Saxon 01 - The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell Page B

with his father. That was because Rorik was sick again, struck by cramping pains in his belly so severe that he was sometimes reduced to helpless tears. He vomited in the night, was Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom pale, and the only relief came from a brew of herbs made for him by an old woman who was a servant of the bishop. Ragnar worried about Rorik, yet he was pleased that his son and I were such good friends. Rorik did not question his father's fondness for me, nor was he jealous. In time, he knew, Ragnar planned to take me back to Bebbanburg and I would be given my patrimony and he assumed I would stay his friend and so Bebbanburg would become a Danish stronghold. I would be Earl Uhtred and Rorik and his older brother would hold other strongholds, and Ragnar would be a great lord, supported by his sons and by Bebbanburg, and we would all be Danes, and Odin would smile on us, and so the world would go on until the final conflagration when the great gods fought the monsters and the army of the dead Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom would march from Valhalla and the underworld give up its beasts and fire would consume the great tree of life, Yggdrasil. In other words everything would stay the same until it was all no more. That was what Rorik thought, and doubtless Ragnar thought so, too. Destiny, Ravn said, is everything.

News came in the high summer that the Mercian army was marching at last and that King Æthelred of Wessex was bringing his army to support Burghred, and so we were to be faced by two of the three remaining English kingdoms. We stopped our raids into the countryside and readied Snotengaham for the inevitable siege. The palisade on the earth wall was strengthened and the ditch outside the wall was deepened. The ships were drawn up on the town's riverbank far from the walls so they could not be reduced to ash by fire arrows shot from outside the Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom defenses, and the thatch of the buildings closest to the wall was pulled off the houses so that they could not be set ablaze.

Ivar and Ubba had decided to endure a siege because they reckoned we were strong enough to hold what we had taken, but that if we took more territory then the Danish forces would be stretched thin and could be defeated piece by piece. It was better, they reckoned, to let the enemy come and break himself on Snotengaham's defenses.

That enemy came as the poppies bloomed.

The Mercian scouts arrived first, small groups of horsemen who circled the town warily, and at midday Burghred's foot soldiers appeared, band after band of men with spears, axes, swords, sickles, and hay knives. They camped well away from the walls, using branches and turf to make a Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom township of crude shelters that sprang up across the low hills and meadows.

Snotengaham lay on the north bank of the Trente, which meant the river was between the town and the rest of Mercia, but the enemy army came from the west, having crossed the Trente somewhere to the south of the town. A few of their men stayed on the southern bank to make sure our ships did not cross the river to land men for foraging expeditions, and the presence of those men meant that the enemy surrounded us, but they made no attempt to attack us. The Mercians were waiting for the West Saxons to come and in that first week the only excitement occurred when a handful of Burghred's archers crept toward the town and loosed a few arrows at us and the missiles whacked into the palisade and stuck there, perches for birds, and that was the Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom extent of their belligerence. After that they fortified their camp, surrounding it with a barricade of felled trees and thorn bushes.

"They're frightened that we'll make a sally and kill them all," Ragnar said, "so they're going to sit there and try to starve us out."

"Will they?" I asked.

"They couldn't starve a mouse in a pot,"

Ragnar said cheerfully. He had hung his shield