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

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      They searched for two days, never coming close, and on the third day we saw Alfred’s royal cavalcade riding south on the road under the hill. The meeting at Baðum was over, and that meant the Danes were retreating to Readingum and neither of us had any idea how to reach Readingum, but we knew we had travelled west to reach Baðum, so that was a start, and we knew we had to find the River Temes, and our only two problems were food and the need to avoid being caught.

      That was a good time. We stole milk from the udders of cows and goats. We had no weapons, but we fashioned cudgels from fallen branches and used them to threaten some poor old man who was patiently digging a ditch and had a small sack with bread and pease pudding for his meal, and we stole that, and we caught fish with our hands, a trick that Brida taught me, and we lived in the woods. I wore my hammer amulet again. Brida had thrown away her wooden crucifix, but I kept the silver one for it was valuable.

      After a few days we began travelling by night. We were both frightened at first, for the night is when the sceadugengan stir from their hiding places, but we became good at traversing the darkness. We skirted farms, following the stars, and we learned how to move without noise, how to be shadows. One night something large and growling came close and we heard it shifting, pawing the ground, and we both beat at the leaf mould with our cudgels and yelped and the thing went away. A boar? Perhaps. Or perhaps one of the shapeless, nameless sceadugengan that curdle dreams.

      We had to cross a range of high, bare hills where we managed to steal a lamb before the shepherd’s dogs even knew we were there. We lit a fire in the woods north of the hills and cooked the meat, and next night we found the river. We did not know what river, but it was wide, it flowed beneath deep trees, and nearby was a settlement where we saw a small round boat made of bent willow sticks covered with goatskin, and that night we stole the boat and let it carry us downstream, past settlements, under bridges, ever going east.

      We did not know it, but the river was the Temes, and so we came safe to Readingum.

      Rorik had died. He had been sick for so long, but there were times when he had seemed to recover, but whatever illness carried him away had done so swiftly and Brida and I reached Readingum on the day that his body was burned. Ragnar, in tears, stood by the pyre and watched as the flames consumed his son. A sword, a bridle, a hammer amulet and a model ship had been placed on the fire, and after it was done the melted metal was placed with the ashes in a great pot that Ragnar buried close to the Temes. ‘You are my second son now,’ he told me that night, and then remembered Brida, ‘and you are my daughter.’ He embraced us both, then got drunk. Next morning he wanted to ride out and kill West Saxons, but Ravn and Halfdan restrained him.

      The truce was holding. Brida and I had only been gone a little over three weeks and already the first silver was coming to Readingum, along with fodder and food. Alfred, it seemed, was a man of his word and Ragnar was a man of grief. ‘How will I tell Sigrid?’ he wanted to know.

      ‘It is bad for a man to have only one son,’ Ravn told me, ‘almost as bad as having none. I had three, but only Ragnar lives. Now only his eldest lives.’ Ragnar the Younger was still in Ireland.

      ‘He can have another son,’ Brida said.

      ‘Not from Sigrid,’ Ravn said, ‘but he could take a second wife, I suppose. It is sometimes done.’

      Ragnar had given me back Serpent-Breath, and another arm ring. He gave a ring to Brida too, and he took some consolation from the story of our escape. We had to tell it to Halfdan and to Guthrum the Unlucky, who stared at us dark-eyed as we described the meal with Alfred, and Alfred’s plans to educate me, and even grief-stricken Ragnar laughed when Brida retold the story of how she had claimed to be King Edmund’s bastard.

      ‘This Queen Ælswith,’ Halfdan wanted to know, ‘what is she like?’

      ‘No queen,’ I said, ‘the West Saxons won’t have queens.’ Beocca had told me that. ‘She is merely the king’s wife.’

      ‘She is a weasel pretending to be a thrush,’ Brida said.

      ‘Is she pretty?’ Guthrum asked.

      ‘A pinched face,’ Brida said, ‘and piggy eyes and a pursed mouth.’

      ‘He’ll get no joy there then,’ Halfdan said, ‘why did he marry her?’

      ‘Because she’s from Mercia,’ Ravn said, ‘and Alfred would have Mercia on his side.’

      ‘Mercia belongs to us,’ Halfdan growled.

      ‘But Alfred would take it back,’ Ravn said, ‘and what we should do is send ships with rich gifts for the Britons. If they attack from Wales and Cornwalum then he must divide his army.’

      That was an unfortunate thing to say, for Halfdan still smarted from the memory of dividing his own army at Æsc’s Hill, and he just scowled into his ale. So far as I know he never did send gifts to the Britons, and it would have been a good idea if he had, but he was distracted by his failure to take Wessex, and there were rumours of unrest in both Northumbria and Mercia. The Danes had captured so much of England so quickly that they had never really subdued their conquest, nor did they hold all the fortresses in the conquered land and so revolts flared like heathland fires. They were easily put down, but untended they would spread and become dangerous. It was time, Halfdan said, to stamp on the fires and to cow the conquered English into terrified submission. Once that was done, once Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia were quiet, the attack on Wessex could be resumed.

      The last of Alfred’s silver came and the Danish army released the young hostages, including the Mercian twins, and the rest of us went back to Lundene. Ragnar dug up the pot with his younger son’s ashes and carried it downstream on Wind-Viper. ‘I shall take it home,’ he told me, ‘and bury him with his own people.’

      We could not travel north that year. It was autumn when we reached Lundene and so we had to wait through the winter, and it was not till spring that Ragnar’s three ships left the Temes and sailed north. I was almost sixteen then, and growing fast so that I was suddenly a head taller than most men, and Ragnar made me take the steering oar. He taught me to guide a ship, how to anticipate the buffet of wind or wave and how to heave on the steering oar before the ship veered. I learned the subtle touch, though at first the ship swayed drunkenly as I put too much pressure on the oar, but in time I came to feel the ship’s will in the long oar’s shaft and learned to love the quiver in the ash as the sleek hull gained her full speed.

      ‘I shall make you my second son,’ Ragnar told me on that voyage.

      I did not know what to say.

      ‘I shall always favour my eldest,’ he went on, meaning Ragnar the Younger, ‘but you shall still be as a son to me.’

      ‘I would like that,’ I said awkwardly. I gazed at the distant shore that was flecked by the little dun sails of the fishing boats that were fleeing from our ships. ‘I am honoured,’ I said.

      ‘Uhtred Ragnarson,’ he said, trying it out, and he must have liked the sound of it for he smiled, but then he thought of Rorik again and the tears came to his eyes and he just stared eastwards into the empty sea.

      That night we slept in the mouth of the Humber.

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