The Last Berserker

by Angus Donald

  ‘Hildar Torfinnsson hurled himself into the shield wall, three men thick, and wrought bloody destruction with his long axe and with his shield. He slew the jarls, and he scattered the hersirs, he smashed open the wall, and fought all the way to the king himself. And there, after a bloodbath the likes of which had never been seen before, the lone Rekkr slew King Anders and every man in his personal bodyguard, with his axe and seax he ripped their ranks apart… and Harald Fox-Beard, King of Svearland, kept his word to his liegeman. He followed Hildar Torfinnsson with all his men, charging in the footsteps of the Fire Born’s one-man assault upon the far superior foe.

  ‘And when Hildar broke open their wall and killed the king, Harald’s whole army – or what was left of it – poured through the gap the Rekkr had made and streamed down the mountainside into the forests of Varmland. And the army of the Vestfold, shattered, leaderless, and demoralised by this disaster, could not follow after them, and so they allowed their enemies to escape.

  ‘And that, my friends, was how Hildar Torfinnsson saved Harald, King of Svearland, from defeat in the mountains and almost certain death.’

  Valtyr stopped talking. And a silence fell over the little camp.

  ‘That is a good story, old man,’ said Tor sleepily. ‘I shall allow you to keep your one remaining eye.’

  ‘You are generosity made flesh, girl,’ said Valtyr.

  ‘Do you think it’s true?’ said Bjarki. ‘That just one man could break a well-formed shield wall like that? Sounds like a fanciful story for children.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Valtyr. ‘I know for sure that it is true.’

  ‘How can you be so certain?’ said Bjarki.

  ‘I know because I was there. I was a young spearman in the army of Harald Fox-Beard on the ill-fated Vestfold raid.’ He put a finger to his empty socket. ‘I left my right eye on the field at Blundfjell. But I made it home to Svearland nonetheless. And I have Hildar Torfinnsson to thank for my deliverance.’

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Return to the Groves

  They left the road the next day and plunged into the First Forest, heading roughly south and west. They released the horses, slapping their rumps to send them cantering away, and packed all their belongings into their back-sacks. There was not much food left, and beside their weapons and spare clothing, they did not have all that much to carry except for Tor’s mysterious package. Valtyr claimed that he was leading them on a well-known path through the tangled trees, but to both Bjarki and Tor it seemed as if they were struggling through virgin woodland, almost as thick as the snowy wastelands they had negotiated with such difficulty north of Regensburg.

  Bjarki took the lead, hacking at the undergrowth with his axe, trying to locate this path that Valtyr insisted existed. But when he complained that he could see no trace of it, the old man answered just as vaguely as he had last time he had been questioned about the exact routes, and times and distances of travel through these primeval woodlands.

  ‘The First Forest is a magical place, Bjarki,’ Valtyr said. ‘No journey through this place is ever the same twice. The old trees are alive, for they contain the ancient spirits. So go easy with that great big axe, will you?’

  ‘I can’t walk through wood,’ snapped Bjarki. ‘I must cut a path.’

  ‘Think of the trees as the hairs growing on the Middle-Realm’s beard,’ Valtyr said. ‘Your axe is a razor. So take the proper care when you cut.’

  When they camped for the night, Valtyr refused to let them have a fire yet Bjarki made no complaint. He was regretting his former ill humour. In fact, if was rather pleasurable to be reliving their previous journey in the First Forest together. ‘I wonder if we will meet another bear,’ said Bjarki.

  ‘I haven’t got over the one near Eggeldorf,’ said Tor. ‘And speaking of that monster, I have something for you, Bjarki. I have been trying to find the right moment to give it to you. I guess this is as good a time as any other.’

  Tor rummaged in her back-sack, and pulled out her package. She untied the leather thongs that held it all together, and shook out the contents. It was a vast bearskin cloak, very thick and black as midnight.

  Garm gave a little snuffle and waddled towards it; its scent striking a powerful chord in his memory.

  ‘It’s a gift,’ said Tor. ‘For you. To celebrate you becoming a Rekkr.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bjarki. ‘Oh… it is… magnificent. But how did you…?’

