The Last Berserker

by Angus Donald

  He is irritatingly good-looking, Tor thought.

  ‘I’m not his fucking servant,’ she said loudly. ‘And any man who comes near me with a rope is going to lose more than a hand.’

  ‘You would rather die, witch? Very well. Archers, nock!’

  The handsome fellow stepped back; the Red Cloaks were also pulling away. On the castrum wall, Tor could see a dozen archers, bows drawn.

  Now she could die. Right now. She could leap at the nearest Frank and try to get in one last killing blow. But she found she could not move. She was frozen to the spot over Bjarki’s still body. Death, a glorious death, was hers for the taking; a place in the Hall of the Slain finally within her grasp.

  And she found, in that crystal moment, that she did not wish to perish. Not yet. She opened her two fists and the blades clattered to the ground. ‘Very well,’ she said as grandly as she could manage, ‘if this king of yours desires the pleasure of our company, we shall graciously oblige him.’

  Part Two

  Chapter Thirteen

  All roads lead to Aachen

  Tor had been certain that Bjarki would die. He was wounded so grievously, and in so many places, that his body must surely surrender. But he did not and, she reasoned afterwards, it must have been his gandr, the Bear spirit that came into him so unexpectedly during the fight at the castrum that kept his chest faintly rising and falling and the blood trickling through his veins.

  She had heard all the stories, of course: the tales of Rekkar who could not be killed, whose flesh was impervious to steel, and those divine warriors who could survive even the most terrible wounds and continue slaying their enemies. But she had only half-believed them – until now. Any normal man would most likely be dead after the many cuts and punctures that Bjarki had suffered all over his body. But he didn’t die, the wounds did not go bad and begin to stink, and his much-mangled flesh soon seemed to be knitting well.

  After she had surrendered to their dazzling leader – a gothi of the Christian god, she assumed – and allowed them to tie her hands, she and the unconscious Bjarki had been herded into an empty wooden horsebox, watched over the open top of the half-open door by six Red Cloaks with drawn swords. After an hour or two, when the courtyard had been cleared of bodies, an ancient healer of some kind came in to look at their wounds.

  Bjarki was stripped of his torn and bloody clothes and armour, washed all over with wine and water, his wounds were filled with honey and then stitched and bound with clean linen strips. The old healer tutted and clucked over the half-healed burns on Bjarki’s skin, muttering about the ‘natural hardiness of healthy young barbarians’, and smeared a salve over the large areas of his skin that were still raw. Bjarki remained unconscious during this process, which was a blessing from the war god Tiw, since it must have been appallingly painful. Certainly when the old man tended Tor’s own wounds it had hurt her almost as much as if she were back in the burning ship.

  Though, of course, she could not allow herself to show the pain.

  They rested for several days in the horsebox, sleeping on clean straw under a pile of red woollen military cloaks and given surprisingly decent fare – small amounts of meat, and even some wine to drink. But always guarded, every moment, by at least six Frankish soldiers with drawn blades.

  On the third day of their captivity, Bjarki awoke and abruptly sat up – unwisely, as it happened, for the blood started fresh on the white cloths that swathed him. But he was able to relieve himself into a bucket, with a little help from Tor, and drink a quantity of watered wine with honey, and sops of barley bread dunked in the mixture. The healer came again that afternoon and cleaned and re-bandaged his wounds, and he seemed greatly impressed by the speed with which Bjarki’s flesh was healing. He gave them a pair of rough red woollen tunics to wear, and lengths of rope to cinch the tunics round their waists.

  On the fifth day, Bjarki stood up all on his own, doddering like an old man, and shaking top to toe with pain and the effort, but upright on his own two feet. At this development, a dozen archers were immediately added to the contingent of guards outside the horsebox that held the two prisoners.

  On the sixth day, the Frankish leader, stripped of his impressive multi-hued war cloak and wearing only a plain undyed robe, came to see them. He stood outside the box, leaning his forearms on the open top half of the door as he fondly regarded his two prisoners lying on drifts of loose straw inside.

