The Last Kingdom (20 page)

“Wessex needs a strong man,” Guthrum said obscurely, “a man who understands how to govern.”

“Sounds like a husband,” Ravn said.

“We take their strongholds,” Guthrum said, “but we leave half their land untouched! Even Northumbria is only half garrisoned. Mercia has sent men to Wessex, and they’re supposed to be on our side. We win, Ravn, but we don’t finish the job.”

“And how do we do that?” Ravn asked.

“More men, more ships, more deaths.”

“Deaths?”

“Kill them all!” Guthrum said with a sudden vehemence. “Every last one! Not a Saxon alive.”

“Even the women?” Ravn asked.

“We could leave some young ones,” Guthrum said grudgingly, then scowled at me. “What are you looking at, boy?”

“Your bone, lord,” I said nodding at the gold-tipped bone hanging in his hair.

He touched the bone. “It’s one of my mother’s ribs,” he said. “She was a good woman, a wonderful woman, and she goes with me wherever I go. You could do worse, Ravn, than make a song for my mother. You knew her, didn’t you?”

“I did indeed,” Ravn said blandly. “I knew her well enough, Guthrum, to worry that I lack the poetic skills to make a song worthy of such an illustrious woman.”

The mockery flew straight past Guthrum the Unlucky. “You could try,” he said. “You could try, and I would pay much gold for a good song about her.”

He was mad, I thought, mad as an owl at midday, and then I forgot him because the army of Wessex was ahead, barring our road and offering battle.

The dragon banner of Wessex was flying on the summit of a long low hill that lay athwart our road. To reach Æbbanduna, which evidently lay a short way beyond the hill and was hidden by it, we would need to attack up the slope and across that ridge of open grassland, but to the north, where the hills fell away to the river Temes, there was a track along the river, which suggested we might skirt the enemy position. To stop us he would need to come down the hill and give battle on level ground.

Halfdan called the Danish leaders together and they talked for a long time, evidently disagreeing about what should be done. Some men wanted to attack uphill and scatter the enemy where they were, but others advised fighting the West Saxons in the flat river meadows, and in the end Earl Guthrum the Unlucky persuaded them to do both. That, of course, meant splitting our army into two, but even so I thought it was a clever idea. Ragnar, Guthrum, and the two earls Sidroc would go down to the lower ground, thus threatening to pass by the enemy-held hill, while Halfdan, with Harald and Bagseg, would stay on the high ground and advance toward the dragon banner on the ridge. That way the enemy might hesitate to attack Ragnar for fear that Halfdan’s troops would fall on their rear. Most likely, Ragnar said, the enemy would decide not to fight at all, but instead retreat to Æbbanduna where we could besiege them. “Better to have them penned in a fortress than roaming around,” he said cheerfully.

“Better still,” Ravn commented drily, “not to divide the army.”

“They’re only West Saxons,” Ragnar said dismissively.

It was already afternoon and, because it was winter, the day was short so there was not much time, though Ragnar thought there was more than enough daylight remaining to finish off Æthelred’s troops. Men touched their charms, kissed sword hilts, hefted shields; then we were marching down the hill, going off the chalk grasslands into the river valley. Once there, we were half hidden by the leafless trees, but now and again I could glimpse Halfdan’s men advancing along the hillcrests and I could see there were West Saxon troops waiting for them, which suggested that Guthrum’s plan was working and that we could march clear around the enemy’s northern flank. “What we do then,” Ragnar said, “is climb up behind them, and the bastards will be trapped. We’ll kill them all!”

“One of them has to stay alive,” Ravn said.

“One? Why?”

“To tell the tale, of course. Look for their poet. He’ll be handsome. Find him and let him live.”

Ragnar laughed. There were, I suppose, about eight hundred of us, slightly fewer than the contingent that had stayed with Halfdan, and the enemy army was probably slightly larger than our two forces combined, but we were all warriors and many of the West Saxon fyrd were farmers forced to war and so we saw nothing but victory.

