Aithlenn laughed and ruffled her young friend’s hair. ‘You have been a good friend to me, Caylen,’ she said. ‘When others in your village have approached no closer than the magic well, and have scorned and spurned me, you have come and been a companion to me, and for that simple gift I shall give you … not one gift, but three. The first,’ she smiled and leaned slightly to kiss his hair, ‘is the wind. It shall never blow against you while you fight a Roman. The second is a helmet, a horned helmet. Come to the back of the cave.’
Caylen followed the old woman to a part of the low-roofed cave where there was dirt instead of rock on the floor. She swept the dirt away and drew a bulky and wide cloth bag from a hole in the rock. Opening this she took out a helmet the like of which Caylen had never before seen.
It was of bronze, and bright as the sun. Intricate designs covered the metal of it, and a narrow crest ran from front to back, and on this crest were fragments of bone, sharp and evil to look at. From the sides of the helmet stubby horns sprouted, made not of metal, nor of bone, but of something that Caylen had never seen before. The material was cool and smooth to the touch. To the rim of the helmet had been fastened a nose guard, and short, skull-like face guards had been rivetted to each side.
Aithlenn reached up and placed the helmet on Caylen’s head. ‘It fits,’ she said. ‘I knew it would. You wear, and must always keep precious, the helmet of a great warlord, a man who led the peoples of this land long before the iron in your axe and of that sword was known to exist. I talk not of a time a few generations ago, but of countless centuries in the past, when even the children of the villages were familiar with the spells and magic words that we hold so precious, and which are now guarded by our wizards and Hags and druids. Guard that helmet well, Caylen. It is a great inheritance.’
‘What will it do?’ asked the boy, proud and pleased with the weight of the metal on his head.
Aithlenn laughed, girlish laughter from a woman whose girlhood was as lost in time as the owner of the helmet.
‘It will stop swords,’ she said. ‘It will keep your head from being split open. What else is a helmet for?’
She gave him no chance to answer or apologise for his presumption that the helmet was magic. She had produced the third item she would give him, a ring, small and simple, with a piece of jade smoothed and rounded and set in some silvery metal, possibly silver itself. She reached for Caylen’s left hand and slipped the ring on the middle finger. Caylen stared at it, at the black jade that reflected back a shadowy image of his own face.
Almost in a whisper Aithlenn said, ‘If you ever truly need me, to ask me what you should do, then say only, “To the jade, Aithlenn, your spirit to the crystal.” I shall come to you. But use the ring cautiously, for my appearance in it will be my appearance at the time of calling.’
Caylen kissed the ring and clenched his fist. Aithlenn passed her hand across it and murmured something. ‘Only your eyes can see it now,’ she said, then, ‘The Romans will be unbothered by the helmet should they ever take you. But the ring would have been a good spoil.’
Outside the cave Bedivyg called anxiously, ‘They are no more than a few minutes away. Come on, Caylen. If they catch us here we are dead.’
‘He’s coming,’ said Aithlenn. But still she held Caylen with her, reaching her hands to remove the helmet and then cover his scalp with her fingers.
‘Caylen,’ she said, ‘in all the months you have come here, to talk to me, to be friends with me, I have understood more about you by peering shallowly into your mind and your past. I might have understood you fully over several years, and helped you. I might have explained why you dream of this giant bear, and of your own cruel death in a ring of stones. Now there is no time for subtlety. Forces are at war and at work within you, and you must understand them if you are to survive. When you leave this cave you will not be the young Coritanian who entered a few minutes before. You will be all those people I have sensed, and of whom you have dreamed … the warriors and the animals that inhabit your troubled skull. Close your eyes … quickly …’
Caylen did as he was told. Aithlenn reached into him …
He had been so young, and so innocent, and it had been the incautiousness of youth, and not arrogance, that had upset the Berserkers. She looked into the images of Caylen’s previous lives, and listened to the incomprehensible languages, and saw the first tragic day, when the Berserker warriors, lusting and maddened for blood, had begged their god Odin to take the young norseman Swiftaxe and make him one of them. He had killed a Berserker, they told the Bear God, and he should make good the loss. And the one-eyed demon god, the evil shape-changer, had found the idea amusing, and in less time than it takes to squash a fly he had stolen the soul of Swiftaxe, the viking, and implanted his own spirit, the spirit of the bear, in the warrior’s skull.
