‘No! I cried, and she revealed her plump, soft thighs.
‘No! I cried, and she sang a song, entrancing me, inviting me. But I shook my head and poked her with my singing life-taker, my blooded sword!’
At this great cheers and the thunder of the oak table being solidly pounded by bronzed and brawny fists.
Harald grinned and swayed, reached for the jug of ale, glancing at his father as he did so. The old man winked and laughed, and Harald felt a great surge of pleasure; amid the din there was the sound of thunder, a scream, perhaps of laughter, perhaps of something else …
And then:
With a crash the door of the hall flew open. Bitter wind blew suddenly across the table, sending the warmth and smoke swirling before it. The night, the winter darkness, sent fingers of ice running around the gathered hold.
For a moment Harald thought the sound, the noise of thunder, was just the antics of the guests; but when the fire dimmed, and the atmosphere of contentment and pleasure drained away to leave a haunting silence, grey shapes and staring, frightened eyes, he knew that the festivities were ended.
Lurching upright, feeling the ale’s heady drug make a fool of his body and vision, he stared at the door, across the turned heads of his fellow village folk.
Walking slowly into the hall, swaying as great bears sway when they walk towards some panicking deer, the Berserks came.
Led by the huge, red-haired man who had seemed to Harald to be the leader of the group of killers, they stopped inside the hall and stared at Erik Bluetooth. Grotesque to look at, their smell was worse – the stench of blood and excrement soaking their furs and seal-skin leggings. Around the bull neck of the leader hung a necklace of flashing, fire-trimmed bear-teeth. All six wore, on their metal helms, the skull of a bear, canines reaching down across the forehead to point to the narrow, deep-set eyes of the warriors of Odin who carried these trophies.
Swords slithered from sheaths, waved threateningly in the fire glow, flashing and glittering as the six Berserks moved in towards the table. The giant who led them was grinning and his gaze seemed fixed on Harald.
‘A burning for us all, is it?’ he muttered loudly, menacingly. ‘Then come and try us, young farmer whore-slit. Come and hack the heads off our shoulders and see how long your tripes remain unspilled.’
There was sudden panic in the hall; the benches were overturned as men, old and young alike, fled from the Berserks’ approach, ran for cover, or in rare instances darted for weapons stacked against the wall.
Harald wielded his sword, manifestly unafraid, secretly petrified. The great Bear Tooth himself came towards him, preceded by his fecal stench, the eyes that watched the young Viking filled with hatred and shot through with red and black.
Smoke choked Harald as the fire billowed and guttered, torn before the icy gale blowing from the yard.
A man screamed, his body arching as a Berserker’s sword split his head through to the jaw, spilling brains and blood in a pink and grey mess.
At once there was frenzy.
The smell of blood, the sight of it, sent the Berserks into that frightening rage of animal frenzy, of sword-wielding, invulnerable offensiveness, that was so useful in battle and so terrifying in any other place.
Harald had seen it before, the wheeling, whirling, screaming action, as singing blades took off scalps, heads, arms and feet, the Berserks crouching and jumping as they spat and screamed, thrusting, lunging and slashing everything including themselves.
Men fell like pigs at a midwinter fertility feast, stuck through and split open, guts and brains washing the earthen floor and draining through into the valleys of the mid world. Harald fled from the hall, driving one Berserker before him, dodging the frenzied shape as its screams deafened him and its blade sang close to his ears, narrowly missing cutting him down for once and for good.
In this state, he knew, there was no personal motivation, no desire for revenge; there was only the need for killing … Odin had possessed them, drawn from Asgard by the sudden stench of human blood, drawn from his idle games by the thought of slaughter, directing his beast-men in their whirling dance of destruction.
Was he laughing?
Thunder rolled across the northern sky; Thor groaning, perhaps, at the indulgence of the other war god. Lightning prefaced a storm, out across the black mountains of the eastern lands; Odin strode the heavens, his tears of laughter drenching the autumn soil, driving the panicking beasts before them.
