And Harald dropped the helm from fingers suddenly shaking.
The warrior stepped from the pool, shook his hair like a dog shakes its fur after swimming. Cold water drops rained across the younger warrior who stood his ground and stared at the Norseman.
Naked, the warrior was more than a head taller than Swiftaxe himself, but he seemed disinclined to battle, recognising a fellow countryman, recognising also, perhaps, the impetuous inquisitiveness of youth.
Still naked, the man squatted by his clothes and picked up the helmet, stared up at Swiftaxe.
‘Its eyes are my eyes. I’ve been watching you for some minutes. Are you badly hurt?’
A voice like gravel, but a warm voice. Harald dropped to a crouch and touched his shoulder where blood clotted and the flesh ached. ‘Not badly,’ he said. ‘But it hurts like … like …’
The warrior laughed, swept back his hair from a face as brown and ridged as oak.
‘Your first taste of the Celtish blade, I suppose.’
‘My first taste of blood,’ said Harald Swiftaxe. ‘I killed many.’
‘At least a hundred, no doubt.’ The warrior grinned.
‘I’m no Celt that I need to brag my death score.’
‘How many then?’
Abashed for a moment, but then feeling that even a single kill was worth a moment’s pride … ‘Three. It would have been more but I felt merciful.’
The older warrior laughed. ‘Mercy is the right of kings. These Celtish sword-sluts wouldn’t spare you, so don’t go being merciful. They’ll cut off your tail when your back turns. Or your manhood.’
Harald shivered at the thought. ‘I wouldn’t care for that, not at all.’
As if reading something into the expression on his face, or the tone of his voice, the older warrior chuckled. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never used your mightiest weapon! Don’t tell me that young fair-haired blood-arm is innocent! Never slain a beast in a Celtish slut’s cavern? Never chased the sleep from a Norse matron’s belly? Odin’s arse! I’d tie metal round it, if I were you. You haven’t lived boy. You haven’t known manhood yet!’
Too tired to object, Harald laughed with the other man. ‘I’m saving such pleasure for Elena. She’s my betrothed, and she’s waiting for me.’
‘Unless some Berserker gets to her first.’
‘She lives high in the hills of the northlands. No warrior in his right mind would venture so far away from decent action.’
‘Talking of which,’ said the warrior, changing the subject, ‘the action here lies towards the great central settlement of MacNeill. We’ll have the sword-slut eating worms before the sun sets tomorrow evening. But we have some catching up to do.’
He stood and dressed, while Harald stripped and briefly washed the blood from his aching arm and shoulder. The older man helped him bind the wound, and then he pulled on his skull-like helmet and regarded Harald through the eye-sockets. He seemed to become more serious for a moment, as if – when encased within the helm – he was possessed of some darker spirit that destroyed his humour and set his sword hand itching, ready to strike at anything that moved.
But he said, ‘My name is Sigurd Gotthelm, and I allow none to touch my helmet. I shall spare you because of your innocence and pleasantness, and because I want to see you fight. But most of all,’ he went on, his voice rising in humour, ‘I want to see you bloody that innocent axe you keep so quiet!’ He laughed. ‘So we’ll go together, young fair-haired blood-arm, scrawny-figured, blue-eyed virgin with his three mighty kills … we’ll go together and poke our swords up MacNeill’s guts.’
‘My name is Swiftaxe, Harald Swiftaxe,’ said Harald loudly. ‘And I may be scrawny, but the scrawny hen is the one that lives the longest.’
‘Very true,’ shouted Gotthelm, already on his way, short red cloak flying behind him as he ran. Harald followed, running up the slopes away from the pool. They stood, for a moment, looking out across the green and rolling land. Mountains probed darkly at the edge of vision, half hidden in the heat-haze of summer. To the south they could see other hills, gentler, more inviting. That was where the great river flowed into the land, and between them and that river lay the strange mounds of dead warriors and gods, and that was a place that filled many of the Vikings with a strong sense of fear. Others less so. A magic place, a place where the spirits of the dead and the not-yet-born could be heard singing their prophesies in the dark hours before dawn.
‘Are you a king?’ asked Harald as they stood, getting their bearings.
