The Reluctant Berserker (17 page)

A priest, Wulfstan thought, here at the very edge of death. If God was merciful, the archer would be a priest, would be able to give him absolution before it was too late. God knew he repented his sin. He did. He did. It wanted only a man with authority to pardon it. Perhaps he might yet be saved.

Alas, the figure who came noiselessly out of the trees was no priest. He was tall and fair and beautiful, and the sparks that swarmed in Wulfstan’s vision seemed to cluster around his head and make his grim grey eyes and his tight knife-blade of a mouth glow silver, uncanny and awe-inspiring. The bow at his back curved over something hunched in the centre of his spine, like folded wings.

An elf. Or an angel? The fight went out of Wulfstan on a tide of his pumping blood. He was too lightheaded to be properly afraid. There seemed something inevitable about this, something familiar, as though he should recognise a crossroads on a path he had turned down a long time ago. His senses had begun to leave him. How could either elf or angel ever be familiar?

The creature knelt by Wulfstan’s side and pressed a long hand to his wound. The bolt of pain felled him like one of its arrows, so that he did not have time to solve the puzzle or shed a tear over his own damnation.

Chapter Eight

Many times, Leofgar thought, as he took his knife to the fine linen skirts of the fallen warrior’s undertunic, he had told his master that he did not believe in wyrd. He revolted against the thought of fate as he revolted against the idea of being told what to do by anyone. But if this was not proof, he did not know what was.

Wadding half the linen into a pad, he laid it atop the bleeding wound and weighed it down with the man’s sword and seax. There were sounds of scrabbling behind him, and the youth—propped against a tree by the path’s edge—breathed like a saw around a fully awake pain. He dared not do more for…

He cast his disciplined mind back to blood-month in Uisebec, opened up his memories of their meeting. Replayed in his thoughts all the words that had been spoken, behind him as well as to his face. Ah. A name.

He did not dare do more for Wulfstan until the outlaws were dealt with.

Straightening, he pulled an arrow from the quiver at his belt and nocked it, but did not draw. He turned over the first body with his foot. This man had an arrow through his throat. The marshy ground beneath him was soggy with crimson, but Leofgar still leaned down and felt for the heartbeat under his skin. Nothing.

Good. That was good.

He padded to the next, from whom his fletchings stuck out like the bristles of a hog. Backbone and skull broken, and he did not breathe. Good.

The handless man lay in his own pool of gore, as dead as meat, but Leofgar double-checked before he allowed himself to tally that one too as none of his concern. With those over, the harder task began.

He stooped to take up a fallen branch, threw it hard at the outlaw who lay facedown, sobbing into the grass. “You. Look at me.”

He wasn’t sure if the man had heard him, there was no sign of it. Still, Leofgar was going no closer than this—he could hear the breathing, he would not be tempted to venture into the other man’s range. “If you do not look at me now, I will shoot you without once setting eyes on your face.”

With a tearing groan, the outlaw forced himself onto hands and knees. He looked up, and Leofgar was thrown back into a shallower past. He had seen just such a wound after the Danes had gone from Tatwine’s burh. One of the corpses had been an old man with his eye gouged out and hanging on his smashed cheek. His name had been Garulf, a maker of baskets and a dauber of walls, a father of three fatherless children.

It wasn’t horror that Leofgar felt. He knew horror from the stories. This was something quieter, colder, bleaker. It was winter inside his skin and everything was dying. He remembered his parting words at Anna’s grave, speaking out against Tatwine’s warriors, the brave, coldhearted men skilled in dealing out such atrocities.

“Can you walk, outlaw?”

No,
said part of him to the rest, like pupil and master in dialogue, as though he could learn something new by debating with himself.
I can’t let him go. Would I fill this land with wolf packs and wild animals. Destroyers of children, devourers of pilgrims? I can’t simply spare him.

“I…” The man held his eye to him, cradling it in his palm, and Leofgar’s word-hoard filled the moment with omens. He saw Woden one eye, sharpened by wisdom, who had gone almost to the doors of death and returned more dangerous for it. What was Leofgar creating in sparing this man’s life?

