Saxon 01 - The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

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 Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom 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 Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom 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 Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom 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?"

Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom "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 wall, you will learn the oar, you will learn to give honor to the gods, and then you will use what you have learned to make your life good or bad."

"I want Bebbanburg," I said.

"Then you must take it. Perhaps I will help Bernard Cornwell The Last Kingdom you, but not yet. Before that we go south, and before we go south we must persuade Odin to look on us with favor."

I still did not understand the Danish way of religion. They took it much less seriously than we English, but the women prayed often enough and once in a while a man would kill a good beast, dedicate it to the gods, and mount its bloody head above his door to show that there would be a feast in Thor or Odin's honor in his house, but the feast, though it was an act of worship, was always the same as any other drunken feast.

I remember the Yule feast best because that was the week Weland came. He arrived on the coldest day of the winter when the snow