Berserker (Omnibus) (30 page)

‘I do,’ said Niall the Mad Bear.

The old man closed his eyes and Niall tried to control his great excitement, but his breath came fast and frosted in the cold air, as he watched the struggle within the old man to recall one of the ancient spells that he and his kind had once used as often as the scattered forest dwelling wizards who would do few favours for the warlike tribes of Ireland.

Suddenly Cathabach spoke, his voice as cold as the snow, a voice out of time, not really from the old man’s mind, but from the memory of a time when magic was a great art, and all aes dana, all the many men of art, could use magic to inspire their particular skill.

This is what he spoke:

He looked at Niall then. ‘Pick it up.’

Niall reached for the snow sword. It was heavy in his hand as it lifted from the ground. Green jewels sparkled in the pommel; bright bronze rested comfortably in his hand, overlaid with ivory and sweat-gripped with thin strips of tough leather; each contour moulded to his grasp. The blade shone bright, iron bright, but through it he could see Cathabach, and the round-house that was his father’s house. But when he struck the ice blade against the stone wall behind him, it rang loud, rang sweet, the summons to battle of a great warrior. Stone chipped and flew, sparks raced and died across the snow. The ice blade was stronger than anything that the Earth could produce, save snow tempered with the blessing of this ancient spell.

Niall rose to his feet.

Feradach, hearing the sound of a sword being struck in challenge, had raced from the house, and now stood staring, puzzled but angry, as Niall the Mad Bear walked towards him.

‘Get your wooden sword, Feradach,’ said Niall loudly, undoing the leather bindings that held his fur jerkin across his chest. He cast the coat aside and faced his brother, wearing just his short, purple-dyed kirtle, and high cowhide boots. ‘Get your wood sword, do you hear? And we’ll see how my snow sword melts.’ He waved the sword above his head, grinning and sweeping back his long yellow hair as the knot unravelled and the wind caught it. Brightness flashed from the ice blade. Feradach stared at the sword, and at the Mad Bear, then darted into his father’s house.

And came out with his father’s sword!

Long, broad and jewelled with red and black stones in the brilliant yellow hilt, its pointed blade defied the eye to follow its wavering motion as Feradach, unbothered by the consequence of his action, came towards Niall, the look on his face leaving Cathabach in no doubt that this would be no boyish contest but a blood duel, with one head forfeit at the end.

‘You will both be killed,’ the Druid shouted angrily, but Feradach waved him silent.

‘I have a Mad Bear to cure and place on the spit,’ he shouted. His father heard this and raced from the small house where he had been warming himself with one of the younger women.

Naked and breathless, he stood in the doorway, his excitement visibly waning as puzzlement filled his face. He watched the slowly circling youths, his two sons, and he saw the flash of bright light on the extended blades. He seemed unable to talk, and it was not the cold that froze his tongue, but fear of the outcome of this duel.

‘No longer a Mad Bear,’ cried Niall, ‘I am your Sneachta Doom, Feradach, your Snow Destroyer. My snow sword is ten times sharper, ten times faster than your heavy metal blade, and your neck will part under the edge of it like thin butter that yields to a child’s finger.’

Tualaith, their mother, raced into the snow-filled compound and saw the confrontation. ‘Stop them!’ she screamed at Amalgaid. The Warlord looked at her, looked down. Tualaith realised he had been with another woman and turned, shocked and silent, to stare at her sons. She knew her husband enjoyed the bellies of all the women of the fort (as was his right) but she was content not to see it, merely to suspect it. To observe the man standing before the woman’s house, undressed and flushed from his exertions, was something she preferred not to notice.

‘Spill blood,’ called Amalgaid, ‘But death I shall reward with death. Note that well, you angry cubs.’

Feradach leapt at his brother and his blade swept down towards Niall’s head. The ice sword flew between Niall’s hands, and the blades met and held, and Feradach drew back his arm so that sparks flew where the two surfaces ground so hard together.