At the door of the hall, the noise of the screaming and the stench of slaughter still strong in his senses, Harald paused.
There were less dead than he had imagined, most of the farmers having fled and escaped the blind fury of the Berserks.
But as he watched, so the six foul creatures turned to regard him, ceasing their frenzy, stifling their death cries, shaking and tensing as their blood-stained bodies froze, a momentary image of horror …
Each had the face of a bear, dripping jowls, pointed snout, opening and growling, red tongues licking forwards, tasting the air for the flesh drops that filled the hall; gleaming eyes, coal black; brown fur, smeared and clogged with the blood of their victims; all the features of the great brown bear that prowled and haunted these northlands and was best left well alone.
At once the bears were laughing, swaying as they stood and watched Harald, leaning back and laughing through the sticky muzzles, roaring with humour at something that Harald failed to understand.
He stood in the night and slowly became aware that he was alone in the yard. Turning quickly he saw the halls and huts tightly closed, their occupants already barricaded inside. Not for anything would they open up now.
But something else caught his attention. A sound – like the scything of wind on a summer’s day, the way it sounds as it blows across an empty field. And cries, as of pain, or dying … outside the wall.
He ran across to the palisade and climbed the narrow steps until he could peer over into the earth ditch, and beyond that to the gentle slopes leading down to the fjord.
Approaching through the darkness, wailing their grief, were the stained and mutilated corpses of the dead of Unsthof.
Appalled by what he saw, Harald’s first instinct was to run and hide his eyes, to cower in some dark and private corner of the hold until the horrendous manifestation of Odin’s displeasure had passed away into the cloudy dawn. But his hands gripped the palisade, his body tensed, and he found himself staring at the white faces of the farmers and hunters and their wives and children that he had known; men and women whom he had loved in his youthful enthusiasm for what they could teach him of snaring rabbits or netting the great fish that played in the shallows of the fjord.
‘Let them in peace!’ he screamed, as if in some way his puny voice would rise above the god wind, the howling, thundering scream from the sky that blew around and across the hold, carrying with it the stench of death.
Truly there was great displeasure in the heart of the one-eyed god whom Harald had so recently thought merciful!
He looked again at the shuffling dead, as they neared the hold gates, gathering together and uniting in their fish-eyed scrutiny of Harald’s tense shape above them.
There was brave Ingredd, left hand on the gaping wound in her chest, tattered robe blowing wildly in the strange wind. There was young Niel, a boy like Harald in so many ways, impetuous, hungry for adventure … he still clutched, in death, a short wooden sword that Harald had fashioned for the lad himself, days before he had departed for the great crossing. Headless, a woman’s body stretched its arms towards him. All the people of Unsthof, unbothered by their terrible wounds, approached Harald and from some of their dead mouths emerged the laughing sound of the wind, the howling pleasure of Odin … wind on a summer afternoon, waving the cornfield, sending butterflies and insects whirling into the hot air …
In the middle of the host of dead was Bjorn the Axe, white beard matted with the encrusted spill of his several times split heart. Guts and flesh
hung low around his waist and his legs, themselves torn by the javelin practice he had been used for. He walked stiffly towards the wooden palisade; blind, dulled eyes stared upwards – his lips moved, but no sound emerged – like the woman’s head on the spear, trying, perhaps, to express in death some of the grief for his loss of life, to shout some warning to the young warrior who stood, filled with fear, above the corpse, unable to move, to tear himself away from the vile scene before him, unable to express his contempt for Odin’s foul joke.
But though Bjorn’s lips moved, greater forces – the teasing fingers of the Sky god – had stilled his tongue, poked a wood knot between the cords of his throat so that no sound emerged, just the noise of wind scything across a field of corn, a singing summer wind, the fleeing of souls from the pleasant light of earth to the heaving darkness of the underworld.
‘Gotthelm!’ shrieked Harald, feeling the tears (of fear, and of grief, mixed and jumbled, expressing so many emotions as they ran from his eyes), feeling the weakness of his legs, the knotting of his stomach. ‘Gotthelm! Help me! What do I do?’
