Berserker (Omnibus)

by Holdstock, Robert

  The huge and angry Bear that he could feel inside his skull had reared up and roared loudly; flashing white claws had clicked open and struck at the wriggling piglet.

  With his teeth, his soft milk teeth, he had bitten through the animal’s throat and felt the flood of warm juice; his soft nails had broken back on the pig’s belly, but with loud cries of ecstasy he had torn the guts from the creature with a sharp splinter of charred wood from the dead fire-pit.

  The Bear, satiated with the spill of blood, had receded into darkness and Niall, the younger son of the chief, Amalgaid mac Eochu, had collapsed into the gore and mud that he had created. He had sobbed when he had woken. In the dim light of his father’s house, his father had stared down at him, his blood-tempered dirk – bright silver – held across his chest in case some earth demon had possessed his son.

  Feradach, his hateful elder brother, had glared down at him, thick red hair falling across his eyes, but not thickly enough to hide the jealousy he felt for his father’s favourite son.

  ‘He’s possessed,’ Feradach had said. ‘Kill him.’

  ‘No,’ said his mother, stroking the wetness from his face, smearing lime into her hands and plastering down his damp hair. ‘It’s just a bad dream. His eyes are full of the fear of darkness. It was just a nightmare.’

  The shapes slipped away from him and the flickering light vanished, leaving him in darkness. Through the plastered wickerwork wall of the house Niall could hear the howling winter wind; rain slapped noisily against the running daub and the occasional icy splash of moisture fell upon him from where the thatch roof was ruffled and torn by the wind flowing between the mountains and the scattered skull islands, some miles off-shore in the great sea.

  Niall mac Amalgaid had never seen a bear, and yet he knew what the beast had been. He shook, as he lay beneath the thick and pungent skins, and had wondered at the strange possession.

  Cathabach ran into the house and dropped to his knees just inside the doorway. Amalgaid mac Eochu stood there, a tall and angry man, heavy of face, powerful of arm, his thickly muscled body wrapped around with a green linen robe. He held a torch before him and its yellow light fell full upon the cowering shape of the six year old, Niall, the Mad Bear. The boy, his face a mask of anger, of fury, looking far older than his tender age, stared at the frightened host around him.

  He looks just like a bear cub, thought Cathabach, rising to his feet, adjusting his loose blue robe where it had twisted about his shoulders during his frantic run down the mountain-side.

  Amalgaid mac Eochu turned to him. ‘Do something.’

  Cathabach approached the boy and dropped to his knees again, reaching out a hand to touch the lad’s face.

  Sharp teeth closed agonisingly on his fingers and Cathabach snatched back his hand, watching the dribbling blood and listening to Niall’s maniacal laughter. The boy stared at the Druid, his face distorted and twisted, his eyes narrowed, his blond hair (lime bleached) unkempt and uncombed. His thin body was naked, dripping with sweat; his boyish phallus was stiff and unnaturally dark; there were scratch marks down his belly and thighs, wounds inflicted by his own long, toughened nails.

  Normally he was such a pleasant looking boy, lean-faced and handsome, with sparkling green eyes that were full of warmth, full of friendship, even for the other boys of the village fort with whom he constantly battled in the ritual tests of approaching manhood.

  Now there was the look of demonic possession about him and Cathabach was afraid.

  A woman came running into the house, stood deferentially inside the doorway and stared around at the four small living cubicles, normally closed to her gaze, now open as the family of Amalgaid stared at the frightening scene in the dark room. Night was descending faster than normal as the dark storm clouds from Slieve Mor covered the sky with their own night’s veil.

  ‘A rider!’ shouted the woman, the fine edge of panic in her voice. ‘It looks like Gormgal mac Colcu, the Dubhfasog.’

  Amalgaid straightened and walked to the door of the house, stared out into the dusk where the wind blew hollow and loud. It carried the sound of a horse approaching, the regular beat of hooves on the wet turf, the snorting breath of the animal as its rider urged it to the warmth and security of the fort before night fell with its icy vengeance.

