Gods of the North

Publisher's Note: The publication of this strange story by Robert E. Howard, author of the Conan stories, so much a part of the Living Library of Fantasy, represents a departure for this magazine. Without abandoning our policy of bringing you, month after month, the best in NEW Science Fiction and Fantasy, we will, from time to time, publish material such as this, hitherto known to only a few students of the field! GODS OF THE NORTH was published in 1934, in Charles D. Hornig's THE FANTASY FAN, which had a circulation of under a hundred! We thank Sam Moskowitz, Editor and SF historian, who showed us this story.
She drew away from him, dwindling in the witch-fire of the skies, until she was a figure no bigger than a child.
The clangor of the swords had died away, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The pale bleak sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice-fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade, where the dead lay in heaps. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt: helmeted heads, back-drawn in the death throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in last invocation to Ymir the frost-giant.
Across the red drifts and mail-clad forms, two figures approached one another. In that utter desolation only they moved. The frosty sky was over them, the white illimitable plain around them, the dead men at their feet. Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a world.
Their shields were gone, their corselets dinted. Blood smeared their mail; their swords were red. Their horned helmets showed the marks of fierce strokes.
One spoke, he whose locks and beard were red as the blood on the sunlit snow.
Man of the raven locks, said he, tell me your name, so that my brothers in Vanaheim may know who was the last of Wulfhere's band to fall before the sword of Heimdul.
This is my answer, replied the black-haired warrior: Not in Vanaheim, but in Valhalla will you tell your brothers the name of Amra of Akbitana.