The Last Berserker

by Angus Donald

  Tor wore a leather breastplate, a kilt of leather and iron strips, leather vambraces and greaves over bare feet and a steel cap on her head – the best combination she could conjure of protection without too much weight.

  She needed to be fast.

  She had armed herself with a six-foot spear, tipped with a razor-sharp leaf-shaped blade, a short stabbing sword of the kind favoured by the Red Cloaks, and a seax hung horizontally over her loins. But for her bare feet, she would not have stood out in any military muster in the North. She also looked small, skinny and dull in her old leathers, almost insignificant.

  Bjarki, by contrast, was a sight to behold. He had spiked with honey and dried pig’s blood what remained of his thick blond hair, after the cruel burns he had suffered at the Fyr Ceremony, which made it stick up in mad-looking reddish clumps all over his head. His face was painted dead white with a paste of flour and chalk, provided by Henk, with black and red circles drawn around his eyes to make them seem unnaturally huge and unnerving.

  He wore a long mail hauberk and mail leggings, but patches of fur had been sewn into the links of the metal, here and there, to make it seem as if he were an animal bursting out from under the mail. His shoulders were made even broader with rolls of a thick fur cloak. Tor had sewed dozens of animal bones to his sleeves and the edges of his mail, which rattled eerily as he walked.

  He was armed with a long, bearded axe, a sword at his waist and a seax, slung over his groin. He also had a large round linden-wood shield bound with iron – but no helmet. They had quarrelled over the lack of proper head-protection. But Tor had insisted their enemies must see his terrifying face.

  The brightness of the amphitheatre, when they emerged from the dark tunnel with a dozen bow-wielding Red Cloaks at their back, was almost overwhelming; as was the sudden wave of noise from the packed benches that rose up on all sides. Henk had been right: this trial by combat was quite the event. Bjarki stared around, gawping at the packed citizenry, stacked tier after tier – there must be tens of thousands of people here, he thought, and then rejected the idea. No settlement, even a Frankish city, could boast such a vast number of inhabitants. But the noise of the crowd was like the noise of a stormy sea, rumbling, growling, crashing down on him in wave after wave.

  Thousands of folk, anyway. And all seemed to be screaming the same thing: ‘Beast-man! Beast-man!’ Bjarki realised that they were shouting for him. Calling him a monster. That he wasn’t even human in their eyes.

  Tor, standing beside him – a slight, drab figure – was ignored by the crowd. It was the fabled ‘beast-man’ they had come to see: the wizard-warrior of the North who could transform himself into a terrifying creature, a killer impervious to pain. Bjarki desperately wanted to piss; his mouth was dry as ashes. He was terrified. He wanted to scream: ‘I can’t do it! Please, I cannot. I’m an ordinary man just like you. This paint and fakery is not me.’

  Tor nudged him in the ribs; she said something but it was impossible to hear over the screams and roars of the huge crowd. She jerked her head at the bank of seats in the middle of the amphitheatre. Bjarki looked at a large box draped in thick, golden cloth, at the figure seated in the throne there…

  It was the man he had thought was the cook Humboldt.

  Tor had been right, as usual. The king was better dressed this bright autumn morning, in long purple robes embroidered at the hem and neck with golden stitching, a golden crown encasing his brow. Behind him stood Lord Grimoald, the King’s Shield, and the Bishop of Aachen, Lord Paulinus.

  Karolus was leaning forward to say something to his wife, Hildegard, who was seated on a golden bench in front of his with her brother. She was twisting her long neck around to hear him; smiling, excited. Duke Gerold merely looked bored. He began to clean his fingernails with a small knife.

  Bjarki felt a presence at his side and turned his outrageously decorated head to see Father Livinus beside him: the priest was in his colourful war garb once more, a mantle of gold and blue and scarlet and white, and close up, Bjarki could see symbols of his Christian faith inscribed on the rich cloth – crosses, and fish and the arrangement of rune-like letters. Livinus was holding up his two arms, as if in triumph, receiving the tumultuous accolade of the crowds in the packed stands. In one hand, he held a large spiked mace. The crowd was chanting for him now: ‘Liv-in-us… Liv-in-us!’ On and on. An accolade for something, but what, Bjarki wondered. The priest had done nothing special. What had he achieved to deserve such public acclaim? Then it struck him: the accolade was for capturing these half-human barbarians.

