Berserker (Omnibus) Page 2

  Harald Swiftaxe was remembering too!

  He slapped the short sword that hung across the saddle, touched the dents in the haft of his bearded axe, spread his hands across the shifting muscles of his horse’s shoulders and sensed, in their power, something of his own power – the power he had used as he had wielded sword and axe, and laid waste the lives of warriors, both old and young.

  If it ever occurred to him that he was lucky to be alive he never brooded upon the thought. He had been on the winning side, and most of all, he had been alive at the end of the invasion. The men of the great town, that had been called Dublin, had fallen back and Gudrack, the invading king, had triumphed. The Innocent had survived to return to his northern hold and relate his initiation to his father.

  How proud his family would be, how glad to see him! How his mother would weep! (Had she wept while he had been away? Had she held her youngest son – so like Harald in looks and spirit – and dreamed of her eldest?) His father would sneer, of course, and belittle him, but all in the cause of welcoming him as a man.

  And Elena, lovely Elena … she would be there too, welcoming him as more than a man! Before he left the hold again he would finally take her as his wife, bonded to her as he had promised, and as their parents had encouraged them.

  First, though, there would be the welcome (he could imagine it all!) and the accounting for himself. He would not brag, of course. Men did not brag of personal battle; that was the sort of indulgence that the Celtish peoples practised, expanding their prowess out of all proportion. There would be no such exaggeration when Harald related his adventures. Why bother? He had fought as hard as any man, he had killed as hard, and for as good a cause; and Odin had smiled upon him in the form of his silent companion, the old southerner, Sigurd Gotthelm, for the two men – becoming friends before the great battle at Dublin – had become blood brothers in the course of slaughter; they had fought side by side in the fiercest part of the fray, where the numbers of the Celts had been highest, and the flashing of swords in the weak sunlight had been like the glittering of a fierce, sunlit sea.

  Time and again Harald had deflected the spear or the knife that was speeding towards the older man; time and again Harald had turned to see a barbarian giant toppling in death, face creased in agony as a sword blade probed from neck through mouth; and behind the corpse, shaking his head and grinning: Sigurd Gotthelm.

  They had fought a war of conquest, a war that would continue as long as the people of the southern lands clung to their territory of rock and stone. In the earth was their heritage, and few men would part with that heritage without first leaving their blood in the soil. The battle would not be finally won until the Norse blood ran in Celtish veins as well as across the Hibernian earth.

  He was proud, young Harald Swiftaxe, of his part in the fighting. He was proud of the killing he had done. And somewhere deep inside him there lurked a lesser pride, a pride that he would not acknowledge aloud, and yet which set him apart from many others of his own age, and race, and warlike position.

  He was proud of the killing he had not committed.

  In the sword of Swiftaxe, Odin was a merciful god. Odin was always as angry or as merciful as the warriors who wielded metal in his name, and it pleased Harald to think that Odin might not be unhappy with the young warrior’s compassion.

  There had been the pagan monk, cowering in a brick grotto below the ruined chapel where he worshipped his one god. So young, so innocent of war, and instead of screaming abuse and chanting the weird spells of his solitary god, he had watched the smoke and blood-encrusted figure of the Viking through tear-filled eyes and finally had bowed his head, waiting for the death-blow.

  Harald had leaned his sword against the man’s neck, and some primitive impulse had been urging him to strike the head from the shoulders; and yet …

  He had spared the holy man.

  The monk had looked up at him and puzzlement had creased his face in an almost comical fashion. He had made the strange cross sign, and Harald had tensed, waiting for some magic effect, but nothing occurred. The monk had spoken incomprehensible words to him. A question?

  ‘I shall spare your life,’ Harald had said. ‘If that’s what you’re asking me. I can’t kill a man who wields trust and love instead of a sword.’

  Backing out of the small grotto he had paused, for a moment, and wondered if he was right to spare this Christian.

