The Lords of the North by Bernard Cornwell Page B

They were, instead, the people of

Cumbraland who had been brought to Cair Ligualid by their priests or lords because they had

been promised that their new king would come. And now, from the east, his mail reflecting the

brilliance of the sinking sun, came a gleaming warrior on a great black horse. The king!'

another voice shouted, and more voices took up the cry, and from the wrecked homes and the

makeshift shelters folk scrambled to stare at me. Willibald was trying to hush them, but his

West Saxon words were lost in the din. I thought Guthred would also protest, but instead he

pulled his cloak's hood over his head so that he looked like one of the churchmen who struggled

to keep up as the crowd pressed in on us. Folk knelt as we passed, then scrambled to their feet

to follow us. Hild was laughing, and I took her hand so she rode beside me like a queen, and

the growing crowd accompanied us up a long, low hill towards a new hall built on the

summit. As we grew closer I saw it was not a hall, but a church, and that priests and monks

were coming from its door to greet us.
    There was a madness in Cair Ligualid. A different madness from that which had shed blood

in Eoferwic, but madness just the same. Women were crying, men shouting and children

staring. Mothers held babies towards me as if my touch could heal them. 'You must stop them!'

Willibald had managed to reach my side and was clinging onto my right stirrup.
    'Why?'
    'Because they're mistaken, of course! Guthred is king!'
    I smiled at him. 'Maybe,' I said slowly, as though the idea were just coming to me, 'maybe I

should be king instead?'
    'Uhtred!' Willibald said, shocked.
    'Why not?' I asked. 'My ancestors were kings.'
    'Guthred is king!' Willibald protested. 'The abbot named him!'
    That was how Cair Ligualid's madness began. The town had been a haunt of foxes and birds

when Abbot Eadred of Lindisfarena came across the hills. Lindisfarena, of course, is the

monastery hard by Bebbanburg. It lies on Northumbria's eastern coast, while Cair Ligualid is

on the western edge, but the abbot, driven from Lindisfarena by Danish raids, had come to

Cair Ligualid and there built the new church to which we climbed. The abbot had also seen

Guthred in his dreams. Nowadays, of course, every Northumbrian knows the story of how Saint

Cuthbert revealed Guthred to Abbot Eadred, but back then, on the day of Guthred's arrival in

Cair Ligualid, the tale seemed like just another insanity on top of the world's weltering

madness. Folk were shouting at me, calling me king and Willibald turned and bellowed to

Guthred. 'Tell them to stop!'
    'The people want a king,' Guthred said, 'and Uhtred looks like one. Let them have him for the

moment.'
    A number of younger monks, armed with staves, kept the excited people away from the church

doors. The crowd had been promised a miracle by Eadred and they had been waiting for days,

expecting their king to come, and then I had ridden from the east in the glory of a warrior,

which is what I am and always have been. All my life I have followed the path of the sword.

Given a choice, and I have been given many choices, I would rather draw a blade than settle

an argument with words, for that is what a warrior does, but most men and women are not

fighters. They crave peace. They want nothing more than to watch their children grow, to plant

their seeds and live to see the harvest, to worship their god, to love their family and to be

left in peace. Yet it has been our fate to be born in a time when violence ruled us. The Danes

appeared and our land was shattered, and all around our coasts the long ships with their beaked

prows came to raid
    and enslave and steal and kill. In Cumbraland, which is the wildest part of all the Saxon

lands, the Danes came and the Norsemen came and the Scots came, and no one could live in peace,

and I think that when you break men's dreams, when you destroy their homes