The Last Berserker

by Angus Donald

  Svein howled with pain and humiliation.

  Tor was bouncing on her toes, laughing openly at her red-faced foe.

  He swung at her, full strength, using the staff like a long club. If the blow had landed it would have split her skull in two. But Tor ducked, flicked the lethal strike harmlessly over her head with one end of the staff, and neatly swept away Black Svein’s weight-bearing right leg with the other.

  The big man flew up in the air and thumped down on the beaten earth full on his back, winded and utterly astonished.

  Tor, leaning casually on her staff, said: ‘Best of three?’

  ‘That is enough, Torfinna,’ said a voice beside Bjarki. ‘Stop bothering that poor man. Put the quarterstaff down and come here. We’re leaving.’

  Chapter Three

  Mountains made by men

  The new shoes felt strange on Bjarki’s feet. He had never owned a pair before, although he had once tried on old Thialfi’s greasy, fish-smelling boat slippers when his master was asleep and Ubbi the Huntsman had loaned him a spare pair of warm, dry, reindeer-hide boots when they went out last winter in the snows on one of the rare hunting expeditions he was invited to join.

  He disliked not being able to feel the earth properly beneath his toes, and he felt clumsy and unsteady wearing them, as if he might slip over and land flat on his arse at any moment. Anyway, the soles of his bare feet were now as thick and hard as any shoe leather, so that he had long ago stopped feeling any pain even over the stoniest terrain. But he rather liked his new possessions, he glanced at them often, with quiet pleasure as they marched, and was determined to learn how to walk in them as well as Tor and Valtyr.

  The shoes, along with a cheap iron knife in a wooden sheath, and a wooden plate, spoon and cup, an ale flask and a thick woollen blanket, were gifts that Valtyr had purchased for him at the market in Flens before they left. He carried them in a new wood-framed oiled-linen pack on his back, along with a couple of loaves of bread and some other dried food items, and a linen-wrapped package with a strong scent of lavender, which Valtyr said was soap. It made him feel like a man of substance to be so encumbered.

  They marched south along a highway on a low, flat-topped ridge known as the Ox Road, sleeping the first night in a ditch under a blackthorn hedge beside a cow pasture, and moving on at dawn, past hamlets and farmsteads, but meeting few folk as they travelled. On the second afternoon, an hour before sunset, the Dane-Work became visible, a bar on the horizon.

  It looked like a series of small barrows or hillocks marching across the southern skyline. Even from half a mile away they seemed to loom menacingly over the flat countryside like a vast series of waves about to crash on to the shore. There were evidently a great number of people living here too. The smoke from cooking fires was thick over the gap between two long mounds of earth, already lightly stubbled with grass and weeds, where the high road was leading them. And Bjarki could see men toiling on the mounds of earth further out with baskets of dug earth strapped to their backs. There was a township of grubby tents and turf-roofed houses – many hundreds of them, some already showing lights in the gloaming – laid out at the bottom of the mounds on both sides of the Ox Road by the gap.

  ‘That is Hellingar,’ said Valtyr. It was the first time any of them had spoken since the midday meal. ‘It’s a dangerous place. Be on your guard.’

  ‘Why dangerous?’ said Bjarki. He was greatly in awe of Valtyr and, more recently, of Tor as well, since she had displayed her quarterstaff skills.

  For a moment, Bjarki thought that Valtyr would not answer him. They were, as a rule, a group who travelled in silence, like a patrol of stealthy warriors scouting for signs of the enemy. Since they’d left Flens, Bjarki, who was now fully recovered from his near-death ordeal in Bago, had been a bubbling cooking pot of questions, but Valtyr largely ignored them, or snapped single-word answers and told him to be quiet, and Tor had given him a furious glare in reply to his whispered enquiries. Soon Bjarki resigned himself to silence and they trudged along all day like a trio of mutes.

  ‘There are more than a thousand men living in Hellingar,’ said Valtyr, ‘very few women, and they are all far away from their villages and families. It is like an army camp or a long siege. The men labour all day on the Dane-Work for King Siegfried. At night they drink and fight over the handful of drabs foolish enough to join them in this place of mud, muscle and sweat.’

  ‘Why – why do they come here to live like this?’ Bjarki wondered if he was pushing his luck.