  Later, retiring hurt from a skirmish, he had watched from some high rocks as three monks raped and slaughtered a young Celtish girl by the banks of a winding, red-stained river. Too tired, too hungry to attack them, he had crawled away and wondered at what he had seen.

  And later still, recovered and running through a small town, sword in one hand and a fire-brand in the other, he had found himself alone with a screaming woman, a woman who was both young and yet experienced, because she clutched a child to her breast and cowered away from the lean warrior who approached her. Fire-brand dropped behind him, sword held towards her, as he had reached down and torn the woman’s child from her arms, and then her rough woollen robe from her plump body. She had frozen, in shock perhaps or hope that her submission would earn her the right to live. Full breasts, not sagged from their nourishing of the child, and a thick, handsome waist … he had stood above her and stared at her, and his desire had increased with every racing heartbeat, every wafting scent of her body odours, every glance to her slowly parting thighs.

  She spoke strange words – like the monk’s words – and again he felt he understood her. Her knees had drawn up, and her white belly shook as she invited him to be gentle and to spare her all but his rape.

  But he had backed away.

  In the doorway he stopped and watched as she gathered her robe about her, clutched the screaming child to her body, and raced into the shadow of a large, metal cauldron. He had burned the house, standing in the flickering light, breathing the flesh-stinking smoke, listening to the screams of the dying and suffering, the cries and shouts of his own men, and had watched the woman slip from the hut to vanish into the darkness.

  A hand on his shoulder!

  Whirling, bringing up his sword to hack at the other man, he had only just managed to stop himself from killing; Gotthelm stood there, breathing heavily, bleeding from a vicious wound across his left cheek, below the face-guard of his strange, skull-like silver helmet. The man stank of blood and excrement; his hands shook as he touched Harald and smiled.

  ‘The young Innocent,’ he said, mockingly, but grinning again. ‘You spared that woman. Why?’

  ‘Why not? I have Elena at home, in the hills, and she is everything I need in a woman.’

  A group of Celtish farmers ran past them, pursued by a shrieking Norseman who gave up the chase and darted into the blazing house that Harald had just left. A moment later he appeared again, looking around, searching through smoke-darkened eyes for something to kill.

  A spear clattered noisily on to the flagstoned pathway and both warriors ducked and withdrew from this open place.

  The horn sounded the instruction to re-group, the job of pillage having been completed.

  ‘I dislike this raiding tactic as much as you,’ said Gotthelm. ‘But it’s your right to take: to take life, to take women, to take a child and sacrifice it. It’s your right, Harald.’

  ‘It’s my right to choose what I take, then.’

  ‘Frey’s phallus!’ moaned Gotthelm. ‘Too bloody innocent!’

  Innocent.

  As they rode, months later, through the cold lands of his home, this night of the full moon and the high, white clouds that rolled across the stars in gentle waves, so that fight and Gotthelm’s exasperated rebuke came back to him.

  Innocent of faith and innocent of sex. But a warrior none the less, and fierce and bloodied, and very very proud!

  The wolf stalked.

  Harald sensed it, and with each hour, with each pause for rest as they urged their horses on through the long night, across moonlit rid
ges and through sombre woods filled with the screech of owls and less familiar night life, so the sensation of fear grew stronger.

  At times Harald stopped and rose up in his stirrups, turned to stare into the land they had covered.

  Light sparkled on a river – a shadow passed across that river, but perhaps just a cloud …

  Trees lined the ridges in stark formation, reaching towards sky and earth; they seemed to move, to shift position as a restless sleeper shifts position during a haunted night. But just wind, perhaps. The gods were sleeping too, and surely had no enthusiasm for wandering abroad at this depressing time of year.

  Something howled in the darkness. A dog? A wolf?

  Tensely, Harald sat in the saddle and spurred his horse forwards.

  He sensed the wolf, sensed the pursuer, but did not fully understand what that beast was, and why it stalked him. And yet it was there.

  Twisting in the saddle he stared into the night.

