The Last Berserker

by Angus Donald

  ‘I know nothing of all this,’ Bjarki said. ‘It would help me understand if you told me how you became a Rekkr. If you don’t mind speaking of it.’

  ‘Fetch more ale,’ said Brokk.

  * * *

  ‘I was Barda,’ said the Rekkr, when Bjarki had replenished the jug from the huge barrel in the far corner of the Lodge. ‘I could fight, but I had no gandr. Three years I waited. No gandr. I hummed daily. You know how to hum?’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘They will teach you. Pay attention. And practise. You hum to summon the gandr to you. The vibrations reach out to the otherworld, they say, and call it, like… like whistling for a dog. But not always. Your gandr is not your dog. Not at all. Better to say you are the gandr’s dog.’

  Bjarki looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Listen to me. Sometimes a gandr is angry with you. Sometimes it wants to tease you. Play games. Sometimes it just doesn’t want to come…’

  ‘You speak with your gandr?’

  ‘It speaks to me. It speaks to me like… like my dead mother.’

  Bjarki made an explosive little noise, a hastily smothered laugh.

  Brokk looked at him again. His face twitched on the right side again.

  ‘You think this funny? It is funny. My gandr has my mother’s voice. Funny, but also true. But not all gandr are the same. Nikka says her gandr is like the wind rustling through the leaves of an ash. Each one is different.’

  ‘So when did it come to you?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. More ale.’

  Bjarki passed over the jug.

  ‘I was a Barda and we went to help the Eastphalians – far to the east on the River Elbe. They have a problem with the Sorbs. You know the Sorbs?’

  Bjarki didn’t.

  ‘Slav tribesmen – very fierce. They live in the marshes. Damp villages. They all stink bad. Like rotting wool.’

  Brokk took a massive pull from the ale jug.

  ‘Our Saxon friends wanted to punish the Sorbs for raiding across the river. They had stolen some cows, I think. I don’t remember. And the Eastphalian chief – Hermann was his name – he said we should go across the Elbe and burn their villages, take back his cows. Or maybe it was sheep.

  ‘I was taking a shit – I went away from the camp, a little way, and dropped my trews. It was the middle of the night. And that’s when the Sorbs attacked us. A dozen of them. They had been watching us in secret. They killed everyone. Even our Rekkr – Arnulf – he was killed in his sleep. Two arrows punched through his blankets. He never even woke up. Hermann was killed too. They took his head off with an axe. And – you will think this very funny – if I had not been taking a shit, I would be as dead as my own dung.’

  Brokk’s cheek twitched again at the memory. Bjarki was fascinated.

  ‘I saw the attack, my trews round my ankles. I shouted a warning. But they were all killed. Zip, zip, zop. They heard me, and they came looking for me. I didn’t even have my sword. I pulled up my trews, picked up a rock and began to hum. I hummed – I should have fled into the darkness. But, no, I hummed the summoning tune. My whole body was vibrating like… like a harp string. I could hear the Sorbs approaching. And then my gandr came to me. And you know what it said? First thing my gandr ever said?’

  Bjarki shrugged.

  ‘You didn’t wipe your arse, you dirty boy!’

  The face was twitching wildly now. Bjarki, too, began to chuckle.

  ‘It was my mother’s voice. And she was scolding me. And since then whenever I summon my gandr, I hear my dead mother. That silly old bitch.’

  Brokk was laughing openly now, making a strange harsh noise like a cawing crow. And Bjarki could not help but join in the merriment. When he had at last recovered his poise, regained his wind, and wiped his streaming eyes, Bjarki said: ‘And what happened next? With the Sorbs, I mean?’

  ‘Oh… them,’ rumbled Brokk, and Bjarki felt him slipping back into his normal boulder-like state of blankness. ‘I fed them all to the ravens.’

  * * *

  As spring expanded into summer, and Bjarki’s face healed, he settled into the rhythm of life in the Fyr Skola. And, as the pain and shock of his brutal encounter in the Fyr Pit faded, he began to appreciate his community a little more and find the virtues of the unique group of people that surrounded him.