The woman who watched from another time, who observed from the beginning of the millennium events that would not occur until its end, chilled and shivered at the awful, mindless killing urge of the man who had become Berserker, saw him sweep away lives as a woman sweeps the ashes from her hearth stone.
She saw his death, then, failing to fulfil the spell that would break Odin’s curse upon him. And she saw the consequences of his failure, rebirth in another age, still a Berserker, still a mindless, ravening blood and life seeker, but a warrior, now, in the middle centuries of this millennium, fighting with the men and women who were the descendants of the same folk who lived in the valleys and dales in these troubled Roman years, four centuries earlier.
The bear was there, possessing him, driving him to a frenzy, a frenzy of killing and of lusting, and she saw Swiftaxe, who was known at this time as Niall, cull lives as a fisherman culls fish from a crowded pool. And between the bursts of fury, between the periods of Odin’s laughter (for the god was always there, delighting and relishing each blow, each cruel mutilation) between the moments of insane violence … the human still sought to break Odin’s hold on him. He still sought a spell to break the curse.
The answer, or part of it, lay in the ring of stone henges that stood, in ruins, in the land of the Belgae. From her earlier time the old woman watched Swiftaxe, four hundred years hence, die treacherously whilst on the very point of calling to the beings who resided within the stones. But from her own experience, and knowing the way of things, she knew that even had that dying warrior survived long enough to call through the stones he would have failed, for he did not have the word, the gate word, the summoning word.
She would have to tell Caylen Swiftaxe how to obtain that word. She would have to leave this boy with an over-whelming desire to find those stones in the land of the Belgae. For she knew that when the bear took him over again – and she could feel it lurking there, a part of his worst dreams, but waiting, waiting to satiate the blood-lust of this incomprehensible god, this Odin – when that happened she knew that Caylen would become Berserker, and she feared for him, and for his soul.
She broke the contact with his dreams, with his memories, the unremembered part of what his mind stored, the images and words from other times, carried into this third incarnation of Swiftaxe.
Caylen stared at her, puzzled, scared, his mind, too, filled with the things she had seen.
‘I’m frightened,’ he said.
‘You will know more fear than you can imagine when this bear begins to possess you again. You must mark out your life to search for the key and for the spell that will break this god’s hold upon you.’
‘The stones … in the south, those henges, in a ring … an evil place …’
Aithlenn laughed. ‘A beautiful place,’ she said. ‘One of many such. But a place that guards its secrets well, and you must first find a way to summon the beings that haunt its outer ring …’
But before she could say more, before she could make her suggestion, Bedivyg screeched loud from outside: ‘They come! Caylen, quick, or we shall be taken.’
‘Go!’ shouted Aithlenn, propelling Caylen firmly
towards the cave mouth. The boy, his weapons and helmet held tight in his hands, fled the cave. The Hag heard them scampering down the slopes, scattering stones. She heard a voice bark crisp and unpleasant-sounding orders in a language strange to her.
She started to walk towards the cave mouth, but a shadow darkened it: a man stood there, broad and armoured, the red plume on his helmet brushing the cave roof. Aithlenn saw that his left wrist was bandaged in bloody rags. The man’s face was drawn into a mask of pain and anger, the pallor of his skin worse than that of a corpse.
Distantly there was a boy’s cry, just one, and Aithlenn closed her eyes as she murmured a silent prayer that it was Bedivyg and not Caylen. But the earth goddess could no longer hear her.
The man spoke to her, words in her own language, the sound of his voice reflecting the awful pain of his mutilation. ‘Witch,’ he said. ‘Foul Hag of the hills. I shall break the magic wall as I break your neck, and then the village shall be ours.’