  Turning to gaze at Cathabach, Amalgaid said bitterly, ‘Do what you have to do, quickly … quickly …’

  Cathabach darted to his small holding in Amalgaid’s house and returned with his arms full of the ritual instruments of his trade; then he went outside, where the warriors were grouping and discussing the rider, and crossed the muddy ground to the low earth wall around the fort. He made straight for one of the several piles of stone that had been built as storage houses and extra defensive layers. He drew other objects from a niche in this fragmentary wall and within moments was ready to exorcise the low-world spirit from the boy.

  The rider, a frightening arrival if it should prove to be the Black Beard, was outside the pallisaded fort and demanding entry with loud voice and weighty boasts of sword-swinging prowess. The gate was open, in fact, but even Gormgal mae Colcu observed the old traditions. Until bidden inside by the dual blast of bronze horns he would not enter the stronghold.

  Swiftly Cathabach took up the severed head of Nath I, the great leader who had been defeated by Amalgaid in single combat (at the Ford of the Broken Harp) these ten years past; he held the shrivelled object across the boy’s cowering form.

  The sound of the horns was shrill and ugly, welcoming Gormgal Dubhfasog, as Cathabach began his incantation.

  ‘By the three strengths of the Erismen, strong arm, strong loin, strong life, I exorcise the dark demon from this son of Danu. In the name of the three strengths, and the warriors who carry the gilded swords in their name, of Brion, of Iuchar, of Iucharba, sons all of the great Danu, most high-breasted and fertile daughter of the Dagda, I exorcise the Bear from this high-born juvenile.’

  He pushed the wrinkled lips of the decaying skull (still dripping cedar oil) against the placid face of Niall mac Amalgaid and observed the boy push his tongue between the stinking teeth of the head, forcing the jaws apart so that the sudden stench of the rotten and acidifying flesh inside made Cathabach recoil, drawing the trophy back to his breast, touching the glazed eyes, covering them with their yellowed lids so they might not see the insulting gestures of the infant.

  Niall the Mad Bear laughed, but the demon was leaving him; the hysterical rage into which he had so recently plunged was gone, and now just the shadow remained.

  Cathabach placed the head back into its leather bag. A bronze amulet, carved in the image of the sun and powered with the soul of Eochu Mugmedon, the great ancestor of the Connachta, this he placed around the boy’s neck. Two gold torques he made the boy hold. The skull of a girl, sacrificed to the pleasure of Lug, he placed across Niall’s member. He spoke quickly, then, a scattering of spells and prayers, and soon the exorcism appeared to be completed.

  Within moments Niall was calm and normal and the tension in his muscles had subsided. The boy fell into a shallow sleep, his lips slack, his breathing irregular. Cathabach packed away his skulls and bones and metal tokens and crouched, staring at the boy.

  He was too old, this Druid, and too wise to think that the quietness had anything to do with his simple rituals. The spirit that possessed the son of the chief was a powerful force of the Dark Sky, a place where the gods were far less friendly and co-operative than the gods of Earth, and it would take more than an old filid’s exhortations to split god-spirit from human, demon from innocent mind.

  Staring at the peaceful form of Niall mac Amalgaid, Cathabach felt utterly and despondently helpless. He could not imagine from the boy’s history of activity where the possession had come from. It was as if Niall the Mad Bear, the Mad Hound, as if he had been born with the Bear inside his head.

  And such powerful possession needed to be dealt with by stronger practitioners of magic and medicine than Cat
habach who was, after all, just a simple westlands Druid, son of such a Druid, and part of a line of such simple priests stretching back into those times when in the eastern lands the very earth was being stirred by wiser, more fluent speakers of the ancient rituals.

  Already Cathabach had forgotten many of the words that his father, and the hidden and secret schools, had taught him. Already the ancient wisdom of the priesthood was being lost, and when Cathabach died there would be just the frail woman, Cuimne, to remember what he himself had remembered. Cathabach had never taken the opportunity to sire a follower, as was his right, to plant his seed in the young womb of a girl who was destined, from birth, to die by sacrifice as she entered full womanhood. Without such a son there was only Cuimne, who had listened to his speakings so many times that she had memorised them and could help him even now when his own memory failed.

