Bernard Cornwell - The Last Kingdom Series Books 1–8 - The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, The Lords of the North, Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings, The Pagan Lord, The Empty Throne

‘He’s too young,’ Gytha protested.

‘He is almost ten,’ my father said, ‘and he must learn to fight.’

‘He would be better served by continuing his lessons,’ she said.

‘A dead reader is no use to Bebbanburg,’ my father said, ‘and Uhtred is now the heir so he must learn to fight.’

That night he made Beocca show me the parchments kept in the church, the parchments that said we owned the land. Beocca had been teaching me to read for two years, but I was a bad pupil and, to Beocca’s despair, I could make neither head nor tail of the writings. Beocca sighed, then told me what was in them. ‘They describe the land,’ he said, ‘the land your father owns, and they say the land is his by God’s law and by our own law.’ And one day, it seemed, the lands would be mine for that night my father dictated a new will in which he said that if he died then Bebbanburg would belong to his son Uhtred, and I would be Ealdorman, and all the folk between the Tuede and the Tine would swear allegiance to me.

‘We were kings here once,’ he told me, ‘and our land was called Bernicia.’ He pressed his seal into the red wax, leaving the impression of a wolf’s head.

‘We should be kings again,’ Ælfric, my uncle said.

‘It doesn’t matter what they call us,’ my father said curtly, ‘so long as they obey us,’ and then he made Ælfric swear on the comb of Saint Cuthbert that he would respect the new will and acknowledge me as Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Ælfric did so swear. ‘But it won’t happen,’ my father said. ‘We shall slaughter these Danes like sheep in a fold, and we shall ride back here with plunder and honour.’

‘Pray God,’ Ælfric said.

Ælfric and thirty men would stay at Bebbanburg to guard the fortress and protect the women. He gave me gifts that night; a leather coat that would protect against a sword cut and, best of all, a helmet around which Ealdwulf the smith had fashioned a band of gilt bronze. ‘So they will know you are a prince,’ Ælfric said.

‘He’s not a prince,’ my father said, ‘but an Ealdorman’s heir.’ Yet he was pleased with his brother’s gifts to me and added two of his own, a short sword and a horse. The sword was an old blade, cut down, with a leather scabbard lined with fleece. It had a chunky hilt, was clumsy, yet that night I slept with the blade under my blanket.

The next morning, as my stepmother wept on the ramparts of the High Gate, and under a blue, clean sky, we rode to war. Two hundred and fifty men went south, following our banner of the wolf’s head.

That was in the year 867, and it was the first time I ever went to war.

And I have never ceased.

‘You will not fight in the shield wall,’ my father said.

‘No, father.’

‘Only men can stand in the shield wall,’ he said, ‘but you will watch, you will learn, and you will discover that the most dangerous stroke is not the sword or axe that you can see, but the one you cannot see, the blade that comes beneath the shields to bite your ankles.’

He grudgingly gave me much other advice as we followed the long road south. Of the two hundred and fifty men who went to Eoferwic from Bebbanburg, one hundred and twenty were on horseback. Those were my father’s household men or else the wealthier farmers, the ones who could afford some kind of armour and had shields and swords. Most of the men were not wealthy, but they were sworn to my father’s cause, and they marched with sickles, spears, reaping hooks, fish gaffs and axes. Some carried hunting bows, and all had been ordered to bring a week’s food which was mostly hard bread, harder cheese and smoked fish. Many were accompanied by women. My father had ordered that no women were to march south, but he did not send them back, reckoning that the women would follow anyway, and that men fought better when their wives or lovers were watching, and he was confident that those women would see the levy of Northumbria give the Danes a terrible slaughter. He claimed we were the hardest men of England, much harder than the soft Mercians. ‘Your mother was a Mercian,’ he added, but said nothing more. He never talked of her. I knew they had been married less than a year, that she had died giving birth to me, and that she was an Ealdorman’s daughter, but as far as my father was concerned she might never have existed. He claimed to despise the Mercians, but not as much as he scorned the coddled West Saxons. ‘They don’t know hardship in Wessex,’ he maintained, but he reserved his severest judgment for the East Anglians. ‘They live in marshes,’ he once told me, ‘and live like frogs.’ We Northumbrians had always hated the East Anglians for long ago they had defeated us in battle, killing Æthelfrith, our king and husband to the Bebba after whom our fortress was named. I was to discover later that the East Anglians had given horses and winter shelter to the Danes who had captured Eoferwic, so my father was right to despise them. They were treacherous frogs.

Father Beocca rode south with us. My father did not much like the priest, but did not want to go to war without a man of God to say prayers. Beocca, in turn, was devoted to my father who had freed him from slavery and provided him with his education. My father could have worshipped the devil and Beocca, I think, would have turned a blind eye. He was young, clean-shaven and extraordinarily ugly, with a fearful squint, a flattened nose, unruly red hair and a palsied left hand. He was also very clever, though I did not appreciate it then, resenting that he gave me lessons. The poor man had tried so hard to teach me letters, but I mocked his efforts, preferring to get a beating from my father to concentrating on the alphabet.

We followed the Roman road, crossing their great wall at the Tine, and still going south. The Romans, my father said, had been giants who built wondrous things, but they had gone back to Rome and the giants had died and now the only Romans left were priests, but the giants’ roads were still there and, as we went south, more men joined us until a horde marched on the moors either side of the stony road’s broken surface. The men slept in the open, though my father and his chief retainers would bed for the night in abbeys or barns.

We also straggled. Even at nine years old I noticed how we straggled. Men had brought liquor with them, or else they stole mead or ale from the villages we passed, and they frequently got drunk and simply collapsed at the roadside and no one seemed to care. ‘They’ll catch up,’ my father said carelessly.

‘It’s not good,’ Father Beocca told me.

‘What’s not good?’

‘There should be more discipline. I have read the Roman wars and know there must be discipline.’

‘They’ll catch up,’ I said, echoing my father.

That night we were joined by men from the place called Cetreht where, long ago, we had defeated the Welsh in a great battle. The newcomers sang of the battle, chanting how we had fed the ravens with the foreigners’ blood, and the words cheered my father who told me we were near Eoferwic and that next day we might expect to join Osbert and Ælla, and how the day after that we would feed the ravens again. We were sitting by a fire, one of hundreds of fires that stretched across the fields. South of us, far off across a flat land, I could see the sky glowing from the light of still more fires and knew they showed where the rest of Northumbria’s army gathered.

‘The raven is Woden’s creature, isn’t it?’ I asked nervously.

My father looked at me sourly. ‘Who told you that?’

I shrugged, said nothing.

‘Ealdwulf?’ He guessed, knowing that Bebbanburg’s blacksmith, who had stayed at the fortress with Ælfric, was a secret pagan.

‘I just heard it,’ I said, hoping I would get away with the evasion without being hit, ‘and I know we are descended from Woden.’