He drew his sword, held it uneasily as if unfamiliar with its particular weight and feel. But the blow he would deliver would be a simple one.
Aithlenn turned her face away from the man, and only the movement of his shadow on the cave wall forewarned her of the blow that sliced off the top of her skull, and spilled her brains on the floor of the cave.
CHAPTER 2
Southern Italy, AD 58
‘I love the games,’ observed Gregorius Pyxus Gilius dryly, as he walked with the senator, Gaius Antonius, along the cool, dimly-lit tunnel towards the arena. ‘I love the stench of fear, that raw meat smell. It excites my taste buds. Something of the animal in me takes over.’ He grinned at his host for this brief stop-over on his way to Rome. ‘It’s been a long time since I last saw some really professional butchery.’
Antonius shifted his grey and red toga higher on to his shoulder and extended a pudgy, white-skinned hand to point ahead of them. ‘No mere butchery, my dear Gilius. Not for the star performance, at least. You will see skilled mutilation and the subjugation of men by other men before their lives are taken. These are the most thrilling games in this part of the world. Nero himself is a regular visitor.’
Gilius, maintaining his placid composure, felt an inward thrill. He could hardly wait to see some real games after so long in the sand wastes of north Africa. But he knew that his composure mustn’t drop, that he must affect, at least outwardly, an appearance of disdain and boredom. It was the accepted thing to do.
He was short, this visiting governor of some obscure African province. He was white, of course, whiter by far than Antonius had expected; for all that he had been exposed to the fierce semi-tropical sunshine, Gilius was as white as a baby’s belly. His body, swathed in green, seemed frail to the stockier senator, who was not much impressed by this black-haired visitor.
Antonius himself was older, more experienced, and that experience showed in his half-opened eyes, and his short-cropped white hair, still fashioned in the style of a warrior of the State. Antonius had spent many years in the campaigns of Claudius, and had been a young soldier when Caligula himself had fallen from power at the end of a sword. He had seen Germany and Britain, Spain and the hostile deserts of Africa, where this weakling Gilius was now a governor. He had had a belly full of killing, and a mind full of mindless slaughter, and yet he too would confess a certain excitement at the thought of the games he had laid on in honour of his guest.
It was not the first or second order games that appealed to him, however, but the last game of all. He had seen the man fight twenty times, and each time it was the same, a bludgeoning, mindless slaughter. And yet something, some aura reached out from the killer and swamped him with its vibrating excitement and animal frenzy. He loved the feeling, even though he could not understand it.
He could hardly bear the thought of the tedium of two-and three-man duels, slave hacking at slave, animal savagery and subjugation that would precede the man who was known as the Horned Warrior.
The man who was sometimes referred to as the Berserker.
‘You’ve become quiet,’ said Gilius as the two men emerged into the daylight. A few token cheers from the nearby tiers of seats in the vast arena brought a sour grin to Antonius’s face, and he waved a hand in brief, perfunctory acknowledgement.
‘I was thinking of the last fight we shall see.’
Gilius nodded. ‘The Horned Warrior. I’ve heard much of this man. Where do we sit?’
‘At the front of course.’ Antonius took Gilius by the arm and led him to a seat at the front. Gilius was uneasy. He seemed uncomfortable in the heat, and suspicious of the babbling voices of the crowd, themselves restless and eager for the games to start.
‘We’re in spear range from the arena if we sit there. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to sit further back?’
Antonius grinned cruelly. ‘But the smell is better at the front. Besides, it wouldn’t look good to the people … a Roman Governor afraid of a few slaves? Dear me, Gilius, this doesn’t say much for your relationship with your subjects. Plotting to kill you, are they?’
‘Always,’ said Gilius mournfully. He took his seat, and leaned forward against the stone parapet to peer down at the yellow sands below. ‘Besides, I care not what the people think. In my palace I am known as the cowering wolf. But I am very much a living cowering wolf, and my contemporaries, arrogant, strutting cocks, have all found their way to the feasting table of Mars … as braised steak, and not dinner guests.’
