He felt the power, rising from his feet to his groin, power unlike anything he had ever experienced; as he ran into battle, as his sword cut flesh, he sensed the strange possession with a mortal fascination that caused him suddenly to hold his place on the river shore, whirling around, his sword arm extended, but unaware, unbothered by the war around him. Foot to leg the power rose, leg to groin, swelling him with its passionate lust of death, groin to belly, belly to throat, throat to mind …
‘O-DIN!’ he screamed, though the name, the word, meant nothing to him. And yet when he screamed that name he sensed the black-caped rider, the grinning demon of the underworld, riding through some dark night, skull-faced and malevolent.
The surging power of the Bear, the wild beast that had been in him since his birth, dominated him, filled him, took control of his every fibre …
‘BER–SERK–ER!’ he screamed, an incomprehensible battle cry that caused the vicious affray to hesitate as metalled faces turned to the whirling, maniacal figure in the middle of the fight.
The Bear consumed him.
His arms became the arms of the Bear, his fingers its claws.
His body became the body of the killer, black-furred, heavy with muscle; its ecstasy at possession was his own ecstasy at being possessed.
Its fangs were his teeth, and his gums ached as his canines grew and his mouth watered to the taste of blood – his own blood, his own pain.
His eyes were the eyes of the Bear, his voice the Bear’s voice, and he growled and snarled as he twisted on the bank of the shallow river, and cried his war cry of animal frenzy, his bizarre language, an incomprehensible spell from a time that had not yet been born.
‘I am Berserker! I am Art Mire, the Mad Bear! I am Swiftaxe, Viking! I am cursed by Odin … I kill for Odin! I am cursed … I am adrift … Aaiee, I am the Mad Bear of Connact, the Swiftaxe has taken my body … I am reborn! I am reborn! I am reborn!’
He cut them down, drove them back into the shallow waters where the horses collapsed and the stream turned blood red with the segments of human corpses that fell from the flashing snow sword of Sneachta Doom.
He whirled, he ran, he screamed; he was a warrior possessed, a ghost warrior, immune to the slashing blows of those he killed, unbothered by the sling stones and javelins that ploughed their killing paths through his naked body. Heads, hands and arms flew before him like a flock of frightened birds, taking to the dusk skies. Riders fell from their mounts, horses reared and screamed, mail and metal clashed and clanked, and the thud and swish of blades was as loud as thunder, like some devil’s wind, blowing from the very lungs of the Mad Bear, the young warrior whose uncontrollable rage caused the slaughter of the men of the Ui Neil until they scattered back towards the hills, leaving just the war queen, Grania, and Niall’s brother, Feradach, in the centre of the fray.
Grania reined round her horse and leapt back across the stream. Four men of Connacht followed her, but she turned on them and cut them down like thistles, two heads struck from shoulders, and two skulls split down to the chest. Then she yelled a last defiant word, cried the house cry of the green branch, and rode fast for the hills. Soon she was a shadow against the greyness of the night, and then distance and darkness had consumed her.
Feradach leapt down from his horse, slew a single man that came at him, and faced Niall the Mad Bear. A wide circle of horsemen, blooded and triumphant from battle, gathered about the brothers.
Feradach, like all men of both provinces, had seen the bizarre fury of the youngest warrior on the field, but now he made the mistake of believing that the fury was dead, just because Niall stood quiet, apparently peaceful, staring at him.
One of the Connacht warriors urged his horse forward to intercept Feradach the One-Armed as he ran towards Niall, but Amalgaid cried, ‘No! Let my sons fight this out alone.’
The circle of horsemen drew back. Feradach stopped running and stood facing his brother. The sun dropped out of sight and the last light of day caught and emphasised the fury on both young men’s faces. Reddened blades gleamed; light flashed from Feradach’s helmet as he took it from his head and cast it into the river, where its faceplate had fallen earlier. There was total silence but for the whisper of an evening breeze and the distant splashing of the stream.
