The Last Kingdom (25 page)

I did fight well, that is no lie, but I had spent my growing years dreaming of little else, and I was young, and the young are reckless in battle, and I was strong and quick, and the enemy were tired. We left their severed heads on the bridge parapets as a greeting for other Britons coming to visit their lost lands. Then we rode south to meet Æthelred who was doubtless disappointed to find me alive and still hungry, but he accepted Tatwine’s verdict that I could be useful as a fighter.

Not that there would be much battle, except against outlaws and cattle thieves. Æthelred would have liked to fight the Danes because he fretted under their rule, but he feared their revenge and so took care not to offend them. That was easy enough for Danish rule was light in our part of Mercia, but every few weeks some Danes would come to Cirrenceastre and demand cattle or food or silver and he had little choice but to pay. In truth he did not look north to the impotent King Burghred as his lord, but south to Wessex, and had I possessed any intelligence in those days I would have understood that Alfred was extending his influence over those southern parts of Mercia. The influence was not obvious, no West Saxon soldiers patrolled the country, but Alfred’s messengers were forever riding and talking to the chief men, persuading them to bring their warriors south if the Danes attacked Wessex again.

I should have been wary of those West Saxon envoys, but I was too caught up in the intrigues of Æthelred’s household to pay them any notice. The ealdorman did not like me much, but his eldest son, also called Æthelred, detested me. He was a year younger than I, but very conscious of his dignity and a great hater of the Danes. He was also a great hater of Brida, mainly because he tried to hump her and got a knee in the groin for his trouble, and after that she was put to work in Ealdorman Æthelred’s kitchens and she warned me, the very first day, not to touch the gruel. I did not, but the rest of the table all suffered from liquid bowels for the next two days thanks to the elder-berries and iris root she had added to the pot. The younger Æthelred and I were forever quarreling, though he was more careful after I beat him with my fists the day I found him whipping Brida’s dog.

I was a nuisance to my uncle. I was too young, too big, too loud, too proud, too undisciplined, but I was also a family member and a lord, and so Ealdorman Æthelred endured me and was happy to let me chase Welsh raiders with Tatwine. We almost always failed to catch them.

I came back from one such pursuit late at night and let a servant rub down the horse while I went to find food and instead, of all people, discovered Father Willibald in the hall where he was sitting close to the embers of the fire. I did not recognize him at first, nor did he know me when I walked in all sweaty with a leather coat, long boots, a shield, and two swords. I just saw a figure by the fire. “Anything to eat there?” I asked, hoping I would not have to light a tallow candle and grope through the servants sleeping in the kitchen.

“Uhtred,” he said, and I turned and peered through the gloom. Then he whistled like a blackbird and I recognized him. “Is that Brida with you?” the young priest asked.

She was also in leather, with a Welsh sword strapped to her waist. Nihtgenga ran to Willibald, whom he had never met, and allowed himself to be stroked. Tatwine and the other warriors all tramped in, but Willibald ignored them. “I hope you’re well, Uhtred.”

“I’m well, father,” I said, “and you?”

“I’m very well,” he said.

He smiled, obviously wanting me to ask why he had come to Æthelred’s hall, but I pretended to be uninterested. “You didn’t get into trouble for losing us?” I asked him instead.

“The Lady Ælswith was very angry,” he admitted, “but Alfred seemed not to mind. He did chide Father Beocca, though.”

“Beocca? Why?”

“Because Beocca had persuaded him you wanted to escape the Danes, and Beocca was wrong. Still, no harm done.” He smiled. “And now Alfred has sent me to find you.”

I squatted close to him. It was late summer, but the night was surprisingly chilly so I threw another log onto the fire so that sparks flew up and a puff of smoke drifted into the high beams. “Alfred sent you,” I said flatly. “He still wants to teach me to read?”

“He wants to see you, lord.”

I looked at him suspiciously. I called myself a lord, and so I was by birthright, but I was well imbued with the Danish idea that lordship was earned, not given, and I had not earned it yet. Still, Willibald was showing respect. “Why does he want to see me?” I asked.

“He would talk with you,” Willibald said, “and when the talk is done you are free to come back here or, indeed, go anywhere else you wish.”

Brida brought me some hard bread and cheese. I ate, thinking. “What does he want to talk to me about?” I asked Willibald. “God?”

The priest sighed. “Alfred has been king for two years, Uhtred, and in those years he has had only two things on his mind. God and the Danes, but I think he knows you cannot help him with the first.” I smiled. Æthelred’s hounds had woken as Tatwine and his men settled on the high platforms where they would sleep. One of the hounds came to me, hoping for food, and I stroked his rough fur and I thought how Ragnar had loved his hounds. Ragnar was in Valhalla now, feasting and roaring and fighting and whoring and drinking, and I hoped there were hounds in the Northmen’s heaven, and boars the size of oxen, and spears sharp as razors. “There is only one condition attached to your journey,” Willibald went on, “and that is that Brida is not to come.”

“Brida’s not to come, eh?” I repeated.

“The Lady Ælswith insists on it,” Willibald said.

“Insists?”

“She has a son now,” Willibald said. “God be praised, a fine boy called Edward.”

“If I was Alfred,” I said, “I’d keep her busy, too.”

Willibald smiled. “So will you come?”