  ‘For greed, oaf.’ Tor’s tone brimmed with contempt. ‘For the love of silver, men who might be warriors grub down in the dirt of the Dane-Work.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Odin’s arse,’ muttered Tor. ‘Because they’re fools, that’s why.’

  Bjarki opened his mouth but before he could speak, Valtyr said: ‘The King of the Dane-Mark is building an earthen rampart here, but he is also cutting a huge ditch, an artificial river, if you like, on the other side of that huge rampart – you cannot see it from this side – but it’s a waterway that runs from the port of Hedeby on the Schlei inlet, about two miles that way—’ Valtyr pointed eastwards ‘—all the way to Hollingsted Fort on the River Treene, which flows into the Eider marshes, eight miles that way.’

  The old man indicated the west.

  ‘Siegfried calls the ditch the Mark-Channel. He doesn’t have enough thralls to do the work so he’s paying poor freemen to do the digging for him. And before you ask me why, like an accursed infant, Bjarki, I shall tell you.

  ‘Imagine that King Siegfried takes his grand fleet west cruising down the coast to raid the Frisians. And, in his absence, he hears that the down-trodden fishermen of Bago have rebelled against his irksome rule or, more likely, that the brutal Svears—’ here Valtyr winked at Tor ‘—have taken to their dragon-ships and are merrily robbing and burning the king’s lands in the east; playing pirate in the home islands while the mighty sea-lord of the Danes is away with his fleet. Siegfried must return and crush his enemies as swiftly as he can. Yes? But to get his ships from the West Sea to the Eastern Lake he has to go all the way around the north tip of the Jutland Peninsula and, just perhaps, past enemies lying in wait in the fjords of the Little Kingdoms. That journey by the whale’s road might take him one or two weeks – even if he’s unmolested on the way there. Think what damage a couple of shiploads of Svear raiders could do in that time among all the peaceful fishing villages on Fyn or Lolland. So Siegfried is making himself a short cut, a route right across the base of his peninsula, and when it is completed, he can move easily his ships along the Mark-Channel from the West Sea to the Eastern Lake in a matter of days. Understand now, son?’

  Bjarki nodded. He had so many other questions to ask – how could King Siegfried afford to pay out so much silver? If he had so much silver to spend, why not just build more ships and have fleets in both the West Sea and the Eastern Lake? – but he decided, perhaps wisely, to hold his tongue.

  He thought about the Svears attacking his village on Bago: burning the houses, killing the men, raping the women. The prospect seemed quite plausible. He wondered what Freya was doing, right at this very moment. Did she miss him? He wished, desperately, painfully, that she were in his arms; the two of them on their blanket in the dunes. He wished that golden moment, frozen in time, were the reality. That all this – his near hanging, his expulsion from Bago, these two strange companions – was just a bad dream. He thought fleetingly of his oath to Freya. And felt a shaft of raw pain in his guts. That promise – meant to last a lifetime – had died in less than a day.

  They were approaching the sprawling town of tents now: Hellingar. The first ones were the meanest ones, set up either side of the Ox Road, some of them not much more than a cloak or blanket hung over a rope tied between two stakes in the ground. Men, young men, all very dirty, peered out at the travellers as they passed. They looked hostile, wary. And dog-tired.

  Bjarki looked straight ahead, avoiding mee
ting their hard, challenging gazes. The earthworks seemed more oppressive close up, steeper and more unnatural. They must be at least five times the height of a man, Bjarki reckoned, and he wondered how long it would take to move so much earth, to hack it from the ground and haul it up to the top of these extraordinary man-made mountains. No wonder all these labouring men looked so exhausted.

  His eye was drawn to a huge wooden fortress, set out right in the middle of the gap between the two central earth barrows, barring the main road. He saw a thick circular palisade of sharpened wooden poles, and the shingle roofs of several longhouses visible inside the walls. The road they were on – here made more substantial with rows of logs embedded in the mud, led straight to the gatehouse in the palisade – and Bjarki saw soldiers in helmets watching their approach from a roofed gallery above the gates.