Suddenly Feradach screamed and whirled his blade, let the middle of the edge slash towards Niall.
As if he had been paralysed by some Druid’s spell, needing only the sound of violence to release him from the grip of stone, Niall jumped high into the air, his own scream adding to the combat cry of his brother. Feradach’s sword passed through the air where Niall’s head had been, and seconds later Niall dropped back to the ground, leapt forward, his sword moving so fast that it was difficult for those who watched to see the blade from one moment to the next.
It was quickly over. Feradach made two futile attempts to block the edge of the sword that slashed down his face, down his body, then neatly severed his sword arm below the elbow.
‘That’s that, then!’ cried Feradach as he fell to the ground, his face distorted with agony, though brave words were not yet lost to him. ‘I’m dead, brother. Slay me swiftly, take my head clean.’ Then he saw what was about to happen. ‘Niall! Lug’s Arm, NO!’
Niall the Mad Bear was still screeching, and now he stood above the prone form of his brother and hacked blindly at the squirming body until the corpse was dismembered and disembowelled and yet still life and pain existed in the bloody mess.
Through his slashed lips, choking on his own blood, Feradach begged an honourable end.
‘Stop this!’ cried Amalgaid, jumping down from his horse and racing to try to frustrate the blind slashing of his youngest son. ‘Take the head, Niall! Stop this desecration!’
Niall was deaf to reason, however. Slowly, from deep in his throat, came a new cry, an animal cry of triumph adding to the bizarre animal expression of blood lust.
His stained blade lifted and he whirled on his father, who stopped and stared, shocked by the sight of the savage mask his son’s face had become – teeth bared, eyes swollen and red-rimmed, skin drawn and dark beneath the smudged war paint … like a horrid transformation from human to animal, and yet the human was there, beneath the twisted features of the beast.
‘Take Feradach’s head, or I shall kill you for dishonouring him.’
His reply was to receive the blood-stained edge of the Mad Bear’s sword, and Amalgaid mac Eochu, Warlord of a proud tribe of the Ui Fiachrach, who had fought twenty campaigns against the kings of Ulster and the Ui Neill, Amalgaid, whose boyhood deeds were still fireside fare, whose warrior deeds might yet be passed into the writing form to be told from hearth to hearth for centuries to come, this brave and noble Connachtman sank to his knees, staring at the delighted, savage features of the boy who had just struck him dead with a single blow.
Niall the Mad Bear’s laughter drifted loud and harsh across the still lands of this province, and all who heard it would go to their dying beds with that laughter in their minds.
Fifteen Connacht horsemen kicked their horses towards the boy, blades singing from their leather slings as they resolved to cut him down. Niall cried, for the last time this side of the river, ‘I am Berserker! I am Swiftaxe! My sword eats life for Odin! Ayayay, I am reborn! I am reborn!’
And with a last burst of demoniacal laughter he turned and leapt the stream, only seconds before the thundering hooves of fifteen horses came down on the opposite bank in wild pursuit.
They chased him fiercely across the lowlands and up the distant hills where the Well of the Mother, the sacred well, watched the pursuit and moaned a prophecy that none waited to hear.
In all the two hours that the angered warriors chased the running boy they made no ground, and he gained no ground. Two horse-lengths separated them all the time, and though javelins were thrown at the racing shape of Niall the Mad Bear, they missed. He plucked them from the ground and tossed them backwards, without looking, so that the man wh
o had thrown the weapon was hard put to avoid death at the point of the returning spear.
And when darkness settled full and heavy on the land, the horsemen stopped and watched the slim and naked shape of Sneachta Doom vanish into the night.
Then they turned and rode back to the fort. There was little rejoicing, despite the triumph of the dusk battle. A fort without a warlord owes no allegiance, and soon loses honour. As the men of the Ui Fiachrach rode back to the palisaded community they knew that the sun had set on more than a field of slaughter that day.