  ‘I worked on it while we travelled through the snow, while you were asleep, scraping the fat off the skin and rubbing in salt and oil. I had some help from a tanner in Brenna and, well, that’s not important. You like it?’

  Bjarki, who had never been given such a splendid gift, was rendered speechless. He opened up his massive arms and enfolded Tor in a giant hug.

  They held each other for a long, long time, feeling the warmth and comfort of each other’s bodies. Bjarki found he was weeping with joy.

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ said Valtyr. He seemed oddly disturbed by this physical show of their affection for each other. ‘Put her down, Bjarki.’

  ‘Try it on,’ said Tor, sniffing too, and Bjarki draped the heavy fur around his broad shoulders and clasped it. The cloak fell exactly to the right length, the hem just brushing the forest floor. Garm sniffed the edge of the fur and began making happy squeaking noises. ‘I will sleep warm and dry tonight,’ said Bjarki, ‘and I believe Garm will be curling up with me, too.’

  * * *

  The first thing they sensed that told them something was wrong was the smell of smoke. It was faint but persistent. They all looked at each other in alarm. No one made campfires in the First Forest, no one – and the smell was too pervasive for a small cooking blaze anyway.

  ‘Hurry,’ snapped Valtyr, his vague, old-man pose entirely gone.

  They rushed through the trees, the low branches seeming to grab angrily at them as they pushed through. Valtyr led, moving surprisingly fast, dodging under branches, sliding round trunks, and Bjarki and Tor, who was carrying Garm, had a good deal of difficulty in keeping up with him.

  They came out on the bald ridge to the north of the valley of the Groves and stopped dead, utterly appalled.

  The Groves of Eresburg had been destroyed. Where there had been a high, island-like oasis of bright green sticking up in the centre of the river valley there was now a blackened mash of mud and broken timber. The One Tree, the mightiest of oaks, the fabled Irminsul, was a massive twisted charcoal skeleton. A haze of smoke hung over the whole valley. Not one of the Lodges was still standing, nor any of the other buildings atop the stronghold. The Thing House, the largest building on Eresburg, was a rectangle of ash.

  And the destruction was recent. The One Tree was still smouldering, wisps of smoke rising into the clear air from its tortured limbs. And there were flocks of ravens circling the incinerated settlement, where Bjarki could just make out the tiny, scattered bodies of his folk, his friends.

  ‘Yesterday,’ said Tor. ‘The fires were raging yesterday, or possibly the night before that. They took their time with it; set them all cunningly, against every wooden wall, to be thorough. If we had only been a little faster on the journey, if we had not dawdled, we could have—’

  ‘We would have been slaughtered with the rest of them,’ said Valtyr.

  ‘Who could have done this?’ Bjarki’s brain was having difficulty encompassing the scale of this disaster. ‘The Irminsul, the Groves…’

  ‘We know who did this,’ said Valtyr, and he looked hard at Bjarki.

  They went slowly, blades at the ready, Valtyr leading the way down the steep path to the valley bottom. Bjarki found he was weeping again, and trembling a little, but he was also filled with a pure, cold rage. And one ice-hard word was bouncing around inside his head: vengeance.

  They found the place where the main battle had been fought down in the valley. It was a little to the west of the heights of the Groves on the northern side of the river. Some sort of shield wall h
ad been formed, they could tell by the fall of the bodies, and then swiftly broken, with heavy cavalry triumphant by the look of the hoof-torn ground – many hundreds of cabellarii. The defenders had battled on individually until they all fell.

  He could imagine the thick knots of Frankish horsemen surrounding each Rekkr or Barda, swamping them with their superior numbers. There were bodies everywhere, even in the shallows of the river, and Bjarki found his eyes misting with tears again as he saw face after torn face that he knew so well. He sensed a sudden movement and turned quickly but it was only Valtyr falling suddenly to his knees, and picking up a slight, limp corpse and crushing it to his breast. It was Skymir the Mikelgothi.

