Free The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell Page B

a great sound of water, was where the mountains were. “And there are Svear there, too,” he went on.
    “Svear?”
    “A tribe. Like us. They worship Thor and Odin, but they speak differently.” He shrugged. “We get along with the Svear, and with the Norse.” The Svear, the Norse, and the Danes were the Northmen, the men who went on Viking expeditions, but it was the Danes who had come to take my land, though I did not say that to Ragnar. I had learned to hide my soul, or perhaps I was confused. Northumbrian or Dane? Which was I? What did I want to be?
    “Suppose,” I asked, “that the rest of the English do not want us to stay here.” I used the word us deliberately.
    He laughed at that. “The English can want what they like! But you saw what happened at Yorvik.” That was how the Danes pronounced Eoferwic. For some reason they found that name difficult, so they said Yorvik instead. “Who was the bravest English fighter at Yorvik?” Ragnar asked. “You! A child! You charged me with that little saxe! It was a gutting knife, not a sword, and you tried to kill me! I almost died laughing.” He leaned over and cuffed me affectionately. “Of course the English don’t want us here,” he went on, “but what can they do? Next year we’ll take Mercia, then East Anglia, and finally Wessex.”
    “My father always said Wessex was the strongest kingdom,” I said. My father had said nothing of the sort. Indeed he despised the men of Wessex because he thought them effete and overpious, but I was trying to provoke Ragnar.
    I failed. “It’s the richest kingdom,” he said, “but that doesn’t make it strong. Men make a kingdom strong, not gold.” He grinned at me. “We’re the Danes. We don’t lose, we win, and Wessex will fall.”
    “It will?”
    “It has a new weak king,” he said dismissively, “and if he dies, then his son is a mere child, so perhaps they’d put the new king’s brother on the throne instead. We’d like that.”
    “Why?”
    “Because the brother is another weakling. He’s called Alfred.”
    Alfred. That was the first time I ever heard of Alfred of Wessex. I thought nothing of it at the time. Why should I have?
    “Alfred,” Ragnar continued scathingly. “All he cares about is rutting girls, which is good! Don’t tell Sigrid I said that, but there’s nothing wrong with unsheathing the sword when you can, but Alfred spends half his time rutting and the other half praying to his god to forgive him for rutting. How can a god disapprove of a good hump?”
    “How do you know about Alfred?” I asked.
    “Spies, Uhtred, spies. Traders, mostly. They talk to folk in Wessex, so we know all about King Æthelred and his brother Alfred. And Alfred’s sick as a stoat half the time.” He paused, perhaps thinking of his younger son who was ill. “It’s a weak house,” he went on, “and the West Saxons should get rid of them and put a real man on the throne, except they won’t, and when Wessex falls there will be no more England.”
    “Perhaps they’ll find their strong king,” I said.
    “No,” Ragnar said firmly. “In Denmark,” he went on, “our kings are the hard men, and if their sons are soft, then a man from another family becomes king, but in England they believe the throne passes through a woman’s legs. So a feeble creature like Alfred could become king just because his father was a king.”
    “You have a king in Denmark?”
    “A dozen. I could call myself king if I fancied, except Ivar and Ubba might not like it, and no man offends them lightly.”
    I rode in silence, listening to the horses’ hooves crunching and squeaking in the snow. I was thinking of Ragnar’s dream, the dream of no more England, of her land given to the Danes. “What happens to me?” I finally blurted out.
    “You?” He sounded surprised that I had asked. “What happens to you, Uhtred, is what you make happen. You will grow, you will learn the sword, you will learn the way of the shield