  Tor had also seen the triumphant gesture from the priest. She scowled.

  Now Father Livinus was ushering the pair of them towards the centre of the arena and under the box containing the royal family. There was a row of fifty Red Cloaks, armed with spears and bows, standing at the edge of the nearest seats. Bjarki looked up into the box. He felt ridiculous with his white and red painted face and blood-and-honey clumped hair. Like an entertainer, a mountebank at a travelling market who will dance to amuse the crowds.

  Livinus shouted up: ‘Hail, great king! Hail, Lord of the Franks! Hail, Karolus! I bring before you a wizard of the North – a savage creature of the wilderness. Behold the beast-man of Saxony and his witch-servant of that same benighted land. They have been accused of the murder of several of your loyal servants at a place called Thursby in my county of Westphalia.’

  Karolus, the supreme ruler of Francia, rose to his feet.

  ‘We meet again, my friend,’ he called out, smiling down at Bjarki. ‘You have been accused of a terrible crime and the court has deemed that you must prove your guilt or innocence on the field of battle. God Almighty will be your judge – he will spare you or punish you according to His will. Are you ready to show us your skill and prowess in this place of judgement?’

  ‘I thought you were a cook,’ mumbled Bjarki, too quietly to be heard.

  Father Livinus gave him a shove on the arm. ‘Answer the king!’

  Bjarki looked down at his feet. Tor muttered: ‘Do we have a choice?’

  ‘They are ready, great king,’ the priest boomed. ‘They put their trust and faith in Almighty God and accept the wise decision of the royal court.’

  ‘Before you hazard your lives,’ said the king, ‘do you choose to save your souls? Will you renounce all superstition and embrace the Heavenly Father, the Holy Ghost and His only Son, Jesus Christ, as your Saviour?’

  Bjarki shrugged. Tor hawked and spat on the sand.

  ‘You need only say a few words to Father Livinus,’ the king called down, ‘and you will be saved. Say only: “I renounce sin and all the works of the Devil. I turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as my Lord and my Saviour”.’

  Bjarki said nothing.

  But Tor stepped forward: ‘I piss on your god, O King. I piss on his only son and his false promise of eternal life. Tomorrow, Bjarki Bloodhand and I, Torfinna Hildarsdottir, will be feasting in the Hall of the Slain. Today, we will show you how folk of the North can fight – and how we can die.’

  ‘Brave words,’ said the king, sitting down. ‘We shall see if your actions match them.’ He gave a flourish with his right hand. ‘Let it begin!’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Blood on the sand

  A trumpet sounded, and then a dozen more, a bold and joyful fanfare. At the far end of the amphitheatre an enormous iron-studded double gate swung slowly open. And Tor could see a dark mass of people emerging through it.

  Father Livinus left them, walking towards the line of Red Cloaks, which parted immediately, and a little door opened in the wall of the arena. The priest disappeared through it and, a few moments later, he reappeared in the royal box and took up his station just behind the king’s left shoulder.

  Tor closed her eyes, and breathed a silent prayer to all the gods and spirits: grant me vengeance, ancient ones. For a brief instant, she imagined being loose in that absurd gold-swathed box, armed as she was and free to kill and maim as ma
ny as she could before the Red Cloaks put her down.

  Then she dismissed this fantasy and turned her attention to the Avars.

  They were slight, sun-darkened men in loose dun-coloured clothes. They wore no armour but for spiked steel helms over their dark, bearded faces, and carried small round metal shields, also spiked in the centre. Each man had a long, slim, curved sword and a curved dagger stuffed into his leather belt.

  There seemed at first glance to be a great deal more than forty of them, and then she realised there were twice that number of Red Cloaks behind the Avars, urging them into the amphitheatre at the points of their spears.

  The Avars spilled out into the centre of the amphitheatre, spreading out into a loose semi-circle, every man staring at Bjarki and Tor. The gate closed behind them; the Red Cloaks retreated and took their places against the wall.

  ‘Ready?’ she said to Bjarki, who nodded. He looked terrified under his odd white paste, ringed eyes huge with fear. ‘Remember what we agreed?’

  Bjarki said: ‘We will show them who we are. And what we are!’

  ‘Can you feel your gandr close by?’

