Bernard Cornwell - Saxon 01 - The Last Kingdom

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*Published by HarperCollins Publishers

THE LAST KINGDOM

Bernard Cornwell

The Last Kingdom

is for Judy, with love.

Wyrd bi ful ræd.

MAP

PLACE NAMES

PROLOGUE: Northumbria, a.d. 866–867

My name is Uhtred. I am the son of Uhtred, who was the son

PART ONE

A Pagan Childhood

ONE

The Danes were clever that day. They had made new walls inside

TWO

Springtime, the year 868, I was eleven years old and the Wind-

THREE

The next day we made a pavilion in the valley between the town

FOUR

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King Edmund of East Anglia is now remembered as a saint, as

FIVE

We gathered at Eoferwic where the pathetic King Egbert was

SIX

These days, whenever Englishmen talk of the battle of Æsc’s Hill,

PART TWO

The Last Kingdom

SEVEN

I settled in southern Mercia. I found another uncle, this one called

EIGHT

We spent the spring, summer, and autumn of the year 875

NINE

I suppose, if you are reading this, that you have learned your letters,

PART THREE

The Shield Wall

TEN

Alfred’s army withdrew from Werham. Some West Saxons

ELEVEN

Ealdorman Odda did not want to kill Danes. He wanted to stay

HISTORICAL NOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY BERNARD CORNWELL

CREDITS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

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PLACE-NAMES

The spelling of place-names in Anglo-Saxon England was an uncertain business, with no consistency and

no agreement even about the name itself. Thus London was variously rendered as Lundonia,

Lundenberg, Lundenne, Lundene, Lundenwic, Lundenceaster, and Lundres. Doubtless some readers will

prefer other versions of the names listed below, but I have usually employed whatever spelling is cited in

theOxford Dictionary of English Place-Names for the years nearest or contained within Alfred’s reign,A .

D. 871–899, but even that solution is not foolproof. Hayling Island, in 956, was written as both

Heilincigae and Hæglingaiggæ. Nor have I been consistent myself; I have preferred the modern England

to Englaland and, instead of Nor hymbralond, have used Northumbria to avoid the suggestion that the

boundaries of the ancient kingdom coincide with those of the modern county. So this list, like the spellings

themselves, is capricious.

Æbbanduna

Abingdon, Berkshire

Æsc’s Hill

Ashdown, Berkshire

Baðum (pronounced Bathum)

Bath, Avon

Basengas

Basing, Hampshire

Beamfleot

Benfleet, Essex

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Beardastopol

Barnstable, Devon

Bebbanburg

Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland

Berewic

Berwick on Tweed, Northumberland

Berrocscire

Berkshire

Blaland

North Africa

Cantucton

Cannington, Somerset

Cetreht

Catterick, Yorkshire

Cippanhamm

Chippenham, Wiltshire

Cirrenceastre

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Cridianton

Crediton, Devon

Cynuit

Cynuit Hillfort, near Cannington, Somerset

Contwaraburg

Canterbury, Kent

Cornwalum

Cornwall

Dalriada

Western Scotland

Deoraby

Derby, Derbyshire

Defnascir

Devonshire

Dic

Diss, Norfolk

Dunholm

Durham, County Durham

Eoferwic

York (also the Danish Jorvic, pronounced Yorvik)

Exanceaster

Exeter, Devon

Fromtun

Frampton-upon-Severn, Gloucestershire

Gegnesburh

Gainsborough, Lincolnshire

The Gewæsc

The Wash

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Gleawecestre

Gloucester, Gloucestershire

Grantaceaster

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Gyruum Jarrow,

County Durham

Hamanfunta

Havant, Hampshire

Hamptonscir

Hampshire

Hamtun

Southampton, Hampshire

Haithabu

Hedeby, trading town in southern Denmark

Heilincigae

Hayling Island, Hampshire

Hreapandune

Repton, Derbyshire

Kenet

River Kennet

Ledecestre

Leicester

Lindisfarena

Lindisfarne (Holy Island), Northumberland

Lundene

London

Mereton

Marten, Wiltshire

Meslach

Matlock, Derbyshire

Pedredan

River Parrett

The Poole

Poole Harbour, Dorset

Pictland

Eastern Scotland

Readingum

Reading, Berkshire

Sæfern

River Severn

Scireburnan

Sherborne, Dorset

Snotengaham

Nottingham, Nottinghamshire

Streonshall

Strensall, Yorkshire

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Sumorsæte

Somerset

Suth Seaxa

Sussex (South Saxons)

