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.
A huge spear had been driven through the Berserker’s belly. Its recurved hooks were jammed back into his flesh, and the shaft was hacked and splintered where the man had tried to cut it out of his body but had failed. One of the younger men of the settlement perhaps had had at least one word of revenge, had perhaps turned the Berserker’s own looted weapon against him.
As Harald closed in he became aware of the smell of the beast, a rich, fetid odour, the stink of split guts and voided bowels. And blood. Always blood.
The Berserker roared again, his eyes narrowing, his lips drawing back from teeth that were black with decay. His sword slashed through the air, stopping both Gotthelm and Swiftaxe, then Gotthelm closed in to kill.
His first vicious swipe was knocked aside by the Berserker, whose parrying sweep completed the arc and nearly cut Harald’s throat. Harald drew back and threw the twisting spear from a range of ten paces. It homed true and straight, spinning as it flew.
The Berserker released his hold on the upright pole and plucked the spear from the air before the point could make contact with his body; he twisted round and the weapon sang on swiftly towards Gotthelm who had no trouble knocking it aside, the throw was so weak. He attacked again, swiping wildly with his gleaming blade.
It happened, then, almost too quickly to appreciate.
Steel met steel, rang loudly in the still air. Blow was parried by blow, and the Berserker, hanging on to life though he was, seemed only slightly outclassed by the other warrior.
Then there was a high-pitched yelp. Metal flashed from hand to hand, then back again. Gotthelm hesitated. The Berserker seemed to be toppling, but as he fell he lunged, then caught the upright pole again to stop his fall. His reddened blade found the gap between two of the whalebone plates in Gotthelm’s leather jerkin, entered his body, tore at his heart.
Harald felt his head spin with shock. He leapt at the Berserker, who grinned and barked, and then shouted obscenities. Gotthelm crawled away, leaving a trail of red on the cracked flagstones of the small roadway.
Engaging the Berserker in close combat, Harald felt the power of the man-beast, the animal frenzy transmitted to every devastating lunge and cut. Harald’s youth and agility kept him narrowly out of the range of the biting edge of the warrior’s blade.
He had left his shield on the horse, and without it he had no way of hampering those devil’s thrusts. If he persisted in attacking, the Berserker would take his life by strength alone.
If Harald could only get a grip on the disembowelling pilum which would claim the Berserker’s life anyway, given a few hours.
He drew close again, swiped at the warrior’s head, felt his blade driven earthwards. He recovered and thrust up at the man’s throat, but again he felt his blow parried, turned down to the earth so that he only just managed to keep a grip on the hilt. As he prepared for a third lunge he saw a blur of movement, and felt icy steel shattering through the thin metal links of his father’s short mail-coat, which he wore in preference to a leather and bone breastplate. Broken edges of the iron links bit into his shoulder agonisingly, but the blade was stopped, and for a split second caught in Harald’s armour.
And Harald grabbed the pilum and twisted it viciously.
The Berserker screeched in pain, and released his grip on the upright just long enough for Harald to use the spear to push him to the ground. Harald cast his sword away and unslung the bearded axe from his belt ready to hook the sword from the Berserker’s grasp; even so, a frantic slash by the dying man cut a groove across the youth’s forehead that blinded his left eye with blood and pain.
But the Berserker was down, a dying animal, staring through insane blue eyes at the warrior towering above him. As he tried to cut Harald’s legs, Harald hooked the sword under the blade of his axe and wrenched it from the man’s grip. Then he lopped off the hand that had held it.
‘See me Odin!’ he cried angrily, triumphantly. ‘Blind as you are blind, yet I destroy one of your animals!’
He stood over the Berserker and drove the pilum deep into the soil by the side of the flagstone road. The warrior screamed as his body was firmly pinned down. He clutched with his remaining hand at the point of entry of spear in body, strained to raise himself up, but could no longer even twist.