  ‘No, nothing. Even if I could summon it – look how many they are. It is over. This is the end for us, Tor; and I just want to say thank you for—’

  ‘Oh shut up, you soppy oaf. Let’s go and make a start on killing them.’

  They began to crunch across the hard-packed sand of the amphitheatre towards the waiting enemy. Bjarki gripped his bearded axe handle tight, he thought about the mad plan Tor and he had come up with the night before.

  Tor walked behind Bjarki, to his left, holding the spear casually over her shoulder, trying to stay out of the line of sight of the Avars in Bjarki’s massive shadow. The sun was to her right, low over the southern side of the stands. It was two hours before noon, she thought. A day of pure blue skies.

  They stopped, facing a wall of Avars. One man in the centre of the line, a black-bearded ogre, very thick in the chest although of short stature, was gently swishing his curved sword to and fro in the air in front of him. He was a killer, Tor knew it, a leader of men. He’d be the first to taste her spear.

  ‘Work your way towards the southern part of the arena,’ she muttered to Bjarki. ‘Circle to your right. Keep the low sun in their eyes, if you can.’

  There was another peal of trumpets, and suddenly there were Red Cloaks running everywhere; hundreds of them, and dozens of big men in scale-mail with black cloaks, too; the Scholares, Karolus’s royal bodyguard. They formed a thick line of bristling spears between Bjarki and Tor and the mass of the now very surprised-looking Avar warriors.

  They heard Father Livinus’s voice, well aided by some sort of brassy speaking trumpet, echoing out over the hot dry circle of the amphitheatre.

  ‘The king declares this contest to be manifestly unfair. The numbers are grossly unequal,’ Father Livinus boomed. ‘His Majesty has decreed the two heathen sorcerers shall face only ten of the Avar – the best ten. The two fighters from the North will fight only the last ten Avar standing. Let the battle to determine which ten Avar men shall have that honour begin now!’

  ‘That will set the cat among the starlings,’ said Tor.

  The crowd around the edge of the amphitheatre was cheering, some were laughing, and calling out that the king was a man of wisdom and wit, a few were even throwing nut shells and pieces of half-eaten fruit down on the heads of the Avars to taunt the eastern warriors, who were now completely surrounded by hundreds of Frankish troops with lowered spears.

  The Avars appeared bewildered by this turn of events. Bjarki wondered if they had understood the meaning of the priest’s booming words. They were, after all, even more alien in this strange city than the two fighters from the Groves of Eresburg. They came from lands far to the east. Their language was utterly different to the tongues that Bjarki, Tor, Livinus and the king spoke.

  But some of the Avars had understood the message.

  Bjarki saw a man inside the ring of Red Cloaks pull a dagger from its sheath and ram it into the belly of the man standing next to him. Blood blossomed on the victim’s loose brown tunic; he stared uncomprehendingly at his comrade and sank to his knees, his life spilling and spurting on the sand.

  His murderer was immediately cut down from behind by another man’s sword, which severed his head from his neck. In an instant, it was mayhem inside the circle of Red Cloak spearmen. The Avars fell upon each other with cries in their strange language and the clash of steel. A few moments later, and half of the Avars were down, and desperate men were duelling everywhere inside the ring, slashing and hacking at their friends in a frenzy.

  After the initial cull of the unsuspecting, the last remaining men fought with grim determination, cut and riposte, blades clanging on steel shields, the screams of the wounded, and stench of opened bowels filling the air.

  It was done inside a hundred heartbeats. The last few remaining men, eleven of them by Bjarki’s swift count, stopped fighting, panting, gore-spattered… A man in the centre of the fallen, who was wounded in three or four places and swaying, but still on his feet, looked about him desperately. Three of his comrades advanced on him at the same time. The swords arced down on him; an arm was lopped. He toppled to the sand.

  There were ten Avars still standing. Many of them wounded. The crowd was cheering wildly. Sweets and flowers were raining down all over the sand. The trumpets sounded once more: a recall to barracks. The Frankish troops formed a line and trotted away. Bjarki stared in disbelief at the carnage before him, the pathetic humps of broken men lying on the sand, some still gasping, moaning, bleeding away the last moments of their lives.

  ‘Now it’s our turn,’ said Tor, giving him a little push. ‘Go, oaf, go.’