  Diamond eyes watched him as from a great distance; lost among the stars they seemed to flicker between the trees and the clouds, to rise from the earth and to recede from him. Watching.

  Fear dried the wetness of his mouth, wetted the dryness of his palms. He rode on. The beast followed.

  The wolf might not have been seen by human eye for it was not yet manifest in this fleshy, earthy world of sword and conquest. It pursued Harald from the nether world, running sleekly along the edge of the great chasm that led from the place of gods to the place of man. Its saliva was the wetness that fell on the young warrior’s brow; its breath was the cold wind that froze his bones and made him draw a short cloak about his thin body; its padding was the thunder of sky and earth; its howl was the scream with which Harald awoke from his dreams to find Sigurd Gotthelm pressing him gently back to the blanket, calming him, smiling warmly as he recognised the symptoms of a haunted man.

  ‘It pursues me, Sigurd.’

  ‘The wolf?’

  Cold wind at the mention of the name. The stars above him seemed to wheel and revolve, as if dancing in ecstasy at the coming of winter. Tall, bare trees framed the sky as he stared upwards; clouds rippled across the stars, grey and black, chasing each other before the winds.

  ‘It pursues me; it follows me …’

  ‘You’re dreaming that’s all. There’s no wolf, merely a nightmare. You’re having a nightmare.’

  ‘It pursues me!’

  His scream added to the noises of the night, the howls and wingbeats, the rustles and grunts of dying creatures.

  ‘You need rest, Harald. You need days of sleep and eating, long nights of loving and kissing. You need to get the taste of blood out of your mouth. I felt the same when I was a boy. The fear will pass. We’ll soon be a-slaughtering again.’

  ‘There is something wrong,’ Harald murmured to the shadowy face of his friend. Sigurd’s eyes, in the night, were dim white shapes, staring earnestly down; the fire-light caught the eyes redly, gave them the appearance of a demon’s.

  Sigurd wiped the boy’s forehead, grinned (red flame on white teeth, the teeth of a wolf – Harald tensed).

  ‘Calm, boy. Keep calm. It’s just a dream.’

  ‘It pursues me. It’s no ordinary wolf. It comes from Hell, Sigurd. I know it, I sense it.’

  ‘A nightmare. Think of that woman you could have had but spared. Remember her? Think of her, and you’ll fall asleep with aggravation. What a waste …’

  Before dawn they were riding. It was still dark. Harald turned in the saddle and stared behind him.

  He heard the growl, smelled the urine stink of the great beast, saw its coalfire eyes blinking and surveying as it rested a moment in some woody recess of his haunted mind.

  Sunlight spilt across the hills to the east; the trees became alive with fire, no longer black, pathetic skeletons, restlessly waiting for summer. Birds sang, but so few now, the hardy remnants of the summer flocks.

  Sigurd had forged ahead, riding between the trees as they wound towards the final ridge before the tiny village of Unsthof, and then his father’s hold at Urlsgarde. The dawn light flashed off the metal of Sigurd’s shield and belt, and as the old warrior rode across a bare earth knoll, red cloak streaming behind him, so the light caught the gleaming facets of his helmet. Harald froze again, pulled his horse to a stop and stared with his heart thundering at the mysterious man ahead, at the helmet, the skull-like helmet with its drawings and carvings, and the frightening fact of its link with Sigurd Gotthelm’s own destiny.

  Unable to shake the past few months from his mind, Harald reminisced again on the events of his first battle, and in particular on his meeting with the older Viking …

  Sunlight glittered on a metal helmet.

  Harald Swiftaxe dropped to a crouch behind a jutting boulder and slowly rose again to peer down the slope to the dark pool of water by whose softly lapping edges a pile of blue and red clothes lay scattered, as if they had been discarded in a great hurry.

  Hot and bloody, sore, wounded, the warmth and stickiness of his own blood irritating him, Harald thought how truly inviting that pool looked.

  But where was the owner of the pile of garments?

