The Last Berserker

by Angus Donald

  ‘My son,’ he growled. ‘My Fire Born son…’

  Bjarki was holding on to the real world now only by his fingertips.

  ‘There is our enemy, Father. Karolus’s man. The duke. There. Over there. Come with me, Father! Come – let’s cut the head off the snake!’

  Hildar grinned horribly. He threw away his chewed shield and climbed on the top of the log wall. Bjarki joined him, scrambling up on to the perilous pine summit of the defences. The young Rekkr threw back his head and bellowed at the sky. Then he drew his seax; holding his long bloody sword in the other hand. Humming, grinning, laughing… Bjarki felt suddenly freezing cold; he heard the sound of rushing water in his ears like the noise of a waterfall. He felt his gandr huge, black and triumphant, swelling inside his chest, he felt his heart engorge with power, he could feel blood pounding hot in his veins; he felt light, buoyant, stronger than ever before…

  Tor yelled. ‘What are you doing, oaf! Don’t be an idiot.’

  Bjarki jumped.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The life of just one man

  Tor watched in disbelief as Bjarki, grinning, blood-covered, a blade in each hand, leapt off the wall and crashed into the mass of Red Cloaks below.

  So she did the only thing she could. She jammed the butt of her spear against the floor of the walkway and vaulted over the pine barrier after him.

  A mound of dead and wounded Red Cloaks below broke her fall as softly as a pile of brushwood, and she staggered upright, stepping hard in the middle of a crying young man’s gory open belly, but still gripping her spear.

  Bjarki was in a space all his own, blades slicing, blood spattering, and he was surging forward as he killed, ever forward, heading for the channel.

  She heard a savage yell behind her and Hildar crashed down, landing partially on an empty ladder, snapping it to kindling but not seeming to notice. Hildar rocketed to his feet, kicking bits of broken wood away from his greaves, and hacked the head from a terrified Red Cloak with his axe.

  He plunged into the fray after Bjarki. Tor ran after her father, yet oddly she faced no resistance – the Franks were utterly bewildered by this sudden apparition: two gore-wet madmen and a slip of a girl suddenly thumping down among them. Not a man lifted his hand against her – at first.

  Then an officer bellowed, ‘Kill that bitch! Kill her right now!’ and Tor made two savage cuts with the spear, ripping one man’s face wide open and causing another Red Cloak to leap back and stumble over his own feet.

  The way in front of her was now open.

  She ran after her brother and her father, following their bloody trail. There was a drawbridge before her now, too. She saw Bjarki, howling with joyful rage, hacking his way through the scatter of frightened blue-cloaked men guarding the big wooden structure – the enemy wisely fleeing before him and his two swinging blades. A moment later, in the body-filled wake of the charging Rekkar, Tor found herself clumping alone across the deserted wooden planks and simply walking over to the enemy’s side.

  For Tor, everything had a dream-like quality, the armed men around her, her Frankish foes, stared at her in blank amazement, stunned by this unexpected turn of events. Hildar and Bjarki were two dozen paces ahead, surging onwards, almost shoulder to shoulder, cutting and killing, carving a gory channel through the knots of men. Slicing and stamping; battering and barging a way through the shifting disorganised crowd of enemies.

  The Red Cloaks were distracted; not looking at her, nor even at the two blood-splashed madmen ploughing through their loose ranks. They were all now looking behind her, north, over the channel, at the carnage taking place on the slopes of the ramparts and before the gates of Hellingar.

  There was Duke Theodoric, in a Boar Lodge war costume, boar-skull helmet, pig-skin cloak and armour, screaming and slaying, butchering Red Cloaks left and right, and hundreds of screaming warriors of the North at his back. It was an astounding scene, like something out of a nightmare, and little wonder the enemy stared in fear. Theodoric was driving all before him, his mad charge down the slopes had cleared the enemy from the rampart.

  He was fighting in front of the central drawbridge now; she saw the gates of Hellingar suddenly thrown open and its thousand-strong garrison pour out to join Theodoric in the jostling bloodbath on the channel’s bank.

  The scattered sheaves of Franks around her, instead of surging forward to join the melee, were edging backwards, away from the horror.

  Those Red Cloaks on the north bank were pouring back across the drawbridges. Some were already running from the field, streaming south.

