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. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ not?’

      ‘Because I won’t bide him killing you,’ Steapa said and turned his horse west.

      We reached Ocmundtun at dusk. It was a small town built along a river and guarded by a high spur of limestone on which a stout palisade offered a refuge if attackers came. No one was on the limestone spur now and the town, which had no walls, looked placid. There might be war in Wessex, but Ocmundtun, like Cridianton, was evidently at peace. Harald’s hall was close to the fort on its hill and no one challenged us as we rode into the forecourt where servants recognised Steapa. They greeted him warily, but then a steward came from the hall door and, seeing the huge man, clapped his hands twice in a sign of delight. ‘We heard you were taken by the pagans,’ the steward said.

      ‘I was.’

      ‘They let you go?’

      ‘My king freed me,’ Steapa growled as though he resented the question. He slid from his horse and stretched. ‘Alfred freed me.’

      ‘Is Harald here?’ I asked the steward.

      ‘My lord is inside,’ the steward was offended that I had not called the reeve ‘lord’.

      ‘Then so are we,’ I said, and led Steapa into the hall. The steward flapped at us because custom and courtesy demanded that he seek his lord’s permission for us to enter the hall, but I ignored him.

      A fire burned in the central hearth and dozens of rushlights stood on the platforms at the hall’s edges. Boar spears were stacked against the wall on which hung a dozen deerskins and a bundle of valuable pine-marten pelts. A score of men were in the hall, evidently waiting for supper, and a harpist played at the far end. A pack of hounds rushed to investigate us and Steapa beat them off as we walked to the fire to warm ourselves. ‘Ale,’ Steapa said to the steward.

      Harald must have heard the noise of the hounds for he appeared at a door leading from the private chamber at the back of the hall. He blinked when he saw us. He had thought the two of us were enemies, then he had heard that Steapa was captured, yet here we were, side by side. The hall fell silent as he limped towards us. It was only a slight limp, the result of a spear wound in some battle that had also taken two fingers of his sword hand. ‘You once chided me,’ he said, ‘for carrying weapons into your hall. Yet you bring weapons into mine.’

      ‘There was no gatekeeper,’ I said.

      ‘He was having a piss, lord,’ the steward explained.

      ‘There are to be no weapons in hall,’ Harald insisted.

      That was customary. Men get drunk in hall and can do enough damage to each other with the knives we use to cut meat, and drunken men with swords and axes can turn a supper table into a butcher’s yard. We gave the steward our weapons, then I hauled off my mail coat and told the steward to hang it on a frame to dry, then have a servant clean its links.

      Harald formally welcomed us when our weapons were gone. He said the hall was ours and that we should eat with him as honoured guests. ‘I would hear your news,’ he said, beckoning a servant who brought us pots of ale.

      ‘Is Odda here?’ I demanded.

      ‘The father is, yes. Not the son.’

      I swore. We had come here with a message for Ealdorman Odda, Odda the Younger, only to discover that it was the wounded father, Odda the Elder, who was in Ocmundtun. ‘So where is the son?’ I asked.

      Harald was offended by my brusqueness, but he remained courteous. ‘The ealdorman is in Exanceaster.’

      ‘Is he besieged there?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘And the Danes are in Cridianton?’

      ‘They are.’

      ‘And are they besieged?’ I knew the answer to that, but wanted to hear Harald admit it.

      ‘No,’ he said.

      I let the ale pot drop. ‘We come from the king,’ I said. I was supposedly speaking to Harald, but I strode down the hall so that the men on the platforms could hear me. ‘We come from Alfred,’ I said, ‘and Alfred wishes to know why there are Danes in Defnascir. We burned their ships, we slaughtered their ship-guards and we drove them from Cynuit, yet you allow them to live here? Why?’

      No one answered. There were no women in the hall, for Harald was a widower who had not remarried, and so the supper guests were all his warriors or else thegns who led men of their own. Some looked at me with loathing, for my words imputed cowardice to them, while others looked down at the floor. Harald glanced at Steapa as if seeking the big man’s support, but Steapa just stood by the fire, his savage face showing nothing. I turned back to stare at Harald. ‘Why are there Danes in Defnascir?’ I demanded.

      ‘Because they are welcome here,’ a voice said behind me.

      I turned to see an old man standing in the door. White hair showed beneath the bandage that swathed his head, and he was so thin and so weak that he had to lean on the door frame for support. At first I did not recognise him, for when I had last spoken to him he had been a big man, well-built and vigorous, but Odda the Elder had taken an axe blow to the skull at Cynuit and he should have died from such a wound, yet somehow he had lived, and here he was, though now he was skeletal, pale, haggard and feeble. ‘They are here,’ Odda said, ‘because they are welcome. As are you, Lord Uhtred, and you, Steapa.’

      A woman was tending Odda the Elder. She had tried to pull him away from the door and take him back to his bed, but now she edged past him into the hall and stared at me. Then, seeing me, she did what she had done the very first time she saw me. She did what she had done when she came to marry me. She burst into tears.

      It was Mildrith.

      Mildrith was robed like a nun in a pale grey dress, belted with rope, over which she wore a large wooden cross. She had a close-fitting grey bonnet from which strands of her fair hair escaped. She stared at me, burst into tears, made the sign of the cross and vanished. A moment later Odda the Elder followed her, too frail to stand any longer, and the door closed.

      ‘You are indeed welcome here,’ Harald said, echoing Odda’s words.

      ‘But why are the Danes welcome here?’ I asked.

      Because Odda the Younger had made a truce. Harald explained it as we ate. No one in this part of Defnascir had heard how Svein’s ships had been burned at Cynuit, they only knew that Svein’s men, and their women and children, had marched south, burning and plundering, and Odda the Younger had taken his troops to Exanceaster and he had prepared for a siege, but instead Svein had offered to talk. The Danes, quite suddenly, had stopped raiding. Instead they had settled in Cridianton and sent an embassy to Exanceaster, and Svein and Odda had made their private peace.

      ‘We sell them horses,’ Harald said, ‘and they pay well for them. Twenty shillings a stallion, fifteen a mare.’

      ‘You sell them horses,’ I said flatly.

      ‘So they will go away,’ Harald explained.

      Servants threw a big birch log onto the fire. Sparks exploded outwards, scattering the hounds who lay just beyond the ring of hearth stones.

      ‘How СКАЧАТЬ