Berserker (Omnibus) (15 page)

He ran and walked inland, hugging the rocks and trees, listening always for the sound of voices to give a clue as to where the army had gone after its victory.

He passed villages, small clusters of round wooden huts with low, stone walls built into their bases, and tiny dog corrals clustered just inside low, unsteady-looking palisades. The dogs barked noisily as he crept along ridges above them, or through glades near by. More than once a heavy-looking farmer emerged and scanned the woodlands, looking for the disturbance, but Harald remained undetected. By midday he had come a long way inland, still quite close to the winding river along which the defeated Norse raiders should have sailed yesterday to join the ill-fated expedition in the north.

He passed the night in the woods, nervously waiting for dawn. The noise of the forest was frightening and alien; there were animals here that he had never experienced at home, and they crashed through the undergrowth, sniffing and growling deep in their throats. Harald felt sure that the blood on his clothing must attract their attention, but they went past and he survived.

It was during the night that again, for the first time in many months, he heard the howling of wolves.

Reacting with all the instincts of both animal and man, he twisted round on to his belly and lay flat, eyes wide in the darkness, staring through the trees, listening above the rustling and screeching of night life for the terrifying cry of the beast he feared both as man and bear. The bear twisted restlessly, reared up darkly and tried to come forward, to see for itself through the blue
eyes of the young warrior. But Harald fought it back and, because it was not its time, because Odin was elsewhere amusing himself, the bear curled back into its corner. Just the human lay there, breathing quietly, dreading the sudden padding of wolves, staring and searching for the coal-fire eyes.

He remembered the journey with Sigurd Gotthelm, and the great wolf that had haunted him in his dreams. Again he sensed it prowling through the sky somewhere near, looking down from its strange land, its jowls heavy with saliva, its tongue lolling as it focused on the Berserker warrior and looked for a low point in the bank of cloud from which to jump to the earth below.

The image, which existed only in his mind, faded away, yet Harald was aware that the great wolf was still near, close behind, not yet ready to spring, but leaving him in no doubt as to its presence.

And Harald was terribly afraid.

The wolf pack, the mortal beasts that scattered before the night winds, ran along the edge of the wood, passed on into the darkness.

Towards the end of the next day he came to the retreating Celts, in camps spread out along the river shore whilst they regained their strength and dressed their wounds. Small leather tents told Harald of the sleeping quarters of the leaders, but he saw no sign of Deirdre among the milling warriors, heard no woman’s voice among the male laughter and the shrill sound of metal being sharpened or beaten back into shape.

The roasting carcasses of pigs and a large deer made Harald’s mouth water, but he repressed the agony of starvation and watched only for the strange woman.

Night fell and guards walked out on all sides, one coming quite close to where Harald lay in the undergrowth. The man, dressed in a thick woollen shirt and breeks, carried only a long spear and, with this held between his knees, he sat at the base of a yew tree and let his gaze wander out across the river valley.

Below them, along the silver river, the fires burned low and glowed an inviting red. Around them the hills were stark against the starry night, and in the direction that Harald was headed a high mound capped the knoll. A strange blue radiance outlined the earthen structure and seemed to cast its shadow across the silent camp, although no shadow could be seen in the night.

When the guard was relaxed, Harald crept up behind him and pressed his sword against the man’s throat, holding it tight so the blunted edge nevertheless drew blood. The warrior’s spear fell to the earth as he relaxed his grip upon it, sensing his doom close at hand.

‘Where’s Deirdre?’ demanded Harald, and the man gasped and murmured something in his own language.

‘Deirdre!’ snapped Harald, and repeated the name over and over until at
last the man cried quietly in his throat and lifted an arm, pointing to the dull, blue glow on the western horizon.

Harald drew the blue blade quickly in sawing fashion across the man’s gullet and dragged the corpse out of sight of the camp. Then he stripped off the clothes and pulled them over his own, finding both sets of garments warmer than he had been used to and welcoming the sensation.