‘How refreshingly original your metaphors are,’ said Antonius, seating himself and adjusting his robes so that he could, if he felt the need (which he rarely did) slip a hand beneath his toga for more physical pleasure during the spectacle that would unfold for them over the next hour.
Below them a short and boring parade of fighters began, for the benefit of the crowd, and as a mark of respect for the distinguished visitor. The Horned Warrior was not among those paraded. While the retiarii and secutores did their proud walk around the sandy arena, white and black skins mixed almost equally, but muscle mostly on the black side, with arrogance on the white, Gilius questioned Antonius about the Horned Warrior.
‘What have you heard of him?’
‘Only that he fights with an animal frenzy rarely seen in the arena … that he uses an axe against which no blade can stand, that when he fights the wind is always in the eyes of his opponent, blowing sand and dust in them so that it seems even the gods favour his particular brand of violence. I have heard that he is a Briton, and that there is not a man or woman in the land who would not give half their household treasure to have the Horned Warrior in their bed for just one night.’
Antonius laughed at that. ‘The matrons and patrons of Rome are so bored by being bored by the upper classes that even a desert rat, if it could fight in the arena, would have a queue of gentry waiting to sleep with it.’ He grew solemn. ‘I fear that it would be more than one’s life was worth to enter the same bed as that horned madman.’
Gilius said, ‘Why is he known, as I have heard, as the …’ he frowned. ‘The name eludes me.’
‘The Berserker?’
Gilius nodded slowly. ‘Yes, the Berserker. A strange name, and one I have never heard before.’
‘Nor has anyone. It is not even the name of an élite British warrior type.’ He grinned. ‘There are no élite British warrior types, of course. No, it is a name which he uses himself, but never explains. He claims to be a bear in human flesh. He claims that he is of a race of people to whom the Berserker warrior was a demon, almost a god, and something to be feared. No one knows to which people he refers, but I believe him. He is a fearsome and excruciatingly violent warrior. He was taken from his village among the Coritani … a tribal league in Britain. He was captured with his brother. Their village had been protected by magic for generations, but a patrol finally killed the witch who was protecting the stronghold, and the two boys were taken from the cave. Their spirit and warrior quality must have impressed someone in the garrison; the centurion who
had razed their village wanted to kill them – they’d attacked him in some way – but they ended up in gladiatorial school, a few hours’ ride from here. One brother became a great gladiator, the man known as Bedus the Ox – his British name is unpronounceable.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard of him.’
Antonius smiled. ‘The Horned Warrior, the other brother, needed no training at all. He is all-powerful with his axe, and with the stolen Roman sword he insists on using, and in forty fights against huge odds he has received more wounds than an infantryman would receive in forty years of campaigns against the Goths. And he scarcely flinches at any of them as he destroys the opposition in its entirety.’
Gilius frowned. ‘Could it be that a spell protects him?’
‘The druids that we made examine him – Gaulish druids, admittedly – say not.’ Antonius turned to look at his guest closely. ‘Although something unnerving did occur.’
‘Unnerving?’
‘Yes. Three druids cast cleansing spells upon him, in the early days when he was still more of a boy than a man. The next morning all three druids had been disembowelled by what appeared to be some large animal … a bear, perhaps.’
Gilius laughed nervously, stared at the Senator with a puzzled expression on his face. ‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Oh, just that there’s a silly rumour attached to the Berserker,’ said Antonius, as if nothing could be less important. ‘It is said that the ghost of the bear in the warrior sometimes revenges itself upon those who have abused its master, by attacking it with spells, for example, or watching it fighting …’ he laughed, patted Gilius’s knee. ‘I’m sure it’s just a rumour, a silly tale.’
Gilius, if he could have blanched whiter than he already was, may well have done so. Antonius laughed the louder. ‘I’m teasing, my friend. Just teasing. The man is merely a beast of flesh and blood. Fear not.’