The Last Berserker

by Angus Donald

  This, surely, thought Bjarki, was a Rekkr. The odd fellow could not possibly have looked more like one of the fabled warriors if he’d tried.

  ‘See you’ve met Brokk,’ said Gunnar. ‘He’s halfway to being Galálar and so not terribly talkative for much of the time, but if you give him enough drink he can be quite amusing. Angantyr, the Lodge Father, will be out with the others in a bit, and I’ll introduce you to everyone. Sling me over that ale jug, Brokk, there’s a good fellow, I’ve got a burning thirst on me today.’

  The food at the Fyr Skola was more than abundant. Bjarki had at first assumed that the wooden plate piled high with dripping, bloody beef that was placed in front of him was for the whole table to share. But it quickly became apparent, as other similar plates were slammed down on the board and were claimed by other members of the Bear Lodge, that it was a portion for him alone. There was bread and cheese, too, huge raw radishes and onions, boiled mashed turnips, and some sort of greens wilted with butter and served in a – Bjarki could think of no other suitable word – bucket.

  He gorged. He ate till he could eat no more, and washed it all down with copious amounts of nutty, freshly brewed brown ale. The conversation around the table was loud and bawdy, old jokes were cracked, the language was shockingly filthy, and his new Lodge mates were teased, mercilessly teased, but it all seemed to be perfectly amicable and extremely congenial.

  Brokk said nothing at all. He lowered his face over his platter of beef and ate like a starving wolf, smiling up at Bjarki in a weird mechanical way from time to time with his beef-blood smeared face, as if he had been told to do so by some chiding inner voice. After the privations of life on the road – the gritty mushrooms, the salty fish porridge – Bjarki felt he had died and gone straight to the Hall of the Slain. He swilled and gorged with the rest of them, forcing himself to eat beyond his stomach’s usual capacity, fully determined to do all honour to this unexpected and quite magnificent feast.

  That was his second misunderstanding – this was no feast, no special celebration. This was the ordinary midday meal, taken a little after noon on every day of the week when they were in the groves. Bjarki could barely comprehend such extravagance. When he muttered something in this vein to Gunnar – who was sitting beside him – the young man mumbled, ‘Got to keep your strength up,’ through a gigantic mouthful of half-chewed beef.

  When Bjarki tried to express his gratitude to Angantyr, the Father of the Lodge, a massive warrior with an entirely bald, shaven head, and a tattoo of a snarling bear on his smooth sun-bronzed chest, the man smiled over at him in a cool but friendly way and said: ‘Eat hearty, youngster, and drink up your ale – you’ll soon be earning that meat and drink, I promise you that.’

  Bjarki looked at him enquiringly, smothering a belch, and Angantyr said: ‘Tomorrow morning, lad, you enter the Fyr Pit. We’ll see what you are made of then. Tomorrow, my little bear, you’ll fight for the very first time.’

  Chapter Six

  Into the Fyr Pit

  In the afternoon, Bjarki began his training: he attended a Voyaging session with the Bear Lodge’s Dreamer, a middle-aged matron called Nikka, who informed her charges that the search for true knowledge began inside every one of them. ‘Delve deep into your heart,’ she said, in an odd, soft voice. ‘The truth will emerge like the magnificent butterfly from its drab cocoon.’

  Bjarki was so sleepy then, after his gargantuan midday meal, that he had great difficulty staying awake for the duration of the lesson.

  There were seven novices in the group sitting at her feet inside the Lodge, at the western end, near the wall that was plastered with lime and painted with images of wide dark forests and huge bears, with stick-like human figures armed with spears running between the trees.

  ‘The truth is inside you all,’ intoned Nikka. ‘Every one. And while I cannot say what that truth may be,’ she continued, ‘whether you are found worthy or not, I can say this: if you find your inner strength, if you do indeed find the true fury of the Rekkr, it will derive from the Bear, not from you.’

  Bjarki puzzled hard over this. So did a Rekkr’s strength come from inside the warrior or from outside – from this Bear that she spoke about?

  By the end of the hour, he thought he had a better understanding of it. A Rekkr was possessed by a gandr, a kind of animal spirit – in Nikka’s case the Bear spirit – which came into the body of the Rekkr during the ordeal of Voyaging, and took up lodging there in his or her heart. When the Rekkr was called upon to fight in battle, the gandr was unleashed, and this spirit granted the Rekkr all the power and ferocity and fearlessness of a wild beast.

