Berserker (Omnibus) Read online

  Berserker

  SF GATEWAY OMNIBUS

  SHADOW OF THE WOLF

  THE BULL CHIEF

  THE HORNED WARRIOR

  Robert Holdstock

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were — and remain — landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  SF Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Introduction from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

  Shadow of the Wolf

  Dedication

  Part One: The Bear God

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two: Deirdre of the Flames

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Three: The Quest

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  The Bull Chief

  Dedication

  Part One: The Emissary

  Chapter One

  Part Two: Sneachta Doom – the Snow Destroyer

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Three: The Naked Warriors

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Four: The Warlord of the Britons

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Horned Warrior

  Dedication

  Author’s note

  Part One: The Red Queen

  Chapter 1: The hidden lands of the Coritani, AD 55

  Chapter 2: Southern Italy, AD 58

  Chapter 3: The tribal lands of the Iceni, part of the Roman Province, AD 60

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two: The Ancients

  Chapter 6: The island sanctuary of Mona, in the West

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9: The lands of the Belgae

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Coda

  SF Gateway website

  Also by Robert Holdstock

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Shadow of the Wolf

  When Odin’s curse fell upon him, Harald Swiftaxe, the young Norse warrior, lusty in love and battle, was fully human no longer. He was incensed with the animal rage of the god’s devotees, the Berserkers. The snarling ferocious savagery of the bear possessed him. Immune to fire and steel, frenzied by the smell of blood and the sight of torn human flesh, he was driven to the worst of human deeds. The bear screeched its ecstasy – yet at times the man dimly understood the horror. Could the spell be lifted? If there was a way, the price of failure would be high, greater than death itself …

  The Bull Chief

  In the Celtic tribal lands of Connacht, he came of age among the Druids and headhunters and the ghosts of the great Bronze Age people of Danann. He fought his savage, bloodthirsty way to the east, as a naked warrior who had rejected the tribal laws. And there Arthur, Warlord of the Britons, came to find him, to exploit his skill and invulnerability in the war against the Saxons. Yet Swiftaxe, the Berserker, wanted one thing only: to break the curse that condemned him to his life of frenzied violence and bloodlust.

  The Horned Warrior

  Along the wild hills and forests of Britain, he was reborn as the Celt’s mightiest warrior. Even as a boy, his mad bloodlust spread superstitious terror among friend and enemy alike. He was Swiftaxe, known as the Horned Warrior: half ghost, half man – and all killer …

  INTRODUCTION

  from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

  Robert Holdstock (1948–2009) was a British author, with an MSc in medical zoology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; he spent 1971–1974 in medical research before becoming a full-time writer, though he published his first short story, ‘Pauper’s Plot’ for New Worlds as early as November 1968. He went on to write a number of pieces of short fiction before concentrating for most of his career on novels. Among the more notable stories of this period are the novelettes ‘Travellers’, a Time-Travel tale, and ‘The Time Beyond Age: A Journey’; some others are collected in In the Valley of the Statues (1982), which also includes the brilliant novella that became Mythago Wood (1984); taken together, these stories range across Holdstock’s entire career to that point. After the mid-1970s his writing broke into two superficially incompatible categories.

  Under the House Names Ken Blake and Richard Kirk, and under his personal pseudonyms Robert Black, Chris Carlsen, Steven Eisler and notably as Robert Faulcon, he published more than twenty novels, novelizations and works of popular SF ‘nonfiction’ (these under his own name), almost all of them commercial efforts and most of them infused with a black intensity of action that gave even clichéd Sword-And-Sorcery plots something of a mythic intonation. The most striking of these may be two series: the Night Hunter sequence as by Robert Faulcon; and the Berserker Arthurian sequence as by Chris Carlsen (see below). Also of interest was the quasi-fictional Tour of the Universe: The Journey of a Lifetime: The Recorded Diaries of Leio Scott and Caroline Luranski (1980) with Malcolm Edwards, which describes a 26th century tour of the local galaxy. Though he wrote relatively fewer short stories after 1980 or so, tales like Thorn (1984) or ‘The Ragthorn’ (1991) with Garry Kilworth convey chthonic narratives with a parable-like density.

  At the same time, under his own name, Holdstock began to publish SF novels in which he accommodated the mythologizing of his dark fantasies within the frame of ‘normal’ SF worlds. Examples include Eye Among the Blind (1976), in which he explores the interplay between Aliens and alienation; Earthwind (1977), the title referring to a ‘chthonic’ atavism pulsing deep in the blood of all that lives universe-wide, though tragically, the human cast, on an alien planet, seem not able to comprehend the multifaceted nature of a world they were not born to; and Where Time Winds Blow (1981), which is much more complex. On a world riven by literal winds, a c
onflicted cast is caught up in an ornate narrative which gradually reveals to them some of the plumbings of the structure of time, through which time winds blow, depositing valuable artefacts, which are coveted by all.

