Berserker (Omnibus)

by Holdstock, Robert

  Then he went to the very edge of the mound, crouched with Conan against the palisade and watched the fire. After a while the woman screamed, and the scream was seemingly endless. It finally gave way to racking sobs, and then a final shriek … and silence, save for the crackling fire.

  Fergus burst through the flame, brushing fire from his own hair, and slowly straightening. He held something fleshy in his hand … not a head … and this he cast into the darkness.

  Smoke blackened and furious he stared across the top of the blazing mound at Niall.

  ‘Here we part, friends Niall and Conan. I shall not rest until I have killed Grania, and since this goes astray from your own destiny, Niall, I feel that here we should say goodbye.’

  ‘Lug’s strength guide you,’ said Niall.

  ‘The triple goddess treat you well,’ answered Fergus, and an instant later he was gone, into the night, his horse whinnying at its rough treatment as the warrior rode it too hard, too fast through the darkness.

  There was a brief flurry of white as Fergus rode through the river, then nothing … nothing but crackling fire, thundering heart, and the memory of screams of death and cries of pleasure.

  Knowing that Ui Neill riders, from Tara and even nearer, would soon come to find the reason for this fire, Niall dragged the half-living Conan beyond the palisade wall around the giant mound, and located the place on its slopes which faced the setting sun.

  He began to dig.

  The standing stone was half as tall as Niall but very heavy, and lay shallow in the soil where he soon discovered it. Using Conan’s brute strength, ignoring the fact that great gouts of blood spilled from the man’s crushed skull, the two fiana dragged the stone upright.

  Conan collapsed, but he was still alive. Niall ignored him.

  The stone was all that mattered.

  He placed a knotted spancel loop of alder on its top, caressed its ragged, chipped slopes, and then tried to estimate where the shadow of the loop would be at midday.

  He kissed the spot on the stone’s top, then stood back and addressed it directly.

  ‘How do I summon the giant from the Swamp of the Three Sisters?’

  There was no response.

  Puzzled he went back to the stone and stared closely at it. Distantly he heard the thunder of horses, and glancing into the darkness to the south he saw a hundred torches bobbing through the blackness; a host of men from a fort, somewhere close by, coming to discover why the mound of Cnocba was aflame. They would certainly kill him if they found him here.

  Again he asked the stone his question, while Conan – on his knees – watched and burbled incoherently, touching the crushed and bloody side of his head, and laughing as if, in the feeling of the great depression in his skull, he found a source of great humour.

  Still no response.

  Then it occurred to him: if they’ve buried the stone, they may have turned it round.

  Quickly Niall turned the stone so that it faced a quarter round the other way. He asked his question again, first kissing the place where the midday shadow of the spancel loop would lie.

  Nothing.

  He could hear the cries of the approaching army. Perhaps they suspected that the terrifying women of Cnocba were dead now, and that they could begin their bloody campaign of vengeance without worry.

  Whatever motivated them to so salute the night, they were very close, and Niall was alone and unlikely to be spared.

  Again he turned the stone. His horse voiced its pain at being so close to the fire and he realised that time was running out. The brightness of the conflagration lit his slim features, made them seem huge in the darkness against the empty background of the lowlands. Conan watched him, murmuring happily.

  He asked his question.

  The stone said: Call three times the name Carnbillanak, then cast three stones into the mire, each carved with a single eye.

  Niall made a sign of thanks and grabbed Conan by the arm, wrested him from the ground and hauled him up the slopes of the tumulus. Men splashed by the tens through the river ford, a few hundred yards distant, crying their triumph and wielding their swords.

  By the time they reached the remnants of Grania’s fortress on Cnocba, Niall the Mad Bear was riding hard, with Conan slumped across his own horse’s saddle, into the darkness and high land that lay to the immediate north.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was a hard ride, for they stopped neither for food nor drink, nor rest of any sort. Conan’s crushed skull seemed to heal well, the blood clots darkening and forming a thick barrier against any foulness in the air. Occasionally Conan would fall heavily from his horse, but he always jumped back up again, laughing delightedly. Sometimes he would scream and ride ahead of Niall, his sword waving violently around his head, until a low slung tree branch knocked him cleanly from the saddle and on to the damp trail they followed.