  Bjarki noticed that Nikka too had a small triangle tattooed between her bushy eyebrows, the same shape as those of Brokk and Angantyr.

  After some conversation with Gunnar immediately following the Voyaging session, Bjarki also felt he was beginning to get an idea about the different types of people who made up the full membership of the Bear Lodge.

  There seemed to be about forty men and women living in the smoky longhouse but, of these, only four or five were actual Rekkar. They could be distinguished by the tattoo they bore on their foreheads, a triangle with equal length sides. Gunnar had explained that each lodge had its own shape of triangle for their Rekkar. The Wolf Lodge had a triangle with two long sides and one short one at the top, supposed to resemble the face of a wolf; the Boar Lodge had a very long triangle, to mimic the elongated face of a wild pig. The Bear Lodge, of course, had a triangle with three equal-length sides.

  ‘The Bear Lodge is the senior Lodge,’ said Gunnar. ‘It was the one which was founded first and which gives the common name to all Rekkar – the Bear Shirts, berserkir – because they wear the fur of a bear as armour.’

  Gunnar leaned in closer. ‘It is also the best Lodge by miles, in my opinion. But I am not entirely impartial,’ he chuckled. ‘The Wolf Lodge prize speed and teamwork; the Boars – the svinfylking – think they are the bravest and the most stubborn in a long fight. But we Bears have by far the greatest strength and ferocity – and that’s what really counts in a battle.’

  ‘So when will you become a Rekkr?’ asked Bjarki. He liked Gunnar. The young man had a fine sense of humour and an air of irreverence that was appealing. And, although he had been already enrolled in the Lodge for more than a year, he did not brandish his superiority over the newcomer.

  ‘Next year, perhaps. Only the All-Father knows. Odin loves all the Rekkar – and he decides who will be chosen, and when. But there are all sorts of mystical tests and difficult lessons to be learnt first, and complicated hoops for you to jump through. Then you must go out Voyaging into the First Forest alone and meet your very own Bear spirit. There’s also the Fyr Ceremony in front of the whole assembled Skola – that’s the final test. And it’s brutal. You have to leap into a blazing inferno and come out the other side – that’s why the Rekkar are called Fire Born. They undergo a rebirth in the sacred fire. Some don’t survive that. They get burnt to a cinder. On second thought, I hope to become Rekkr the year after next, or even the one after that.’ He chuckled. ‘Until then we might as well enjoy ourselves.’

  After Voyaging with Nikka, they had a two-hour lesson on Warcraft in the cool evening in a flattened area of ground outside the longhouse. The middle-aged man in charge, who was called Hymir, was not a Rekkr – no head tattoo – which intrigued Bjarki. The man was obviously a fine warrior.

  Hymir demonstrated the correct use of the spear and shield in dazzling combinations to the seven Bear Lodge novices and a few of the younger men-at-arms, too, calling on a beanpole youth and a sturdy woman to come out and show the less-experienced the more complicated moves. This pair were frighteningly competent, jabbing at each other like lightning with their blunted spears, blocking with the shields in a thoroughly professional way.

  Gunnar whispered in Bjarki’s ear that Hymir was a master of all known arms – but he had utterly failed to find his own Bear spirit when Voyaging. Therefore he could not
become a Rekkr but, instead, had been given the important role of teaching the Lodge members the use of commonplace weapons, and guiding them to become skilled fighters. Hymir was also the captain of the Lodge’s twenty-strong company of Barda, or Grove guards.

  The Barda, none of whom were Rekkar, made the daily patrols in the countryside around the groves – such as the one that had intercepted the three travellers the day before. They also fought in battle, in an unbreakably solid shield wall behind the Rekkar, if the groves were ever threatened – or if they were sent away elsewhere to fight on behalf of the Eresburg community.

  ‘You two seem to have a lot to say to each other,’ Hymir bellowed. ‘Maybe you two noble hersirs feel you don’t have need of my instruction?’

  Bjarki blushed and hung his head. Gunnar just grinned up at the furious master-at-arms. ‘Since you don’t want to listen to me. Why don’t you two would-be heroes come here and show us what you know about the spear.’