  With the publication of the book form of Mythago Wood (1984), Holdstock’s two writing directions suddenly and fruitfully converged in a tale whose elaborate proprieties of rationale are driven by strong narrative energies and an exuberance of language. Much expanded from the 1981 fantasy (see above), Mythago Wood is a central contribution to late 20th century fantasy and is dense with fantasy tropes. It is fantasy rather than SF, perhaps because its cognitive premise – that it is possible to construct an ‘engine’ through which one might literally conceive racial archetypes – is much easier to convey in fantasy terms. The frame of the Mythago Cycle, which this tale initiates, is obdurately rational in tone, and the ‘mythagos’ discovered – and transmuted – by the contemporary protagonist are appropriate expressions of what might be called the unconscious tale of the race: they are that tale made animate, and each mythago bears a name or names – and enacts the nature – of those archetypes from whom flow the permutations of that tale. The wood from which they come – like the interior lands for which the protagonists of much British fantasy long – is a classic Little Big heartwood, huger inside than out, and more and more ancient the further one penetrates inwards. In describing this world Holdstock engages in language of a metaphoric density rarely encountered in marketable fiction, and through his language articulates a hard, knotty pain of desiderium so many English people feel for an Ur-land that never existed but which seems still to pulse through what remains of the astonishingly dense world of Britain. Mythago Wood won the 1985 World Fantasy Award.

  The next volume in the Mythago Cycle, Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region (1988), only increases the intensity of the Chymical Marriage between rational discourse and desiderium or Sehnsucht (a term C. S. Lewis employed to describe the melancholy longing for ‘something that has never actually appeared in our experience’, and by which he meant to designate the impulse behind certain kinds of fantasy). The longing of the protagonists of Lavondyss to enter the ‘unknown region’ – Holdstock’s term here for the wood within (and prior to) the world – is absolute, and it gives the book much of its obdurate potency. ‘Toward the Unknown Region’ (1906) is a choral work by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), a composer whose evocations of a longed-for Britain are refreshingly muscular; Holdstock’s citing of this piece of music is therefore heavily loaded (Vaughan Williams himself appears in the novel); and the obdurate Sehnsucht of his music conveys to most listeners what Holdstock at his best conveys: a sense that the Matter of Britain is a Story that can be told.

  The title novella in The Bone Forest (1991), and the title novel in Merlin’s Wood: Or, The Vision of Magic (1994), continue the Mythago Cycle in modes closer to conventional fantasy, as do The Hollowing (1993) and Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (1997). During these later years, Holdstock published a few more singletons of high merit, including The Emerald Forest (1985), which evokes the Lost Race stories of an earlier epoch as a father searching for his son in the Amazon jungle discovers a tribe of Indians in a world that echoes Mythago Wood; The Fetch (1991), which through the story of a small boy hauntingly explores the liminal region between the mundane and the true world; and Ancient Echoes (1996), in which another violent separation of a parent from its child climaxes in a temporally dislocated city accessible by an anguished father underground where, once again, reality is most intense.

  Holdstock’s last sequence, Merlin Codex, comprising Celtika (2001), The Iron Grail (2002) and The Broken Kings (2006), the Merlin Codex is a complex and hauntingly surreal reworking of some central motifs from the Mythago Wood tales into a rendering of European mythology as a whole into a kind of temporal labyrinth, with lines of story interweaving through time. The central drama whose ramifications echo through the worlds of the series is the conflict between Jason and Medea, underlier figures who shape the complex epic. The central character, an immortal Merlin, serves as both victim and guide, whose quest for a primordial riven family – Jason’s abducted children – knits the sequence together.

  In his last completed book, Avilion (2009), Holdstock returns directly to the central knot of story of Mythago Wood and Lavondyss, continuing the Huxley family tale through deaths and resurrections that amount in the end, as does his work as a whole, to a grave-song for England, though the wood continues.

  In this volume a different Holdstock takes centre stage, the author (as Chris Carlsen) of the Berserker series of fantasies, Shadow of the Wolf (1977), The Bull Chief (1977) and The Horned Warrior (1979). In 1977 these tales may have seemed brutal and even thoughtless, but with the benefit of hindsight, they read very differently now, and we’re lucky to have a chance to appreciate them within the frame of Holdstock’s work as a whole. The protagonists of the sequence, at the heart of which broods a darkly conceived King Arthur, are like raw heroes out of the heart of Mythago Wood; their resemblance to traditional Sword-and-Sorcery figures can now be seen as almost accidental. The Berserker books lack the subtleties of Mythago Wood, but in a sense they supply a deep backstory for that tale, and for everything else Holdstock would write. They are the bone shop. It is a thrill to encounter them properly at last.