Helpless in his panic, unfamiliar with the evil ways of the angry gods, terrified of what might have been happening, and of what the gods might have in store for him, Harald could think only of Gotthelm, his companion, his sturdy helper, his guide and life-saver, the old warrior who had been more of a father to him than even Bluetooth had been …
But Gotthelm was dying, eyes closed, oblivious, no doubt, of the supernatural rage that had possessed the hold.
Out of the night, dropping from their hiding places in the dark clouds, came the Valkyries, black armour gleaming, golden eyes glowing; they swirled in the air, riding the currents of the wind, shrieking and laughing as their hands rose and fell, directing the jerky movements of the corpses below them.
They hovered above the palisade, and spat and vomited at Harald. He dodged the ejecta as best he could and ran along the thin ramp to escape their teasing wrath. The demon women followed, pulling their armour from their breasts so that the firm domes of flesh jigged and tantalised, invited his loving touch, invited tender exploration of the cold flesh below …
Shielding his eyes from the Valkyries’ taunting, tempting advances, he looked back into the hold, wondering where he could crawl and hide, wondering why it was only he who was so tormented.
Then he looked out to the horizon, to where the stark ridges cut across the lighter grey of the sky. Skeletal autumnal birch and oak reached thin and twisting arms towards the seat of Thor; the clouds seemed entangled in the twigs of the restless woods.
Among them a great shape swayed, black against the sky, growing in size as it rose slowly up the hill.
A coal-bright eye gazed across the dark and haunted land at the tiny hold, at the flimsy human figure that stood and watched.
The shape grew larger until at last it stood upon the distant ridge, among the trees, and looked about its domain – and growled.
Huge, towering above the tallest birch, ten times the height of a man, five times the breadth, arms reaching out so that light flashed and gleamed on claws the length of a Saxon sword … the Bear god, the one-eyed haunter of dreams, the Angry One from the storm skies …
Odin!
His cry, the throaty growl of a bear, echoed and boomed across the night-scape. The scything wind died and then flourished again, as if even the dead souls, oblivious of the mortal whims of gods, bowed for a moment before the wrathful one.
The great bear swayed for a moment, crushing trees like twigs as it stepped towards the hold, an enormous black shape advancing through the storm of dead.
At last Harald gained control of his fear. He turned from the approaching shape and jumped the fifteen feet to the saturated, sticky ground of the courtyard, and raced into the hut where Gotthelm lay. As he passed the open door of his father’s hall he noticed that the fire was extinguished, but he could see no sign of men within the darkness.
Gotthelm lay on his pallet tense and agonised. Foam flecked his mouth, and for an awful moment Harald thought his friend had died. But when he shouted his sudden shock, Gotthelm turned his head and struggled up on to his elbow. The Saxon girl cowered on the other side of the bed, her hands touching the warrior as if she drew strength and courage from his flesh.
‘Harald …’
His voice was weak; his skin as white, almost, as the skins of the dead. His eyes no longer burned with that lively fire that gave Gotthelm an ageless appearance despite his greying hair and wrinkled skin.
Harald ran to the old warrior, and glanced back across his shoulder as if he expected the Berserks to burst in at any moment, or Bjorn the Axe to walk stiffly through the door and flash his great double axe one last time, taking Harald with him to the dark hall of Valhalla.
Gotthelm’s hand grasped the young Viking’s wrist. The warrior stared through eyes filled with tears and pain. His voice, weakened by loss of blood and strength and possibly by some supernatural power as well, spoke words that for a moment Harald couldn’t understand.
Then he heard them, more clearly. Gotthelm was saying, ‘Don’t forget the warlock … beyond the wolf’s pass … Blackskull mountains … the warlock, Harald … don’t forget him … Harald, if you value … if you …’ Pain creased his face and he closed his eyes, trying to squeeze the agony back into the recesses of his body. ‘Don’t forget him,’ he murmured one last time. ‘Only one who can help …’ and, having said all he could find strength to say, he collapsed backwards, breathing heavily and noisily.