Then, as our leading troops marched out of an oakwood, we saw the enemy had followed our example and divided their own army into two. One half was waiting on the hill for Halfdan while the other half had come to meet us.

Alfred led our opponents. I knew that because I could see Beocca’s red hair and, later on, I glimpsed Alfred’s long anxious face in the fighting. His brother, King Æthelred, had stayed on the heights where, instead of waiting for Halfdan to assault him, he was advancing to make his own attack. The Saxons, it seemed, were avid for battle.

So we gave it to them.

Our forces made shield wedges to attack their shield wall. We called on Odin, we howled our war cries, we charged, and the West Saxon line did not break, it did not buckle, but instead held fast and so the slaughterwork began.

Ravn told me time and again that destiny was everything. Fate rules. The three spinners sit at the foot of the tree of life and they make our lives and we are their playthings, and though we think we make our own choices, all our fates are in the spinners’ threads. Destiny is everything, and that day, though I did not know it, my destiny was spun.
Wyrd bi
ful a
ræd,
fate is unstoppable.

What is there to say of the battle that the West Saxons said happened at a place they called Æsc’s Hill? I assume Æsc was the thegn who had once owned the land, and his fields received a rich tilth of blood and bone that day. The poets could fill a thousand lines telling what happened, but battle is battle. Men die. In the shield wall it is sweat, terror, cramp, half blows, full blows, screaming, and cruel death.

There were really two battles at Æsc’s Hill, the one above and the other below, and the deaths came swiftly. Harald and Bagseg died, Sidroc the Older watched his son die and then was cut down himself, and with him died Earl Osbern and Earl Fraena, and so many other good warriors, and the Christian priests were calling on their God to give the West Saxon swords strength, and that day Odin was sleeping and the Christian God was awake.

We were driven back. On top of the hill and in the valley we were driven back, and it was only the weariness of the enemy that stopped a full slaughter and let our survivors retreat from the fight, leaving their companions behind in their death blood. Toki was one of them. The shipmaster, so full of sword skill, died in the ditch behind which Alfred’s shield wall had waited for us. Ragnar, blood all over his face and with enemy’s blood matted in his unbound hair, could not believe it. The West Saxons were jeering.

The West Saxons had fought like fiends, like men inspired, like men who know their whole future rested on a winter afternoon’s work, and they had beaten us.

Destiny is all. We were defeated and went back to Readingum.

T
hese days, whenever Englishmen talk of the battle of Æsc’s Hill, they speak of God giving the West Saxons the victory because King Æthelred and his brother Alfred were praying when the Danes appeared.

Maybe they are right. I can well believe that Alfred was praying, but it helped that he chose his position well. His shield wall was just beyond a deep, winter-flooded ditch and the Danes had to fight their way up from that mud-bottomed trough and they died as they came, and men who would rather have been farmers than warriors beat off an assault of sword Danes, and Alfred led the farmers, encouraged them, told them they could win, and put his faith in God. I think the ditch was the reason that he won, but he would doubtless have said that God dug the ditch.

Halfdan lost as well. He was attacking uphill, climbing a smooth gentle slope, but it was late in the day and the sun was in his men’s eyes, or so they said afterward, and King Æthelred, like Alfred, encouraged his men so well that they launched a howling downhill attack that bit deep into Halfdan’s ranks that became discouraged when they saw the lower army retreating from Alfred’s stubborn defense. There were no angels with fiery swords present, despite what the priests now say. At least I saw none. There was a waterlogged ditch, there was a battle, the Danes lost, and destiny changed.

I did not know the Danes could lose, but at fourteen years old I learned that lesson, and for the first time I heard Saxon cheers and jeers, and something hidden in my soul stirred.

And we went back to Readingum.

There was plenty more fighting as winter turned to spring and spring to summer. New Danes came with the new year, and our ranks were thus restored, and we won all our subsequent encounters with the West Saxons, twice fighting them at Basengas in Hamptonscir, then at Mereton, which was in Wiltunscir and thus deep inside their territory, and again in Wiltunscir at Wiltun, and each time we won, which meant we held the battlefield at day’s end, but at none of those clashes did we destroy the enemy. Instead we wore each other out, fought each other to a bloody standstill, and as summer caressed the land we were no nearer conquering Wessex than we had been at Yule.