Gotthelm laughed. At last he said, ‘I am a wooden doll,’ and the smile faded. He didn’t meet Harald’s gaze but he was obviously disturbed by something. ‘No, not a king. A warrior, a killer, a sword slut at the mercy of fate’s whim.’ Now he looked at Harald, deep eyes peering from the darkness of the helm. ‘As a young warrior, not so many years ago, I saved the life of a warlock. This was at home, in the snow-capped mountains where no man lives, but trolls are professed to walk – not that I ever saw such infamous things. I shouldn’t have been there, of course. They are forbidden hills where the trolls live. But the warlock lived there, and it was he I had sought out. When I found him he was being savaged by a bear, and I saved him from certain death. He forged me this helmet – it was his gift to me, he said, his thanks. My destiny was portrayed in twenty frames. A frame for each year of life remaining to me. Each frame might be my death, but until the last frame is blanked from the metal, I shall live. His gift to me, counting down the years, counting out the battles and the adventures.’
‘You sound unhappy with the gift.’
‘Time draws short,’ said Gotthelm. ‘And there are ways of death that I really would rather do without. The thing being, that each frame shows my death, but from all I am destined to recover, all but the last, of course.
‘I have died too many times, Harald. Too many times.’
Harald found his eyes drawn to the helmet again, and for a second, before they began to run, he noticed the strangest frame of all again. The bear and the wolf, savaging each other, neither seeming to be the victor or the loser. The wolf and the bear, but no man, no Gotthelm character to indicate the meaning of that enigmatic frame.
‘A bear and a wolf,’ said the youth. ‘Are you bear or wolf? What soul lies beneath your human skin?’
‘Both,’ said Gotthelm. ‘If I could obliterate that panel I should do so with pleasure. It is the one frame that fills me with loathing. I believe it depicts my final death. But I don’t understand how.’
And for a moment, as they stood there, the wind blew cold, and seemed to merge their souls, the young and the old, carrying a life force between them both, along the line of the blue-eyed, black-eyed gaze.
Each man smiled, recognising something that neither understood, an inevitability of friendship, an inevitability of entwined destiny. It might have made them afraid, but they were unafraid; it might have made them happy, but there was a scent of blood on the air, and the metal blades they carried seemed to cry for the feel of air passing swiftly across their flattened surfaces …
And the bite of bone and flesh.
CHAPTER TWO
Months later, after an eternal and terrifying ocean crossing, they rode out of the forestlands of the north on to the low hills that led to the great hold at Urlsgarde. They were still not far from the coast, and the hold itself lay at the tip of a great fjord; but first, quite close now, they would come to the tiny settlement of Unsthof, where Elena lived and where the farmers were all warriors who had fought with Bluetooth, Harald’s father.
As they neared Unsthof Harald’s excitement grew. And the horses too sensed something and began to whinny and shake their heads.
Harald broke from his thoughts of days and nights to come and noticed Gotthelm glancing back at him, face beneath the helmet creased with puzzlement.
Then Harald caught it, the terrible message that the horses had already reacted to. The air. It stank of blood.
He reined his steed to a
halt and the black mare shuffled restlessly on the dry turf, whinnied and snorted as if she, too, could sense the danger in the blood stench she could clearly smell.
The land rose steeply ahead, bare ground, tight, spiky grass thinly shot through with yellow flowers. Overhead the sky was a dark, rolling grey, a sombre build-up towards a storm, marking the turning point between autumn and winter.
And on the wind, the last thing Harald Swiftaxe had expected this close to his father’s hold, the smell of death.
Harald turned to Sigurd Gotthelm.
‘Unsthof lies over the ridge – it’s just a small farming settlement.’
The older warrior nodded thoughtfully, almost certainly unaware of the deeper reason for Harald’s concern, imagining that Elena was a girl of his father’s hold. He stared up at the ridge, then twisted round in his saddle, sharp eyes narrowed as he searched for danger, peering hard through the small skeletal eye-holes in his heavy steel helmet.
