spies, just as we do.” And Alfred’s spies, I realized, had to be efficient for he knew so much. “Does Kjartan care about your life?” he went on. “If you tell the truth about Ragnar’s death, Uhtred, then he does care because you can contradict his lies and if Ragnar learns that truth from you then Kjartan will certainly fear for his life. It is in Kjartan’s interest, therefore, to kill you. I tell you this only so that you may consider whether you wish to return to Cirrenceastre where the Danes have,” he paused, “influence. You will be safer in Wessex, but how long will Wessex last?” He evidently did not expect an answer, but kept pacing. “Ubba has sent men to Mercia, which suggests he will follow. Have you met Ubba?”

  “Many times.”

  “Tell me of him.”

  I told him what I knew, told him that Ubba was a great warrior, though very superstitious, and that intrigued Alfred who wanted to know all about Storri the sorcerer and about the runesticks, and I told him how Ubba never picked battles for the joy of fighting, but only when the runes said he could win, but that once he fought he did so with a terrible savagery. Alfred wrote it all down, then asked if I had met Halfdan, the youngest brother, and I said I had, but very briefly.

  “Halfdan speaks of avenging Ivar,” Alfred said, “so it’s possible he will not come back to Wessex. Not soon, anyway. But even with Half-dan in Ireland there will be plenty of pagans left to attack us.” He explained how he had anticipated an attack this year, but the Danes had been disorganized and he did not expect that to last. “They will come next year,” he said, “and we think Ubba will lead them.”

  “Or Guthrum,” I said.

  “I had not forgotten him. He is in East Anglia now.” He glanced reproachfully at Brida, remembering her tales of Edmund. Brida, quite unworried, just watched him with half-closed eyes. He looked back to me. “What do you know of Guthrum?”

  Again I talked and again he wrote. He was intrigued about the bone in Guthrum’s hair, and shuddered when I repeated Guthrum’s insistence that every Englishman be killed. “A harder job than he thinks,” Alfred said drily. He laid the pen down and began pacing again. “There are different kinds of men,” he said, “and some are to be more feared than others. I feared Ivar the Boneless, for he was cold and thought carefully. Ubba? I don’t know, but I suspect he is dangerous. Halfdan? A brave fool, but with no thoughts in his head. Guthrum? He is the least to be feared.”

  “The least?” I sounded dubious. Guthrum might be called the Unlucky, but he was a considerable chieftain and led a large force of warriors.

  “He thinks with his heart, Uhtred,” Alfred said, “not his head. You can change a man’s heart, but not his head.” I remember staring at Alfred then, thinking that he spouted foolishness like a horse pissing, but he was right. Or almost right because he tried to change me, but never succeeded.

  A bee drifted through the door, Nihtgenga snapped impotently at it, and the bee droned out again. “But Guthrum will attack us?” Alfred asked.

  “He wants to split you,” I said. “One army by land, another by sea, and the Britons from Wales.”

  Alfred looked at me gravely. “How do you know that?”

  So I told him about Guthrum’s visit to Ragnar and the long conversation that I had witnessed, and Alfred’s pen scratched, little flecks of ink spattering from the quill at rough spots on the parchment. “What this suggests,” he spoke as he wrote, “is that Ubba will come from Mercia by land and Guthrum by sea from East Anglia.” He was wrong about that, but it seemed likely at the time. “How many ships can Guthrum bring?”

  I had no idea. “Seventy?” I suggested. “A hundred?”

  “Far more than that,” Alfred said severely, “and I cannot build even twenty ships to oppose them. Have you sailed, Uhtred?”

  “Many times.”

  “With the Danes?” He asked pedantically.

  “With the Danes,” I confirmed.

  “What I would like you to do,” he said, but at that moment a bell tolled somewhere in the palace and he immediately broke off from what he was saying. “Prayers,” he said, putting down his quill. “You will come.” It was not a question, but a command.

  “I have things to do,” I said, waited a heartbeat, “lord.”

  He blinked at me in surprise for he was not used to men opposing his wishes, especially when it came to saying prayers, but I kept a stubborn face and he did not force the issue. There was the slap of sandaled feet on the paved path outside his chamber and he dismissed us as he hurried to join the monks going to their service. A moment later the drone of a chant began, and Brida and I abandoned the palace, going into the town where we discovered a tavern that sold decent ale. I had been offered none by Alfred. The folk there were suspicious of us, partly because of the arm rings with their Danish runes, and partly because of our strange accents
, mine from the north and Brida’s from the east, but a sliver of our silver was weighed and trusted, and the wary atmosphere subsided when Father Beocca came in, saw us, and raised his inky hands in welcome. “I have been searching high and low for you,” he said. “Alfred wanted you.”