  ‘You have been well treated? Yes?’ he asked, smiling in a friendly fashion. ‘Do you require anything? Your wounds are properly tended to?’

  His accent was strange but Tor could understand him perfectly. Bjarki was asleep, lying on his back in the straw, mouth open and snoring gently.

  ‘Who are you?’ said Tor, getting slowly to her feet. ‘Are you the chief of these Frankish warriors – their jarl?’

  ‘I am their Father,’ the man said.

  Tor frowned at him. ‘What – all of them? You have been busy.’

  The man laughed. It was a light, musical sound, pleasing to Tor’s ear.

  ‘That is what I am called by my people – Father. I have no children of my own seed. Yet I am the spiritual Father of all of the faithful Franks here, and a few of the Saxons, too. I am a missionary of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a humble man of God. However, my lord and king, Karolus, has placed me in command of this conquered region of Saxony. My given name is Livinus.’

  ‘The rightful lord of Westphalia is Theodoric,’ said Tor, thrusting out her chin aggressively. ‘This is his realm. You are the interloper here.’

  The man took no offence. ‘It is true Duke Theodoric was once the lord of this new part of Francia. But that is no longer true. What is your name?’

  For a moment, Tor did not wish to tell him. But it seemed pointless, cowardly even, to refuse even to name herself to this odd, smiling man.

  ‘I am Torfinna Hildarsdottir – called Tor – and that big snoring fellow is Bjarki Bloodhand. We are both fighters from the Groves of Eresburg.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Livinus. ‘I have heard of that nest of sin. Your friend is a sorcerer, a wizard – how do you say it? – a berserkr? Is that not the case? A man who becomes possessed by a demon from Hell in the heat of battle?’

  ‘He’s a Rekkr,’ said Tor proudly. ‘As I shall be, if I live long enough.’

  ‘Fascinating. And you believe in – what? – all the usual nonsense about trolls and elves and so-called gods of trees and hills and rivers and so forth?’

  Tor was struck speechless. This man – this missionary of the Christ god or Father or gothi or whatever he was – seemed genuinely interested in the Groves of Eresburg and the ancient gods and spirits but, at the same time, contemptuous of them, as if they were merely her people’s amusing foibles.

  She had once seen a misshapen pedlar, a dwarf, in Uppsala, the largest town in Svearland, who had a comical little goat-pulled cart filled with jars of strange creatures floating in liquid. There were two-headed lambs, and mandrake roots that looked like people, weird eyeless fish and a pair of half-formed human babies joined together at the hip – an unborn monster, ripped from some unfortunate’s womb. It seemed to Tor then that Livinus regarded her and the sleeping Bjarki in much the same way that the crowds of slack-jawed Svear yokels had gawped at the dwarf’s murky jars.

  She did not like it at all.

  ‘You asked if we had been well treated,’ said Tor. ‘We have been fed. Your healer has tended us. But we would like the freedom to take some exercise in the courtyard. We have been mewed up here for nearly a week.’

  ‘Out of the question,’ Livinus said. His smile disappeared. ‘But you will be leaving here soon. We shall take you into the presence of King Karolus at Aachen. You shall be shown to him. It will be a great honour.’

  ‘I’m sure it will be. And we shall be pleased to bestow that honour on your king. Till then, it would aid our healing if we might take exercise.’

  The smile came back, just a flicker. ‘You are pleased
to joke. That’s good. The king himself enjoys some amusements, from time to time.’

  And he turned and walked away.

  On the seventh day of their captivity, a strange vehicle came into the castrum courtyard. It looked like a hay wagon, a platform on four wheels, drawn by four oxen, but the sides were a latticework of oak bars as thick as a man’s wrist, and the top was covered over with inch-thick planks. It was, in effect, a cage on wheels. And it was to be their home for the next ten days.

  * * *

  Tor envied Bjarki’s extraordinary ability to sleep almost as much as his newly revealed Rekkr powers. He slept for almost the whole of the journey to Aachen, waking only in the late afternoon, when the cavalcade stopped and hot food was prepared in big brass cauldrons for the whole column. Bjarki would mumble and roll over, then a few moments later, sit up sniffing the air like a dog, and say something oafish like, ‘Oh, is it time for supper?’