Harald’s panic grew and he felt glad that the southerner had agreed to accompany him to his father’s hold, to rest and regain strength in comfort rather than in the filthy wharf-side villages where the Viking forces gathered for their raids. Gotthelm’s presence instilled strength and courage into the youth, and he had an awful feeling that both would soon be needed to fight an enemy that was unaffected by sword or axe – the enemy of grief.
Gotthelm slipped from his horse and gently removed his helmet. Like a glittering skull it again watched Harald with its empty eyes, the intricate designs on its crown seeming to move, playing through the heroic deeds they depicted. Gotthelm knelt down to the ground and listened.
After a moment he stood up and stared thoughtfully up the slope, wondering, perhaps, what scene of horror lay over the other side.
‘No sound, but it smells like a battle,’ he said, rubbing a leather-clad hand across his blond beard. ‘Fought some hours ago.’
‘A battle at Unsthof?’ cried Harald, feeling his unease crystallise into dread. ‘But why? Why would a battle be fought this far north? What point is there in that? And Unsthof! It’s … it’s so insignificant. I know the families who live there.’
On impulse, feeling the blood draining from his face so he became dizzy with anticipation, he spurred his horse up the rise. Gotthelm shouted to him. ‘Harald!’
‘Come on, Sigurd!’
‘Harald, wait!’
Gotthelm climbed back into his saddle and rode up to Harald Swiftaxe, who waited impatiently, his face white and angry.
‘What is it?’
‘Are the people of Unsthof your friends? Your special friends?’
‘I know them well. I spent a lot of time here as a child. Yes, most of them are my friends.’
And one friend especially!
Gotthelm drew his short sword and kissed the blade once. He waved it round his head and spurred his horse ahead of Swiftaxe, shouting, ‘Prepare yourself for grief, my young friend. But if there’s any fight to be had, then let’s fight it hard!’
From the top of the rise they stared down at the silent settlement. It had every semblance of being deserted. A small community, it consisted of no more than four long houses, and a scattering of stables, storehouses and corrals. There was no sign of life, but indefinable shapes lying all around the buildings were a certain sign of death.
Harald led the way at a gallop, his sword held tightly by his side, Gotthelm’s shield slung behind him, on his saddle, since Gotthelm himself preferred to fight without one. Cows watched them pass, running only if the two warriors rode close by. A broken wooden corral had spilled its population of black pigs and they were spread about the planted land that surrounded the small community, rooting up the winter’s provisions prematurely.
Arriving between the four long houses, Harald could not hold back his cry of horror. Even Gotthelm was sickened by the sight, but he recovered quickly and rose in his stirrups to search outside the settlement for a sign of the killers.
Bodies littered the stone pavement between the four houses where the families had lived. Severed limbs and twisted torsos lay in profusion. The stench was appalling, worse even than the stench of battle. A woman’s head stared obscenely from a spear that had been pushed into the mud from around one of the stables; Harald recognised her and felt sickness rise in his throat. Her eyes open, her long fair hair hanging limp around the gashed neck, she seemed almost to be trying to speak. Her body lay elsewhere, with the bodies of the other women, naked and sprawled, bellies and thighs covered with blood from the final rape with a short broad-sword.
Harald climbed down from his horse and the beast whinnied and cantered away from the scene of murder, perhaps to escape the foul smell of decay.
‘By all the gods,’ cried the youth. ‘If Elena is dead …!’
‘Berserks,’ said Gotthelm indifferently. ‘I recognise the style.’
‘Elena … Elena! …’ Harald searched among the defiled corpses, pushed into the smallest long house, and appeared again, shaking his head. ‘She isn’t here. Elena isn’t here. Pray Odin she’s been spared.’
He ran across to the largest house, then stopped. Puzzled, he stared at Gotthelm. ‘Berserks? But why? Why such a tiny settlement as this? Berserks are warriors …’
‘They’re beasts,’ said Gotthelm. ‘In some parts of the land they’re feared more than wolves, or even bears from which they gain their strength. Did you see them fighting in that first campaign against MacNeill? Remember those creatures who led us into the fray?’
‘Like mad men,’ said Harald, remembering. ‘Screaming, cutting themselves with their own blades … I’d never seen such warriors before.’