  Bjarki found himself clutching a long blunted spear and a heavy round shield and facing Gunnar, who was similarly equipped, in front of the class.

  ‘Fight!’ commanded Hymir.

  Bjarki stepped forward and poked at his new friend, half-heartedly.

  Gunnar took the weak blow on his shield, tried to stab Bjarki back as a counter attack; and missed completely, the blunted spear going harmlessly under Bjarki’s right arm. Gunnar blundered forward, impelled by his own momentum, and crashed into Bjarki, knocking him off balance, and they both ended up on the ground in a laughing tangle of spear-shafts and limbs.

  ‘Hopeless, both of you,’ said Hymir, ‘completely hopeless. Sit down, keep quiet, unblock your ears and try at least to learn something today.’

  * * *

  Gunnar woke him early the next day for a breakfast of boiled eggs, ham, cheese and bread, and watered ale – all in similar quantities as the midday repast of the day before. He had slept deeply on the benches in the Bear Lodge, on a pile of blankets and furs, and he felt strong, rested and, for the first time in a very long while, absolutely and utterly content.

  After breakfast, an hour or so after dawn on another beautiful, warm spring day, Gunnar took him over to the Fyr Pit, which was beyond the clearing of the Irminsul, in part of the groves that Bjarki had not yet seen.

  It was a large square pit, sunken to the height of a man, fifteen paces by fifteen, walled with blackened stone slabs. The floor of the Fyr Pit was a tamped-down surface of fine grey ash and cinders. Indeed, the whole Fyr Pit strongly resembled an enormous empty cooking hearth in some giant’s hall.

  ‘They will pick out someone roughly your height and weight,’ said Gunnar. ‘But it won’t be one of your Lodge brothers, so don’t feel you have to hold back in the slightest. If you feel the Beast stirring inside you, that’s good. Embrace it. Let it have control. If you hurt your opponent, or even kill him, you won’t be punished. This is the Fyr Skola: casualties are expected.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yes. You won’t have weapons. You’ll also fight barefoot. And the Ropers are there to stop the bout if one of you goes completely Galálar.’

  ‘Ropers? Galálar?’

  ‘Sorry, I forgot that you don’t yet know all our jargon. Galálar is probably not the right word anyway. It means that the Beast inside you takes over completely. You stop being a man and wholly become a wild animal. It happens – but only rarely – to some of the Rekkar. They cannot come back from the place they go when the Bear spirit – or the Wolf, or Boar – rises up inside them. You met Brokk? He’s gone Galálar a few times. But they have always managed to bring him back; so far, anyway. If someone goes that way completely, they must be put down immediately or we’re all at risk.’

  Bjarki was transported back to the Thing at Bago, and Olaf Karlsson, the hersir, saying Bjarki was no better than a mad dog, an indiscriminate killer of men, who must be put down immediately lest he endanger them all.

  ‘And the Ropers?’ he asked.

  ‘Those men over there. They are the… well, sort of the judges. They will all work together to stop a fight, with any luck, if it gets out of hand.’

  Bjarki looked at the group of four bulky warriors on the far side of the Fyr Pit. Hymir, the Bear Lodge master-at-arms, was one of them. He wished he had been more attentive in the Warcraft class the evening before; not that it would help him. The four men, the Ropers – none of them Rekkar, as far as Bjarki could tell – were conferring together, they each had a coil of rope looped over their shoulders, and carried nets made of thick knotted hemp.

  ‘And I have to do this?’ Bjarki felt suddenly cold and sick.

  ‘Oh yes, every novice must do this. Sorts out the wheat from the chaff. Think of it as an initiation. May the gods bring you victory!’ said Gunnar cheerily, slapping him on the back. ‘Don’t forget, Little Brother, fight your absolute hardest: the other fellow will almost certainly be trying to kill you.’

  Tor walked towards the Fyr Pit with a large, chattering, laughing crowd of her fellow Wolf Lodge mates. She had never felt more alone. Her reception in her new home, in the community she had long dreamed of, in the place where for years she had longed to be, had not gone well. Quite the opposite.

  When Valtyr had left her under the Irminsul, she had been collected by an older girl, perhaps nineteen years of age, a tough-looking creature with bulging arm muscles, hairy tree-trunk legs and a thick, much-broken snub nose, who introduced herself grumpily as Helga, her Older Sister.