  Tor found him intensely irritating. All day long she was jounced around in the wooden cage on wheels – stared at by the Red Cloak guards, a score of archers and spearmen, who marched alongside, their eyes never off her – while Bjarki lay on a pile of blankets and snored like a contented pig. He seemed entirely unconcerned that they had been captured; after the first few days his wounds apparently ceased paining him, and he slept like a worn-out child, only roused himself in the evenings to slurp down a bowl of hot soup, or eat some bread and stew, before curling up and going to sleep again.

  They were fed bread and ale at dawn before the cavalcade set off again, and the smelly wooden bucket for their evacuations was emptied, and they were fed again just before dusk when they stopped for the night. At first, Tor spent many hours, and more than one sleepless night, considering how they might escape from their rolling prison. But they were never allowed to leave the wooden cage – not for any reason. When Tor pretended to have a fit, aping an old Gottar madwoman she had seen on her travels and rolling about the cage, frothing at the mouth and shouting gibberish, the guards gathered around the cage and watched, and she heard them placing bets on whether she would die, soil herself or beat her brains out on the bars. After a while she became embarrassed, and stopped, curling into a ball and feigning sleep.

  As the guards walked away, she heard one ask if they should check she was alive. The reply from his officer filled her with impotent fury: ‘She’s of no account, trooper. Lives, dies, don’t matter to the good Father. It’s the male he’s interested in. He means to show that devil-worshipper to the king.’

  She could see little of the company in which they travelled: she counted three dozen Frankish foot soldiers, two of them officers; the apostle in his simple, undyed white robe she glimpsed occasionally, and two other priests with their pates shaven on the top in a similar manner to Livinus. For so-called humble servants of their god, these priests travelled in high style – on horseback. There was no doubt that they were in command of the column.

  There were also mounted scouts, a handful, she could not be sure of the exact number – small mud-spattered lancers with green cloaks on swift ponies who occasionally cantered past the bars of their cage. There was a supply wagon, which carried the food, and a couple of donkey-carts, which transported who-knew-what. Booty from Saxony, perhaps.

  They travelled west, with a little southing too, as far as she could make out from the sun, soon leaving the Saxon lands behind and coming down from the hills into the soft, cultivated regions of Francia. Once they had crossed into the country of their enemies, the roads began to improve, from the muddy, mountainous tracks of Saxony, in which the wagon was thrown all around by pot holes and rocks half buried in the surface muck, to an even, dead-straight thoroughfare more than a long spear’s length wide, the slightly curved surface hardened with flat, square paving stones. She once heard the guards refer to the highway as the Hellweg – but what sort of name was that for a road? It meant the way to the world of the dead. A very bad omen.

  Occasionally other roads joined the Hellweg, like tributaries joining a mighty river – and more than a few people joined the main route from these arteries – pedlars, peasants, soldiers, priests – almost all going in the same direction – to Aachen. It seemed all roads eventually led to Aachen.

  They came to an actual river – and a mighty one – on the fifth day. The Rhenus, the guards called it – even Tor had heard tell of it. The Rhenus ran through the Frankish heartland from the snow-capped Alps to the West Sea.

  Tor hoped they might be allowed out of the cage for a little while when they crossed over this wide river, perhaps to board a boat or a ship, and that this might present an opportunity for escape. But they remained confined the whole time and, instead of boarding a boat, they trundled over a gigantic bridge towards a sprawling town under a smudge of smoke on the far bank.

  Both Tor and Bjarki, in one of his rare periods of wakefulness, stared out through the bars at the grey expanse of flat water as they crossed the massive bridge – some four hundred paces in length from shore to shore – looking in awe at the trading ships and smaller craft that passed under their cage. It made Tor feel insignificant. She had believed she had already seen much of the Middle-Realm in her short but adventurous life and was privy to many of its deepest secrets. She had travelled with Valtyr for nearly a whole year before they met Bjarki. But this journey had shaken her iron self-belief.