Niall attacked. His snow sword travelled like lightning as it cut through the air and drew a line of blood across Feradach’s thin chest. The boy tensed and roared and then attacked back. His sword stopped a finger’s breath from Niall’s neck, held there by the snow sword for a moment before it was eased back, away and down, pushed by the suddenly greater strength of the younger lad.

They struck at each other again, and blood flew from Niall’s shoulder where his arm did not support the swiftness of the blade it held and the edge of Feradach’s sword knew the taste of blood for the first time. The circle of fostered boys yelled their pleasure at this and Feradach cried his triumph, cheered by the support of his friends.

He struck with all his strength!

But Niall calmly smashed the blow aside and Feradach staggered, his sword arm limp, the sword clutched in his fingers still very firmly, but his body weakened by the sudden shock of the deflection. Niall swept up his sword and grabbed Feradach’s long hair, pulled him down to his knees in the same motion that he used to expose his brother’s neck. He made ready to take his trophy.

Tualaith screamed, and Cathabach shouted, ‘If you take the head, the spell is broken! I shall break it, though it will kill me to do so.’

As the Mad Bear struck, as some supernatural force took Niall’s body and made him hack at his brother, so Niall managed to wrench his arm aside and the razor sharp edge of the blade cut down across Feradach’s sword wrist.

The boy screamed as his hand was hacked away from his arm. It lay limp and bloody on the snow, the fingers gradually uncoiling from the sword it still held.

Feradach collapsed screeching, and where his bloody stump lay on the white blanket beneath him, the snow boiled and red steam formed a cloud above his body.

The fort fell silent, all eyes watching the Mad Bear as he raised his snow sword to his lips and licked his brother’s blood, laughing all the time – laughing.

Feradach Aonlamh, Feradach the One-handed, was driven from the fort, for no physical imperfection was tolerated in a warlord or his son, or in a chief, or a king or a High King, or in the eldest son of any of these. With his horse and gifts of weapons and with a full leather pouch of gruel made from nuts, some berries and the ground wheat that had been stored for the winter, Feradach rode across the white plain and up the low foothill to what was called Tobar na Mathair or Mother’s Well. There he knelt before the tall wooden carvings of Danu and Lug that stood in their secret cists of stones, guarding the magic well that spoke with the voice of the Earth Mother. Watching, distantly, was Amalgaid mac Eochu, untearful and yet desperately sad at the loss of his eldest son. Beside him, grinning broadly, delighted with what he had achieved, was Niall the Mad Bear, the Snow Destroyer.

What Feradach asked the icons no one could know, but light flashed on his newly forged sword as he stood and waved it about his head in defiance. All men in the fort ducked as Feradach’s childish wooden javelin was seen to rise from his grip, four miles distant, and flew into the compound, burying itself half way along its shaft into the earthen bank.

There was no doubt that Feradach Aonlamh would return. He had not yet finished with Niall, the Mad Bear, only son now of Amalgaid mac Eochu.

Three wet summers fled, rain and sun so swiftly taking each other’s place that Niall and the fostered boys of his father’s house, took to playing a game: to run to the distant magic well, four miles off, and back before the sun gave way to rain. Only Niall could do this at the summer’s height, and he alone remained dry as a bone, but none of the others minded their soaking because from Niall they gained an unusual strength: an understanding of how a man and a sword fall together in richer, more heartfelt love than a man with his green-eyed wife, or the yellow-maned son of her womb.

Niall grew tall, reaching his father’s height, though his limbs were still thin and wiry and his chest bulged with ribs that had not yet become sheathed in the thick muscle of a powerful man. He took to wearing his bleached hair tied back in a double plait and painted black, radiating lines across his face to demonstrate the manful power he felt assuming control of his body. His friends, the boys who had once mocked him, were in awe of this. Though they played and tussled with him during the day, in the evening they were
careful of his green-kirtled figure as he raced about the palisade, often screaming, often waving his bizarre, translucent sword; often moaning in a strange language. The fits tended to be short-lived and unbloody, but it was known that Cathabach was doing much to drain the animal power from the Mad Bear, son of the chief.