  Here was Angantyr, lying in a lake of blood. He had very nearly been cut into pieces and it was clear that the Father of the Bear Lodge had fought to the last like a true Rekkr. He had been pierced deeply in both thighs, and had lost one hand and was wounded deeply many times through his bare torso. The lower half of his face was entirely missing, yet Bjarki was still able to recognise him. The Bear triangle between his brows was untouched.

  It suddenly occurred to him that there was no sign of his enemies. The scores of Frankish troops Angantyr had fought against, the Red Cloaks, or the heavily armoured Scholares or whoever it had been who ended his life; they were nowhere to be seen. Neither were there any wounded. All the Grove people were stone dead, throats opened, finished off by their enemies.

  Bjarki lifted his eyes from the churned-up ground and the puddles of gore and saw a huge mound of freshly dug earth over by the tree line.

  The Christians had buried their own, it seemed, but ignored the corpses of their foes. Almost two-thirds of the membership of the Groves was lying here, scattered, dismembered, bloody, cold and still. Bjarki saw Helga, or rather just her sightless severed head: she had been Tor’s Elder Sister before becoming Rekkr, and had treated Tor indifferently, he remembered. She was nobody’s sister now. A few paces later he came across Hymir, the Bear Lodge master-at-arms, and endured a fresh shaft of agony. He remembered the kindly man’s backhanded compliment that had pleased him so much: ‘Just do the simple routine that I teach, little bear, don’t go showing off.’

  He had to cuff his hot eyes clear at that moment. And there were more corpses that he knew: Sif, another of the Bear Lodge’s Rekkar, a woman with a lusty appetite for young warriors; Edmund the Angelcynn, another brave comrade; Floki the White, one of the senior Barda; Little Sven Half-Finger, a Bear Lodge servant, a clumsy little fellow; and many more whose names he could not recall.

  He found himself standing next to Valtyr.

  ‘We should bury them,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Valtyr, ‘we have not the time. There are more than seventy dead here and Tor says more are lying up on the summit of the Groves; Lodge servants and gothi, those who chose not to fight. Just as dead. We must bear the news to Theodoric, tell them what has befallen the Fyr Skola.’

  ‘We can’t just leave them here, lying out like this—’

  ‘No!’ There was steel in Valtyr’s voice. ‘The only woman I ever loved is lying over there, cold as contempt. Do you think I would leave her if this were not far more important? We must go to Theodoric now.’

  ‘Hey, hey, help me…’ a distant voice was shouting, and Bjarki turned to look at the tree line. A gaunt figure was emerging from the wall of green.

  ‘Is that… no, is it? Can that really be old Bjarki Bloodhand?’

  The figure came closer, running a little in his eagerness, and Bjarki saw that it was Gunnar, the boy who had been his Elder Brother and then his good friend, and that one side of his face was crusted black with dried blood.

  * * *

  They got the tale from Gunnar as they hurried north through the First Forest. Two days ago a massive Frankish force had appeared, coming from the west along the river, filling the little valley with their vast numbers – a thousand Red Cloaks, five hundred Green Cloaks and about two hundred mounted Scholares, that’s what Angantyr had estimated when they mustered for battle. The Fyr Skola had fewer than a hundred shields. And nine Rekkar.

  ‘We couldn’t work out how they had discovered us,’ Gunnar said. ‘For generations the location of the Groves has been a closely held secret – you remember that solemn oath we all had to swear, Bjarki, under the Irminsul?’

  There was an awkward silence. Nobody answered him.

  ‘Well, however they did it, they found us, and came in overwhelming force. We made our battle line down in the valley, two-men thick, Rekkar in the centre and on the wings. The Mikelgothi said we should remain on the summit of the Groves, and fight behind the palisade, but Angantyr said they would be able to scale the cliffs and come at us from all sides. And anyway, we were seeking to keep the fighting far away from the One Tree, so we came down to the valley and made our thin line across it, barring their path.

  ‘We made our shield wall there and we all sang the “Death Song of Tiw”, that miserable old dirge – I am a Barda now, Bjarki, did I tell you? They finally allowed me to join the ranks. Not that I really wanted to. I’d rather have been up in the compound with the servants and the gothi than standing in that feeble line in the valley, quaking with fear, warm piss dribbling down my legs, waiting for those massed Frankish horsemen to charge into us.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have been any safer in the compound,’ said Tor.