  She whistled for Tor to follow, as if she were a dog, took her over to the Wolf Lodge, where she abandoned Tor to fend for herself at the dinner table. Despite the mountains of food available, Tor found she was really not very hungry at all and she only picked at her meat. Her Wolf Lodge brothers and sisters looked at her as she ate it but no one spoke directly to her.

  Tor realised that, as was her habit, she was glaring ferociously at any person who happened to catch her eye. But somehow she could not prevent herself from doing this. She found, much to her surprise, she was actually missing the company of that dull oaf Bjarki, and when she thought of the comforting silence of one-eyed Valtyr, she felt like weeping into her plate.

  She had attended a class on Stealth, with a small, balding idiot who mumbled endlessly about how to move in various terrains without being spotted by enemies, using the ground, and any natural features, how to break up the outline of your body using twigs and leaves shoved into your belt and clothing. But it was all obvious, childish stuff to Tor – she had been taught these exact skills from a young age by some of Svearland’s finest hunters.

  She grew bored during the long lesson; feeling she was somehow being shunned. Nobody in Wolf Lodge seemed to be at all interested in her.

  After the miserable old buffoon had finished his Stealth lecture, the junior members of the Lodge and some of the servants went off to perform a sacred rite to propitiate the spirits of the forest at dusk – it was the Wolf Lodge’s turn to do this, apparently. During the whole ceremony, Tor had not the slightest idea what was going on, and nobody saw fit to explain it to her. They spent hours delicately trimming the branches of long rows of beech and alder trees with bronze sickles all around the three groves, carefully collecting up the leaves and cut branches as if they were rare treasures.

  Then they returned to the middle, to the Irminsul, where a pair of bound chickens were ritually slaughtered and their blood sprayed around the One Tree’s massive trunk in a pair of circles, one sun-wise, one widdershins.

  There was some chanting, some more of the eerie four-note humming, and the Wolf Lodge Mother, a decrepit little hag, quite clearly as mad as a moon-frog, by Tor’s reckoning, lead the prayers in a voice so soft Tor could not make out a single word. Then they all went back to the Lodge for supper.

  After she had finished her bowl of chicken soup – all the sacrifices were eaten by the Lodges who supplied them, after the deities had had their invisible share – she decided it was time to take matters into her own hands.


  She stood up on the bench and kicked hard on the table edge with her boot to attract attention. The forty-one people who were in the Wolf Lodge at the time stopped eating and talking and turned in astonishment to stare.

  ‘I wish to introduce myself to the Lodge,’ she said. ‘I am Torfinna Hildarsdottir – you may call me Tor. I’m honoured to join your community.’

  ‘Sit down, you ninny, and be quiet,’ hissed Elder Sister Helga from across the table. ‘Learn your proper place, you silly girl.’

  Tor ignored her. ‘I want you all to know that I am the daughter of Hildar Torfinnsson, who was once a famous Rekkr of this Lodge, and I am proud of my connection with him. I plan to become Fire Born myself, with your help. I hope I’ll bring as much honour to the Lodge as my father did.’

  There was an unpleasant silence following her words. Then somebody guffawed. Then another person laughed too. A huge scarred warrior at the end of the table slapped his dinner companion and said: ‘As much honour as Hildar Torfinnsson – ha-ha! – that shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve.’

  Helga was now tugging at her leggings. ‘Get down, Tor, down now.’

  The Lodge Mother rose, coughed wetly, and fixed Tor with her raw-egg eyes. Between wheezes, she said: ‘If you wish to remain a… member of the Wolf Lodge… you’ll sit in your allotted place… and be… silent.’

  Tor sat down quickly. Her face was burning. The hag, though, was not finished. ‘Furthermore… you will not again speak the name of… Hildar Torfinnsson… within this Lodge… on pain of… immediate expulsion.’

  When Helga informed her in the chilly light of dawn, after a wretched sleepless night, that she must attend the Fyr Pit and fight, Tor welcomed the idea. She would show them. She would prove to them that she was more than worthy of a place in the Wolf Lodge. And if they no longer respected the memory of her poor dead father – so what? They would come to respect her when they saw her prowess, the fruit of her hard training, at first hand.