Excerpt of The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell
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Chapter One
The Danes were clever that day. They had made new walls inside
the city, invited our men into the streets, trapped them between the new walls,
surrounded them, and killed them. They did not kill all the Northumbrian army,
for even the fiercest warriors tire of slaughter and, besides, the Danes made
much money from slavery. Most of the slaves taken in England were sold to
farmers in the wild northern isles, or to Ireland, or sent back across the sea
to the Danish lands, but some, I learned, were taken to the big slave markets in
Frankia and a few were shipped south to a place where there was no winter and
where men with faces the color of scorched wood would pay good money for men and
even better money for young women.
But they killed enough of us. They killed Ælla and they killed
Osbert and they killed my father. Ælla and my father were fortunate, for they
died in battle, swords in their hands, but Osbert was captured and he was
tortured that night as the Danes feasted in a city stinking of blood. Some of
the victors guarded the walls, others celebrated in the captured houses, but
most gathered in the hall of Northumbria's defeated king where Ragnar took me. I
did not know why he took me there, I half expected to be killed or, at best,
sold into slavery, but Ragnar made me sit with his men and put a roasted goose
leg, half a loaf of bread, and a pot of ale in front of me, then cuffed me
cheerfully round the head.
The other Danes ignored me at first. They were too busy getting
drunk and cheering the fights that broke out once they were drunk, but the
loudest cheers came when the captured Osbert was forced to fight against a young
warrior who had extraordinary skill with a sword. He danced around the king,
then chopped off his left hand before slitting his belly with a sweeping cut
and, because Osbert was a heavy man, his guts spilled out like eels slithering
from a ruptured sack. Some of the Danes were weak with laughter after that. The
king took a long time to die, and while he cried for relief, the Danes crucified
a captured priest who had fought against them in the battle. They were intrigued
and repelled by our religion, and they were angry when the priest's hands pulled
free of the nails and some claimed it was impossible to kill a man that way, and
they argued that point drunkenly, then tried to nail the priest to the hall's
timber walls a second time until, bored with it, one of their warriors slammed a
spear into the priest's chest, crushing his ribs and mangling his heart.
A handful of them turned on me once the priest was dead and,
because I had worn a helmet with a gilt-bronze circlet, they thought I must be a
king's son and they put me in a robe and a man climbed onto the table to piss on
me, and just then a huge voice bellowed at them to stop and Ragnar bullied his
way through the crowd. He snatched the robe from me and harangued the men,
telling them I knew not what, but whatever he said made them stop and Ragnar
then put an arm around my shoulders and took me to a dais at the side of the
hall and gestured I should climb up to it. An old man was eating alone there. He
was blind, both eyes milky white, and had a deep-lined face framed by gray hair
as long as Ragnar's. He heard me clamber up and asked a question, and Ragnar
answered and then walked away.
"You must be hungry, boy," the old man said in
English.
I did not answer. I was terrified of his blind eyes.
"Have you vanished?" he asked. "Did the dwarves
pluck you down to the underearth?"
"I'm hungry," I admitted.
"So you are there after all," he said, "and
there's pork here, and bread, and cheese, and ale. Tell me your name."
I almost said Osbert, then remembered I was Uhtred. "Uhtred,"
I said.
"An ugly name," the old man said, "but my son
said I was to look after you, so I will, but you must look after me too. You
could cut me some pork?"
From The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell.
Copyright Bernard Cornwell 2005. Used by permission of the publisher,
Harper Collins.