But we did manage to kill King Æthelred. That happened at Wiltun where the king received a deep ax wound to his left shoulder and, though he was hurried from the field, and though priests and monks prayed over his sickbed, and though cunning men treated him with herbs and leeches, he died after a few days.

And he left an heir, an ætheling, Æthelwold. He was Prince Æthelwold, eldest son of Æthelred, but he was not old enough to be his own master for, like me, he was only fourteen, yet even so some men proclaimed his right to be named the King of Wessex, but Alfred had far more powerful friends and he deployed the legend of the pope having invested him as the future king. The legend must have worked its magic for, sure enough, at the meeting of the Wessex witan, which was the assembly of nobles, bishops, and powerful men, Alfred was acclaimed as the new king. Perhaps the witan had no choice. Wessex, after all, was desperately fighting off Halfdan’s forces and it would have been a bad time to make a boy into a king. Wessex needed a leader and so the witan chose Alfred, and Æthelwold and his younger brother were whisked off to an abbey where they were told to get on with their lessons. “Alfred should have murdered the little bastards,” Ragnar told me cheerfully, and he was probably right.

So Alfred, the youngest of six brothers, was now the King of Wessex. The year was 871. I did not know it then, but Alfred’s wife had just given birth to a daughter he named Æthelflaed. Æthelflaed was fourteen years younger than me and even if I had known of her birth I would have dismissed it as unimportant. But destiny is all. The spinners work and we do their will whether we will it or not.

Alfred’s first act as king, other than to bury his brother and put his nephews away in a monastery and have himself crowned and go to church a hundred times and weary God’s ears with unceasing prayers, was to send messengers to Halfdan proposing a conference. He wanted peace, it seemed, and as it was midsummer and we were no nearer to victory than we had been at midwinter, Halfdan agreed to the meeting, and so, with his army’s leaders and a bodyguard of picked men, he went to Ba
um.

I went too, with Ragnar, Ravn, and Brida. Rorik, still sick, stayed in Readingum and I was sorry he did not see Ba
um for, though it was only a small town, it was almost as marvelous as Lundene. There was a bath in the town’s center, not a small tub, but an enormous building with pillars and a crumbling roof above a great stone hollow that was filled with hot water. The water came from the underworld and Ragnar was certain that it was heated by the forges of the dwarves. The bath, of course, had been built by the Romans, as had all the other extraordinary buildings in Ba
um’s valley. Not many men wanted to get into the bath because they feared water even though they loved their ships, but Brida and I went in and I discovered she could swim like a fish. I clung to the edge and marveled at the strange experience of having hot water all over my naked skin.

Beocca found us there. The center of Ba
um was covered by a truce, which meant no man could carry weapons there, and West Saxons and Danes mixed amicably enough in the streets so there was nothing to stop Beocca searching for me. He came to the bath with two other priests, both gloomy-looking men with running noses, and they watched as Beocca leaned down to me. “I saw you come in here,” he said. Then he noticed Brida who was swimming underwater, her long black hair streaming. She reared up and he could not miss her small breasts and he recoiled as though she were the devil’s handmaid. “She’s a girl, Uhtred!”

“I know,” I said.

“Naked!”

“God is good,” I said.

He stepped forward to slap me, but I pushed myself away from the edge of the bath and he nearly fell in. The other two priests were staring at Brida. God knows why. They probably had wives, but priests, I have found, get very excited about women. So do warriors, but we do not shake like aspens just because a girl shows us her tits. Beocca tried to ignore her, though that was difficult because Brida swam up behind me and put her arms around my waist. “You must slip away,” Beocca whispered to me.

“Slip away?”

“From the pagans! Come to our quarters. We’ll hide you.”

“Who is he?” Brida asked me. She spoke in Danish.

“He was a priest I knew at home,” I said.