  He expected Valtyr to turn aside before the fortress gate, to lead them to some large tent or turf-roofed house where they would rest. Night was falling; a washed-out wafer of moon was already visible over the brow of the western barrow. But the old man did not. He took them straight up to the portal of the fortress and, staring up at the soldiers above, said: ‘Open the gates, open them quickly for Valtyr Far-Traveller and his followers. I claim guest-friendship of Jarl Snorri Hare-Lip, the Master of Hellingar Fort.’

  They were admitted. The gates creaked open and the three of them walked inside to be greeted by a cheerful red-headed soldier in leather armour, with a hand-axe in his belt and a spear. The soldier who, it seemed, was more of a guide than a figure of authority, led them into the fort.

  Once inside, Bjarki was immediately astonished by the regularity of the layout. He was used to people building their houses and barns and animal pens and workshops wherever they wished, as long as it did not impinge on their neighbours’ space. But this place, this great fortress of Hellingar, was laid out with strange precision, all straight lines and sharp corners. He muttered something of this nature to Tor, who gave him a look of icy scorn.

  Valtyr, seeing his surprise, leaned over as they walked along and hissed into his ear. ‘The master has fashioned Hellingar in the Frankish style; he’s aping our enemies. Now keep your mouth shut and eyes open.’

  Bjarki did not understand. But he knew how, and when, to obey. He kept his mouth closed and took in the sights of the extraordinary settlement.

  The circumference of the perfectly circular fort was marked by a man-high earth bank, topped with a double-thickness palisade of split pine trunks, twice that height, sharpened at their ends. A walkway ran around the inside, allowing a sentry or defender to stand with most of his body protected by the stout palisade, with only head and shoulders exposed above the pine spikes. A defender could shower missiles down on any attacker, or use sword, axe and spear from a commanding and well-protected position inside the walls.

  Once through the gate, a log road led due south straight across to the other side of the fortress two hundred paces away where there was another double gate. Another log-paved road, running east to west, intersected the north–south road, creating four distinct areas, quadrants inside the circular fortress. Each of the four quadrants contained four large longhouses arranged in a square or box, with one longhouse on each side, and it was to the nearest quadrant, to the immediate right of the gatehouse, that the soldier-guide led the travellers. They entered the nearest longhouse through a door in the gable end, and came into a large hall filled with warmth, wood smoke and the usual pungent household odours, and several dozen strangers.

  The red-headed soldier stopped a passing steward, a harassed-looking middle-aged man in a gold-trimmed scarlet tunic, and asked where Jarl Snorri was. The man gave the grimy travellers’ rags one contemptuous glance and said the jarl was busy. He nodded towards the end of the hall, where a pair of wooden screens partitioned off the final third of the long building. So the soldier took them to the benches at the side of the hall and left them sitting there, saying the steward would look after them from now on.

  Valtyr nodded his thanks. Bjarki was already feeling slightly uneasy, overwhelmed to be inside such a huge, bustling place. There seemed to be more people inside this one long room than in the whole of Bago village.

  They sat in a row on the bench, watching the people moving about the great hall. Warriors in leather armour reinforced with iron strips sat on the benches on the other side of the hall, their swords across their knees, drinking from horns and joking with their fellows; women with embroidered aprons, their hair tied up in white kerchiefs tended steaming cauldrons of soup that bubbled over the rectangular central hearth fires; in one corner a group of a dozen children was being told a story by a skinny grandfather, who acted out all the parts of his tale, the firelight casting shadows on the bare wooden-plank walls of the hall as he became, in turns, a terrifying frost giant, then an innocent blushing maiden, then a hideous mountain troll.

  In a little while, a fat matron with a large tray brought them bowls of leek soup and fresh bread, and a scabby youngster, a thrall by the iron collar he wore, brought wooden cups and an ale skin. They ate, drank and waited.

  Finally the screen shifted aside and a man came out of the space behind it. Bjarki had never seen anyone like him before. His face was angular, kindly and wise, with bright blue eyes, and his blond hair was tidily cut in the shape of a ring that ran all the way around his head, but the top part had been shaven to expose his sun-browned pate. He wore a long robe of undyed wool so pale it seemed to shine in the gloom of the hall. He carried no sword, nor a knife. He had few adornments on his attire, merely a rope belt and thong round his neck from which hung a plain wooden cross.