“Yes. I can walk.” The outlaw lurched up to stand trembling on unsteady feet, and Leofgar pulled his bowstring to his ear in full draw.

Now was the moment to loose. He could put an arrow straight through that socket, protect himself and many others in times to come. He
should
do it. To harbour outlaws was itself a crime.

“Pick up the youth and go. The pair of you, go. Find healing. If you come back to this life, I will kill you as suddenly as I did your fellows.”

Laughter sounded obscene among the pink-tinged pools that surrounded him. It was the boy who laughed. Holding closed the wound beneath his arm with one hand, while he pressed his elbow into his side to stanch the bleeding there. “Coward,” he sneered, his teeth stained red. “Every man’s hand is against us. If we go for help, we will receive torment. Your mercy prolongs our suffering. You offer it simply to spare yourself discomfort.”

It stung, because it was true. “I have offered you kindness.” Leofgar jerked his chin up to show them he grew impatient Obediently, the one-eyed man struggled to raise the boy to his feet. “If you wish, I can take it back.”

He slackened the bow only enough to steady his hand beneath his chin, to ease the pull before his muscles began to tremble. Staring the arrow in its point, the boy gave a tiny courteous bow—a remnant of a better life—and leaning on each other, the two outlaws hobbled away.

Leofgar watched them out of sight. Then he hauled Wulfstan further onto dry land, unbuckled his belt and with much labour—the man was heavier than he and as limp as a sleeping child—pulled off his tunic. Gathering a handful of the most sticky cobwebs he could find from among the cow-parsley, Leofgar pinched the shoulder wound shut and slapped the strands atop it to keep it so. Using the second half of the length of linen he had cut to provide a new pad and bandage, he bound it securely, knotted the ends with hands and teeth and let the man slip back to lie against the cold damp earth.

Wulfstan did not awake during this treatment. His breath came fast and shallow, but regular. His heart beat like a drum beneath Leofgar’s exploring fingers. A strong life, as was right for a warrior.

Leofgar had dreamed of him, at times. And he was fascinated now to see the differences between his dream lover and the real thing. Without intention, his thoughts had fined Wulfstan down, taken away some of the bulk of muscle, the convex shape of shoulders strong from bearing shield and spear, his waist less trim and more sturdy. Long legs twice the width of Leofgar’s, well fit to run or leap all day in battle, though he wore a coat of iron heavy as a calf.

Slackened in unconsciousness, his face looked kindly. That, Leofgar’s inner eyes had repeated accurately. But his hair! In the dark of night it had been black, in the dimness of the hall, brown. Leofgar had never seen it in daylight, and he could not explain now why it took his breath from him to see it was a blaze of copper, lying like a pool of fire on the green grass. Never had he seen such an intensity of colour, save in the pages of monks’ manuscripts, where the gold leaf glittered.

He touched it, and it slid, soft and warm, over a hand that had begun to shake. Behind Leofgar’s eyes, the songs and stories that had been shocked into silence after the attack on Tatwingham roused a little and clamoured like hungry ghosts.
There is something to praise,
they said, thin and hopeful.
Look, here it is.

Slipping his cloak off, he covered Wulfstan with it to keep him from dew and damp, while he rose to collect wood, cut away a square of turf and start a fire.

By the time it had caught enough to throw out some warmth, twilight had come down, the tricky blue-silver light that lay trapped between day and night. The border time, when spirits walked and other worlds might be glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.

He could see one! A great spirit creature, white and silver, moved through the dark tangled branches. Leofgar scrambled up onto weary feet, bit down to prevent his heart from flying out of his mouth, and—grabbing his bow—gazed out with the string pressed to his cheek to see what manner of monster disturbed him now.

The thing emerged from the darkness, and he laughed aloud, for it was a white horse, bridled and saddled, riderless. It approached the fallen man tentatively, as though it had done wrong but hoped for forgiveness. Lowering its head to nose at his ankle, it allowed Leofgar to catch its reins and loop them around a nearby branch. It lapsed into quiet grazing, seemingly comforted by the fire.