He screamed once more as Harald hacked off his head, taking his time about it, crying out the names of the dead of Unsthof as he severed the neck cords with gentle blows that ate an inch at a time into the Berserker’s bull neck. The severed head he wrapped in a cloth garment that had been stripped from a young girl, and then he went to where Gotthelm lay, face down, absolutely motionless.
Turning him over Harald realised at once that his friend was not lost just yet. The wound was deep, it was severe, but if it were going to be fatal, Gotthelm would have been dead by now. If the Berserker had not been so severely weakened, it might have been a different story entirely.
‘Gotthelm! Come back to the land of the living.’
After a moment Gotthelm’s eyes opened, fractionally, then widened by degrees. He coughed and bloody froth rose to the corners of his mouth.
‘What … what are you doing here?’
‘Who were you expecting?’
‘A Valkyrie at least,’ gasped Gotthelm, trying to smile. Harald eased the man’s helmet off, and rubbed his cloth sleeve across his face, wiping the drenching sweat that ran into his eyes. Gotthelm blinked and smiled. ‘Harald … I was slain … I felt life pass from my body, drained into that beast.’
‘The beast is dead. He was weakened. He was still as strong as three men, but weakened. His thrust has pierced a lung. Men have lived through worse.’
He helped Gotthelm into a sitting position and watched the southern warrior explore the gash in his leather tunic. ‘The blow drove whalebone into my ribs. I can feel it.’
‘My father’s hold is just a few miles away, now. We should make it by sundown, or just after.’
Gotthelm raised his head, coughed again and grimaced with pain. ‘There are Berserkers … loose … keep constant watch, Harald …’
‘Once at Urlsgarde not even the gods can harm us.’
Gotthelm reached round for his helmet and drew it to his chest, staring at it. ‘Another death,’ he murmured quietly. ‘Another year.’
Harald stared at the metal skull, and felt a strange uneasiness stir his soul.
Where, just yesterday, there had been a picture of a man fighting an impaled warrior, now there was just blank metal, gleaming brightly in the autumn daylight.
CHAPTER THREE
It was near dusk when Harald saw the first flickering torches of the hold at Urlsgarde; his spirits surged immediately at that welcome sight. He found himself spurring his tired horse faster across the rolling hills, towards that beacon of warmth and security.
Gotthelm, slumped forward in his saddle, moaned loudly as the pace suddenly increased and Harald stopped a moment, rode back to comfort his friend.
‘A few more minutes and we’ll be in more comfort than we’ve known for a year. With some of this mead we pillaged from Dublin we’ll soon forget our aches.’
Gotthelm tried to smile, but his agony was too great. ‘Ride,’ he said, his voice no more than an urgent whisper.
Harald again took up the reins of the older warrior’s stallion and ro
de fast towards the palisaded settlement.
On the highest ridge, looking across a shallow valley to the hold itself, the riders stopped, Harald watching as the sun vanished behind those dark hills that protected the winding fjord, some miles to the west. The fjord was a silver snake, stretching into that wide and hostile sea that was the graveyard of so many valiant hirdmen and young and bloodthirsty warriors. In that sea had drowned so many fine and lusty drengs, cheated in death of the death they had desired to administer.
How soon before he, Harald, would once again brave those rolling seas? How soon before he listened in terror to the ice floes cracking against the tarred timbers of the Sea Strider, his father’s dragon ship, now docked at Thorskeid in the south, where Gudrack had commandeered it for the next great campaign to the Celtish lands of soft rain and green valleys that they all so loved?
A few months only, time enough to wed gentle Elena, if she had survived. Time enough to raise his own band of hirdmen from among the adventure-loving sons of the scattered hauldr, the free farmers who made this cold and inhospitable land into a fertile area, cultivating the ash and bone of their ancestral dead and never parting from the spirits and gods who sang and danced across the mountains and the silver waters of the fjord.