  But though madness and instability now affected the warrior, Conan had eluded the dark wings of death, and Niall felt grateful for this.

  They passed the fallen standing stone of the warrior Uargus and turned south, riding between the seven trees. After a day and a night they rode down a low ridge, and faced a foul and hazy land of glistening bogs and dirty green peat. A thin trail – at times almost too thin – wound through the deeper pit and was lost in the mist. Coolness made Niall’s skin draw and ache, and he found tatters of rags, the remnants of his old clothes tucked away in his saddle sack, and tugged them on. Conan was unbothered by the cold, and rode into the bog with childish enthusiasm, his laughter and merry cries drifting out of the haze.

  Niall followed.

  At length they came to a ruined house. It stood in the middle of a raised island of rock and more solid earth, surrounded by the treacherous bog for as far as Niall could see into the fog, and as far as he could see, in all probability, without it.

  Dismounting, and shivering uncontrollably, Niall looked at the ruins and determined that they could be made habitable. He watched Conan walking around the rim of this strange island, occasionally stepping on to what appeared to be solid peat, but sinking up to his knees and frantically clambering and crawling out of danger, When his task was done here, Niall decided, he would build this place up and leave Conan alone, alone with his strange thoughts and half memories, alone at the mercy of whatever gods and goddesses resided in the depthless mud of the swamp.

  Niall snared two long-legged birds which waded through the sharp-tasting waters of a shallow pool, some ten minutes jog back along the pathway. Their screeching pierced the heavy stillness of the fog and brought Conan running and whimpering, his sword held before him, shaking in his excited grip. Niall calmed him and they returned to the ruined house.

  Night added its own veil of mystery to the concealed swamplands, and the two fiana curled up inside the cracked wattle walls of the old house, sleeping fitfully until daylight roused them from the difficult slumber. Niall went outside, then, to face his destiny once again.

  The fog had lifted; the boglands looked unimpressive and far less frightening than they had the day before. Distantly he could see high ridges leading to less treacherous ground, and across those ridges were the scattered tumuli and standing stones of a community that lived, perhaps, less than two hours ride beyond the swamp.

  Conan Halfbrain crouched by the house, his sword driven into the underfoot between his legs, his hands gripping the ivory hilt tightly; his green eyes glittered brightly beneath his buckled bronze headband. He watched Niall thoughtfully, almost sadly, as if the crushed warrior suspected that soon he would be left alone.

  Niall had no time for remorse; within his head he could feel the anxiety of the Bear, the interested observation of his haunter. His mouth watered with the imagined taste of blood, and he felt a moment of dizziness, but he cried against this tentative possession, and fought it back. The Bear, in a weakened state, unable to draw on any great charge of warlike excitement to take over Niall’s muscles and swordarm, retired cowering.

&nb
sp; Niall walked to the edge of the swamp and loudly called for the Fomorian warrior-magician in the manner that the stone had told him.

  At first nothing happened. Again and again he shouted the calling words, again and again he cast scratched fragments of stone from Meath into the mire, and each time his composure was lessened, his heart was that much more frantic in its beat. Conan chuckled from where he crouched, and Niall regarded him stonily. The simpleton didn’t realise how hurtful he was being, and fixed Niall’s angry gaze with his own grinning stare. A sudden gusting wind blew Conan’s fair hair about his face and he swept it back, knocking the circlet from his head. Niall’s skin crawled with the sudden chill of that breeze, and he hunched up a little inside his rags, and turned back to the bog.

  The surface of the mire was slowly rising!

  Conan shrieked and crawled out of sight around the back of the house. Niall stepped back, his snow sword instantly in his hand, his eyes agog at the sight of the gigantic head that was slowly emerging from the depths of the earth. Mud and strands of green and brown weed hung like massive tendrils from the scalp of the beast; water and slime poured thickly back to the bog, splashing noisily, adding to the terrifying sounds of the giant’s emergence.