  ‘Who is that man?’ Bjarki whispered to Valtyr.

  There were two men coming out behind the bald fellow, men with steel helmets tucked under their arms, and grey scale-armour visible under long black cloaks. Black tunics, black trews and black leather boots. They wore two swords at their belted waists, a yard-long one on the left and a shorter one on the right, and the ever-watchful expressions of hard men tasked with warding the precious life of another.

  ‘That,’ said Valtyr, in a bleak tone, ‘is an apostle. A Christian priest – what we would call a gothi. His name is Livinus and he is an Angelcynn missionary from the lands across the West Sea. But what he’s doing in the hall of one of Siegfried’s most important jarls, I do not know.’

  ‘And what—’ began Bjarki.

  ‘An apostle is a holy man of the Christian god, a fanatic, who seeks to force the whole world to submit to his foul doctrine. That one is also a lord of warriors, who controls much land; he is, in short, a dangerous enemy.’

  The Christian apostle and his two hard-faced bodyguards were shown out of the hall by the steward, who bowed and bobbed along beside them obsequiously, as if he were in the presence of the king of the Mark himself.

  Bjarki watched them leave, fascinated – both attracted and repelled by the pale-clad priest and his grim entourage. Then they were gone, and the hall seemed a good deal darker. He could feel the hot soup pleasantly filling his belly, and the long day of walking began to take its toll. His eyes began to droop. After a little while, the steward came to them and announced that His Excellency Jarl Snorri would deign to see Valtyr Far-Traveller now.

  Valtyr relieved Bjarki of the strongly scented package of lavender soap – an expensive gift for the jarl’s wife, apparently – and left his two young companions drowsing on the wide wooden bench while he walked to the end of the hall and disappeared into the dark space behind the screen.

  Valtyr’s conversation with the jarl did not last very long at all, perhaps less than a quarter of an hour. Nor was it satisfactory, judging from the dark expression on the old man’s face when he rejoined them on the hall bench.

  ‘I thought he might have one or two good prospects for me from among the men on the Dane-Work,’ Valtyr said to Tor. ‘But no. The mean bastard took my soap, called me a demon-worshipper and told me to be off.’

  * * *


  They slept on the benches and woke before dawn. They breakfasted on well-watered ale and oatmeal porridge sweetened with honey and, before the sun was above the horizon, they had left Hellingar by the southern gate and were making their way across the bridge of land that spanned the Mark-Channel.

  Bjarki stopped in the middle of the causeway and looked left and right. Of all the wonders he had seen in his life, this was the most extraordinary. An enormous trench had already been excavated on either side of the narrow land bridge, a monstrous muddy ditch more than twenty paces wide. And the diggings were already half filled with rainwater. The scale of this mammoth undertaking was, to Bjarki’s mind, almost inconceivable: that a man, even a great ruler such as Siegfried, could order a ten-mile river to be dug from one side of his realm to the other, and demand a high earthen rampart to be built behind it, and that all this would actually be accomplished. It was awe inspiring, stupendous. While the sun was not fully risen there were already hundreds of dirt-smeared men along the edges of the Mark-Channel, wielding their picks and spades, with the overseers bawling instructions…

  ‘Don’t dawdle, oaf,’ snapped Tor. ‘We haven’t got all day for you to stand around and gawp at these scurrying river rats.’

  Bjarki broke into a trot but he was surprised to see Valtyr standing on the far side of the land bridge looking back thoughtfully at the long broken shapes of the man-made mountains on the bank of this artificial waterway.

  ‘Take another look, Bjarki, if you wish to,’ the one-eyed old man said. ‘You may not see the Dane-Mark again for some time. Since the peace was made, this place now marks the frontier between the kingdom and Saxony.’

  ‘Siegfried and the Saxons were at war?’ said Bjarki.

  ‘Until last summer. Theodoric of Saxony and King Siegfried have been butting heads in this region for many years – mostly squabbles over the theft of cattle and sheep by border folk – but they are now fully reconciled. They made the old sacrifices at Hellingar last year, agreed that this was the border between their territories and feasted like heroes. Duke Theodoric’s eldest son, Widukind, was married off to Siegfried’s daughter Geva to seal a peace. And this, the Dane-Work, is a monument to the alliance they made then.’