  These Christians, he had often thought, could save our traditions, for they possessed a skill that Cathabach found essentially incomprehensible: they could transmit spoken words and thoughts into marks on parchment, and speak them back! It was vaguely obscene to the Druid, and in times past it would have been thought the ultimate crime to so record the Druidic secrets. Now, at times, Cathabach wished he was skilled in more than the pitifully inadequate ogam, bare marks on stone, so limited in what they could record.

  Perhaps – he thought at other times – it was as well that the Christians were so adamant in their refusal to write down anything connected with the gods that were not their own. The trouble with writing the old rituals down was that then the ancient knowledge became anybody’s, and in the wrong hands some of the gate-words, the spells that took a man beyond the mortal world of Earth and into the various kingdoms of the gods, could be destructive and abused.

  Cathabach rose and crept back to his small household cubicle, his imda, where he squatted and listened to the sounds of Gormgal’s arrival. Niall’s life is beyond my helping, he thought sadly. The boy, hidden from view in his own room, cried softly in his sleep, and was then silent.

  Although he always bragged that he fought and hunted naked but for his sword and spear, Gormgal mac Colcu invariably dressed in thick furs and padded jerkin and breeches. This gave him the appearance of a giant, standing head and shoulders taller than his half-brother, Amalgaid, the warlord of this Connacht fortress. Whereas it was still customary for these pure-blooded Gaels to bleach their hair with lime dug from pits in hostile country, four days’ ride to the north east, Gormgal chose to blacken his own hair with a tar product of certain burning rocks that were not mined in this country at all. He looked more Roman than Celtic, but his god-worshipping was in no doubt, and his hatred of the monkish invasion never questioned.

  As he dismounted from his seedy-looking roan mare, and straightened, grinning and bellowing about how much the fort stank, so the watchful eyes of the villagers picked out the two kickball-sized pouches that dangled from his belt, one on each side.

  Niall the Mad Bear watched from the broken slat of his house-room, afraid and yet offended by this big man that he had been told was his uncle.

  There was about Gormgal the smell of blood, and of death. His brown fur covering was matted and filthy, and there were rips in his thick padded chest-plate. He wore his clothes tight bound at his waist with a thick, gold-trimmed belt, from which hung three beautifully fashioned torques, his booty from three dead Druids, slaughtered in the constant skirmishing between Connacht and the province of Ui Neill. Gormgal relished such skirmishing and he took an active and deadly part in it. His sword was long, richly decorated and hung, now, safely behind him. He carried no shields.

  Noticing the questioning glances of the crowd, Gormgal laughed, the sound bitter and humourless, as ugly as the brown teeth that showed through his dark beard. He undid one of the pouches and pulled out the severed head of a monk, holding the trophy by its short rim of hair.

  Amalgaid appeared from the doorway of his house, clad in a thick fur coat and a tight leather crotch-piece that left his thickly muscled legs bare, showing the blue decorations of his status. He carried no weapons.

  Gormgal was laughing loudly, and shouting, ‘I don’t know what I hate these bastards the more for … their idiot god, or their lack of any decent hair to tie on to my belt!’ He roared his mirth as he demonstrated how difficult it was to tuck half an inch of hair into his broad sword-belt. The slack, staring features of the youthful Christian stared blindly at Niall the Mad Bear, the tongue slightly distended between the parted teeth. This one had been strangled before the ritual decapitation.

  Gormgal tossed the head to Amalgaid, who caught it and grinned as he poked his fingers into its eyes. ‘For me? How kind.’

  ‘Stick that on the palisade and you’ll not have a Christian fly around this corpse of a fort for twenty generations.’

  Amalgaid threw the head to a woman who scampered up the uneven dry stone steps against the rampart and placed the trophy, blind eyes staring outwards, on a sharp pole. Gormgal slapped his belly as he watched. ‘By Alcain’s shrivelled stick!’ he cried, invoking an obscure ancestral figure, ‘I’m hungry! I haven’t eaten for a hundred days, my sword has been so busy.’

  Amalgaid called for the slaughter of a pig, and led Gormgal into his house. Torches were being struck as night fell full and dark across the peninsula. ‘Hide Niall,’ Amalgaid whispered to his wife, Tualaith, as he saw the Mad Bear’s haunted features watching him from the side-room. Tualaith raced across the hall and drove her son out of sight, pulling the decorated curtain firmly across the entrance.