  Each day began with prayers to the spirit of the Bear, lord of the forest, and to the Irminsul, the One Tree. Most of the Bear Lodge attended these simple rituals, which involved a call and response led by the Lodge Father, although there were always a few members away, detached on other duties.

  ‘Hear us, Brother Bear, and grant us your strength, your courage and your wisdom as we undertake the labours of this day,’ Angantyr would intone, both hands, palms facing out, lifted high above his big, shaven head.

  ‘Hear us, Brother Bear, hear us this day,’ the Lodge would reply.

  After the prayers would come breakfast – eggs, bread, butter, cheese, ham, ale and sometimes oatmeal porridge – eaten informally on the benches around the sides of the longhouse. Gunnar always sat beside Bjarki during this first meal of the day, and usually passed on snippets of gossip or news or advice about Lodge members – ‘Never ask Hymir about his Fyr Pit fight with Elendri, the ancient Mother of the Wolf Lodge, she beat him half to death more than twenty years ago – and he still hasn’t quite got over the embarrassment of being knocked out of his skull by a skinny old woman!’

  The five members of the Bear Lodge who were Fire Born were treated like royalty, Bjarki discovered. They never had to do any of the day-to-day chores, none of the cooking or washing, or fetching water or firewood, which was done by the handful of Lodge servants and the younger novices.

  Three of the Rekkar were men: Angantyr, the Lodge Father, half-mad Brokk, who heard his dead mother’s voice, and Edmund, an Angelcynn from across the seas, who spoke Saxon with an odd accent but apart from that seemed an ordinary man. Two were women: Nikka, who taught Voyaging, and Sif, a burly matron who, according to Gunnar, had an eye for handsome novices, and wasn’t above trying to fondle them when she got the chance.

  ‘Watch out for Sif,’ Gunnar whispered. ‘I’ve seen her eyeing your arse when you walk out of the Lodge. Stay out of her way, unless you want to bed her. Although I’ve heard it’s quite the experience. Whatever you do, Little Brother, don’t make her lose her temper. She has slaughtered more than twenty trained warriors in battle and never once took a serious wound.’

  After prayers and breakfast came the physical training, which was mandatory for every member of the Lodge except the servants, who were too busy to participate, and the five Rekkar, although they most often joined in anyway, sometimes leading those exercises that they particularly favoured.

  There was a special area just outside the Bear Grove, set up for the whole of Eresburg to take exercise in. But the Bear Lodge training always began with running: novices, Barda and Fire Born all jogging off out of the gate, down the track to the valley and then up the steep wooded hillsides and running a loop of eight or so miles before returning to the exercise yard.

  Then came exercises to strengthen the body, lifting and throwing heavy boulders or man-sized logs with handles cut into the wood, these wooden weights, polished smooth by antiquity and the hands of long-dead Rekkar, were decreed sacred and Gunnar claimed that the logs were, in fact, the first children of Irminsul to be sacrificed after the war between folk and forest.

  ‘That’s obviously a load of horseshit,’ Gunnar added, ‘all wood starts to rot after a few years in the rain. And the gods’ war is supposed to have taken place a thousand years ago. A lot of what they tell you is rubbish. But you have to pretend to believe it or you’ll get in trouble and be punished.’

  Any punishment, though, was absurdly light by Bjarki’s standards. In Bago, his master Thialfi would thrash him bloody with a fishing rod when he was mildly displeased, which was several times a month. Once, when Bjarki had crushed an old lobste
r pot by accidentally stepping on it, Thialfi and two other fishermen had beaten him unconscious with cudgels – Bjarki had been twelve years old at the time. He was regularly forced to sleep outside Thialfi’s hut in the cold with no blanket for very minor transgressions.

  Here at the Fyr Skola, chastisement meant being made to run round the outside of the Grove palisade three times – about three miles in distance – or being denied a meal. Bjarki didn’t mind a bit of running and the meals were always so enormous that skipping one was sometimes even a great relief.

  There was a powerful sense of belonging, even of living in a close-knit family, that came with being a member of the Bear Lodge; something Bjarki very soon came to recognise and to luxuriate in. He felt accepted; he felt part of an important whole. His life on Bago – even his fierce longing for Freya – was becoming a mere memory. He threw himself into the life of the Lodge.