  Bjarki roared. A mighty battle call to shake the branches of the One Tree itself. He charged at the nearest Avar. The man was half-turned away and wiping his bloody sword on the brown cloak of one of his fallen comrades when Bjarki’s axe smashed into his shoulder, slicing through flesh and bone and plunging deep into his chest.

  Tor, right behind him, half-obscured by his bulk, leapt out and skewered another Avar who was staring in shock at the bellowing apparition with dead, white face, weird spiked hair, and mad red-and-black ringed glaring eyes.

  Bjarki was already terrifying the next fellow, exchanging cuts of axe and sword, the blades battering at each other’s shields. Tor was a darting demon in leather, killing with a swift miraculous skill, leaping out from Bjarki’s shadow, slicing with the spear, cutting tendons, dropping Avars here, there, and reversing the pole and punching the spear down into them when they were sprawling on the sand. Meanwhile, Bjarki roared and stamped and battered at the lightly built easterners with his superior weight and strength. The much-practised blows and combinations of the Fyr Skola flowed naturally through Bjarki’s powerful limbs: he smashed opponents out of his path with great sweeps of the axe; he hooked the bearded blade over the small Avar shields, pulling his opponents forward to be met with a terrible bone-crunching punch from the steel boss of his own wooden shield.

  He howled and gibbered like a madman, and capered crazily when he remembered to, stepping in between the corpses of the fallen as he danced, and roared, Tor’s cunning words of the night before still echoing in his ears: ‘You distract them, Bjarki, I’ll be killing. Draw their eye; I’ll do the rest.’

  Tor killed like a striking serpent: precise, swift, a flickering steel blade sheathed in glistening red. When her spearhead eventually became trapped between the bones of one Avar warrior’s spine, she abandoned it in the body, whipping out her short sword and seax and laying about her with renewed fury. So the slaughter continued. Bjarki found he was humming as he bellowed and stamped and smashed at the swarming enemy, hacking with his long axe, and his heavy shield doing equal damage to his foes. Yet while his hot blood was definitely singing in his veins with the commonplace joy of combat. He could not sense the dark, inhuman presence that he craved.

  H
e took several crunching blows to his well-armoured arms, legs and back, and felt them like kicks from an angry horse, one man spiked him with his shield point, but none of them managed to pierce his iron-link mail.

  And still his gandr did not come.

  Until, quite abruptly, it was all over. Tor dispatched the last wounded Avar with a lightning lunge to the throat, the point of her short sword hacking through one side of the man’s neck in a horrible shower of red.

  The battle was done.

  The noises from the crowd were ear splitting. Every man, woman and child in the amphitheatre, it seemed, was on his or her feet, roaring their joy and approval at the slaughter. Flowers floated down on them from all sides as the Franks of Aachen showed their appreciation for the spectacle, just as their old Roman ancestors had in the days of the barbarians and beast hunts.

  The cry of, ‘Beast-man, Beast-man,’ sprang up once again and this time Bjarki did not find it nearly so demeaning. It was a hymn to his victory. To the victory he and Tor had won. He dropped his battered shield and stood swaying, head drooping, leaning on his long gore-clotted axe, white paste mingled with sweat dripping on the sand, his body trembling uncontrollably.

  Three paces away Tor sank to her knees, panting. She had a bad cut along her jaw line, and fresh blood dribbled from the point of her chin on to the ground. But otherwise she seemed more or less unharmed.

  They looked over at each other and grinned.

  * * *

  They were relieved of their weapons and armour and immediately ushered by the Red Cloaks into a horse-drawn wagon, with Father Livinus on the bench up front, and a squad of guards all around, and transported the short ride southwest along a fine main road to the sprawling palace complex.

  The Red Cloaks helped them to dismount and Bjarki looked around at the fine buildings of pale stone and red tiles – some of which were still in the process of being constructed. He could see the long council hall in all its magnificent bulk away to his right, and the tall square tower at the end, and all the other buildings of the palace, connected by red-roofed galleries. Slaves, soldiers and tonsured clergy bustled here and there. A light fog of dust gathered over the half-built areas of the palace and the music of workmen’s hammers tinked in the air. They were conducted into a low square building, with colonnades on all sides and a shallow, open-air tank of gently steaming water the size of a small lake in the centre of the space.