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

and ruin their

harvests and rape their daughters and enslave their sons, you engender a madness. At the

world's ending, when the gods will fight each other, all mankind will be stricken with a great

frenzy and the rivers will flow with blood and the sky shall be filled with screaming and the

great tree of life will fall with a crash that will be heard beyond the farthest star, but all

that is yet to come. Back then, in 878 when I was young, there was just a smaller madness at

Cair Ligualid. It was the madness of hope, the belief that a king, born in a churchman's

dream, would end a people's suffering.
    Abbot Eadred was waiting inside the cordon of monks and, as my horse came close, he raised

his hands towards the sky. He was a tall man, old and white-haired, gaunt and fierce, with eyes

like a falcon and, surprising in a priest, he had a sword strapped to his waist. He could not

see my face at first because my cheek-pieces hid it, but even when I took off my helmet he

still thought I was the king. He stared up at me, raised thin hands to heaven as if giving

thanks for my arrival, then gave me a low bow. 'Lord King.' he said in a booming voice. The

monks dropped to their knees and stared up at me.
    'Lord King,' Abbot Eadred boomed again, 'welcome!'
    'Lord King,' the monks echoed, 'welcome.'
    Now that was an interesting moment. Eadred, remember, had selected Guthred to be the

king because Saint Cuthbert had shown him Hardicnut's son in a dream. Yet now he thought that

I was the king, which meant that either Cuthbert had shown him the wrong face or else that

Eadred was a lying bastard. Or perhaps Saint Cuthbert was a lying bastard. But as a

miracle, and Eadred's dream is always remembered as a miracle, it was decidedly

suspicious. I told a priest that story once and he refused to believe me. He hissed at me,

made the sign of the cross and rushed off to say his prayers. The whole of Guthred's life was to

be dominated by the simple fact that Saint Cuthbert revealed him to Eadred, and the truth is

that Eadred did not recognise him, but these days no one believes me. Willibald, of course, was

dancing around like a man with two wasps up his breeches, trying to correct Eadred's

mistake, so I kicked him on the side of the skull to make him quiet then gestured towards

Guthred who had taken the hood from his head. This,' I said to Eadred, 'is your king.'
    For a heartbeat Eadred did not believe me, then he did and a look of intense anger crossed

his face. It was a sudden contortion of utter fury because he understood, even if no one

else did, that he was supposed to have recognised Guthred from his dream. The anger flared,

then he mastered it and bowed to Guthred and repeated his greeting and Guthred returned it

with his customary cheerfulness. Two monks hurried to take his horse and Guthred

dismounted and was led into the church. The rest of us followed as best we could. I ordered

some monks to hold Witnere and Hild's mare. They did not want to, they wanted to be inside the

church, but I told them I would break their tonsured heads if the horses were lost, and they

obeyed me.
    It was dark in the church. There were rushlights burning on the altar, and more on the

floor of the nave where a large group of monks bowed and chanted, but the small smoky lights

hardly lifted the thick gloom. It was not much of a church. It was big, bigger even than the

church Alfred was building in Wintanceaster, but it had been raised in a hurry and the walls

were untrimmed logs and when my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw that the roof

was ragged with rough thatch. There were probably fifty or sixty churchmen inside and half

that number of thegns, if the men of Cumbraland aspired to that rank. They were the

wealthier men of the region and they stood with their followers and I noted, with

curiosity, that some wore the cross and others wore the hammer. There were Danes and