Skirting the sprawling camp, regretting that none of the fires and their cooking remnants were close enough for him to sneak in and steal a morsel of food, he climbed the hill towards the strange blue glow.

The glow was gone when he reached the top of the mound and he risked standing upright for a moment to stare into the grey night about him.

With a jolt, and a drying sensation in his mouth, he realised that he stood upon the vast burial mound of some giant. He could see the overgrown kerb of stones that told, in their strange runes, of the giant’s fearsome deeds during the thousand years of his life. Down below, perhaps a mile into the valley, he could see the winding, moonlit thread of the river, narrow this far inland, and too shallow for even a long ship to have navigated. The river wound out in a great curve, and in the confines of that curve Harald sensed the scattered tumuli of a race whose exploits he was well familiar with. Again his mouth dried and he found himself sinking slowly to his knees, staring in considerable panic across the dark land that he would never, ordinarily, have dared enter.

There lay the burial ground of the Tuatha De Danann, the magic warriors of the Celtish past whose energy and spirit had spread wide, after their entry into the earth, and entered even the spirits of the Norsemen. It was long ago, of course, centuries before Odin had lost his eye, eons before the first long ship had rowed, with its deep chanting and wave-cutting swish, out into the great ocean, above the snakes of the deep, and onwards to the lands of lesser peoples.

Even as he realised where he was, the nature of the land into which he had blundered, he heard the distant drum of hoof on turf and, peering hard into the night, saw a band of riders appear as if from nowhere.

Blue-hazed they were, and their hair shone silver in the night, streaming behind them as they galloped across the mortal world in a brief venture from their dead lands beneath the great earthen mounds that contained their crumbling bones.

Naked but for richly decorated helmets, each sprouting a wide and gleaming pair of horns, the warriors rode to the river and in the moonlit night stopped to let their steeds drink the crystal waters.

As he watched they waded through the river and rode hard up the opposite ridge. When they reached the top of the rise they didn’t stop but entered the woodlands there, and for a while their shapes were flickering silver
movements among the thick-trunked trees. At last they seemed to ride upon the foliage itself, upwards into the starry sky, until their silver was drowned against the silver of the full moon. Their final cry of triumph and adventure was carried by the wind away from the great cemetery and inland to the silent villages of the Celtic folk.

Nor was this the only manifestation of the ghost warriors. All during the night, as Harald felt the cold creep through even the double layer of clothing he wore, small bands of Tuatha emerged from the deep earth around their final resting places. Whooping and yelling they rode or ran across the land of their children’s children’s children, chasing the moonshadows of ancient foes, or acting out, with the all-too-audible clash of bronze sword against bronze sword, the great fights of their lifetime. Then elven folk and the lumbering trolls lived among them, in the rocks and woods, before they withdrew to nestle high in the snow mountains of Harald’s own land, emerging but rarely, and only when the gods released the lock that kept the over- and under-worlds apart from the mortal world of humans.

Towards dawn, when the night reached its darkest and the dew began to form, frosty and bitter on Harald’s clothes and hair, a wide, winged shape swooped above his head, turned and hovered for a moment, watching through fire-bright eyes, before slowly beating its way into the distance.

The shape had long since vanished when, on a second huge mound across a shallow valley, a woman’s shape became visible against that same enigmatic blue glow. A robed form with arms uplifted – Harald recognised immediately the sorceress Deirdre, and if he stopped to wonder how he had recognised her at such a vast distance, his puzzlement was briefer than a heart’s beat. He was soon scrambling down from the mound and racing across the wind-swept country, tripping across the sparse vegetation and dodging through scattered tree stumps until he found himself near to the great stone bordered tumulus where he had seen her. There he stopped for a moment.

The sun was beginning to emerge and the veil of night sped away, the sky becoming a lighter grey against which the stars found greater and greater trouble showing themselves.

The mound rose above him, grass-covered, with half the ring of carved stones hidden behind earthslip. But those that showed were decorated with the lines and circles of the ancient wizards, and Harald feared their effect should he pass them and enter the dark and narrow passage that he could see leading into the tomb.