  But not all.

  Tor craned to look for her family, and saw them twenty yards away, demolishing a knot of foes. Now a squad of twenty Green Cloaks, the duke’s men, was forming up in a neat line, with spears and shields raised. The line charged straight towards Bjarki and Hildar and their pile of fresh victims, the Franks coming in at an angle to block their bloody path towards the knoll and the Duke of Swabia’s sea of Scholares.

  Bjarki saw them coming, turned abruptly and ran at them frothing and howling. At the last moment, he rolled under the reaching spears, and came up killing under their shield rims, slicing up into groins and bellies.

  Hildar saw his son’s actions – and immediately followed him. He smashed into the wavering Green Cloaks, shattering their line, tossing the Frankish soldiers here and there like leaves in a gale with wide sweeps of his axe. Hildar was giggling, or perhaps weeping, Tor saw, as he crunched his blade through the unarmoured side of a Green Cloak, plucked the blade free of his ribs and crushed another’s skull with an elegant backwards sweep.

  Tor ran in fast to join them. She lunged with the spear at the desperate officer who was trying to re-establish order in the line. She caught him in the inside thigh, ripping through muscles, tendons and veins, feeling the jar as her blade hit the femur, but dropping the man screaming and pissing blood.

  The Green Cloak line was completely disintegrated, and Bjarki and Hildar were well past them all now, with Tor running a few paces behind.

  Ahead of the running trio was a mass of black-clad Scholares on horseback, just in front of a little rise: the Duke of Swabia’s hillock. Tor caught a glimpse of the familiar petulant face, open-mouthed. The young duke himself. And that bastard Livinus, too. Scowling and pointing at them.

  Bjarki, a couple of strides ahead of Hildar, was leaping at a Black Cloak on a shiny black horse. He swarmed up, stabbing, grabbing and pulling the man out of the saddle. And she saw an enemy’s sword blow take him across the back, smashing into his iron mail. She saw him react, too. He spun round and lashed out with his own sword, slicing the top clean off the attacker’s helmeted head. Hildar was right in among the Scholares by then; she saw puffs of blood, and a wave-like ripple as her father chopped his way forward through the mass of black mounts and dark-garbed guards.

  A Black Cloak horseman was suddenly above her, lashing down with a shining sword at her helmeted head. She dodged the blow, twirled her spear and jammed the blade up and into his belly. He yelled out a curse and tried to turn the horse away. She stabbed him again, pushing him off the other side of the saddle with the shove of the spear. In an instant, she was in the saddle herself, the leather slippery with the man’s blood. The horse was terrified and tried to buck her loose. But she soothed and calmed it, pausing only to hurl her spear into a yelling Frank who rode at her swinging a mace.

  She turned the horse round and round, trying to get her bearings in all the chaos. Red Cloaks were streaming past her now, in full retreat.

  She saw that the slopes of the Dane-Work were empty of foes. They were all pulling back. They were beaten. She saw Theodoric in the middle of a bridge lifting both his arms in the eternal pose of triumph; his men around him, crossing the channel, chasing the beaten foe. A gory sword was in each of the Fire Born Saxon’s fists. He was chanting his victory to the heavens.

  She saw the Frankish arrow that struck him in the centre of his chest, just a momen
t later, and buried itself right up to the fletching. And a second shaft punching in right beside the first. And the catch of surprise on his face.

  She looked away. Looked south. There was Bjarki, with Hildar just behind him. They were only yards from the Duke now, who had drawn his own sword, a long, silver, glittering item. Bishop Livinus, she saw, was already urging his mount to the rear, out of the mad crush of Black Cloaks.

  But the Duke of Swabia wanted to fight.

  He slashed at Bjarki, shouting something ugly. Her Fire Born brother blocked the blow but, at the very same time, she saw a Black Cloak officer knee-to-knee with Gerold lean down from the saddle and plunge his sword deep into Bjarki’s side. The Rekkr ignored the wound, spun, and pulled the man down from the saddle, ripping out his throat with one sweep of his seax.

  The duke yelled again, his horse cavorting, and he smashed his blade down hard on to Bjarki’s steel-helmeted head. She saw her brother stumble under the blow and fall. But Hildar was swarming forward, he leapt in the air, his long axe licked out and crashed into the mailed chest of the duke, the keen blade driving right through the overlapping iron scale links.