‘Imagine that sort of mindless kill-Iust pitted against forty or fifty innocent, unarmed farmers. Harald, this is the work of Berserks. I know the signs. Did your Elena come from here?’
Harald nodded, bitterly, glancing around again at the mention of her name. Then he looked up at the more experienced man.
‘But … but Sigurd, why? Why would trained warriors just attack for no reason? Why kill their own countrymen?’
Gotthelm smiled grimly, looked distantly to where dark mountains were shrouded in cloud. ‘They can’t help themselves. Harald. And these were not their countrymen. A Berserker has no countrymen, but his own kind, and hell is his resting place. My young friend, you still have a lot to learn.’
Harald pushed through the wicker door into the main long-house. It was dark inside, the shutters being still closed. On the open hearth, at the far end of the single room, a spilled cauldron lay across the body of the old woman, Ingredd. Harald remembered her tales, tall and not so tall, of the days when the gods had walked these desolate northlands as men, dressed in golden armour and wearing helmets with bulls’ horns that were wider than a man’s reach. He wept as he crossed to her ruined body, and saw the terrible wound in her chest. It had been quick, and she had not been defiled, and for that he was thankful. But what meaningless slaughter! What tragic incomprehensible retribution from so innocent a community!
Gotthelm called to him, and he ran, thinking perhaps that the older man had discovered another girl’s body, terrified that he would soon gaze down at Elena’s soulless form. But the discovery was of Bjorn the Axe, the elder of the settlement, a warrior of old who could still have boasted prowess with his double axe, even though long years had passed since the steel blades had last taken life. The old man’s glorious dark brown hair, always his most prized clothing, had been tied around a high, wooden spar in an open stable, and his naked body had been used for javelin practice; seven great tears in his torso told of the seven well-aimed throws.
‘Something put them into a rage,’ said Gotthelm, as they looked at the corpse hanging above them. ‘But by this time the rage was finished, and it was pure malice that took the life of this man. We are dealing with vicious killers, Harald; not only Berserks, but blood-hungry humans in their quiet times.’
They cut the old man down, and Harald wrapped him in his shor
t lambswool cloak.
Elena was not in the settlement.
They had not finished the search, but Harald felt, now, that she had escaped; how he didn’t know, except to suppose that she was at the hold, caring for his mother as she had often done. He fought away from the notion that the killers had taken her with them; she was beautiful, yes, but not so special that she would have received a different sort of death from the others in the village.
The bodies of Bjorn and Ingredd he lay together and covered with turf blocks which he found stacked inside the door of the largest house, perhaps ready to be added to the drystone walls for extra warmth now that the first bitter winds of autumn were fetching strong.
As he stepped out into daylight, hands trembling with anger and grief, mind full of Elena, he heard a whispering sound …
At the last moment he threw himself backwards, looked to his right in time to see the twisting spear slice past his face, its shaft spinning faster than he had ever dreamed it was possible to spin, the tightly coiled cord in the haft’s centre blood-stained and partly cut through.
The spear clattered off the drystone gable wall of the horse stable, fifty paces further on.
‘Sigurd! Where are you?’
‘Harald! He’s behind the latrine! Be careful!’
Gotthelm’s voice was sharp with urgency. He was searching the other side of the main house and could probably see the small building that was the community privvy. Harald hefted his sword and ran, stooped low, along the length of the smallest house to where the spear lay. The weapon was crusted with gore, its long, narrow blade blunted and chipped, but still very deadly when thrown. He held it in his left hand, low down on the shaft, ready to use it as a second sword. He circled the outside of the settlement and finally saw the danger.
At first he thought it was a naked man, painted red as if in some magical rite of winter. When the figure opened its mouth and roared, however, he got a better idea of the creature’s nature.
It was a dying Berserker, his thick furs matted and plastered down with the spillage from his own wounds. His head was bare and even the lank blond hair on his scalp was riddled through with cuts and slashes, almost certainly self-inflicted. He was holding himself upright against a dog-tether pole and he balanced there, bestial and bizarre, among the hacked corpses of the dogs; his red crusted sword waved in a wide circle as he looked first at Harald Swiftaxe, then at Gotthelm advancing carefully from the opposite direction.