The Last Kingdom

The next night all Ragnar’s men, but no women, walked to the pit in the darkness. We boys carried pitch-soaked torches that flamed under the trees, casting flickering shadows that melted into the surrounding darkness. The men were all dressed and armed as though they were going to war.

Blind Ravn waited at the pit, standing at the far side from the ramp, and he chanted a great epic in praise of Odin. On and on it went, the words as hard and rhythmic as a drum beat, describing how the great god had made the world from the corpse of the giant Ymir, and how he had hurled the sun and moon into the sky, and how his spear, Gungnir, was the mightiest weapon in creation, forged by dwarves in the world’s deeps, and on the poem went and the men gathered around the pit seemed to sway to the poem’s pulse, sometimes repeating a phrase, and I confess I was almost as bored as when Beocca used to drone on in his stammering Latin, and I stared out into the woods, watching the shadows, wondering what things moved in the dark and thinking of the sceadugengan.

I often thought of the sceadugengan, the Shadow-Walkers. Ealdwulf, Bebbanburg’s blacksmith, had first told me of them. He had warned me not to tell Beocca of the stories, and I never did, and Ealdwulf told me how, before Christ came to England, back when we English had worshipped Woden and the other gods, it had been well known that there were Shadow-Walkers who moved silent and half-seen across the land, mysterious creatures who could change their shapes. One moment they were wolves, then they were men, or perhaps eagles, and they were neither alive nor dead, but things from the shadow world, night-beasts, and I stared into the dark trees and I wanted there to be sceadugengan out there in the dark, something that would be my secret, something that would frighten the Danes, something to give Bebbanburg back to me, something as powerful as the magic which brought the Danes victory.

It was a child’s dream, of course. When you are young and powerless you dream of possessing mystical strength, and once you are grown and strong you condemn lesser folk to that same dream, but as a child I wanted the power of the sceadugengan. I remember my excitement that night at the notion of harnessing the power of the Shadow-Walkers before a whinny brought my attention back to the pit and I saw that the men at the ramp had divided, and that a strange procession was coming from the dark. There was a stallion, a ram, a dog, a goose, a bull and a boar, each animal led by one of Ragnar’s warriors, and at the back was an English prisoner, a man condemned for moving a field marker, and he, like the beasts, had a rope about his neck.

I knew the stallion. It was Ragnar’s finest, a great black horse called Flame-Stepper, a horse Ragnar loved. Yet Flame-Stepper, like all the other beasts, was to be given to Odin that night. Ragnar did it. Stripped to his waist, his scarred chest broad in the flamelight, he used a war axe to kill the beasts one by one, and Flame-Stepper was the last animal to die and the great horse’s eyes were white as it was forced down the ramp. It struggled, terrified by the stench of blood that had splashed the sides of the pit, and Ragnar went to the horse and there were tears on his face as he kissed Flame-Stepper’s muzzle, and then he killed him, one blow between the eyes, straight and true, so that the stallion fell, hooves thrashing, but dead within a heartbeat. The man died last, and that was not so distressing as the horse’s death, and then Ragnar stood in the mess of blood-matted fur and raised his gore-smothered axe to the sky. ‘Odin!’ he shouted.

‘Odin!’ Every man echoed the shout, and they held their swords or spears or axes towards the steaming pit. ‘Odin!’ they shouted again, and I saw Weland the snake staring at me across the firelit slaughter hole.

All the corpses were taken from the pit and hung from tree branches. Their blood had been given to the creatures beneath the earth and now their flesh was given to the gods above, and then we filled in the pit, we danced on it to stamp down the earth, and the jars of ale and skins of mead were handed around and we drank beneath the hanging corpses. Odin, the terrible god, had been summoned because Ragnar and his people were going to war.

I thought of the blades held over the pit of blood, I thought of the god stirring in his corpse-hall to send a blessing on these men, and I knew that all England would fall unless it found a magic as strong as the sorcery of these strong men. I was only ten years old, but on that night I knew what I would become.

I would join the sceadugengan, I would be a Shadow-Walker.

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