Dark mountains, possessed not by men but by the dark forces of the angry gods, framed this plateau of gentle land. Cold winds, the angry cries of Thor and Odin, carried frustration to Frey’s seed as it sprung from the soil as corn and rye, as crop and cattle. Here, more than anywhere else in the wide and hostile northlands, the gods warred constantly, fiercely, without remorse …
Go to war, go pillage and conquer! cried the trolls and warlocks of the Bear and Bull gods, Odin sparking the skies with his displeasure, Mjollnir crashing on to the land as Thor spat and laughed at the struggling villages, inciting the blood-lusty youths to brave the snake seas and dragon oceans and take the seed of death and glory to the Saxon sword-sluts of Engle Land and the Celtish romancers of the Western Isles.
But against their cries, whispering in the gentle summers and the fire-log winter evenings, the loving dirges of Frey and Freyja, urging fertility and love, compassion and the soft and careful turning of the earth.
Here we lie, they cried. Here we lie, among the bones of the dead, among the spirits of the past; use us, love us, draw food and warmth from our bosom, and let the seas and the spray winds and the black rocks of alien lands know only the touch and the blood of foolhardy southerners and war-lusting jarls. Turn the soil, sleep in the walking shadows of your past …
Harald had heard the call of the gods, long ago as a boy, when to be called a dreng had insulted him – he, the son of the hersir of Urlsgarde, he Harald with three bondmen of his own to do with as he chose, and a Gaulish thrall to kick when he felt like kicking, a miserable youth whose tongue was irritation to Harald’s ears, and whose life had ended as the lives of most slaves ended, at the point of a knife when he had not acted fast enough for the young master’s entertainment.
Harald had gone to war, against his mother’s wishes but with his father’s blessing. He had left the farmlands, this pocket of thriving life in the bitter Harjedal mountains, and was now returning triumphant.
A follower of Thor! A speaker of praise for Odin! A spurner of Frey and a laugher at farmers and the dirt-grubbing life.
Yet now, after a year, this quiet valley which looked down to the fishing village and the wide, sheltered fjord, seemed so attractive, so welcoming.
His gaze fled across the dark communal sites, the clusters of two or three long huts, grouped in the middle of their corrals. They were all in darkness, for the low roofs hid the warm fires from the hungry eyes that searched them from a distant ridge. Fire could be seen only at Urlsgarde, burning from the palisade that rose above the deep earth ditch.
Harald could see smoke rising from his father’s hall; he could imagine the smells of roasting mutton, the sweet tang of elderberry, the heady stench of ale, brewed down by the shore in one of the boat huts by the old man known only as Ale-bringer.
Night came swiftly, darkness sweeping the land and even the dark mountains fell more sombre as the night demons painted the land with jet and rolling grey clouds that seemed to ever herald the fall of snow, but which rolled on out across the snake-seas to become lost in the hellish whirlpools of Njord’s marine Kingdom.
Harald, leading Gotthelm’s horse, rode down the slope and up the rise until he stood before the cross-beamed gate which led through the wooden walls of the hold.
‘Open the gates! It’s Harald Swiftaxe and a friend.’
A face peered at him from on high, waved a torch towards him and seemed to recognise his sparsely bearded features. The gates opened, pulled by stoop-backed thralls who bowed their heads as he rode past into the muddy courtyard, scattering dogs and ducks, and sending a goat bleating and limping towards the shelter of some stinking corner of the hold.
The gates closed; torchlight was a poor substitute for daylight and the hold seemed cramped and dark. Harald’s feasting eyes found little that he could recognise. His father’s hall had its doors open and the brilliant fire-glow flooded into the yard; voices murmured and the crackle of flame and the sizzle of fat were welcome sounds.
Distantly, in a corner of the compound, a low fire burned in a shallow pit. Several shapes hunched around the flame and watched Harald through red, reflecting eyes, but they turned away after a few moments and silently contemplated the conflagration before them. Harald felt a moment’s puzzlement, but then involved himself with helping Gotthelm from his horse.
And his father emerged from the long hall and embraced him.
‘The gods told me you were alive,’ he said, hugging his son. ‘Some starlings’ entrails too. But I didn’t know when to expect you back.’
