The Last Kingdom Series Books 1-3: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, The Lords of the North. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ did not frighten men as his two older brothers did and so he could do nothing without the agreement of the other chieftains. An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.

      It took two days to get Guthrum’s ships past the bridge. They were beautiful things, those ships, larger than most Danish boats, and each decorated at prow and stern with black painted serpent heads. His men, and there were many of them, all wore black. Even their shields were painted black, and while I thought Guthrum to be one of the most miserable men I had ever seen, I had to confess his troops were impressive. We might have lost two days, but we had gained the black warriors.

      And what was there to fear? The Great Army had gathered, it was midwinter when no one fought so the enemy should not be expecting us, and that enemy was led by a king and a prince more interested in prayer than in fighting. All Wessex lay before us and common report said that Wessex was as rich a country as any in all the world, rivalling Frankia for its treasures, and inhabited by monks and nuns whose houses were stuffed with gold, spilling over with silver and ripe for slaughter. We would all be rich.

      So we went to war.

      Ships on the winter Temes. Ships sliding past brittle reeds and leafless willows and bare alders. Wet oar blades shining in the pale sunlight. The prows of our ships bore their beasts to quell the spirits of the land we invaded, and it was good land with rich fields, though all were deserted. There was almost a celebratory air to that brief voyage, a celebration unspoiled by the presence of Guthrum’s dark ships. Men oar-walked, the same feat I had watched Ragnar perform on that far off day when his three ships had appeared off Bebbanburg. I tried it myself and raised a huge cheer when I fell in. It looked easy to run along the oar bank, leaping from shaft to shaft, but a rower only had to twitch an oar to cause a man to slip and the river water was bitterly cold so that Ragnar made me strip off my wet clothes and wear his bearskin cloak until I was warm. Men sang, the ships forged against the current, the far hills to north and south slowly closed on the river’s banks and, as evening came, we saw the first horsemen on the southern skyline. Watching us.

      We reached Readingum at dusk. Each of Ragnar’s three ships was loaded with spades, many of them forged by Ealdwulf, and our first task was to start making a wall. As more ships came, more men helped, and by nightfall our camp was protected by a long, straggling earth wall which would have been hardly any obstacle to an attacking force for it was merely a low mound that was easy to cross, but no one did come and assault us, and no Wessex army appeared next morning and so we were free to make the wall higher and more formidable.

      Readingum was built where the River Kenet flows into the Temes, and so our wall was built between the two rivers. It enclosed the small town which had been abandoned by its inhabitants and provided shelter for most of the ships’ crews. The land army was still out of sight for they had marched along the north bank of the Temes, in Mercian territory, and were seeking a ford which they found further upstream so that our wall was virtually finished by the time they marched in. At first we thought it was the West Saxon army coming, but it was Halfdan’s men, marching out of enemy territory which they had found deserted.

      The wall was high now, and because there were deep woods to the south, we had cut trees to make a palisade along its whole length that was about eight hundred paces. In front of the wall we dug a ditch that flooded when we broke through the two rivers’ banks, and across the ditch we were making four bridges guarded by wooden forts. This was our base. From here we could march deep into Wessex, and we needed to, for, with so many men and now horses inside the wall, there was a risk of hunger unless we found supplies of grain, hay and cattle. We had brought barrels of ale and a large amount of flour, salt meat and dried fish in the ships, but it was astonishing how fast those great heaps diminished.

      The poets, when they speak of war, talk of the shield wall, they talk of the spears and arrows flying, of the blade beating on the shield, of the heroes who fall and the spoils of the victors, but I was to discover that war was really about food. About feeding men and horses. About finding food. The army that eats wins. And, if you keep horses in a fortress, it is about shovelling dung. Just two days after the land army came to Readingum, we were short of food and the two Sidrocs, father and son, led a large force west into enemy territory to find stores of food for men and horses, and instead they found the fyrd of Berrocscire.

      We learned later that the whole idea of attacking in winter was no surprise to the West Saxons after all. The Danes were good at spying, their merchants exploring the places the warriors would go, but the West Saxons had their own men in Lundene and they knew how many men we were, and when we would march, and they had assembled an army to meet us. They had also sought help from the men of southern Mercia, where Danish rule was lightest, and Berrocscire lay immediately north of the West Saxon border and the men of Berrocscire had crossed the river to help their neighbours and their fyrd was led by an Ealdorman called Æthelwulf.

      Was it my uncle? There were many men called Æthelwulf, but how many were Ealdormen in Mercia? I admit I felt strange when I heard the name, and I thought of the mother I had never met. In my mind she was the woman who was ever kind, ever gentle, ever loving and I thought she must be watching me from somewhere, heaven or Asgard or wherever our souls go in the long darkness, and I knew she would hate that I was with the army that marched against her brother, and so that night I was in a black mood.

      But so was the Great Army for my uncle, if Æthelwulf was indeed my uncle, had trounced the two Earls. Their foraging party had walked into an ambush and the men of Berrocscire had killed twenty-one Danes and taken another eight prisoner. The Englishmen had lost a few men themselves, and yielded one prisoner, but they had gained the victory, and it made no difference that the Danes had been outnumbered. The Danes expected to win, and instead they had been chased home without the food we needed. They felt shamed and a shudder went through the army because they did not think mere Englishmen could beat them.

      We were not starving yet, but the horses were desperately short of hay which, anyway, was not the best food for them, but we had no oats and so forage parties simply cut whatever winter grass we could find beyond our growing wall and the day after Æthelwulf’s victory Rorik, Brida and I were in one of those groups, slashing at grass with long knives and stuffing sacks with the poor feed, when the army of Wessex came.

      They must have been encouraged by Æthelwulf’s victory, for now the whole enemy army attacked Readingum. The first I knew of it was the sound of screaming from farther west, then I saw horsemen galloping among our forage parties, hacking down with swords or skewering men with spears, and the three of us just ran, and I heard the hooves behind and snatched a look and saw a man riding at us with a spear and knew one of us must die and I took Brida’s hand to drag her out of his path and just then an arrow shot from Readingum’s wall slapped into the horseman’s face and he twisted away, blood pouring from his cheek, and meanwhile panicking men were piling around the two central bridges and the West Saxon horsemen, seeing it, galloped towards them. The three of us half waded and half swam the ditch, and two men hauled us, wet, muddy and shivering, up across the wall.

      It was chaos outside now. The foragers crowding at the ditch’s far side were being hacked down, and then the Wessex infantry appeared, band after band of them emerging from the far woods to fill the fields. I ran back to the house where Ragnar was lodging and found Serpent-Breath beneath the cloaks where I hid her, and I strapped her on and ran out to find Ragnar. He had gone north, to the bridge close beside the Temes, and Brida and I caught up with his men there. ‘You shouldn’t come,’ I told Brida. ‘Stay with Rorik.’ Rorik was younger than us and, after getting soaked in the ditch he had started shivering and feeling sick and I had made him stay behind.

      Brida ignored me. She had equipped herself with a spear and looked excited, though nothing was happening yet. Ragnar was staring over the wall, and more men were assembling at the gate, but Ragnar did not open it to cross the bridge. He did glance back to see how many men he had. ‘Shields!’ he shouted, СКАЧАТЬ