“Ugly, isn’t he?” she said.

“You have to come,” Beocca hissed at me. “We need you!”

“You need me?”

He leaned even closer. “There’s unrest in Northumbria, Uhtred. You must have heard what happened.” He paused to make the sign of the cross. “All those monks and nuns slaughtered! They were murdered! A terrible thing, Uhtred, but God will not be mocked. There is to be a rising in Northumbria and Alfred will encourage it. If we can say that Uhtred of Bebbanburg is on our side it will help!”

I doubted it would help at all. I was fourteen and hardly old enough to inspire men into making suicidal attacks on Danish strongholds. “She’s not a Dane,” I told Beocca, who I did not think would have said these things if he believed Brida could understand them. “She’s from East Anglia.”

He stared at her. “East Anglia?”

I nodded, then let mischief have its way. “She’s the niece of King Edmund,” I lied, and Brida giggled and ran a hand down my body to try and make me laugh.

Beocca made the sign of the cross again. “Poor man! A martyr! Poor girl.” Then he frowned. “But…” he began, then stopped, quite incapable of understanding why the dreaded Danes allowed two of their prisoners to frolic naked in a bath of hot water. Then he closed his squinty eyes because he saw where Brida’s hand had come to rest. “We must get you both out of here,” he said urgently, “to a place where you can learn God’s ways.”

“I should like that,” I said and Brida squeezed so hard that I almost cried out in pain.

“Our quarters are to the south of here,” Beocca said, “across the river and on top of the hill. Go there, Uhtred, and we shall take you away. Both of you.”

Of course I did no such thing. I told Ragnar who laughed at my invention that Brida was King Edmund’s niece, and shrugged at the news that there would be an uprising in Northumbria. “There are always rumors of revolts,” he said, “and they all end the same way.”

“He was very certain,” I said.

“All it means is that they’ve sent monks to stir up trouble. I doubt it will amount to much. Anyway, once we’ve settled Alfred we can go back. Go home, eh?”

But settling with Alfred was not as easy as Halfdan or Ragnar had supposed. It was true that Alfred was the supplicant and that he wanted peace because the Danish forces had been raiding deep into Wessex, but he was not ready to collapse as Burghred had yielded in Mercia. When Halfdan proposed that Alfred stay king, but that the Danes occupy the chief West Saxon forts, Alfred threatened to walk out and continue the war. “You insult me,” he said calmly. “If you wish to take the fortresses, then come and take them.”

“We will,” Halfdan threatened and Alfred merely shrugged as if to say the Danes were welcome to try, but Halfdan knew, as all the Danes knew, that their campaign had failed. It was true that we had scoured large swaths of Wessex, we had taken much treasure, slaughtered or captured livestock, burned mills and homes and churches, but the price had been high. Many of our best men were dead or else so badly wounded that they would be forced to live off their lords’ charity for the rest of their days. We had also failed to take a single West Saxon fortress, which meant that when winter came we would be forced to withdraw to the safety of Lundene or Mercia.

Yet if the Danes were exhausted by the campaign, so were the West Saxons. They had also lost many of their best men, they had lost treasure, and Alfred was worried that the Britons, the ancient enemy who had been defeated by his ancestors, might flood out of their fastnesses in Wales and Cornwalum. Yet Alfred would not succumb to his fears, he would not meekly give in to Halfdan’s demands, though he knew he must meet some of them, and so the bargaining went on for a week and I was surprised by Alfred’s stubbornness.

He was not an impressive man to look at. There was something spindly about him, and his long face had a weak cast, but that was a deception. He never smiled as he faced Halfdan, he rarely took those clever brown eyes off his enemy’s face, he pressed his point tediously, and he was always calm, never raising his voice even when the Danes were screaming at him. “What we want,” he explained again and again, “is peace. You need it, and it is my duty to give it to my country. So you will leave my country.” His priests, Beocca among them, wrote down every word, filling precious sheets of parchment with endless lines of script. They must have used every drop of ink in Wessex to record that meeting and I doubt anyone ever read the whole record.