  A single eye gazed unblinking at the tiny warrior on the solid ground, and the eye continued to watch him as the full head came into view, slack, moist lips opened and foul breath gusting like a storm wind about the land.

  The Fomorian was every bit as repulsive as the ancestral stories had painted him; but so much bigger! His head was so large that a fort could have been constructed on the top of it. Twenty men, linking hands, could not have stood around his neck. His skin was horny, like thick bone and metal plate, and grey, like a battlefield corpse emerging from the snow and ice after winter.

  As the being rose, to stand chest deep in the filthy mire, so his two arms emerged from the bog, and his hands, with long, curved and horn-nailed fingers, reached forward to lean on the dry land; one massive fist rested on each side of Niall’s shaking body.

  The Fomorian regarded Niall for a few minutes, then an evil and frightening smile touched the cavernous mouth.

  ‘Who disturbs my sleep? Who calls me, I, Carnbillanak of the Fomorians, wizard, necromancer, and warrior of the mighty army of Graunbak the Furious? He who conquered this island and still sleeps not a hundred strides from here? Who calls me? What manner of ant-warrior are you?’

  ‘I am Niall Swiftaxe, the Mad Bear of Connacht. My people are fierce warriors descended from the Fir Bolg, who still hold the western extremes, and who still commune with the ghosts of your race, and of the people of Danu who fought you for possession of the valleys.’

  The Fomorian, Carnbillanak, looked away from Niall, and his single eye half closed as he remembered. ‘It was a war that lasted a hundred years,’ he said. His voice was like winter thunder, and Niall’s ears threatened to burst. ‘The golden haired people of the goddess Danu were great and worthy warlords, and their magic was of a kind that we, of Fomor, had never known.’ Again he looked at Niall. ‘We all sleep, midget, all of us, men and children of both races, ready to emerge again and wrestle once more for the kingdom of the hills. Make the most of your transient possession. We are merely recouping our strength.’

  ‘Myself,’ said Niall, ‘I fight for no man but myself. I need the help of your magic and wisdom, and once I have it I will vacate these lands permanently, and there will be no sadness in me if you emerge and kick my people back into the sea.’

  Carnbillanak laughed, bowling Niall over and back against the flimsy structure of the house with the force of his wind.

  The evil was back in the Fomorian’s eye, in his expression; he seemed to bob up and down in the viscous mire.

  ‘I have no interest in helping an ant,’ he said, and began to slowly sink again.

  Niall rushed forward and screamed at him, ‘In the name of your gods, you must help me! If you do not, I shall write a curse on a piece of stone and throw it after you!’

  ‘I shall throw it back,’ snarled the giant, but he had ceased to sink. Niall knew of the stone curse from the stories he had heard from visiting bards. It was a desperate gamble, but it seemed that there was much truth in the tales that the aged men told for the price of a night’s sleep and a good meal.

  ‘The stone will be so small that an oak, a giant like yourself, would not be able to distinguish it from a dust mote. Help me with what I want, or I promise that you shall sleep beneath a curse forever.’

  The giant rose again after a while, holding in his two hands an enormous and thick metal pole. For a moment Niall felt he was to be crushed to a pulp, but Carnbillanak made no move to so destroy him.

  ‘What is it you want?’ he boomed, and Niall felt triumphant.

  He explained what had occurred to him, and what he desired. The Fomorian listened, and when Niall had finished he said nothing, not a word, for a span of time that seemed, to the shaking Niall Swiftaxe, like an eternity.

  ‘I know of this creature,’ said Carnbillanak at last. ‘I know of it as Woo-tin. It was known to my ancestors, and even then it was mythical and magical in a way that went beyond us.’

  Niall felt sick. He knew that meant there would be no help here. ‘I need a spell, anything, just to break the curse.’