  The Bear family was very proud of its five Rekkar, the champions produced by the Lodge system, who were unquestionably the finest warriors in the world. A single Rekkr, so the Groves saying went, was the equivalent of ten ordinary warriors. A Bear Lodge berserkr, Gunnar solemnly informed Bjarki, was worth at least twenty.

  Therein lay Bjarki’s greatest fear. His face wound, although painful, healed swiftly under the ministrations of Eldar, the Lodge gothi, and he soon became fit and strong, with large quantities of food and strenuous exercise, but, deep in his heart, he doubted he truly belonged in this collective of exceptional folk. He secretly feared that one day he would be discovered to be a fraud, a man who would never be able to summon the divine spirit – the gandr – which gave the Rekkar their fabled strength and reckless courage.

  His gandr had not manifested itself when he fought the Boar Lodge fellow – Ivar Knuttson – who had so easily humiliated him in the Fyr Pit. He had felt nothing, not even rage, during the fight, not even when the Boar man had bitten him. Neither did the spirit of the Bear come to him during the next few weeks, when he fought mock battles, sometimes drawing blood, with his fellow novices during their daily weapons training under Hymir.

  Whatever the nature of the madness that possessed him when he killed Jeki and Ymir on that red day in the dunes outside Bago, it never returned.

  He went to see Nikka the Dreamer and asked her advice. She told him, once again, to search inside himself and gave him a series of humming exercises to do in the quiet of the evening after supper. Closing his eyes and making the simple four-note tune in his throat, and letting his mind wander along the secret paths into the thick forests of his own imagination.

  ‘The Bear will surely find you, if that’s what the gods decide,’ Nikka said. ‘Greet him as a brother, salute his strength and courage, and humbly ask for his protection. And be patient, Bjarki – no one can truly say when your gandr will come to you. Perhaps tomorrow, but perhaps… never.’

  So Bjarki sat quietly after supper outside the Lodge, away from the jests and the old stories and the singing by the hearth-fire and the evening ale jugs coming round and round, and hummed and tried to imagine he was in the First Forest alone, walking down a path in the gloom. He soon nodded off and dreamt of Freya and their lovemaking, and the sweet puppy Garm.

  He tried again the next night. He did this for seven days in a row and, on each occasion, he swiftly fell fast asleep, and woke up cold and stiff long after midnight with the faint snores of the Bear Lodge buzzing in his ears.

  As the weeks passed he began to despair. Surely they would find out soon he was not blessed – how could they not? – and he would be expelled from the Fyr Skola or perhaps relegated to the humiliating role of servant.

  He decided that, even though he had been Valtyr’s thrall, he could not bear to live as a Lodge servant, bringing the ale, and pouring it for the fighting men. He vowed that, if he could not attain the heights of a Rekkr, he could become a Barda – he had strength and courage enough for that, surely.

  So, in his sixth week at the Fyr Skola, Bjarki went out one long, warm evening and walked over to the Wolf Lodge to find Tor and ask for her help.

  Tor was somewhat surprised to see Bjarki – but also, if she was honest, rather pleased. His face was healing well: a scar with a deep indentation on his right cheek was the only evidence of the fight with the Boar novice.

  She had spoken to him a few times since then, once after a ceremony for the whole Fyr Skola at the Irminsul, and a couple of times at chance meetings around the Groves. Each time, she had found it hard to know what to say. Their conversations had been awkward, brief and embarrassing. They were not really friends. They were just two people who’d travelled together.

  Yet when Bjarki came to seek her out at the Wolf Lodge, she was oddly happy to see him. She would never admit this to herself – it would seem like a grave weakness – but she was lonely. She was aware that most of the members of her Lodge did not like her and, while they had been surprised by her skills when she demonstrated them during Warcraft sessions, good warriors were commonplace in the Fyr Skola and they never warmed to her.

  Even Helga, her Elder Sister, had now abandoned her – although Tor had to admit it was for a very good reason. Helga had dreamed of the Wolf on three nights in a row; in the fevered dreams, her gandr had called to her, howled for her to come and join the spiritual pack, and on reporting this to the ancient Lodge Mother and the Wolf Dreamer it had been swiftly agreed that Helga was ready to undertake her Voyaging.

