The Last Kingdom Series Books 4-6: Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings. Bernard Cornwell

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       Five

      Then all, suddenly, was quiet.

      Not really quiet, of course. The river hissed where it ran through the bridge, small waves slapped on the boat hulls, the guttering torches on the house wall crackled and I could hear my men’s footsteps as they clambered ashore. Shields and spear butts thumped on ships’ timbers, dogs barked in the city and somewhere a gander was giving its harsh call, but it seemed quiet. Dawn was now a paler yellow, half concealed by dark clouds.

      ‘And now?’ Finan appeared beside me. Steapa loomed beside him, but said nothing.

      ‘We go to the gate,’ I said, ‘Ludd’s Gate.’ But I did not move. I did not want to move. I wanted to be back at Coccham with Gisela. It was not cowardice. Cowardice is always with us, and bravery, the thing that provokes the poets to make their songs about us, is merely the will to overcome the fear. It was tiredness that made me reluctant to move, but not a physical tiredness. I was young then and the wounds of war had yet to sap my strength. I think I was tired of Wessex, tired of fighting for a king I did not like, and, standing on that Lundene wharf, I did not understand why I fought for him. And now, looking back over the years, I wonder if that lassitude was caused by the man I had just killed and whom I had promised to join in Odin’s hall. I believe the men we kill are inseparably joined to us. Their life threads, turned ghostly, are twisted by the Fates around our own thread and their burden stays to haunt us till the sharp blade cuts our life at last. I felt remorse for his death.

      ‘Are you going to sleep?’ Father Pyrlig asked me. He had joined Finan.

      ‘We’re going to the gate,’ I said.

      It seemed like a dream. I was walking, but my mind was somewhere else. This, I thought, was how the dead walked our world, for the dead do come back. Not as Bjorn had pretended to come back, but in the darkest nights, when no one alive can see them, they wander our world. They must, I thought, only half see it, as if the places they knew were veiled in a winter mist, and I wondered if my father was watching me. Why did I think that? I had not been fond of my father, nor he of me, and he had died when I was young, but he had been a warrior. The poets sang of him. And what would he think of me? I was walking through Lundene instead of attacking Bebbanburg, and that was what I should have done. I should have gone north. I should have spent my whole hoard of silver on hiring men and leading them in an assault across Bebbanburg’s neck of land and up across the walls to the high hall where we could make great slaughter. Then I could live in my own home, my father’s home, for ever. I could live near Ragnar and be far from Wessex.

      Except my spies, for I employed a dozen in Northumbria, had told me what my uncle had done to my fortress. He had closed the landside gates. He had taken them away altogether and in their place were ramparts, newly built, high and reinforced with stone, and now, if a man wished to get inside the fortress, he needed to follow a path that led to the northern end of the crag on which the fortress stood. And every step of that path would be under those high walls, under attack, and then, at the northern end, where the sea broke and sucked, there was a small gate. Beyond that gate was a steep path leading to another wall and another gate. Bebbanburg had been sealed, and to take it I would need an army beyond even the reach of my hoarded silver.

      ‘Be lucky!’ a woman’s voice startled me from my thoughts. The folk of the old city were awake and they saw us pass and took us for Danes because I had ordered my men to hide their crosses.

      ‘Kill the Saxon bastards!’ another voice shouted.

      Our footsteps echoed from the СКАЧАТЬ