An old man, with his hair long (long like Bjorn the Axe’s – the two men had fought together and adventured together – did his father know?) hanging lank and dirty white around his shoulders. He was still upright and strong, and his green cloth tunic, loose though it hung, could not conceal the power of the man beneath. There was a sparkle in old Eric Bluetooth’s eyes, a touch of a smile on his lips – pride, thought Harald. The old man is proud of me.
Bluetooth slapped his son on the back and hugged him again. ‘You killed many Celtish dogspits. Many. I can see by your eyes, your scars.’
He touched the double scar on Harald’s cheek. Harald drew up and grinned. ‘Not many,’ he confessed, ‘but enough. I fought beside Gudrack at least twice, and my battle cry would have made you wince to hear it, it was so full of anger and death.’
‘You must tell us all your adventures over a fine meal. We’re eating poor scrap at the moment, but we’ll soon have a goat on the spit.’ Bluetooth’s eyes flickered towards the leaning, silent Gotthelm. ‘You are …?’
‘This is my good friend Sigurd Gotthelm,’ said Harald. ‘A jarl from the mountains south of Hringar, and a very fine warrior. He is honoured to be in the hold, but he brings honour by his sword and his spear.’
‘And mystery by his helmet,’ said Bluetooth, staring at the strange metallic skull that encased the old warrior’s cranium. ‘And death by his blood unless we get him tended.’
They helped Gotthelm into the small hut that ran alongside the main hall; here there were beds, fine wooden benches covered with deep layers of bear fur and horse leather. Gotthelm lay and allowed a young bondmaiden to strip off his clothes, caressing his body as well as the wound. He winked at Harald and grinned, and Harald’s fear for the man’s life swiftly subsided.
‘She’s the daughter of a Saxon thrall, given to me in payment for hunting down the Saxon himself when he killed a gestir at Trollestad. If she aids his recovery I shall give her her freedom – if your friend doesn’t desire her.’
Harald laughed. Such generosity was quite unlike his father, but his father’s pleasure at his return was probably very great.
Something about old Bluetooth’s attitude, however,
filled Harald with unease. The man, though obviously overwhelmed and happy, seemed to walk beneath a dark cloud; there were shadows on his face that were the shadows of fear and stress.
And when he found out about Unsthof, and the slaughter of the people there, it might be even worse. Had they been attacked here by the same band of Berserkers?
Sudden fear gripped Harald’s heart. Elena! Had she survived the rape of Unsthof only to find death during a later attack on Urlsgarde?
‘Elena …’ he said loudly, but his father, guessing at his son’s anxiety, said, ‘She’s well. Tomorrow we shall ride to Unsthof and bring bawdy old Bloodaxe and his talespinning wench to our hall.’
‘Bloodaxe is dead,’ said Harald quickly, hardly daring to watch his father’s face. He was relieved, as he spoke, relieved that Elena was safe. But he was terrified now, of what his father would do.
In the event his father did nothing, merely stared. He said, ‘Dead? Bloodaxe? How can that be? We were only hunting together four days ago …’
In the quiet of the hut, while in the main hall the voices grew louder and more excited as preparations for feasting began, Harald told of what they had found over the rise, at the tiny community.
Bluetooth’s face drained of all blood and his eyes closed. He seemed to stoop a little, to grow older.
‘I would not have blinked five years ago,’ he said. ‘Death meant so little when death was so much around us. But now … Bloodaxe … my old friend, so cruelly dead.’
‘We know who did it,’ said Harald.
Bluetooth’s eyes were heavy in the darkness, but watched the youth with obvious pain, obvious expectancy. When Harald told of the dead Berserker Bluetooth tensed, then uttered a fearful scream, of desperation perhaps, but mostly of anger. The cry woke Gotthelm who watched from his bed, brushing away the gentle caress of the bondgirl. Harald backed away from the fiercesome man, but Bluetooth, rather than striking the nearest object as Harald had expected, merely turned and walked away, glancing towards the strange fire near the palisade, and vanishing into the glare of the hall.