  Helga had been stripped naked in front of the whole Lodge, washed in icy river water brought up from the valley, while the Mother of the Lodge chanted over her, and the rest of the community hummed the summoning tune. She was marked with a triangle on her forehead in her own blood. She was given a Wolfskin, a belt and a knife and, thus equipped, she set out into the forest to seek her destiny.

  ‘How long will she be gone for?’ Tor asked one of her Lodge mates, a clumsy and thick-headed young man called Floki who would never make it as a Rekkr, in Tor’s opinion, and was unlikely even to be allowed to serve as a common Barda. If they didn’t expel him soon, he would become a servant.

  ‘Till she finds her gandr,’ said Floki.

  ‘But how long does that take? A week? A month?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Floki angrily, shuffling away from her. ‘Don’t ask me all these stupid questions, Tor; I don’t want to be seen talking to you.’

  Through shameless eavesdropping, Tor discovered from her fellow Lodge members’ conversations that a novice’s Voyage was never less than three days long and had been known to last up to several months.

  A good number of novices who were sent out into the wild, on their own without food or proper clothing, never came back. They starved or froze or went mad or became lost, or were eaten by wild animals, perhaps even by their own gandir. It occurred to her that the First Forest might well be full of half-mad, starving Voyagers – no wonder the terrified villagers in the settled lands to the north nailed up sacrifices to keep the spirits inside.

  Bjarki, typically, was straightforward about his request.

  ‘I don’t believe I will ever be able to summon my gandr,’ he said to her. ‘I’m beginning to think I should be content to be a Barda – but I’m not even very good at combat. Hymir the master-at-arms says I’m slow and that I don’t move my feet enough. I know you are very good at this sort of thing, Tor, and I want your help. You’re my friend. Teach me how to fight.’

  Tor was on the edge of asking what was in it for her, if she were to put in all the effort of teaching him what she knew. But she bit her tongue. She was floundering, frankly, and alone. Even that imbecile Floki did not want to be seen talking to her. But this sad oaf genuinely thought she was his friend.

  And so they began.

  Every night before supper they trained for an hour. She taught him the twelve basic strokes of the sword, the blocks and parries, the strikes and lunges, making him repeat them over and over until they flowed naturally. Then they worked on sword and shield together, which was more d
ifficult, but which he mastered after only a week or two. Then axe and shield; then axe and sword. They made a strange pair, the hulking young man, red-faced and sweating and the lithe girl, half his size, snapping out orders and making him do the time-honoured battle combinations again and again and again.

  People stared. Ivar Knuttson, walking past one evening with a pair of Boar Lodge cronies, pointed and laughed at them: ‘It’s the girl with a man’s name teaching the man who fights like a girl!’ But they ignored the frequent and hurtful jibes and taunts and continued with their crucial sword work.

  Night after night, day after day, they practised. Hymir, the master-at-arms, was the first outsider to notice an improvement at the end of the first month when Bjarki knocked Gunnar off his feet with a convincing sword feint and surprise shield barge during the daily Bear Lodge Warcraft lesson.

  ‘You’ve been paying attention, little bear,’ Hymir said approvingly. ‘We might even make a warrior of you – in about twenty years’ time.’

  Gunnar lying on his back and spitting dust out of his mouth said: ‘I took him under my wing. Taught him everything I know. This is how he repays me. No gratitude, Hymir, that’s the problem with young folk today.’

  One day, in late summer, when Bjarki was called out in front of the class to demonstrate a complicated sword and axe sequence, Hymir said: ‘Just do the simple routine that I teach, little bear, don’t go showing off.’

  Bjarki rushed to meet Tor that evening, with joy in his heart. When he saw her he flung out his arms and hugged her. For a long, long moment, the two of them embraced each other tightly. Then Tor put her right heel behind his, twisted her torso and pushed and Bjarki crashed painfully to the ground.

  ‘Can’t believe you fell for that old trick,’ she said, half-laughing. ‘It’s time, I think, that you learnt something about unarmed combat.’