Saxon 01 - The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page B

eldest son, also called Ragnar, was eighteen, already a man, and I did not meet Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom him then for he was in Ireland where he was learning to fight and to kill so he could become an earl like his father. In time I did meet Ragnar the Younger who was very similar to his father: always cheerful, boisterously happy, enthusiastic about whatever needed to be done, and friendly to anyone who paid him respect.

Like all the other children I had work to keep me busy. There was always firewood and water to be fetched, and I spent two days helping to burn the green muck from the hull of a beached ship, and I enjoyed that even though I got into a dozen fights with Danish boys, all of them bigger than me, and I lived with black eyes, bruised knuckles, sprained wrists, and loosened teeth. My worst enemy was a boy called Sven who was two years older than me and very big for his age with a round, vacant face, a Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom slack jaw, and a vicious temper. He was the son of one of Ragnar's shipmasters, a man called Kjartan. Ragnar owned three ships, he commanded one, Kjartan the second, and a tall, weather-hardened man named Egil steered the third. Kjartan and Egil were also warriors, of course, and as shipmasters they led their crews into battle and so were reckoned important men, their arms heavy with rings, and Kjartan's son Sven took an instant dislike to me. He called me English scum, a goat turd and dog breath, and because he was older and bigger he could beat me fairly easily, but I was also making friends and, luckily for me, Sven disliked Rorik almost as much as he hated me, and the two of us could just thrash him together and after a while Sven avoided me unless he was sure I was alone. So apart from Sven it was a good summer. I never had quite Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom enough to eat, I was never clean, Ragnar made us laugh, and I was rarely unhappy.

Ragnar was often absent for much of the Danish army spent that summer riding the length and breadth of Northumbria to quell the last shreds of resistance, but I heard little news, and no news of Bebbanburg. It seemed the Danes were winning, for every few days another English thegn would come to Eoferwic and kneel to Egbert, who now lived in the palace of Northumbria's king, though it was a palace that had been stripped of anything useful by the victors. The gap in the city wall had been repaired in a day, the same day that a score of us dug a great hole in the field where our army had fled in panic. We filled the hole with the rotting corpses of the Northumbrian dead. I knew some of them. I suppose my father was among them, but I did not see him. Nor, Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom looking back, did I miss him. He had always been a morose man, expecting the worst, and not fond of children.

The worst job I was given was painting shields. We first had to boil down some cattle hides to make size, a thick glue, that we stirred into a powder we had made from crushing copper ore with big stone pestles, and the result was a viscous blue paste that had to be smeared on the newly made shields. For days afterward I had blue hands and arms, but our shields were hung on a ship and looked splendid. Every Danish ship had a strake running down each side from which the shields could hang, overlapping as though they were being held in the shield wall, and these shields were for Ubba's craft, the same ship I had burned and scraped clean. Ubba, it seemed, planned to leave, and wanted his ship to be beautiful. She had Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom a beast on her prow, a prow that curved like a swan's breast from the waterline, then jutted forward. The beast, half dragon and half worm, was the topmost part, and the whole beast head could be lifted off its stem and stowed in the bilge. "We lift the beast heads off," Ragnar explained to me, "so they don't frighten the spirits." I had learned some of the Danish language by then.

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