The Last Kingdom Series Books 1–8: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, The Lords of the North, Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings, The Pagan Lord, The Empty Throne. Bernard Cornwell
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rode in silence, listening to the horses’ hooves crunching and squeaking in the snow. I was thinking of Ragnar’s dream, the dream of no more England, of her land given to the Danes. ‘What happens to me?’ I finally blurted out.
‘You?’ He sounded surprised that I had asked. ‘What happens to you, Uhtred, is what you make happen. You will grow, you will learn the sword, you will learn the way of the shield wall, you will learn the oar, you will learn to give honour to the gods, and then you will use what you have learned to make your life good or bad.’
‘I want Bebbanburg,’ I said.
‘Then you must take it. Perhaps I will help you, but not yet. Before that we go south, and before we go south we must persuade Odin to look on us with favour.’
I still did not understand the Danish way of religion. They took it much less seriously than we English, but the women prayed often enough and once in a while a man would kill a good beast, dedicate it to the gods, and mount its bloody head above his door to show that there would be a feast in Thor or Odin’s honour in his house, but the feast, though it was an act of worship, was always the same as any other drunken feast.
I remember the Yule feast best because that was the week Weland came. He arrived on the coldest day of the winter when the snow was heaped in drifts, and he came on foot with a sword by his side, a bow on his shoulder and rags on his back and he knelt respectfully outside Ragnar’s house. Sigrid made him come inside and she fed him and gave him ale, but when he had eaten he insisted on going back into the snow and waiting for Ragnar who was up in the hills, hunting.
Weland was a snake-like man, that was my very first thought on seeing him. He reminded me of my uncle Ælfric, slender, sly and secretive, and I disliked him on sight and I felt a flicker of fear as I watched him prostrate himself in the snow when Ragnar returned.
‘My name is Weland,’ he said, ‘and I am in need of a lord.’
‘You are not a youth,’ Ragnar said, ‘so why do you not have a lord?’
‘He died, lord, when his ship sank.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Snorri, lord.’
‘Which Snorri?’
‘Son of Eric, son of Grimm, from Birka.’
‘And you did not drown?’ Ragnar asked as he dismounted and gave me the reins of his horse.
‘I was ashore, lord, I was sick.’
‘Your family? Your home?’
‘I am son of Godfred, lord, from Haithabu.’
‘Haithabu!’ Ragnar said sourly. ‘A trader?’
‘I am a warrior, lord.’
‘So why come to me?’
Weland shrugged. ‘Men say you are a good lord, a ring-giver, but if you turn me down, lord, I shall try other men.’
‘And you can use that sword, Weland Godfredson?’
‘As a woman can use her tongue, lord.’
‘You’re that good, eh?’ Ragnar asked, as ever unable to resist a jest. He gave Weland permission to stay, sending him to Synningthwait to find shelter, and afterwards, when I said I did not like Weland, Ragnar just shrugged and said the stranger needed kindness. We were sitting in the house, half choking from the smoke that writhed about the rafters. ‘There is nothing worse, Uhtred,’ Ragnar said, ‘than for a man to have no lord. No ring-giver,’ he added, touching his own arm rings.
‘I don’t trust him,’ Sigrid put in from the fire where she was making bannocks on a stone. Rorik, recovering from his sickness, was helping her, while Thyra, as ever, was spinning. ‘I think he’s an outlaw,’ Sigrid said.
‘He probably is,’ Ragnar allowed, ‘but my ship doesn’t care if its oars are pulled by outlaws.’ He reached for a bannock and had his hand slapped away by Sigrid who said the cakes were for Yule.
The Yule feast was the biggest celebration of the year, a whole week of food and ale and mead and fights and laughter and drunken men vomiting in the snow. Ragnar’s men gathered at Synningthwait and there were horse races, wrestling matches, competitions in throwing spears, axes and rocks, and, my favourite, the tug of war where two teams of men or boys tried to pull the other into a cold stream. I saw Weland watching me as I wrestled with a boy a year older than me. Weland already looked more prosperous. His rags were gone and he wore a cloak of fox fur. I got drunk that Yule for the first time, helplessly drunk so that my legs would not work and I lay moaning with a throbbing head and Ragnar roared with laughter and made me drink more mead until I threw up. Ragnar, of course, won the drinking competition, and Ravn recited a long poem about some ancient hero who killed a monster and then the monster’s mother who was even more fearsome than her son, but I was too drunk to remember much of it.
And after the Yule feast I discovered 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