The Last Kingdom (8 page)

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 Odin 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 that 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 ax 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 ax to the sky. “Odin!” he shouted.

“Odin!” Every man echoed the shout, and they held their swords or spears or axes toward 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.

S
pringtime, the year 868, I was eleven years old and the
Wind-Viper
was afloat.

She was afloat, but not at sea. The
Wind-Viper
was Ragnar’s ship, a lovely thing with a hull of oak, a carved serpent’s head at the prow, an eagle’s head at the stern, and a triangular wind vane made of bronze on which a raven was painted black. The wind vane was mounted at her masthead, though the mast was now lowered and being supported by two timber crutches so that it ran like a rafter down the center of the long ship. Ragnar’s men were rowing and their painted shields lined the ship’s sides. They chanted as they rowed, pounding out the tale of how mighty Thor had fished for the dread Midgard Serpent that lies coiled about the roots of the world, and how the serpent had taken the hook baited with an ox’s head, and how the giant Hymir, terrified of the vast snake, had cut the line. It is a good tale and its rhythms took us up the river Trente, which is a tributary of the Humber and flows from deep inside Mercia. We were going south, against the current, but the journey was easy, the ride placid, the sun warm, and the river’s margins thick with flowers. Some men rode horses, keeping pace with us on the eastern bank, while behind us was a fleet of beast-prowed ships. This was the army of Ivar the Boneless and Ubba the Horrible, a host of Northmen, sword Danes, going to war.

All eastern Northumbria belonged to them, western Northumbria offered grudging allegiance, and now they planned to take Mercia, which was the kingdom at England’s heartland. The Mercian territory stretched south to the river Temse where the lands of Wessex began, west to the mountainous country where the Welsh tribes lived, and east to the farms and marshes of East Anglia. Mercia, though not as wealthy as Wessex, was much richer than Northumbria, and the river Trente ran into the kingdom’s heart and the
Wind-Viper
was the tip of a Danish spear aimed at that heart.

The river was not deep, but Ragnar boasted that the
Wind-Viper
could float on a puddle, and that was almost true. From a distance she looked long, lean, and knifelike, but when you were aboard you could see how the midships flared outward so that she sat on the water like a shallow bowl rather than cut through it like a blade, and even with her belly laden with forty or fifty men, their weapons, shields, food, and ale, she needed very little depth. Once in a while her long keel would scrape on gravel, but by keeping to the outside of the river’s sweeping bends we were able to stay in sufficient water. That was why the mast had been lowered, so that, on the outside of the river’s curves, we could slide under the overhanging trees without becoming entangled.

Rorik and I sat in the prow with his grandfather, Ravn, and our job was to tell the old man everything we could see, which was very little other than flowers, trees, reeds, waterfowl, and the signs of trout rising to mayfly. Swallows had come from their winter sleep and swooped across the river while martins pecked at the banks to collect mud for their nests. Warblers were loud, pigeons clattered through new leaves, and the hawks slid still and menacing across the scattered clouds. Swans watched us pass and once in a while we would see otter cubs playing beneath the pale-leaved willows and there would be a flurry of water as they fled from our coming. Sometimes we passed a riverside settlement of thatch and timber, but the folks and their livestock had already run away.

“Mercia is frightened of us,” Ravn said. He lifted his white, blind eyes to the oncoming air, “and they are right to be frightened. We are warriors.”

“They have warriors, too,” I said.

Ravn laughed. “I think only one man in three is a warrior, and sometimes not even that many, but in our army, Uhtred, every man is a fighter. If you do not want to be a warrior you stay home in Denmark. You till the soil, herd sheep, fish the sea, but you do not take to the ships and become a fighter. But here in England? Every man is forced to the fight, yet only one in three or maybe only one in four has the belly for it. The rest are farmers who just want to run. We are wolves fighting sheep.”

Watch and learn, my father had said, and I was learning. What else can a boy with an unbroken voice do? One in three men are warriors, remember the shadow-walkers, beware the cut beneath the shield, a river can be an army’s road to a kingdom’s heart, watch and learn.

“And they have a weak king,” Ravn went on. “Burghred, he’s called, and he has no guts for a fight. He will fight, of course, because we shall force him, and he will call on his friends in Wessex to help him, but in his weak heart he knows he cannot win.”

“How do you know?” Rorik asked.

Ravn smiled. “All winter, boy, our traders have been in Mercia. Selling pelts, selling amber, buying iron ore, buying malt, and they talk and they listen and they come back and they tell us what they heard.”

Kill the traders, I thought.

Why did I think that way? I liked Ragnar. I liked him much more than I had liked my father. I should, by rights, be dead, yet Ragnar had saved me and Ragnar spoiled me and he treated me like a son, and he called me a Dane, and I liked the Danes, yet even at that time I knew I was not a Dane. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg and I clung to the memory of the fortress by the sea, of the birds crying over the breakers, of the puffins whirring across the whitecaps, of the seals on the rocks, of the white water shattering on the cliffs. I remembered the folk of that land, the men who had called my father “lord,” but talked to him of cousins they held in common. It was the gossip of neighbors, the comfort of knowing every family within a half day’s ride, and that was, and is, Bebbanburg to me: home. Ragnar would have given me the fortress if it could be taken, but then it would belong to the Danes and I would be nothing more than their hired man, ealdorman at their pleasure, no better than King Edgar who was no king but a pampered dog on a short rope, and what the Dane gives, the Dane can take away, and I would hold Bebbanburg by my own effort.

