Free What I Was by Meg Rosoff Page A

we lay side by side, breathing softly together, watching thin rivulets of water run down the cliffs and into the sea, feeling the world slowly revolve around us as we leant into each other for warmth – and for something else, something I couldn’t quite name, something glorious, frightening, and unforgettable.
    For an instant I knew what it was to be immortal, to make the tides cease and time stand still.
    And just this once, it wasn’t Finn’s power. It was mine.
    Rule number five: Don’t let go of the cliff.

13
    According to Mr Barnes (history), the Dark Ages dawned in the middle of the fifth century with the decline of the Roman Empire. Roman occupiers had been settling in Britain all along – marrying, raising families, farming. But once Rome withdrew its central authority from Britain ( AD 410), Saxon tribes invaded from Germany and divided England into four kingdoms: Mercia, Northumbria, Wessex, East Anglia. After a bloody and plague-ridden start, the Saxons settled down to a bloody and plague-ridden rule, until the Vikings came along to institute a new and improved (bloodier and more plague-ridden) kingdom.
    Romance aside, no one with half a brain could be nostalgic for life in the Dark Ages. There were too many ways to live and die miserably in those days, particularly if you were a peasant. I could easily imagine myself as a peasant, dressed in scratchy homespun wool, trying to scrape a living from half an acre of land or maybe a single mangy cow. There would be a wife no one else wanted (pockmarked maybe, or lame) who’d probably die in childbirth leaving me no one to help with the cow or plough the little field. It would be cold all the time, and damp, and by midwinter we would run out of food and options while whatever children there might be wept with hunger, and later fell silent and died of starvation. I could easily picture the brutality and despair of this life, had no trouble imagining myself dying of something unromantic like plague, or something banal like a broken arm.
    Mr Barnes was always keen to drive home the contrast between our charmed existence at St Oswald’s and the brutal realities of history. Much to our delight, this included lurid tales of Viking torture and debauchery, our favourite being the blood eagle. The blood eagle required two deep vertical cuts to be made in a living man on either side of the backbone, severing the cartilage connecting ribs and vertebrae. Through these cuts, the live lungs were grasped and pulled backwards out of the chest cavity. The goal of this unimaginable act of brutality was to preserve the victim’s life long enough to watch the lungs inflate outside the body like wings.
    I thought of Finn’s crab.
    From what I actually managed to absorb in class (the experience was novel and even rather exciting), there emerged a fantastically romantic image of bloodthirsty armies clashing ferociously on barren plains, vast horned heroes sweeping from one end of the island to the other, 960 soldiers slain by a single warrior with a single sword in a single battle on a single day.
    What more could a boy ask for? Especially a boy without the passion or the capacity to rip any creature’s lungs out, even the lowliest.
    You could almost hear the spark of genuine interest ignite during lessons that term. Something about the anarchy and violence of the first millennium struck a chord in us where the hallowed achievements of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome had failed. Which meant there was less groaning than usual when each of us was assigned an essay topic: Athelstan, The Venerable Bede, The Battle of Badon Hill, Alfred the Great, Offa’s Dyke. St Oswald, patron saint of our beloved alma mater, fell to me. Gibbon had lobbied for Boudicca, which he saw mainly as an opportunity to look at drawings of naked breasts.
    ‘Ho ho ho, ’ he leered, waggling pictures out of dusty history books as if they were Playboy centrefolds.
    ‘Nice ones, Gibbon.’ He’d been drooling