“So the absent friend returns when it is all over.” Leofgar patted its neck, closing his eyes to fight down the clawing guilt his unwise words had called up in him.
Just as Tatwine and I only returned when there was nothing left to do for his people but bury the dead.
“At least you bring gifts.”

Searching in the saddlebags, he found a thick, close-woven fur-lined cloak. He spread this on the ground, rolled Wulfstan into it, so the man was surrounded by two layers of wool and one of fur.

There was also a skin of red wine and a joint of ham, a fist-sized lump of soft cheese rolled in nettles, a heel of bread, only a little hard. Finding a pool that looked clear of blood, Leofgar drew water and mixed it with the wine. He dribbled a little of it from the ends of his fingers into the corner of the warrior’s mouth. There was no movement at first, but then his throat worked as he swallowed. His lips parted and he made a little noise, part grunt, part demanding whine. So Leofgar did it again.

Night closed in, dark as the inside of a helmet. In the shifting yellow light of the fire, the warrior’s hair gleamed like a glede. “Wulfstan Glede,” Leofgar told him, taking his own pull from the wineskin, and devouring bread and ham for its rough comfort. “Are you listening to me? I heard the sound of battle, and I ran towards it, though I had sworn I had no stomach for any more death. I ran to the raven’s banquet, and in righteous wrath I strode onto the field of carnage. I have the right to give you a name.”

He edged closer. Lying on his good shoulder as he was, pillowless, Wulfstan’s neck looked stretched and uncomfortable. So Leofgar took the chance to wriggle his legs beneath the cloaks, and lift Glede’s head onto his knee. Both his hands wanted to slide their way back into that hair, so he gave them something else to do, taking the swaddled harp off his back and easing it out of its sheepskin bag.

He played wordlessly for a while: the quiet notes, sweet and sad, of Anna’s song. The pulse of the music strengthened beneath his hands as he found words fitting themselves together behind his teeth, words in praise of glory in battle, of two blades gleaming in rushes as sudden and savage as lightning. Of a strong form, swift to slay. Of blood lust and fire and…

And everything he had sworn to himself he would never praise again.

What a twisted thing this world was, he thought as he sat wakeful into the night—alert in case the outlaws came again. What a twisted thing
he
was, to mistake his lusts for anything worth celebrating. What good was life when death came so sudden in the midst of it? What good was he, when for all his hatred of warriors’ arrogance, he could watch their slaughter and find it beautiful?

Chapter Nine

Wulfstan dreamed of music, plaintive in the darkness, flashes of notes standing out from the silence like the stars in the vaults of heaven. For the longest time, he rested in a world made up of music and warmth—several years of it, he thought, several years of drowsing and thirst, and an ache like little stones being pressed into his flesh on the bottom of a fat man’s shoe.

By the morning his mind had cleared but the thirst had become a torment. He tried to crack open an eye but flinched from the burning shatter of light. Who had broken the sky and set it to jangle down all around him like falling shards of a broken glass bowl? “Nh!” he said, trying to cover his eyes from the sight. “Water?”

“Ah.” The voice that replied held a faint catch of amusement, perhaps relief. A light voice, a voice like amber—full of different shades and colours. “So you lived the night through. Good. How do you feel about getting onto the horse?”

All of a sudden, shocking him, making him want to throw up, Wulfstan remembered the elf. He forced his eyes open, pushed himself to his feet, felt the wound in his shoulder tear open once more and the blood well out. So much pain for so small a stab—it clawed down his side and up his neck into his head, made the day swim and swing about him.

“Whoa, whoa. Stop that.” Hands steadied him. As he almost overbalanced, a thin arm went around his chest and another around his back, supporting him on his uninjured side. His legs trembled beneath him and, in his weakened state, some part of him wanted nothing more than to lean into the embrace and rest. He should fight that part, he knew. If anyone saw…

Instead, he struggled to focus, to look at the creature that supported him. He managed little more than a brief glimpse of blond curls, the edge of a mouth tucked in exasperation. Yet they were earthly curls that smelled of wood smoke and damp. There was a smudge of dirt on the high cheekbone and a round silver scar that told of a childhood chickenpox. The relief made his legs sag. “Not an elf.”