Synningthwait

Swinithwaite, Yorkshire

Temes

River Thames

Thornsæta

Dorset

Tine

River Tine

Trente

River Trente

Tuede

River Tweed

Twyfyrde

Tiverton, Devon

Uisc

River Exe

Werham

Wareham, Dorset

With

Isle of Wight

Wiire

River Wear

Wiltun

Wilton, Wiltshire

Wiltunscir

Wiltshire

Winburnan

Wimborne Minster, Dorset

Wintanceaster

Winchester, Hampshire

PROLOGUE

Northumbria,A .D. 866–867

My name is Uhtred. I am the son of Uhtred, who was the son of Uhtred and his father was also called

Uhtred. My father’s clerk, a priest called Beocca, spelt it Utred. I do not know if that was how my father

would have written it, for he could neither read nor write, but I can do both and sometimes I take the old

parchments from their wooden chest and I see the name spelled Uhtred or Utred or Ughtred or Ootred.

I look at those parchments, which are deeds saying that Uhtred, son of Uhtred, is the lawful and sole

owner of the lands that are carefully marked by stones and by dykes, by oaks and by ash, by marsh and

by sea, and I dream of those lands, wave-beaten and wild beneath the wind-driven sky. I dream, and

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know that one day I will take back the land from those who stole it from me.

I am an ealdorman, though I call myself Earl Uhtred, which is the same thing, and the fading parchments

are proof of what I own. The law says I own that land, and the law, we are told, is what makes us men

under God instead of beasts in the ditch. But the law does not help me take back my land. The law wants

compromise. The law thinks money will compensate for loss. The law, above all, fears the blood feud.

But I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, and this is the tale of a blood feud. It is a tale of how I will take from my

enemy what the law says is mine. And it is the tale of a woman and of her father, a king.

He was my king and all that I have I owe to him. The food that I eat, the hall where I live, and the

swords of my men, all came from Alfred, my king, who hated me.

This story begins long before I met Alfred. It begins when I was ten years old and first saw the Danes. It

was the year 866 and I was not called Uhtred then, but Osbert, for I was my father’s second son and it

was the eldest who took the name Uhtred. My brother was seventeen then, tall and well built, with our

family’s fair hair and my father’s morose face.

The day I first saw the Danes we were riding along the seashore with hawks on our wrists. There was

my father, my father’s brother, my brother, myself, and a dozen retainers. It was autumn. The sea cliffs

were thick with the last growth of summer, there were seals on the rocks, and a host of seabirds wheeling

and shrieking, too many to let the hawks off their leashes. We rode till we came to the crisscrossing

shallows that rippled between our land and Lindisfarena, the Holy Island, and I remember staring across

the water at the broken walls of the abbey. The Danes had plundered it, but that had been many years

before I was born, and though the monks were living there again the monastery had never regained its

former glory.

I also remember that day as beautiful and perhaps it was. Perhaps it rained, but I do not think so. The

sun shone, the seas were low, the breakers gentle, and the world happy. The hawk’s claws gripped my

wrist through the leather sleeve, her hooded head twitching because she could hear the cries of the white

birds. We had left the fortress in the forenoon, riding north, and though we carried hawks we did not ride

to hunt, but rather so my father could make up his mind.

We ruled this land. My father, Ealdorman Uhtred, was lord of everything south of the Tuede and north

of the Tine, but we did have a king in Northumbria and his name, like mine, was Osbert. He lived to the

south of us, rarely came north, and did not bother us, but now a man called Ælla wanted the throne and

Ælla, who was an ealdorman from the hills west of Eoferwic, had raised an army to challenge Osbert and

had sent gifts to my father to encourage his support. My father, I realize now, held the fate of the

rebellion in his grip. I wanted him to support Osbert, for no other reason than the rightful king shared my

name and foolishly, at ten years old, I believed any man called Osbert must be noble, good, and brave.

In truth Osbert was a dribbling fool, but he was the king, and my father was reluctant to abandon him.

But Osbert had sent no gifts and had shown no respect, while Ælla had, and so my father worried. At a

moment’s notice we could lead a hundred and fifty men to war, all well armed, and given a month we

could swell that force to over four hundred foemen, so whichever man we supported would be the king

and grateful to us.

Or so we thought.

And then I saw them.

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Three ships.

In my memory they slid from a bank of sea mist, and perhaps they did, but memory is a faulty thing and

my other images of that day are of a clear, cloudless sky, so perhaps there was no mist, but it seems to

me that one moment the sea was empty and the next there were three ships coming from the south.