  ‘No, I suppose not. Some folk retreated up there after the first Frankish assault, those who survived it. And the Green Cloaks – those are their mountain troops – came scrambling up the cliffs, on all sides, just as Angantyr predicted. He was dead by then, of course… And I saw them torch the Groves afterwards – hundreds of Red Cloaks with oil and bundles of faggots. They carried away the contents of the treasury first in carts, all that gold and silver in Odin’s shrine beside the Thing House, all gone. Well, nothing could have survived that fire, anyway. And if I’d been up there—’

  ‘How did you escape with your life, Gunnar?’ said Bjarki. ‘No wait, shush, absolute quiet now.’

  They were in the deep, gloomy forest, but something was moving up ahead. Bjarki could hear the crackle of a heavy body moving through the undergrowth. He drew his sword; Tor, beside him, had an axe in her hand.

  Whatever it was, it was approaching them. And very close now. Bjarki found that he was humming, softly, deep in his throat. A long hairy snout appeared through a tangle of brush at knee height, below a pair of red piggy eyes. It stared at them for a moment then crashed away noisily heading west.

  ‘It’s just a boar,’ said Valtyr. ‘It’s just a wild pig looking for food.’

  They walked on a little in silence. ‘Carry on, Gunnar,’ said Bjarki. ‘How did you manage to escape them?’

  ‘They had archers,’ the Barda said, ‘and they filled the sky with their arrows. We lost about a third of our strength before they got within a sword’s length of our shield wall. Then the heavy horsemen charged home. They cut through us like a knife through wet curds. The Rekkar were all humming, and chanting, and they fought like heroes, as you would expect. Slaying left and right. But the Franks cut them to pieces in the end; then their infantry came in, all marching together, fifty men in each company. Hundreds of them, row upon row, not like men at all. It was… horrible.’

  ‘You haven’t answered the question,’ said Tor sternly. ‘How did you get away when all the rest of our people died?’

  For a moment, Gunnar said nothing.

  ‘Gunnar?’ said Bjarki.

  ‘All right, all right. I ran – there, are you happy now? I played the coward. I got knocked down by a horseman; took a nasty whack on the head. My helmet split and I had blood in my eyes. By then, the line was broken, and our people were fighting in ones and twos, some running back up to the Groves, Franks riding everywhere slaughtering the Barda, Red Cloaks coming up in vast numbers… and I ran. I sprinted for the trees at the edge of the valley and hid there whimpering like a craven till you came today.’

  There
was a shocked silence.

  ‘Not all men are made to be warriors,’ said Valtyr finally. But even he seemed a little disappointed. The other two could find nothing at all to say.

  * * *

  Two days later, Bjarki was peering out from behind an oak, looking at a cunei of Red Cloaks marching across his line of sight. He had seen dozens more companies – each fifty men strong – passing that morning, heading northeast. The flat Saxon countryside beyond the forest, traditionally the territory of the horse-breeding Angrian tribe, was crawling with them.

  ‘It’s a full-strength invasion,’ said Valtyr at Bjarki’s elbow. ‘They have come north to end Theodoric’s rule for good. To destroy the North.’

  ‘How can we get past them?’ said Tor. ‘Can’t you summon up a magic mist to hide us in? Or make us invisible?’

  ‘I could turn us all into birds? We could fly over their heads and shit all over them, if you like,’ said Valtyr.

  ‘Could you really do that?’ said Tor.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Valtyr. ‘Don’t be idiotic. How many times must I tell you, I’m neither wizard, nor sorcerer, I’m not even much of a conjuror.’

  ‘But, surely, as a Guardian of the North—’

  ‘Listen to me, Tor, as a Guardian I gather information and pass it on to those who can best use it in defence of our folk and our lands. That is what I do – all I do. I gather news, pass messages, sometimes do a little persuading and whispering in the right ears. And right now we must find a way to get to Theodoric quickly and tell him the Groves have been destroyed.’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ said Tor. ‘The Fyr Skola will still be a pile of dead folk and damp ashes in a week’s time – or even next month.’