Did I know all that at eleven? Some, I think. It lay in my heart, unformed, unspoken, but hard as a stone. It would be covered over in time, half forgotten and often contradicted, but it was always there. Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything. He would even say it in English,
“Wyrd bi
ful
aræd.”

“What are you thinking?” Rorik asked me.

“That it would be nice to swim,” I said.

The oars dipped and the
Wind-Viper
glided on into Mercia.

Next day a small force waited in our path. The Mercians had blocked the river with felled trees, which did not quite bar the way but would certainly make it hard for our oarsmen to make progress through the small gap between the tangling branches. There were about a hundred Mercians and they had a score of bowmen and spear-throwers waiting by the blockage, ready to pick off our rowers, while the rest of their men were formed into a shield wall on the eastern bank. Ragnar laughed when he saw them. That was something else I learned, the joy with which the Danes faced battle. Ragnar was whooping with joy as he leaned on the steering oar and ran the ship into the bank, and the ships behind were also grounding themselves while the horsemen who had been keeping pace with us dismounted for battle.

I watched from the
Wind-Viper
’s prow as the ships’ crews hurried ashore and pulled on leather or mail. What did those Mercians see? They saw young men with wild hair, wild beards, and hungry faces, men who embraced battle like a lover. If the Danes could not fight an enemy they fought among themselves. Most had nothing but monstrous pride, battle scars, and well-sharpened weapons, and with those things they would take whatever they wanted, and that Mercian shield wall did not even stay to contest the fight, but once they saw they would be outnumbered they ran away to the mocking howls of Ragnar’s men who then stripped off their mail and leather and used their axes and the
Wind-Viper
’s hide-twisted ropes to clear away the fallen trees. It took a few hours to unblock the river, but then we were moving again. That night the ships clustered together on the riverbank, fires were lit ashore, men were posted as sentries, and every sleeping warrior kept his weapons beside him, but no one troubled us and at dawn we moved on, soon coming to a town with thick earthen walls and a high palisade. This, Ragnar assumed, was the place the Mercians had failed to defend, but there seemed to be no sign of any soldiers on the wall so he ran the boat ashore again and led his crew toward the town.

The earth walls and timber palisade were both in good condition, and Ragnar marveled that the town’s garrison had chosen to march downriver to fight us, rather than stay behind their well-tended defenses. The Mercian soldiers were plainly gone now, probably fled south, for the gates were open and a dozen townsfolk were kneeling outside the wooden arch and holding out supplicant hands for mercy. Three of the terrified people were monks, their tonsured heads bowed. “I hate monks,” Ragnar said cheerfully. His sword, Heart-Breaker, was in his hand and he swept her naked blade in a hissing arc.

“Why?” I asked.

“Monks are like ants,” he said, “wriggling about in black, being useless. I hate them. You’ll speak for me, Uhtred. Ask them what place this is?”

I asked and learned that the town was called Gegnesburh.

“Tell them,” Ragnar instructed me, “that my name is Earl Ragnar, I am called the Fearless, and that I eat children when I’m not given food and silver.”

I duly told them. The kneeling men looked up at Ragnar who had unbound his hair, which, had they known, was always a sign that he was in a mood for killing. His grinning men made a line behind him, a line heavy with axes, swords, spears, shields, and war hammers.

“What food there is,” I translated a gray-bearded man’s answer, “is yours. But he says there is not much food.”

Ragnar smiled at that, stepped forward, and, still smiling, swung Heart-Breaker so that her blade half severed the man’s head. I jumped back, not in alarm, but because I did not want my tunic spattered with his blood. “One less mouth to feed,” Ragnar said cheerfully. “Now ask the others how much food there is.”

The gray-bearded man was now red bearded and he was choking and twitching as he died. His struggles slowly ended and then he just lay, dying, his eyes gazing reprovingly into mine. None of his companions tried to help him; they were too frightened. “How much food do you have?” I demanded.

“There is food, lord,” one of the monks said.

“How much?” I demanded again.

“Enough.”

“He says there’s enough,” I told Ragnar.

“A sword,” Ragnar said, “is a great tool for discovering the truth. What about the monk’s church? How much silver does it have?”

The monk gabbled that we could look for ourselves, that we could take whatever we found, that it was all ours, anything we found was ours, all was ours. I translated these panicked statements and Ragnar again smiled. “He’s not telling the truth, is he?”

“Isn’t he?” I asked.

“He wants me to look because he knows I won’t find, and that means they’ve hidden their treasure or had it taken away. Ask him if they’ve hidden their silver.”

I did and the monk reddened. “We are a poor church,” he said, “with little treasure,” and he stared wide-eyed as I translated his answer. Then he tried to get up and run as Ragnar stepped forward, but he tripped over his robe and Heart-Breaker pierced his spine so that he jerked like a landed fish as he died.

There was silver, of course, and it was buried. Another of the monks told us so, and Ragnar sighed as he cleaned his sword on the dead monk’s robe. “They’re such fools,” he said plaintively. “They’d live if they answered truthfully the first time.”

“But suppose there wasn’t any treasure?” I asked him.

“Then they’d tell the truth and die,” Ragnar said, and found that funny. “But what’s the point of a monk except to hoard treasure for us Danes? They’re ants who hoard silver. Find the ants’ nest, dig, and a man’s rich.” He stepped over his victims. At first I was shocked by the ease with which he would kill a defenseless man, but Ragnar had no respect for folk who cringed and lied. He appreciated an enemy who fought, who showed spirit, but men who were weakly sly like the ones he killed at Gegnesburh’s gate were beneath his contempt, no better than animals.