  The helmet sat on the top of the leather jerkin, glinting and sparkling, a large metallic skull, watching the countryside through its empty eye sockets; but beside it there was no weapon to be seen, no sword, no spear, no axe.

  A thrill of fear passed through the young Viking and he cowered lower, touched the soreness of his shoulder where the Celtish sword had tried to hack off his arm before his own blade had sought and found his attacker’s heart.

  He would not be good in a fight at the moment; he was weakened, and thirsty. The clothes by the pool were Norse, but there were so many different types of men fighting this war that it was not safe to call any man brother or friend until the heat of battle united them into a single war machine.

  But that pool … it looked so good!

  It was nearly midday. The sun was baking hot (a change from the depressing rain that usually thudded on to the saturated earth of this westernmost land of the continent). The main force of Gudrack’s men were camped some miles to the south, having left Harald behind when he had been struck down and left for dead.

  Were there wolves here, he wondered? A wolf could smell blood a mile away, and no doubt they were already ravening and fighting over the spoils of the war, tearing the living limbs from the dying men who lay in the small valley to the south, among the burning timbers of the village that had been raided earlier.

  How soon before they found Harald himself?

  He could hear no howls or cries that he recognised as the hunting call of the great dog and wolf packs that struck such fear into the farmers of his own land.

  The water …

  Coolness, a chance to soak away his hurts …

  That helmet!

  Unlike any helmet he had ever seen, it tantalised in the way it watched him from the pool-side, blind eyes staring upwards hauntingly from the silver skull that in battle would completely encase the skull of the warrior who wore this strange protective garment.

  Surely if the man was in the pool he was dead. The pool surface was quiet, almost gentle, and no man could remain submerged for so long.

  And the rocks and gently sloping land around the water seemed free of any naked warrior, sleeping or crouching, waiting for an intruder …

  The owner of the helmet, then, had been swimming and had chased some small animal across the rocks, and found his destiny at the end of a blood-encrusted Celtish sword.

  It was a good enough argument for Harald. He stood and ran down the slope, crouched by the water and touched its coolness. He looked around, listening to the bird song and high-summer earth sounds.

  Picking up the helmet he stood and stared at the strange and beautiful armour.

  Like the helmet of a Norse king, and yet unlike any helmet he had ever seen on the heads of the warlords behind whom he ran into battle. The vault was divided into small partitio
ns, small frames and richly decorated with drawings … vivid drawings, precise in their execution, again unlike any helm decoration he had seen on a warlord.

  Here a man slew three bull-helmeted Angles … there a man (the same man) wrestled with a troll … here again the man recoiled from beneath the blow from a ragged and giant warrior who stood impaled on a spear … and there a wolf fought a bear, with tooth and claw, upright on its hind legs, snapping at the gaping mouth of the great shaggy beast.

  Many frames were empty, bare metal reflecting the sunlight; dents and scars testified to the efforts of many a swordsman to split the softer tissue beneath the helm; the man, the wearer, had survived well in battle …

  Unease caused icy fingers to clutch at Harald’s youthful heart. A warrior this unusual, this powerful, would surely not fall prey to a lone Celtish swordsman.

  He looked around, still holding the helmet.

  Nothing.

  He stared into the pool, the quiet surface reflecting the rocks and trees of this peaceful part of the land.

  With a sound like the rushing of a waterfall the giant man rose from the pool, casting the water aside, sending waves breaking across the yellowing grass that bordered the tiny lake.

  Harald stood frozen and open-mouthed as the figure rose, almost stiffly, almost without effort, from deep in the pool. A tall, broad-shouldered man, aged, but full of strength; long blond hair and a short beard dripped water; water ran down the man’s body in great rivers, splashing back into the turbulent pool.

  Deep, black eyes fixed Harald with an angry gaze. The man’s sword arm rose from the water and a short, scarred sword waved close to Harald’s throat.

  ‘Put down the helmet,’ said the man.