  Gerold reeled back in the saddle, then lurched forward; then he slowly began to slip to one side, finally sliding off his mount to vanish in the crush.

  A huge moan of sorrow rose from the enemy ranks.

  The Black Cloaks surged forward. Hildar came staggering out of the pack, spinning away, swinging his long axe, scattering drops of ducal gore.

  A shrill Frankish cry rang out: ‘The duke is down. Gerold is hurt!’

  A Black Cloak on foot leapt on to Hildar’s back, arm round his throat, a dagger plunging down. Hildar plucked him off his back one-handed like a man removing a wet cloak and hurled the fellow to the ground with a crash.

  Tor spurred forward, sword in hand, batting swarming Scholares out of her path with her blade, still battle-mad yet gripped with sudden, piercing grief. There was no sign of Bjarki at all. He was trampled somewhere under the melee. Yet the tide of black-cloaked men was moving back, away from her, shifting swiftly like a shoal of dark fish, away, southwards. The still body of the duke, chest sheeted in glistening red, now held high above the rest – and men were shouting: ‘Back, back!’ and, ‘Carry our lord to safety!’

  They were all moving away, gathering momentum, bearing the body of their commander. Tor reined in; the frightened horse skittering under her.

  There on the ground, in a tangle of dead beasts, and the dozens of dead and wounded Black Cloaks, she could see Bjarki, half-sitting, half-lying on the muddy, bloody earth, his eyes half open. He was oozing from a dozen open wounds, but smiling faintly. And Hildar was there too, hunched and kneeling a yard or two away with his back to Tor, equally wet and filthy, his head hanging down, his face hidden by his thick curtain of greasy hair.

  A block of Red Cloaks, formed and under perfect discipline – a whole scara, she assumed – now trotted smartly past, and paid them no mind at all.

  Tor got down from the horse and walked unsteadily over to the only two living members of her family. She looked back at the Dane-Work and saw that her compatriots were visible everywhere; some were even across this side of the channel, too. Warriors of the North were strutting and bellowing, others were collapsed with exhaustion, or bent over their wounds. Some were just standing, leaning on their spears. Everywhere the Red Cloaks were retreating, some still intact as viable units, but most just fleeing across the field, their formations dissolved, a beaten rabble.

  She took a step nearer to her father, who turned his head to look at her. His skin was pale as milk under the spatter, but he was grinning like a Wolf.

  ‘I think,’ said Tor. ‘I think, Father, that we may have won this bout.’

  * * *

  When Bjarki awoke he was lying on his back on a straw pallet in a dim room. He recognised it immediately as the rear of Ash House. Somebody had rigged a curtain to separate him from the main part of the longhouse. Gunnar, with a neatly stitched cut below his cheekbone, was sitting on a stool near by, fiddling with the metal attachment at the head of a long spear.

  The hall was eerily silent. No voices, no murmur or clink of pottery.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ said Bjarki.

  Gunnar looked at him: ‘They’ve all gone to attend Duke Theodoric’s funeral pyre. The whole Dane-Work. But I thought I’d stay here with you.’

  Bjarki slowly lifted a trembling finger and indicated the spear in Gunnar’s hands. ‘You here to finish the job the Black Cloaks started?’

  ‘No, no. Tor has been giving me lessons with the spear these past three days, since… since the battle. She’s rather disappointed with my progress. But even if I were a spear-prodigy, I don’t believe that it is possible to kill you. You seem to be entirely indestructible. Eldar the gothi, who’s been looking at your wounds, is convinced there is some sort of sorcery at work.’

  ‘I don’t feel indestructible. I can barely move my limbs at all.’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Everything hurts. My legs, arms… everything. I’m very thirsty, too.’

  ‘I’ll go and get you some ale. There’s an open cask in the brew yard.’

  Gunnar got up; he leaned the spear against the wall by the curtain and went out into the hall.

  Bjarki lay there, hurting. He tried to lift up his head a few inches from the pillow, and found he could not.

  A shadow crossed his face. ‘Back already?’ he said, looking up at the figure standing over his body.

  It was Ivar Knuttson. He was smiling down at him.

  ‘I heard you got cut up pretty bad, Bjarki-boy,’ he said. ‘At Hel’s black gate, that’s what I heard. But you wouldn’t go through, would you?’