Beautiful things. They appeared to rest weightless on the ocean, and when their oars dug into the waves

they skimmed the water. Their prows and sterns curled high and were tipped with gilded beasts,

serpents, and dragons, and it seemed to me that on that faroff summer’s day the three boats danced on

the water, propelled by the rise and fall of the silver wings of their oar banks. The sun flashed off the wet

blades, splinters of light, then the oars dipped, were tugged, and the beast-headed boats surged, and I

stared entranced.

“The devil’s turds,” my father growled. He was not a very good Christian, but he was frightened enough

at that moment to make the sign of the cross.

“And may the devil swallow them,” my uncle said. His name was Ælfric and he was a slender man; sly,

dark, and secretive.

The three boats had been rowing northward, their square sails furled on their long yards, but when we

turned back south to canter homeward on the sand so that our horses’ manes tossed like wind-blown

spray and the hooded hawks mewed in alarm, the ships turned with us. Where the cliff had collapsed to

leave a ramp of broken turf we rode inland, the horses heaving up the slope, and from there we galloped

along the coastal path to our fortress.

To Bebbanburg. Bebba had been a queen in our land many years before, and she had given her name to

my home, which is the dearest place in all the world. The fort stands on a high rock that curls out to sea.

The waves beat on its eastern shore and break white on the rock’s northern point, and a shallow sea lake

ripples along the western side between the fortress and the land. To reach Bebbanburg you must take the

causeway to the south, a low strip of rock and sand that is guarded by a great wooden tower, the Low

Gate, which is built on top of an earthen wall. We thundered through the tower’s arch, our horses white

with sweat, and rode past the granaries, the smithy, the mews, and the stables, all wooden buildings well

thatched with rye straw, and so up the inner path to the High Gate, which protected the peak of the rock

that was surrounded by a wooden rampart encircling my father’s hall. There we dismounted, letting

slaves take our horses and hawks, and ran to the eastern rampart from where we gazed out to sea.

The three ships were now close to the islands where the puffins live and the seal-folk dance in winter.

We watched them, and my stepmother, alarmed by the sound of hooves, came from the hall to join us on

the rampart. “The devil has opened his bowels,” my father greeted her.

“God and his saints preserve us,” Gytha said, crossing herself. I had never known my real mother, who

had been my father’s second wife and, like his first, had died in childbirth, so both my brother and I, who

were really half brothers, had no mother, but I thought of Gytha as my mother and, on the whole, she

was kind to me, kinder indeed than my father, who did not much like children. Gytha wanted me to be a

priest, saying that my elder brother would inherit the land and become a warrior to protect it so I must

find another life path. She had given my father two sons and a daughter, but none had lived beyond a

year.

The three ships were coming closer now. It seemed they had come to inspect Bebbanburg, which did

not worry us for the fortress was reckoned impregnable, and so the Danes could stare all they wanted.

The nearest ship had twin banks of twelve oars each and, as the ship coasted a hundred paces offshore,

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a man leaped from the ship’s side and ran down the nearer bank of oars, stepping from one shaft to the

next like a dancer, and he did it wearing a mail shirt and holding a sword. We all prayed he would fall,

but of course he did not. He had long fair hair, very long, and when he had pranced the full length of the

oar bank he turned and ran the shafts again.

“She was trading at the mouth of the Tine a week ago,” Ælfric, my father’s brother, said.

“You know that?”

“I saw her,” Ælfric said, “I recognize that prow. See how there’s a light-colored strake on the bend?”

He spat. “She didn’t have a dragon’s head then.”

“They take the beast heads off when they trade,” my father said. “What were they buying?”

“Exchanging pelts for salt and dried fish. Said they were merchants from Haithabu.”

“They’re merchants looking for a fight now,” my father said, and the Danes on the three ships were

indeed challenging us by clashing their spears and swords against their painted shields, but there was little

they could do against Bebbanburg and nothing we could do to hurt them, though my father ordered his

wolf banner raised. The flag showed a snarling wolf’s head and it was his standard in battle, but there

was no wind and so the banner hung limp and its defiance was lost on the pagans who, after a while,

became bored with taunting us, settled to their thwarts, and rowed off to the south.

“We must pray,” my stepmother said. Gytha was much younger than my father. She was a small, plump

woman with a mass of fair hair and a great reverence for Saint Cuthbert whom she worshipped because

he had worked miracles. In the church beside the hall she kept an ivory comb that was said to have been

Cuthbert’s beard comb, and perhaps it was.

“We must act,” my father snarled. He turned away from the battlements. “You,” he said to my elder

brother, Uhtred. “Take a dozen men, ride south. Watch the pagans, but nothing more, you understand? If

they land their ships on my ground I want to know where.”

“Yes, Father.”

“But don’t fight them,” my father ordered. “Just watch the bastards and be back here by nightfall.”

