something new about the Danes and their gods, for Ragnar had ordered a great pit dug in the woods above his house, and Rorik and I helped make the pit in a clearing. We axed through tree roots, shovelled out earth, and still Ragnar wanted it deeper, and he was only satisfied when he could stand in the base of the pit and not see across its lip. A ramp led down into the hole, beside which was a great heap of excavated soil.
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.
Springtime, 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 centre 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 Temes 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 knife-like, but when you were aboard you could see how the midships flared outwards 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