  Bjarki struggled to rise. He got his arm under him and pushed his torso up. Ivar’s foot lashed out and swept the arm away from under him, Bjarki thumped back down on the pallet. He had to bite his lip till the blood ran to prevent himself from screaming out in agony. Ivar gave a little snigger.

  ‘What… do… you… want?’ Bjarki managed.

  ‘Wanted to see you. Maybe give you a little push through that old black gate I mentioned before.’

  ‘I thought… we had… resolved our differences,’ panted Bjarki.

  ‘Is that what you thought? You humiliated me. You took from me the respect of the Fyr Skola. You think I didn’t hear all the little whispers, the sly jokes? Ivar’s not a real Rekkr. He’s just a sham. That was you, that was!’

  ‘You are a sham,’ Bjarki said. ‘But, truly, I don’t care what you claim to be. And I have never spoke ill of you since we came here to Hellingar.’

  Ivar shrugged. ‘I’m Father of the Boar Lodge – nobody can take that from me. But enough. Time for you to succumb tragically to your wounds.’

  Ivar Knuttson pulled his seax from its sheath at his belly.

  ‘I’d look behind you, if I were you.’

  ‘Really, Bjarki? Really? Has anyone ever fallen for that old chestnut?’

  ‘Honestly, have a look. There’s a warrior about to skewer you.’

  Ivar half-turned in time to see Gunnar jump forward and thrust the spear hard into his belly. The point sank in smoothly and burst bloodily out of the other side. Ivar screamed and collapsed beside Bjarki’s cot. He flapped and writhed, legs kicking, blood seeping from his open mouth.

  Eventually he stopped jerking; but his continued breath was a horrible wet laboured sound in the silent hall.

  ‘Told you,’ said Bjarki.

  ‘I am Fire Born,’ Ivar whispered. ‘I am. I can’t be slain by a nithing.’

  ‘You have not,’ said Bjarki, their faces were close now. He could see the flesh on Ivar’s cheeks fall; the eyes roll upwards, the last rattling breath come from his lungs. ‘You’ve just been killed by a Rekkr-slayer,’ he said.

  But, by then, Ivar Knuttson was no longer able to hear him.

  Bjarki looked up at Gunnar, who was standing, pale-faced, with his left fist crammed
into his open mouth. He looked horrified by his actions.

  ‘Good technique, Gunnar,’ said Bjarki. ‘You’re improving.’

  There was the sound of pounding boots, a clatter as a table or a bench was overturned, and the heavy curtain was wrenched wide open.

  Tor stood there, panting slightly, with a naked sword in her right hand. ‘I heard somebody scream,’ she said.

  Then she took in the scene: Gunnar deep in shock; Bjarki lying on the pallet; and Ivar Knuttson curled around the bloody spear that transfixed him.

  ‘You all right?’ she said to Bjarki.

  ‘I’ve had better days.’

  ‘Who did this – you, Gunnar?’ Tor kicked Ivar’s corpse.

  The pale young man managed a jerky nod.

  ‘Nice spear work,’ said Tor. ‘We’ll make a warrior of you yet.’

  ‘That’s what I said!’ Bjarki was grinning up at his sister.

  * * *

  ‘…nobody has seen him since the battle. He’s gone. And to be honest, I am a little worried.’ Tor was sitting on the stool by Bjarki’s bed. Gunnar was dragging Ivar’s corpse out of the sick room, grumbling, sighing and retching, displaying his disgust at having been made to do this messy task.

  ‘You kill ’em; you have to clean ’em up,’ said Tor. ‘That’s the rule.’

  ‘He will have gone north,’ said Bjarki. ‘That’s what he always does.’

  ‘Back to the Sami – to some witch-woman he has up there? I’d have thought he would stick around after the battle to enjoy some of the praise. He did just put his axe into the Duke of Swabia. With our help, of course.’

  ‘I don’t know. Did Hildar say anything before he went?’

  ‘Valtyr says he was muttering something to himself before he left,’ said Tor. ‘Two words. Over again. Something about money.’

  ‘Two words?’

  ‘He said “silver” and “cruel” again and again, like a chant. The Wolf gandr was still strong in him, I think. Or he’d gone completely Galálar.’