  Once they had crossed the Rhenus, Tor asked Bjarki, who was now at least partially recovered from his wounds, if he could summon the gandr and break open the bars of the cage with his Rekkr’s strength. But Bjarki merely shook his head sadly. He claimed not to remember very much of the fight in the castrum. He had no inkling why his gandr had chosen that particular moment to manifest itself in him. He said he had no idea how to summon it.

  To please Tor, he sat that evening in the cage and did the humming exercises that they both knew so well, trying to burrow inside his heart to find the lair of the Beast. Nothing happened. Some of the off-duty Red Cloaks gathered around to watch him – they assumed he was praying to his heathen gods, and muttered as much to each other – but soon they drifted away, one by one, bored. Finally Bjarki stopped. Whatever had occurred in the battle at the castrum, it was not something Bjarki could control himself.

  ‘I simply don’t know how I did it,’ he confessed when Tor lost her temper and called him a useless lump of goat turd. But, for her sake, he gave it another try later that night. With the darkness, and Tor’s body, shielding him from the Red Cloaks’ gaze, he attempted to pull two of the oak bars apart, and then to wrestle one of them free. But they might have been iron set in stone for all the effect his efforts produced. That exertion started the wound in his shoulder bleeding again and Tor felt a spear of guilt as she mopped the leaking wound and bound it with the same dirty bandage.

  They were now passing through peaceful farmlands, and large estates with gangs of slaves at work bringing in the crops – wheat, rye and barley – and past mansions, built from blood-red bricks and tiles, with lush, shaded gardens, tinkling fountains and soaring stone columns in rows at the front.

  She had never seen houses like them before. They were simply huge. And she wondered how many people lived in them – they could easily have accommodated the population of a good-sized Svear village. Yet the houses all seemed strangely empty with only one or two people glimpsed as they passed, or none at all, except for those who were obviously over-worked slaves.

  She might have believed them the homes of kings or princes, such was their grandeur, had she not passed a half dozen of these palaces on the road during the time she and Bjarki lived in that bastard cage. Surely Francia could not boast that many princes in the slice of territory through which they passed.

  They lumbered through humble Frankish villages, too – which were not unlike the northern settlements she was used to, except with low brick-built dwellings with red-tiled roofs instead of wood-and-thatch longhouses – and through larger settlements, often at crossroads, with churches built to
honour the Christian god, then actual towns – they stopped in one of these on a warm autumn night, seven days into their journey, and were given roasted lamb on trenchers of fine-milled bread for supper. But they were not allowed to leave the cage. Never that. And the eyes of the Red Cloaks did not stray.

  They were going to Aachen; this was all they knew. After nine days of hard travel, they overheard comments that suggested they were close to their destination. One of the Red Cloaks spoke warmly to his friend of a wine shop in Aachen he intended to visit the next night, of a girl who served there.

  ‘What do you think their king wants with us?’ Bjarki asked her the next morning as a company of spearmen, at least a hundred strong, every man wearing a moss-green cloak and steel helm but no other armour, trotted past them without a second glance. They had seen three companies like this already that day. Each company was roughly the same size of the force – the ‘mighty army’ – that Theodoric had sent to attack the castrum. Bjarki found himself unnerved by this evidence of the manpower at Karolus’s disposal.

  ‘The priest Livinus seems to think you can summon up foul demons from the realm of the goddess Hel, whenever you choose to,’ said Tor. ‘I think he means to show us off like exotic wild beasts to the king and his jarls. We’ll be paraded, prodded and peered at until they get bored with us.’

  ‘What will they do when they discover I can’t really call up demons? Or even bring out my own gandr? That I’m not really a Rekkr. What then?’

  Tor looked at him. She was remembering the shambles in the castrum courtyard after the battle. All the Saxon wounded had been dispatched with sword blows to the base of the skull, some of the dying Red Cloaks, too. She knew how little their lives would be worth if Bjarki could not summon up his gandr. ‘You’re quite right, oaf,’ she said. ‘We need to make a plan.’