Cold wind blew in from the yard, ruffled the grey hair of the wounded warrior, sent straw fragments spiralling and dancing about the tiny hut.
Someone whimpered and sobbed from a dark corner and Harald glanced in the direction of the sound. A small shape, huddled, cold, frightened.
Elena.
How he wanted to run to her, to hold her to his chest, to caress her.
The biting wind played havoc with her hair and the flimsy cloth robe she wore. Her clothing whipped in the gust, but the girl remained huddled and weeping, staring from some incomprehensible darkness at the man she loved, and yet whom she knew was the target for this terrible wrath.
‘Gotthelm,’ implored Harald, looking again at the pale features of his friend. After a moment Gotthelm’s eyes flickered open, stared at the thatch ceiling. ‘Gotthelm … Sigurd … what does it all mean, all this fury? What have I done? What do I do? Help me, Sigurd. In the name of …’
He broke off. In the name of the gods? It was in the name of the gods that all this was happening. No longer did Odin reach a protective arm around him, guide his singing life-taker into the flabby bellies of red-haired Celtish sword-sluts. No longer did Thor shelter him from the stormy rains, and the disease that racked the weak of body and spirit. No longer did the gentle fingers of Frey or Loki push him along the fertile path between the fields and stables, keeping him in balance with the land and sky, the rocks and sea. Even the dead, the very seed of the earth, had risen to provoke and torment him. He was an island, a man alone, a fragment of mortality being buffeted and directed by the forces of sky and night …
‘Gotthelm … what have I done? … what have I done?’
Tears spilled from Gotthelm’s eyes as he again tried to speak, but all he managed was to shake his head and collapse back again.
Harald looked towards the door, frightened of what might be waiting for him outside.
Where were the six Berserks? It was they who had done this, it had to be. He had angered them with his arrogance, and they were punishing him by invoking their master to kill him in a way more terrible than the dry mouth fear of battle.
The unpredictable warriors and the unpredictable god. Between one moment and the next their mood of placid contemplation had changed to one of violent aggression. At any moment they might change again, the wind might die, the unpredictable, unreadable wind, at once a bringer of hope and a carrier of death …
‘Run!’
The voice,
in the chaos of darkness and wind, was shrill and agonised. Sigurd Gotthelm, summoning every last ounce of strength, had exhorted Harald to escape, and in that one cry Gotthelm had told Harald much – of his fear for the youth’s life, of his fear for the life of the hold if he stayed, of his desperate sadness that their friendship, brief yet so eternally long, should now be ending …
Harald ran to Elena and picked her up. Her face was a mask of terror, and she stared at Harald through eyes almost expressionless, yet alive and shining with the great fear that had possessed her.
Moist lips moved in the darkness and Harald pressed his own against them, lingering on her softness, touching her body in places he had deliberately fought against touching in his earnest desire to know her only when they were bonded for life.
The Innocent.
Kissing an innocent girl in the shadow of Odin, feeling the magnetic tug of the dark spirits dragging him upwards and inwards, as a lodestone pulls the singing blade of a metal sword.
‘Wait for me …’ he whispered, and she cried, bitter tears that broke from her mind and her eyes as she herself broke from her paralysis of terror.
‘What’s happening?’ she sobbed, and a howling wind blew them towards the wall as if to answer her question.
Harald looked to the door, still clutching the trembling girl. Then he pushed her behind a hanging seal-skin drape and kissed her one last time.
Gotthelm was still, and may have been dead. His strange helmet gleamed in the faint light that spilled in from outside, the glow of the moon behind thinner clouds, the burning eye of the Bear god.
Harald walked to the door of the small hut and peered out, looked up. Froze.
It towered over the palisade, huge and featureless in the darkness, shifting from side to side as its great head turned this way, that way, searching the darkness of the hold for a sign of Harald, or perhaps for life of any sort.