And Amalgaid mac Eochu discovered love for his strange son, perhaps because he forgot his grief over the lost honour of Feradach, and perhaps because, now that the animal fury was lessened in Niall, the ageing chieftain could see the powerful warrior that was emerging as his heir.

Like the rest of the fort’s population, when Niall threw one of his fits Amalgaid stayed in his house, listening to the violence outside and the screeching of animals that found their lives blunted by the sharp edge of Niall’s possession. When the sound of the boy’s sobbing testified to the demon’s having left him, the fort’s people emerged from safety. Then they comforted him, for his strength was in no question, and his value to the stronghold, as the forces of the Ui Neill grew hostile again and threatened invasion, was greater than ten warriors of the community.

On the first daybreak of each six-night period, Niall the Mad Bear would rise with the first glimmer of light in the east and run across the land between the mountains, and then across the hills and beyond the Tobar na Mathair, and then to the deep channel that separated this extremity of the province of Connacht from the mainland. This channel he would jump at a single bound, and the worst he ever fared was to miss his footing on the far side of the forty-foot leap and slip half into the cold waters, laughing and still bragging to the skies that not even Cuchulainn could have made such a leap, although he knew this was not so.

He would then run for four hours to the edge of the great forest where the ghosts of the people of Danu, those who had loved this part of the land, shouted to him to catch his breath since he had only taken a single breath since leaving the fort.

For a while he would watch the grey shapes of the giant warriors, and he would stare with a simple longing at their dark-haired women, so full-breasted and wide-hipped that they put the slender girls of the province to shame. After a while he would call back to them to stick to their ghostly trails and leave the real work of hunting to the living.

But they always followed him, drifting through the forest, turning their huge horned helmets so that the horns faced forward and backwards and did not become jammed on the trees. When Niall came to the bald knoll where the deer grazed every sunset they all sat down and laughed and chattered, waiting to observe the spectacle of this young Celt, a worthy successor to these ancient lands, catching the meat for his father’s house for the next six nights.

Sometimes he would sit with them, his eyes lingering on the War Queens
that gathered about. They were the strongest of the women, their hair tied back in thick, intricate braids, wound once around their heads then around the underside of their breasts, and around their waists as a belt from which hung the ghosts of the short bronze swords that they had used in their final days, before the Fomorians had subdued them.

When an unsuspecting deer rose on to the bald knoll, sharply defined against the bright evening sky, Niall the Mad Bear would run it down, chasing it about the knoll until it dropped from exhaustion. He never once struck a deer dead with a blow of his own, but his running strength was so great that no animal on earth could outmatch him in speed or stamina. The deer died of their own efforts, and the unblooded carcasses he slung across his shoulders and ran back to the fort during the night. When he reached the echoing valley that dropped from Slieve na Mathair, the hill of the mother, where the magic well lay, he shouted with all his might, ‘Here is Niall the Mad Bear, the Snow Destroyer, the fastest runner in Connacht, faster even than Cuchulainn, returning with the largest deer that Ireland has ever seen, and he hasn’t stopped for breath since the channel, and there is only one bead of sweat on his brow.’

The other boys ran out to greet him, and a great screaming mob of children returned to the fort around the son of the Warlord and his captured prize.

They were three good summers; and the winter that followed was mild with enough food for all to fight against the cold, and remain satisfied.

The next summer the Ui Neill went to war with Connacht (a not infrequent event). The issue this time was over a shipment of Gaulish iron ingots that had been lost at sea, or taken by Welsh rievers, but which the High King at Tara said had been taken by Connachtmen invading his territory. No one took this reason seriously. The provinces fought each other on the slightest provocation: if it wasn’t the supply of ingots then it was over a cattle raid; and if not a cattle raid then the wind had blown wrong; and if not this then the grass was the wrong colour and it was all someone else’s fault.