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

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, 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 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.
    “The spirits?”
    Ragnar sighed at my ignorance. “Every land has its spirits,” he said, “its own little gods, and when we approach our own lands we take off the beast heads so that the spirits aren’t scared away. How many fights have you had today?”
    “None.”
    “They’re getting frightened of you. What’s that thing around your neck?”
    I showed him. It was a crude iron hammer, a miniature hammer the size of a man’s thumb, and the sight of it made him laugh and cuff me around the head. “We’ll make a Dane of you yet,” he said, plainly pleased. The hammer was the sign of Thor, who was a Danish god almost as important as Odin, as they called Woden, and sometimes I wondered if Thor was the more important god, but no one seemed to know or even care very much. There were no priests among the Danes, which I liked, because priests were forever telling us not to do things or trying to teach us to read or demanding that we pray, and life without them was much more pleasant. The Danes, indeed, seemed very casual about their gods, yet almost every one wore Thor’s hammer. I had torn mine from the neck of a boy who had fought me, and I have it to this day.
    The stern of Ubba’s ship, which curved and reared as high as the prow, was decorated with a carved eagle’s head, while at her mast-head was a wind vane in the shape of a dragon. The shields were hung on her flanks, though I later learned they were only displayed there for decoration and that once the ship was under way the shields were stored inboard. Just underneath the shields were the oar holes, each rimmed with leather, fifteen holes on each side. The holes could be stopped with wooden plugs when the ship was under sail so that the craft could lean with the wind and not be swamped. I helped scrub the whole boat clean, but before we scrubbed her she was sunk in the river, just to drown the rats and discourage the fleas, and then we boys scraped every inch of wood and hammered wax-soaked wool into every seam, and at last the ship was ready and that was the day my uncle Ælfric arrived in Eoferwic.
    The first I knew of Ælfric’s coming was when Ragnar