Saxon 01 - The Last Kingdom Read Free

had been churned by whirlwinds.

"They are sent by God," Gytha said timidly,

"to punish us."

"Punish us for what?" my father demanded savagely.

"For our sins," Gytha said, making the sign of the cross.

"Our sins be damned," my father snarled.

"They come here because they're hungry."

He was irritated by my stepmother's piety, and he refused to give up his wolf's head banner that proclaimed our family's descent from Woden, the ancient Saxon god of battles. The wolf, Ealdwulf the smith had told Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom me, was one of Woden's three favored beasts, the others being the eagle and the raven. My mother wanted our banner to show the cross, but my father was proud of his ancestors, though he rarely talked about Woden. Even at ten years old I understood that a good Christian should not boast of being spawned by a pagan god, but I also liked the idea of being a god's descendant and Ealdwulf often told me tales of Woden, how he had rewarded our people by giving us the land we called England, and how he had once thrown a war spear clear around the moon, and how his shield could darken the midsummer sky, and how he could reap all the corn in the world with one stroke of his great sword. I liked those tales. They were better than my stepmother's stories of Cuthbert's miracles. Christians, it seemed to me, were forever weeping and I did not think Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom Woden's worshippers cried much.

We waited in the hall. It was, indeed it still is, a great wooden hall, strongly thatched and stout beamed, with a harp on a dais and a stone hearth in the center of the floor.

It took a dozen slaves a day to keep that great fire going, dragging the wood along the causeway and up through the gates, and at summer's end we would make a log pile bigger than the church just as a winter store.

At the edges of the hall were timber platforms, filled with rammed earth and layered with woolen rugs, and it was on those platforms that we lived, up above the drafts. The hounds stayed on the brackenstrewn floor below, where lesser men could eat at the year's four great feasts.

There was no feast that night, just bread and cheese and ale, and my father waited Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom for my brother and wondered aloud if the Danes were restless again. "They usually come for food and plunder," he told me,

"but in some places they've stayed and taken land."

"You think they want our land?" I asked.

"They'll take any land," he said irritably. He was always irritated by my questions, but that night he was worried and so he talked on.

"Their own land is stone and ice, and they have giants threatening them."

I wanted him to tell me more about the giants, but he brooded instead. "Our ancestors," he went on after a while, "took this land. They took it and made it and held it. We do not give up what our ancestors gave us. They came across the sea and they fought here, and they built here and they're buried here. This is our land, mixed with our Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom blood, strengthened with our bone. Ours."

He was angry, but he was often angry. He glowered at me, as if wondering whether I was strong enough to hold this land of Northumbria that our ancestors had won with sword and spear and blood and slaughter.

We slept after a while, or at least I slept. I think my father paced the ramparts, but by dawn he was back in the hall and it was then I was woken by the horn at the High Gate and I stumbled off the platform and out into the morning's first light. There was dew on the grass, a sea eagle circling overhead, and my father's hounds streaming from the hall door in answer to the horn's call. I saw my father running down to the Low Gate and I followed him until I could wriggle my way through the men who were crowding onto the earthen rampart to stare along the Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom causeway.

Horsemen were coming from the south.

There were a dozen of them, their