  For a more detailed version of the above, see Robert Holdstock’s author entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/holdstock_robert_p

  Some terms above are capitalised when they would not normally be so rendered; this indicates that the terms represent discrete entries in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

  SHADOW OF THE WOLF

  Dedication

  This, the first, for Angus Wells

  Berserker – A Norse warrior who, in the sight of battle, would fill with a frenzied and irresistible fury; a devotee of the God Odin, from whom he gained his power; a ferocious fighter, as strong as a bear, immune to both fire and steel.

  PART ONE

  The Bear God

  CHAPTER ONE

  The wolf came.

  Out of darkness, out of hell, out of the fire-licked country of the dead, stalking through the night of winter’s snow, through the struggling forest, among the stark, black rocks of the northern wastes, running in pursuit, panting as the warm-blood vision of its destiny drew it onwards … out of the God Sky, out of the rolling, booming, screaming land of ghosts, out of the past the wolf came nearer.

  Huge, and even darker in the night than in the day when its darkness was almost absolute; eyes, in the moonlight, were like twin diamonds glittering in the loping form of the beast. Muscles, beneath black fur, rippled and tensed, blackly, carried the beast across the northlands, scenting, following, knowing – with its animal instinct – that it was not yet ready to meet with its destiny, but sensing that the time was approaching!

  Sent by a god, it would soon enjoy the bloody taste of battle, mortal battle, tooth and sword, claw and shield.

  Its prey was ahead of it, in the highlands, among the scattered villages and the bitter winds.

  Unsuspecting!

  He was called Harald Swiftaxe, but he might have been called the Innocent. There was blood on his sword, and on the scarred blade of the bearded axe his father, Erik Bluetooth, had given him. And the skin of his arms and chest had been several times parted and mended after the frenzy of battle.

  And yet, he was Innocent.

  At eighteen years of age he could not conceal the smile of pride, the grin of triumph; at times, as he rode with his companion through the thin, dying forests of the mountains, he laughed aloud, shaking back his long yellow hair, which he wore loose, and letting his cry pierce the foliage and drift into the blue sky beyond.

  He was a warrior now, and felt the part, even if his youthfulness was still all too apparent. He was tall, and lean, and his face, framed by silky yellow hair, was sparse of beard, though what grew, grew unmolested, for he hoped soon to sport
a thick moustache and neatly pointed beard as did his father, the great Bluetooth of the Ironside campaign against Cormac, a generation before.

  Wearing a loose green kirtle, and tight blue breeches, with tall, calf-skin shoes (very warm, very sweaty) Harald Swiftaxe was a strange mixture of styles, but very individual. More important were his weapons, and these he sensed and he knew were impressive. A short, broad sword hung in its wood and leather sheath from his low-slung sword belt; occasionally he drew the blade and watched the writhing snakes of the centre of the broad steel weapon, the marks of the pattern welding that had produced the splendid sword. Brass decorated the pommel, and the grip was carved from the bone horn of a great bull, and the power of the bull reached into the hand of the wielder when the sword was used in battle.

  He was shieldless, his two shields having been hacked to pieces within moments of the first skirmish, but he still carried a short throwing spear, strapped across his back; this he used to thrust where his sword was good only for hacking.

  Beside the sword he carried his father’s gift to him – the bearded axe that Harald had proved so agile with, and though he used it rarely, his own runes clustered beneath those of his father, near the hilt, before the great silvered blade narrowed to its razor edge.

  Festooned with weapons, aching with the several wounds he had received, Harald felt every bit the warrior he had become, and thus his occasional cry of triumph, of joy, loud in the still forest air, frightening to bird and beast, and probably not a little startling to the youth’s companion who rode ahead of him.

  But his companion was silent at the outbursts, merely turning in his saddle occasionally and shaking his head, a thin grin of amusement touching his lips. He was too old and too blooded in body and mind to see the humour in what they had done, or the pleasure in any single battle among the many he had fought. Still, this silent man made no effort to stifle the youthful enthusiasm behind him. He remembered, perhaps, his own first journey across the wild seas to the ragged, fern covered coasts of the bitter lands to the south. He remembered, perhaps, his own screams of delight as the flesh had parted before his blade, and the shaking legs of virgins before his lust.