The Hanged God
Agni stood silently against the doorframe of his hall, watching as his rewards — and those of the men he commanded, of course — were carted by, along with a few captives, beneath a dark gray sky. He’d been told Britannia held riches, and, evidently, he’d been told the truth. His sword and shield were still stained with the blood of the young would-be warriors he’d hewn down to take those riches today, but it had taken far less effort to draw that blood than what he might have had to do elsewhere.
The village in which he now stood was his. He had built it, had bought and paid for the ships that had brought him and the rest of his people here from Denmark, and had organized today’s raid — the first since they’d arrived here in Britannia. Going viking, it seemed, was going to bring him a sizable profit.
With the spoils came a man. Agni did not know his name any better than he knew the names of the Saxons his men had pulled from the burning ruins of their village — the name of which he also did not know. What he did know was that the small chapel in the center of the town had yielded enough gold to be well worth the trouble.
But, somehow, it was this one man that captured Agni’s attention above all else — which was odd. Ordinarily, the Danish raider cared little for anything but profit. Save for a few small boys, too young to fight against the Danes, the man in question was the only male survivor from the village. He was old — very old — with a thick white beard and hair that ran down almost to his knees. He was frail, as a man of his apparent age was wont to be, but his one good eye held a strange light. His one good eye…for the other was missing.
Looking at that missing eye, Agni spoke at last. “Well, stranger, will you not tell me your name?”
But the old man was silent.
Unaccustomed to his questions going unanswered, Agni lost the smile. “Speak,” he said. “They tell me you know our tongue; you spoke to my men here when they untied you. So, speaking of being untied, surely you owe us at least the courtesy of answering any questions posed to you.”
The old man bowed his head. “Of course, lord,” he said. So he did speak Danish. Not only that, but his voice flowed like honey, or perhaps like a song, simple though his words had been. “I apologize. I simply — well, they held me there for some time, and they did not care to hear my voice.”
“And how did they get a hold of you, old man?” Agni asked.
“I came across the sea with the Great Army all those years ago, with the sons of Ragnar Loðbrók.” He spoke those last words with a flourish that could only have signaled mockery of the hero’s name. Agni chose to ignore that.
“And?” Agni said.
“And I was captured,” the old man said, “as happens in war.”
Agni nodded. “I see. Well, you are Danish, and a warrior. You’re welcome to stay with us, as my guest, if you’ll fight in my shield wall.”
“I’d be of little use at my age,” said the old man, “especially after all those years of poor treatment by my previous hosts.”
“Of little use, perhaps, but you’d be meat in the wall,” Agni said. “Besides, do you really want to die of old age? An old warrior such as yourself would surely rather die in battle and ascend to Valhalla?”
A strange smile tugged at the old man’s lips. “Yes, of course, lord. Thank you.”
“Now,” Agni said, “your name.”
“The Christian name they gave me?” the old man asked. “Osbert.”
“Your real name, Dane.”
“I haven’t used that in some time,” said the old man. “Likely wouldn’t even know to answer to it anymore. So, let’s stick with Osbert.”
Agni grunted, and his glance fell once more to the old man’s missing eye. The warlord laughed as he thought of Odin, the one-eyed god of war and poetry. He was a god to be revered, for there were no lengths to which he would not go to achieve his ends. In order to gain wisdom, he had gouged out his own eye; in order to learn the runes, he had hanged himself from a tree — and it was because of this that hanging a man had become a means of sacrificing him to Odin.
“A One-Eyed Stranger,” Agni said, “just like Odin, yes?”
“Yes,” the old man said with a chuckle. “Just like Odin.”
“Then that’s what we’ll call you,” said Agni. “Odin.”
The old man bowed low before the warlord. “As you wish, lord.”
***
A heavy rain came late that night, bringing with it thunder, lightning, and a strong wind that howled like a wolf. Such storms did not ordinarily keep Agni awake — indeed, there was little that bothered him — but that night, he did not sleep.
After several hours lying awake in bed, his wife, Gudrun, left the room. At first, Agni thought little of it, but, when she took far longer than usual to return, he began to worry. He sat up in bed and was just about to go looking for her when she reappeared in the doorway. She was drenched from the rain.
“Where were you?” Agni asked.
“With the old man,” Gudrun said absently. Her voice shook. “Except…I thought he was you. He looked like you; he spoke like you. But then he wasn’t you.”
It was only then that Agni noticed that her nightgown was not sitting quite right on her shoulders.
Without a word, Agni stood up and dressed himself. He stormed out of his hall, his right hand squeezing the haft of his ax as though he might thereby strangle the old man to death. At each longhouse he passed, he rapped on the door with the flat side of his weapon, so that, behind him, the people of his little village stepped outside and watched as he marched toward the small hut where the old man was being kept.
“Out, old man.” Agni did not yell; he didn’t need to. His deep voice carried a weight to match the thunder.
It took only a moment for the old man to open the door. “Old man? I thought I was to be called Odin.”
Odin, the hanged god, the god who had tied a rope around his own neck by which to dangle himself from a tree, a sacrifice to himself.
“Yes,” Agni said, smiling the sick smile of something about to kill its own meal, “you were to be called Odin because of your eye. But if you are to bear his name, you should be made to resemble him better.”
Agni grabbed the old man by the collar of his tunic and pulled hard, so that his victim collapsed to his knees.
“Rope!” Agni yelled as he dragged the old man between the longhouses down the wide street that led out to the vast field outside his village. “Bring me a rope.”
Outside the village stood a lone tree. A rope was quickly brought out and tied to one of its limbs. Without explanation, Agni sat the old man atop a horse, fixed the noose about his neck, and smacked the horse’s rump with the side of his ax. The old man’s neck snapped when the horse ran off, and his body went limp almost immediately.
Surely the One-Eyed God, the Hanged God, would be happy with this sacrifice. If not, Agni did not care.
***
Agni didn’t sleep with his wife the rest of that night. Instead, he gave her the bed, while he lay on the floor outside their chamber, in the mead hall. She’d said the old man had looked like him; had it been a trick of the light, some cruel joke played by lightning and shadows? Or had she been lying to him? Surely, he thought, his stomach turning, she hadn’t chosen knowingly to sleep with the strange old man.
His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, but he was blind to what they saw — the unchanging wood of the hall, the shadows that jumped across the room with each flash of lightning outside. All he saw was the tree and the silhouette of the old man hanging there in the storm.
Slowly, his mind came back to him, and he was once again mentally present in the hall. But something was off. Agni sat up and looked around. At first, he saw nothing wrong. After a moment, though, he found himself staring at a shadow in the corner of the room.
“Who is it?” Agni asked.
“I think you know,” said the shadow.
“Leave,” Agni said as he climbed to his feet.
“I don’t want to,” said the shadow.
“Then tell me who you are.” Agni’s voice was a low growl.
A flash of lightning briefly revealed the shadow’s face, the light glinting off his one eye. “I have been hanged before, you know, though the other time it was by choice. A sacrifice to Odin — a sacrifice to myself.”
The shadow stepped forward, and it was only at the very last moment that Agni saw the knife in his hand.
In the morning, Gudrun would be the first to find the blood on the floor of the mead hall, but no corpse to accompany the ghastly red puddle. Only a moment later, she would step outside, frantic, and see a much larger form hanging from the tree than the one that had been there before: Agni, his throat cut wide open, the rope serving not kill him but, instead, to dedicate him as a sacrifice to Odin.