Six other men were sent to rouse the country. Every free man owed military duty and so my father was

assembling his army, and by the morrow’s dusk he expected to have close to two hundred men, some

armed with axes, spears, or reaping hooks, while his retainers, those men who lived with us in

Bebbanburg, would be equipped with well-made swords and hefty shields. “If the Danes are

outnumbered,” my father told me that night, “they won’t fight. They’re like dogs, the Danes. Cowards at

heart, but they’re given courage by being in a pack.” It was dark and my brother had not returned, but

no one was unduly anxious about that. Uhtred was capable, if sometimes reckless, and doubtless he

would arrive in the small hours and so my father had ordered a beacon lit in the iron becket on top of the

High Gate to guide him home.

We reckoned we were safe in Bebbanburg for it had never fallen to an enemy’s assault, yet my father

and uncle were still worried that the Danes had returned to Northumbria. “They’re looking for food,” my

father said. “The hungry bastards want to land, steal some cattle, then sail away.”

I remembered my uncle’s words, how the ships had been at the mouth of the Tine trading furs for dried

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fish, so how could they be hungry? But I said nothing. I was ten years old and what did I know of

Danes?

I did know that they were savages, pagans and terrible. I knew that for two generations before I was

born their ships had raided our coasts. I knew that Father Beocca, my father’s clerk and our mass priest,

prayed every Sunday to spare us from the fury of the Northmen, but that fury had passed me by. No

Danes had come to our land since I had been born, but my father had fought them often enough and that

night, as we waited for my brother to return, he spoke of his old enemy. They came, he said, from

northern lands where ice and mist prevailed, they worshipped the old gods, the same ones we had

worshipped before the light of Christ came to bless us, and when they had first come to Northumbria, he

told me, fiery dragons had whipped across the northern sky, great bolts of lightning had scarred the hills,

and the sea had been churned by whirlwinds.

“They are sent by God,” Gytha said timidly, “to punish us.”

“Punish us for what?” my father demanded savagely.

“For our sins,” Gytha said, making the sign of the cross.

“Our sins be damned,” my father snarled. “They come here because they’re hungry.” He was irritated by

my stepmother’s piety, and he refused to give up his wolf’s head banner that proclaimed our family’s

descent from Woden, the ancient Saxon god of battles. The wolf, Ealdwulf the smith had told me, was

one of Woden’s three favored beasts, the others being the eagle and the raven. My mother wanted our

banner to show the cross, but my father was proud of his ancestors, though he rarely talked about

Woden. Even at ten years old I understood that a good Christian should not boast of being spawned by

a pagan god, but I also liked the idea of being a god’s descendant and Ealdwulf often told me tales of

Woden, how he had rewarded our people by giving us the land we called England, and how he had once

thrown a war spear clear around the moon, and how his shield could darken the midsummer sky, and

how he could reap all the corn in the world with one stroke of his great sword. I liked those tales. They

were better than my stepmother’s stories of Cuthbert’s miracles. Christians, it seemed to me, were

forever weeping and I did not think Woden’s worshippers cried much.

We waited in the hall. It was, indeed it still is, a great wooden hall, strongly thatched and stout beamed,

with a harp on a dais and a stone hearth in the center of the floor. It took a dozen slaves a day to keep

that great fire going, dragging the wood along the causeway and up through the gates, and at summer’s

end we would make a log pile bigger than the church just as a winter store. At the edges of the hall were

timber platforms, filled with rammed earth and layered with woolen rugs, and it was on those platforms

that we lived, up above the drafts. The hounds stayed on the bracken-strewn floor below, where lesser

men could eat at the year’s four great feasts.

There was no feast that night, just bread and cheese and ale, and my father waited for my brother and

wondered aloud if the Danes were restless again. “They usually come for food and plunder,” he told me,

“but in some places they’ve stayed and taken land.”

“You think they want our land?” I asked.

“They’ll take any land,” he said irritably. He was always irritated by my questions, but that night he was

worried and so he talked on. “Their own land is stone and ice, and they have giants threatening them.”

I wanted him to tell me more about the giants, but he brooded instead. “Our ancestors,” he went on after

a while, “took this land. They took it and made it and held it. We do not give up what our ancestors gave

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*PublishedbyHarperCollinsPublishersTHELASTKINGDOMBernardCornwellTheLastKingdomisforJudy,withlove.Wyrdbifulræd.MAPPLACENAMESPROLOGUE:Northumbria,a.d.866–867MynameisUhtred.IamthesonofUhtred,whowasthesonPARTONEAPaganChildhoodONETheDaneswerecleverthatday.TheyhadmadenewwallsinsideTWOSpringtime,theyear868...

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