The Lords of the North by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page A

it thoroughly soaked Sven's hair, and when at last he finished he

retied the belt and offered me another of his dazzling smiles. 'You're the dead

swordsman?'
    'I am.' I said.
    'Stop whimpering.' the young man said to Sven, then smiled up at me again. Then perhaps you

will do me the honour of serving me?'
    'Serve you?' I asked. It was my turn to be amused.
    'I am Guthred.' he said, as though that explained everything.
    'Guthrum I have heard of,' I said, 'and I know a Guthwere and I have met two men named

Guthlac, but I know of no Guthred.'
    'I am Guthred, son of Hardicnut.' he said.
    The name still meant nothing to me. 'And why should I serve Guthred,' I asked,
    'son of Hardicnut?'
    'Because until you came I was a slave,' he said, 'but now, well, because you came, now I'm

a king!' He spoke with such enthusiasm that he had trouble making the words come out as he

wanted.
    I smiled beneath the linen scarf. 'You're a king,' I said, 'but of what?'
    'Northumbria, of course.' he said brightly.
    'He is, lord, he is.' one of the priests said earnestly. And so the dead swordsman met the

slave king, and Sven the One-Eyed crawled to his father, and the weirdness that infected

Northumbria grew weirder still. 

Chapter Two
    At sea, sometimes, if you take a ship too far from land and the wind rises and the tide

sucks with a venomous force and the waves splinter white above the shield-pegs, you have no

choice but to go where the gods will. The sail must be furled before it rips and the long oars

would pull to no effect and so you lash the blades and bail the ship and say your prayers and

watch the darkening sky and listen to the wind howl and suffer the rain's sting, and you hope

that the tide and waves and wind will not drive you onto rocks. That was how I felt in

Northumbria. I had escaped Hrothweard's madness in Eoferwic, only to humiliate Sven who

would now want nothing more than to kill me, if indeed he believed I could be killed. That

meant I dared not stay in that middling part of Northumbria for my enemies in the region were

far too numerous, nor could I go farther north for that would take me into Bebbanburg's

territory, my own land, where it was my uncle's daily prayer that I should die and so leave

him the legitimate holder of what he had stolen, and I did not wish to make it easy for that

prayer to come true. So the winds of Kjartan's hatred and of Sven's revenge, and the tidal

thrust of my uncle's enmity drove me westwards into the wilds of Cumbraland. We followed

the Roman wall where it runs across the hills. That wall is an extraordinary thing which

crosses the whole land from sea to sea. It is made of stone and it rises and falls with the

hills and the valleys, never stopping, always remorseless and brutal.
    We met a shepherd who had not heard of the Romans and he told us that giants had built the

wall in the old days and he claimed that when the world ends the wild men of the far north would

flow across its rampart like a flood to bring death and horror. I thought of his prophecy that

afternoon as I watched a she-wolf run along the wall's top, tongue lolling, and she gave us a

glance, leaped down behind our horses and ran off southwards. These days the wall's masonry

has crumbled, flowers blossom between the stones and turf lies thick along the rampart's

wide top, but it is still an astonishing thing. We build a few churches and monasteries of

stone, and I have seen a handful of stone-built halls, but I cannot imagine any man making

such a wall today. And it was not just a wall. Beside it was a wide ditch, and behind that a

stone road, and every mile or so there was a watchtower, and twice a day we would pass

stone-built fortresses where the Roman soldiers had lived. The roofs of their barracks have

long gone now and the buildings are homes for foxes and ravens, though in one such fort we

discovered a naked man with hair down to his waist. He was ancient,