  “He wanted to pray,” I said.

  “He would have you eat with him.”

  I drank some ale. “If I live to be a hundred, father,” I began.

  “I pray you live longer than that,” Beocca said. “I pray you live as long as Methuselah.”

  I wondered who that was. “If I live to be a hundred,” I said again, “I hope never to eat with Alfred again.”

  He shook his head sadly, but agreed to sit with us and take a pot of ale. He reached over and pulled at the leather thong half hidden by my jerkin and so revealed the hammer. He tutted. “You lied to me, Uhtred,” he said sadly. “When you ran away from Father Willibald we made enquiries. You were never a prisoner! You were treated as a son!”

  “I was,” I agreed.

  “But why did you not come to us then? Why did you stay with the Danes?”

  I smiled. “What would I have learned here?” I asked. He began to answer, but I stilled him. “You would have made me a scholar, father,” I said, “and the Danes made me a warrior. And you will need warriors when they come back.”

  Beocca understood that, but he was still sad. He looked at Brida. “And you, young lady, I hope you did not lie?”

  “I always tell the truth, father,” she said in a small voice, “always.”

  “That is good,” he said, then reached over again to hide my amulet. “Are you a Christian, Uhtred?” he asked.

  “You baptized me yourself, father,” I said evasively.

  “We will not defeat the Danes unless we hold the faith,” he said earnestly, then smiled, “but will you do what Alfred wants?”

  “I don’t know what he wants. He ran off to wear out his knees before he could tell me.”

  “He wants you to serve on one of the ships he’s building,” he said. I just gaped at him. “We’re building ships, Uhtred,” Beocca went on enthusiastically, “ships to fight the Danes, but our sailors are not fighters. They’re, well, sailors! And they’re fishermen, of course, and traders, but we need men who can teach them what the Danes do. Their ships raid our shore incessantly. Two ships come? Three ships? Sometimes more. They land, burn, kill, take slaves, and vanish. But with ships we can fight them.” He punched his withered left hand with his right and winced with the pain. “That’s what Alfred wants.”

  I glanced at Brida who gave a small shrug as if to say that she thought Beocca was telling the truth.

  I thought of the two Æthelreds, younger and older, and their dislike of me. I remembered the joy of a ship on the seas, of the wind tearing at the rigging, of the oars bending and flashing back the sun, of the songs of the rowers, of the heartbeat of the steering oar, of the seethe of the long green water against the hull. “Of course I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Praise God,” Beocca said. And why not?

  I met Æthelflaed before I left Wintanceaster. She was three or four years old, I suppose, and full of words. She had bright gold hair. She was playing in the garden outside Alfred’s study and I remember she had a rag doll and Alfred played with her and Ælswith worried he was making her too excited. I remember her laugh. She never lost that laugh. Alfred was good with her for he loved his children. Most of the time he was solemn, pious, and very self-disciplined, but with small children he became playful and I almost liked him as he teased Æthelflaed by hiding her rag doll behind his back. I also remember how Æthelflaed ran over to Nihtgenga and fondled him and Ælswith called her back. “Dirty dog,” she told her daughter, “you’ll get fleas or worse. Come here!” She gave Brida a very sour look and muttered, “Scrætte!” That means prostitute and Brida pretended not to have heard, as did Alfred. Ælswith ignored me, but I did not mind because Alfred had summoned a palace slave who laid a helmet and a mail coat on the grass. “For you, Uhtred,” Alfred said.

  The helmet was bright iron, dented on the crown by the blow of a weapon, polished with sand and vinegar, and with a faceplate in which two eyeholes stared like the pits of a skull. The mail was good, though it had been pierced by a spear or sword where the owner’s heart had been, but it had been expertly repaired by a good smith and it was worth many pieces of silver. “They were both taken from a Dane at Æsc’s Hill,” Alfred told me. Ælswith watched disapprovingly.

  “Lord,” I said, and went on one knee and kissed his hand.

  “A year’s service,” he said, “is all I ask of you.”

  “You have it, lord,” I said, and sealed that promise with another kiss on his ink-stained knuckles.

  I was dazzled. The two pieces of armor were rare and valuable, and I had done nothing to deserve such generosity, unless to behave boorishly is to deserve favors. And Alfred had been generous, though a lord should be generous. That is what a lord is, a giver of rings, and a lord who does not distribute wealth is a lord who will lose the allegiance of his men, yet even so I had not earned the gifts, though I was grateful for them. I was dazzled by them and for a moment I thought Alfred a great and good and admirable man.