And yet Deirdre was in that tomb, he was sure!

A terrifying thought occurred to him. What if she were a ghost, a queen of the Tuatha De Danann, resurrected and roaming abroad when she was needed to lead the kingless Celts against the forces of the northmen.

Would he enter the tomb and discover only her bones? Would he have to wait until the gods again favoured her with the breath of life before she might wander abroad and perhaps advise him on some spell or incantation with which to rid himself of Odin’s terrible curse?

He stared into the darkness, noticing where souterrains had been recently built and substantially filled in. Many of his own kind regarded this ancient land with contempt and these tombs had been ransacked for elfin treasure several times in the previous years by arrogant jarls who had always, without exception, fallen in battle with dis-honour. There would always be those who spat in the face of the past, who were contemptuous of a warrior heritage that was not their own, and who would discover that the dead were fierce in their revenge and uncompromising in their dispatch of those who had abused them.

Harald had learned, when he had first been here, a year or more before, that a people could be subdued and conquered, but the land remembered all people, memory lived on in the rocks and boulders and high earth tombs, and the sword of revenge could reach through time itself to cut down those who tried to spoil the ancient lands of long dead races.

With great respect, therefore, he advanced to the entrance of the earthen crypt and peered into its maw. Beneath the decorated lintel, the waving lines of the entrance stone seemed to ripple and shift as he looked at them, flowing as some bizarre water current through the greyness of the rock.

He drew his blade, but felt immediately uncomfortable and slipped it back into its sheath. He called down the passage, peering into the darkness, noticing that the stone walls were leaning together as if the weight of the earth above them was crushing the tunnel year by year.

He was answered by a warm wind that sighed from the tomb and warmed him to his very spirit. The warmth was inviting and he ducked his head and began to creep along the cold passage, hardly daring to touch the dank walls for fear that his fingers should brush an ancient rune and condemn him to a second darkness.

Creeping gradually forward, he soon noticed the blue glow ahead of him, and this strengthened his resolve. A few moments later he emerged into the tiny burial chamber itself and stood upright, staring at the woman who reclined there in the narrow crypt.

In the strange, blue light she looked very different from the sweaty, screaming naked warrior she had been on the beach. Clad in a flimsy, flowing white robe, which glittered blue in the light that spilled from no visible source, her body was a firm and luscious shape, spread slightly so that her secret places were in shadow and at the same time visible to Harald’s hungry eyes. Her full breasts rose as she breathed, and quivered as she restrained some growing ecstasy while she stared at the warrior above her.

In the strangely warm tomb Harald felt himself begin to sweat, the moisture trickling down inside his rough cloth clothes and making him want desperately to scratch. But he stood motionless, keeping his hands still and allowing only his eyes to rove, though they lingered often on the inviting apex of Deirdre’s plump thighs where the blue light glittered on the moisture of her own excitement. Her green eyes watched his steadily, and a half smile touched her lips as if she sensed his awareness of her willing sexuality. Harald fought to remain calm, for this was no place to manifest the fury of his kind.

Three small crypts branched from the central chamber, and from the high, flagstoned roof weapons of many shapes and designs hung within reach. Perhaps she kept them there and selected her blade according to the whim of the moment, or the magic that was inscribed upon the base of the blades.

Now however, the weapon she used was the softness of her eyes, and the fullness of her lips. And Harald found that weapon to be a blade he could not deflect.

‘Well Berserker,’ she said softly, her voice gentle and yet erotic, sounding full and sensuous in the confines of the rocky chamber. ‘We shall not be disturbed by the lust of war here. No Celt would dare enter the region of these tombs, and the arrogant Vikings who looted these chambers a few years ago now push up yew trees where they were struck down, begging for mercy. We are quite alone, and even the gods who control us will respect our privacy.’

‘You sense my curse,’ said Harald. ‘You recognise the spell.’