All this occurred in the four hundred and eighty-sixth year after the birth of the Man-God called Christ; and in Wales, at this time, a boy called Arthur had reached the age of thirteen.
PART THREE
The Naked Warriors
CHAPTER FIVE
Western Ireland, the territory of the Corco Mruad, AD 488
A year had passed since his banishment when Niall the Mad Bear ran, without breath, up the steep, sparsely vegetated slopes of Slieve Aaran, the tallest mountain in the seven peaks that divided the province of Munster from his own province of Connacht, and both of these from the Hidden Lands where many traditions were reputed to survive.
No man – at least, no man who feared the wrath of the gods – ever entered the shadow of these hills, nor even the shadows of the foothills that led up to the cloud-piercing summits of the great range. So when Niall made the day’s journey from the River Sile to stand on the border-marker, a low tumulus long since scavenged by wolves and weather, he found himself staring at a land where no low-roofed houses or circular settlements had ever stood and survived. Scattered stones, chipped with care, suggested the sites of those foolhardy settlers who had defied the gods and settled this hallowed place. But now their bones were deep in the earth, and the signs of their existence were scattered like the rocks left after the mythical ice sheet had scoured the hills clean of the Faceless Demons of another time and made the mountains fit for the spirits of the gods to walk among them.
At the base of the escarpment, where the land was boggy and waterlogged, and the slope of the mountainside barely rising, Niall stopped and stared into the clouds to where the dark side of the hill was made darker by cloud shadow and the scattered pockmarks that were the Druid Caves. Most of those caves, he had been told, were now deserted as the great tradition of magic and religious incantation had died away.
Was it true, he had asked a local settlement a few days earlier, that in the vast lands where no sea bordered the farther edge, in that land where the Romans had lived, and where the remnants of the worshippers of Lug and Bel still clung to existence, was it true that there had existed a great forest, known as Carnutes, where Druids like those on the mountain had gathered for ritual magic ceremonies? And where a man like he, Niall, might earn release from a curse?
The filid who grouped about him were dark-faced men with their long hair still tinged with colour despite the snow fall of age. They were men in tattered knee-length robes who fought to rise to the majesty of their forbears, but none of these men knew the answer.
Once, he had been told, all Druids had known the secrets of magic; then the Roman forces – themselves now extinguished from the world – had destroyed the natural order of things, and Druids had become those men of wisdom who knew the old customs and the old social ways, and would tell them by way of advice. There had arisen a new type of bard who took those same traditions and expanded them into great folk tales to warm the hearts and minds of cold men on cold nights. Yet others had changed to become the medicine men, wise in the ways of natural cures, but unaware of how these cures had been discovered.
All of these trades had once been practised by a single man in each community, and it was such great Druids who had probably gathered in the magic forests, and who now clustered, dying, in the caves of Slieve Aaran.
So there is hope for me, he had said aloud, and pleased. Is there a price for their help?
There is, they had told him, but the price is acceptable, even to a warrior, though not to a man who would aspire to kingship.
‘I have no such aspiration,’ stated Niall the Mad Bear, and held up his hand towards the old men. ‘Which finger will they take?’ he asked, instinctively knowing this to be their price.
‘That is your choice,’ said the Druids, relieved that this man, this violent man, would go to the ancient mountain aware of the terrible cost of his quest.
‘I am unconcerned at the lack of limbs,’ said Niall, draining the last of his wine and touching the tiny statue of Danu as a gesture of respect for the poor community that had fed him. ‘I am concerned with the loss of a demon from my head.’
They had told him the entry chant to the silent land of the Druid hill, and a few hours later he had found himself slushing through the saturated turf towards the heathered skirts of the mountain.
Wild sheep and two goats, one black, one perfectly white, ran from him as he made his way to what he hoped would be the salvation from the beast in his mind. A ring of human skulls around a small tree stopped him for a while, and he crouched, staring at the strange sight. With every shifting breeze the skulls rattled against the tree from whose branches they hung; the eyes seemed to turn and watch Niall the Mad Bear as he rose – realising that they were not going to question him about his mission – and continued walking, slow and frightened by the watching dead men.