  I should have thought a moment longer. He was generous, of course, but Alfred, unlike his wife, was never grudging with gifts, but why give such valuable armor to a half-fledged youth? Because I was useful to him. Not very useful, but still of use. Alfred sometimes played chess, a game for which I have small patience, but in chess there are pieces of great value and pieces of little worth, and I was one of those. The pieces of great value were the lords of Mercia who, if he could bind them to him, would help Wessex fight the Danes, but he was already looking beyond Mercia into East Anglia and Northumbria and he had no Northumbrian lords in exile except me, and he foresaw a time when he would need a Northumbrian to persuade the northern folk to accept a southern king. If I had been really valuable, if I could have brought him the allegiance of folk nearer his frontier, then he would have given me a noble West Saxon wife, for a woman of high birth is the greatest gift a lord can bestow, but a helmet and a coat of mail were sufficient for the distant idea of Northumbria. I doubt he thought I could deliver that country to him, but he did see that one day I might be useful in its delivery and so he bound me to him with gifts and made the bonds acceptable with flattery. “None of my men has fought on shipboard,” he told me, “so they must learn. You might be young, Uhtred, but you have experience which means you know more than they do. So go and teach them.”

  Me? Know more than his men? I had sailed in Wind-Viper, that was all, but I had never fought from a ship, though I was not going to tell Alfred that. Instead I accepted his gifts and went south to the coast, and thus he had tucked away a pawn that might one day be useful. To Alfred, of course, the most valuable pieces on the board were his bishops who were supposed to pray the Danes out of England, and no bishop ever went unfed in Wessex, but I could not complain for I had a coat of mail, a helmet of iron, and looked like a warrior. Alfred loaned us horses for our journey and he sent Father Willibald with us, not as a guardian this time, but because he insisted that his new ships’ crews must have a priest to look after their spiritual needs. Poor Willibald. He used to get sick as a dog every time a ripple touched a ship, but he never abandoned his responsibilities, especially toward me. If prayers could make a man into a Christian then I would be a saint ten times over by now.

  Destiny is all. And now, looking back, I see the pattern of my life’s journey. It began in Bebbanburg and took me south, ever southward, until I reached the farthest coast of England and could go no farther and still hear my own language. That was my childhood’s journey. As a man I have gone the other way, ever northward, carrying sword and spear and ax to clear the path back to where I began. Destiny. The spinners favor me, or at least they have spared me, and for a time they made me a sailor.

  I took my mail coat and helmet in the year 874, the same yea
r that King Burghred fled to Rome, and Alfred expected Guthrum to come in the following spring, but he did not, nor in the summer, and so Wessex was spared an invasion in 875. Guthrum should have come, but he was a cautious man, ever expecting the worst, and he spent a full eighteen months raising the greatest army of Danes that had ever been seen in England. It dwarfed the Great Army that had marched to Readingum, and it was an army that should have finished Wessex and granted Guthrum’s dream of slaughtering the last Englishman in England. Guthrum’s host did come in time and when that time came the three spinners cut England’s threads one by one until she dangled by a wisp, but that story must wait and I mention it now only to explain why we were given time to prepare ourselves.

  And I was given to Heahengel. So help me, that was the ship’s name. It means Archangel. She was not mine, of course. She had a shipmaster called Werferth who had commanded a tubby boat that had traded across the sea before he was persuaded to steer Heahengel, and her warriors were led by a grim old beast called Leofric. And me? I was the turd in the butter churn.

  I was not needed. All Alfred’s flattering words about me teaching his sailors how to fight were just that, mere words. But he had persuaded me to join his fleet, and I had promised him a year, and here I was in Hamtun, which was a fine port at the head of a long arm of the sea. Alfred had ordered twelve ships made, and their maker was a shipwright who had been an oarsman on a Danish boat before escaping in Frankia and making his way back to England. There was not much about ship fighting that he did not know, and nothing I could teach anyone, but ship fighting is a very simple affair. A ship is a scrap of land afloat. So a ship fight is a land fight at sea. Bang your boat alongside the enemy, make a shield wall, and kill the other crew. But our shipwright, who was a cunning man, had worked out that a larger ship gave its crew an advantage because it could hold more men and its sides, being higher, would serve as a wall, and so he had built twelve big ships, which at first looked odd to me for they had no beast heads at their prows or sterns, though they did all have crucifixes nailed to their masts. The whole fleet was commanded by Ealdorman Hacca, who was brother to the ealdorman of Hamptonscir, and the only thing he said when I arrived was to advise me to wrap my mail coat in an oiled sack so it would not rust. After that he gave me to Leofric.