I touched Brida, who had settled beside me. “We’ll come,” I promised him, and Willibald shook his head at my obstinacy, but did not try to persuade me to leave Brida behind. Why did I go? Because I was bored. Because my cousin Æthelred disliked me. Because Willibald’s words had suggested that Alfred did not want me to become a scholar, but a warrior. I went because fate determines our lives.

We left in the morning. It was a late summer’s day, a soft rain falling on trees heavy with leaf. At first we rode through Æthelred’s fields, thick with rye and barley and loud with the rattling noise of corncrakes, but after a few miles we were in the wasteland that was the frontier region between Wessex and Mercia. There had been a time when these fields were fertile, when the villages were full and sheep roamed the higher hills, but the Danes had ravaged the area in the summer after their defeat at Æsc’s Hill, and few men had come back to settle the land. Alfred, I knew, wanted folk to come here to plant crops and rear cattle, but the Danes had threatened to kill any man who used the land for they knew as well as Alfred that such men would look to Wessex for protection, that they would become West Saxons and increase the strength of Wessex, and Wessex, as far as the Danes were concerned, existed only because they had yet to take it.

Yet that land was not entirely deserted. A few folk still lived in the villages, and the woods were full of outlaws. We saw none, and that was good for we still had a fair amount of Ragnar’s hoard that Brida carried. Each coin was now wrapped in a scrap of rag so that the frayed leather bag did not clink as she moved.

By day’s end we were well south of that region and into Wessex and the fields were lush again and the villages full. No wonder the Danes yearned for this land.

Alfred was at Wintanceaster, which was the West Saxon capital and a fine town in a rich countryside. The Romans had made Wintanceaster, of course, and Alfred’s palace was mostly Roman, though his father had added a great hall with beautifully carved beams, and Alfred was building a church that was even bigger than the hall, making its walls from stone that were covered with a spiderweb of timber scaffolding when I arrived. There was a market beside the new building and I remember thinking how odd it was to see so many folk without a single Dane among them. The Danes looked like us, but when Danes walked through a market in northern England the crowds parted, men bowed, and there was a hint of fear. None here. Women haggled over apples and bread and cheese and fish, and the only language I heard was the raw accents of Wessex.

Brida and I were given quarters in the Roman part of the palace. No one tried to part us this time. We had a small room, lime-washed, with a straw mattress, and Willibald said we should wait there, and we did until we got bored with waiting, after which we explored the palace, finding it full of priests and monks. They looked at us strangely, for both of us wore arm rings cut with Danish runes. I was a fool in those days, a clumsy fool, and did not have the courtesy to take the arm rings off. True, some English wore them, especially the warriors, but not in Alfred’s palace. There were plenty of warriors in his household, many of them the great ealdormen who were Alfred’s courtiers, led his retainers, and were rewarded by land, but such men were far outnumbered by priests, and only a handful of men, the trusted bodyguard of the king’s household, were permitted to carry weapons in the palace. In truth it was more like a monastery than a king’s court. In one room there were a dozen monks copying books, their pens scratching busily, and there were three chapels, one of them beside a courtyard that was full of flowers. It was beautiful, that courtyard, buzzing with bees and thick with fragrance. Nihtgenga was just pissing on one of the flowering bushes when a voice spoke behind us. “The Romans made the courtyard.”

I turned and saw Alfred. I went on one knee, as a man should when he sees a king, and he waved me up. He was wearing woolen breeches, long boots, and a simple linen shirt, and he had no escort, neither guard nor priest. His right sleeve was ink stained. “You are welcome, Uhtred,” he said.

“Thank you, lord,” I said, wondering where his entourage was. I had never seen him without a slew of priests within fawning distance, but he was quite alone that day.

“And Brida,” he said, “is that your dog?”

“He is,” she said defiantly.

“He looks a fine beast. Come.” He ushered us through a door into what was evidently his own private chamber. It had a tall desk at which he could stand and write. The desk had four candleholders, though as it was daylight the candles were not lit. A small table held a bowl of water so he could wash the ink off his hands. There was a couch covered in sheepskins, a stool on which were piled six books and a sheaf of parchments, and a low altar on which was an ivory crucifix and two jeweled reliquaries. The remains of a meal were on the window ledge. He moved the plates, bent to kiss the altar, then sat on the ledge and began sharpening some quills for writing. “It is kind of you to come,” he said mildly. “I was going to talk with you after supper tonight, but I saw you in the garden, so thought we could talk now.” He smiled and I, lout that I was, scowled. Brida squatted by the door with Nihtgenga close to her.

“Ealdorman Æthelred tells me you are a considerable warrior, Uhtred,” Alfred said.

“I’ve been lucky, lord.”

“Luck is good, or so my own warriors tell me. I have not yet worked out a theology of luck, and perhaps I never will. Can there be luck if God disposes?” He frowned at me for a few heartbeats, evidently thinking about the apparent contradiction, but then dismissed the problem as an amusement for another day. “So I suppose I was wrong to try to encourage you to the priesthood?”

“There’s nothing wrong with encouragement, lord,” I said, “but I had no wish to be a priest.”

“So you ran away from me. Why?”

I think he expected me to be embarrassed and to evade his question, but I told him the truth. “I went back to fetch my sword,” I told him. I wished I had Serpent-Breath at that moment, because I hated being without her, but the palace doorkeeper had insisted I give up all my weapons, even the small knife I used for eating.

He nodded seriously, as if that was a good reason. “It’s a special sword?”

“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.”