Weird cries echoed across the land, drifting down from the higher slopes and playing out across the rolling foothills towards the distant glimmering sea. He could see dark-robed shapes scattered between the high rocks, the flash of iron, the gleam of light on rich white hair, uncut since birth and tied in tight coils as was the ancient tradition.
A child’s wailing caught his attention, just for a moment, and he wondered at it.
Before he began to climb the steepest part of the mountainside he cried the appeasement song that would allow him safe passage.
‘As the people of Danann dance in their graveyard forests,
so they dance in my heart.
No Fomorion am I,
who comes to these ancient lands.
As the bright sun gleams on the heathen crosses of Rome,
so it gleams on my sword as I cut them down.
No Christian am I,
who comes to these ancient lands.
As the wild sea beats against our blood-stained shores,
so it beats against the defiant blade of a true born Celt.
No sea-ghost of Atlantis am I,
who comes to these ancient lands.
As the greed of Kings seeks beyond the mortal veil for secrets,
so I stand a simple warrior.
No seeker after magic iron am I,
who comes to these ancient lands.’
As if his words put even the clouds at their ease, the high white mists slipped away from the peaks, and bright sun showed him the profusion of caves that was his destination.
Taking a deep breath, shifting his snow-sword so that it hung more comfortably behind him, he began to run.
He lost track of time, but the sun had moved a considerable distance by the time he crawled along a narrow ledge and peered into the nearest cave.
The cave was empty, but he felt instinctively that he should enter it, and this he did, crouched low to avoid gashing his head on the naked rock ceiling. He crawled to the back of the hole in the cliff and sat there, staring into the daylight, listening to the sound the wind made as it whistled between the crannies and through the holes in the rock. Skulls were scattered around the walls, most of them split or holed in the obvious way of battle. Apart from these trophies of past glory, the cave was empty.
It was also cold. Niall, dressed only in his sleeveless jerkin and knee-length breeches inherited from a man he killed, shivered.
At length he heard the sound of approach along the ledge outside, and the cave mouth darkened as a black-robed man blocked the entrance with his body, staring at the intruder with deep set, grey eye
s.
Niall didn’t move, made no sign of being afraid, and he left his sword conspicuously at arm’s reach, the belt wrapped around the hilt so that to draw it would be difficult.
‘I need help,’ he said simply.
The Druid edged into the cave and sat down, wrapped his arms around his knees and cocked his head to one side. Niall could see his face more clearly now: it was rich with lines, the nose squashed and ugly, unnaturally so, as if he had been hit a violent blow there; his lips thin, almost totally hidden beneath the fine white down of his beard and moustache. His eyes were brightly alive, glittering grey, sparkling with interest in this new arrival.
‘I am Iurstil,’ said the Druid, ‘which in the old tongue means “creator of dreams”. But I can destroy dreams too, and can do many things of the old order, many magic tricks, many ancient rituals. Here on this mountain we have preserved an ancient knowledge. There is a mountain to the far north, across the great ice sea, where in a vast hall all knowledge is kept and guarded. But here on Slieve Aaran we have retained the knowledge of the people of Danann, and of the gold-skinned race that lived here before them, after the Stone Builders, who came themselves after the Atlanteans and the Sky Riders. To have come here took great courage, and you have stepped into a place where time becomes meaningless, for we have the secrets of so many ages. But the price for entering here is very high. Are you prepared to pay it?’
‘I am,’ said Niall.
‘Then come,’ said Iurstil, and he led Niall out of this lowest cave and up the mountain, higher to where the air was bitterly cold, and the view across the land extended to the offshore islands, and beyond even to the ocean wastes where the Sky Riders had lived in eons past.
Here, where the slope of the mountainside decreased for a few paces, a henge of dark, crystalline stones faced Niall, and drew him towards it.