  The fort’s warrior élite followed their warlord and his half brother into the house and they sat down in a great circle while fire was struck to the dry tinder in the centre of the room. A spit was placed across the fire, and the thatch above it moved up on poles so that the flames could lick and cook the meat in safety. The fire illuminated the large, round hall, cast shadows on the wicker walls, made the weapons and tools that hung all around gleam with red light.

  Gormgal eased off his fur coat and cast it aside, then pulled down his leggings leaving his muscled, scarred legs bare to the crotch. He eased his sword around and pulled the dented blade from its scabbard, held it over the fire so the uncleaned bloodstains blackened. He seemed gross and filthy in the fire-light, his eyes shining as he watched the dancing flame.

  ‘I have ridden forty days and nights without leaving the saddle,’ he said loudly, suddenly. ‘And by every noon I had killed a hundred men of the Ui Neill since the noon before.’

  A ripple of applause caused him to grin and stare proudly about him at the colourfully clad warriors. All but Amalgaid and he himself wore bright red and green kirtles and leather shoulder harnesses on which were slung small trophies and weapons. No man, of course, wore his short cloak, not in the warlord’s house.

  Amalgaid slapped his hands together, wary of provoking his violent half brother. ‘Gormgal, you are our honoured guest, and shall cut the flanks of our fattest pig before we even smell its aroma.’

  Gormgal rose to his feet and glared at the warlord, sheathing his sword in an easy motion. His thighs bulged as muscles tensed with his anger. ‘Am I in a fort full of women? Are there no men here that have killed in single combat in a way no other man has killed?’

  ‘We live a long way from the Ui Neill,’ said Amalgaid gently. ‘The main war is fought a hundred miles to the east.’

  Gormgal laughed loudly. ‘The war is everywhere, brother Amalgaid. The war is here!’ he slapped his heart. ‘The war is in all men. Each man fights with the spirit of cowardice and weak arm. Have you all given in to the shadow of peace?’

  The insult made Amalgaid mac Eochu’s heart race, and he felt his fingers curling in anticipation of a sword hilt firmly gripped between them. But he kept calm, stared up at the dark features of his brother. ‘This is my house. Do not insult it.’

  Gormgal seethed. ‘Have I spat on the floor?’

  Amalgaid shook his head.

  ‘Then I have n
ot insulted your house. But no house that is filled with breastless women deserves my honour!’ And with that he spat loudly and messily into the fire.

  This was too much for any of the warriors who had sat silently, but with increasing discomfort, as Gormgal had uttered his jibes. They all drew their ceremonial bronze swords and jumped to their feet, angry to the point of explosion. Gormgal laughed at them.

  Amalgaid shouted loudly for them to sheath their swords. ‘The pig is not even on the spit! Wait until its meat is cooked and then we shall show Gormgal mac Colcu what sort of men we are. Sit down now.’ He turned to Tualaith as the warriors reluctantly made themselves comfortable again. ‘Get someone who can play a lyre, and a harp. Bring that old man who used to be a bard …’

  ‘And a bohran,’ said Gormgal loudly. ‘I like the rhythm of a bohran. It reminds me of the proud heart before battle, thundering in the proud breast.’

  ‘Find a bohran,’ said Amalgaid, and his wife left the house.

  As the gutted pig cooked on the spit the host of men listened to music and the badly told epics of old. Patience wore thin and well before the meat was ready Gormgal cried that enough was enough. Not the least insulted, the musicians gratefully withdrew, perhaps determining to practise a little more in future. As Gormgal drew his sword, signifying that he was about to make claims on the pig, so the green-kirtled warrior, Bricriu, an older man than any here gathered, rose to his feet and drew his bronze sword. He was a well known and respected warrior who had lost his left arm in the great fight against Loegaire mac Niall, east of the Sinann river. For a moment he did tricks with his sword, demonstrating how easily he could control the weapon even with a single hand. ‘In my life!’ he shouted at Gormgal suddenly, ‘I have not drawn as many breaths as the heads of my victims number. At the Ford of the Forked Tree I struggled at the front of the Connachta, and the corpses of Loegaire’s men lay so thick before me that I had to back away to gain room to attack.’