  Carnbillanak laughed. ‘A thousand Fomorians wished for such a spell as well, but died before they could fully accomplish that quest, for one way to shake off a curse of the Woo-tin is to survive—’

  ‘A mortal blow! I know that!’ Niall was angry. ‘Since such a thing is impossible, I was hoping you could offer me something easier. Like cutting down the moon, or swimming around this land underwater with just a single breath.’

  ‘I can’t help,’ said the Fomorian. He seemed to be enjoying Niall’s despair. ‘I can’t help directly, I can only tell you where you will find more ancient beings than I, from a time when the Woo-tin was better known as an earthly being and not merely as a god. They may know of an easier spell-breaking than the mortal wound.’

  ‘Where do I find these beings?’ cried Niall, suddenly excited.

  Carnbillanak hesitated, staring at Niall with his vast single eye, in which flame and anger seemed to burn. ‘You must promise on pain of a slow and lingering death, that if I tell you you will not summon me again, nor will you curse me.’

  ‘I promise,’ cried Niall. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘To the far east, across the channel,’ said Carnbillanak. ‘A land of mounds, a circle of stones, a ruined henge. Find the dagger in the rock and call the Dark Ones.’

  Even as Carnbillanak mentioned the Dark Ones, Niall was remembering their name from his previous life; the soul of Swiftaxe seemed to dance with joy, though the Bear scowled and roared in his head, terrified that it would soon be cast out of the warrior’s skull and consigned to the dark winds of the nether world.

  ‘The Dark Ones!’ cried Niall. ‘I shall ride there at once …’

  But even as he was turning to find Conan, so Carnbillanak’s sudden and frightening laughter bowled him over, made him strike his head hard and painfully against a stone built into the base of the house.

  Carnbillanak’s giant right hand reached down and picked him up with enormous ease. The left hand was raised high, the massive iron pole gleaming in its grasp. Niall sensed death, a pulped skull and the bitter and sudden end to his quest … and then rebirth, who knew where? He screamed.

  The pole came down towards him, but didn’t strike him. It was rammed deeply into the earth, so that forty paces of it lay below the soil and forty paces above it. In its centre huge iron links were threaded through the metal, and it was to these that Niall found himself chained and trapped.

  ‘Let me go!’ he screamed, but Carnbillanak just laughed.

  ‘I shall save you,’ he said, ‘For when I finally wake. You will make a good morsel.’

  ‘Let me go!’ shouted Niall, but already the Fomorian was descending into the bog.

  ‘I shall c
urse you!’ screamed Niall. Again Carnbillanak laughed.

  ‘Since I kept my promise,’ said the giant, ‘you will find that you are bound to keep yours.’

  As Niall drew his snow sword, then, ready to use his precious weapon to cut through the chain, so the sword was snatched by invisible hands and driven into the earth, well out of reach.

  Conan scampered from hiding and reached for the hilt, but recoiled screaming as some magical shock drove him from it.

  ‘None will come here,’ said Carnbillanak with a last, ear-splitting laugh. ‘Because knowledge of your ferocity is spread everywhere. But if anyone does come, then you shall go free. If you are still alive.’

  And then he was gone, and the surface of the mire was closing over him. A few minutes later all was calm.

  ‘Cut me free!’ shouted Niall, but Conan’s blade bounced from the links. ‘Fetch someone here!’ cried Niall, but though he rode for a week, then a month, none would enter the Swamp of the Three Sisters, which now became known as the Swamp of the Mad Bear.

  Despairing, screaming and threshing against his chains, Niall resigned himself to his fate, and with just the idiot Conan for companion, he waited out the years.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Five years. Five times the biting rains of autumn; five times the snow-flurries of winter; five times the humming rain storms of spring; five times the scorching heat of summer.

  Then, on a distant horizon, riders appeared, and Niall struggled upright. He strained against the chains that secured him, and tried to discern who or what they were, these men that rode the thin trail towards him.

  Conan Halfbrain scrambled into cover, whimpering loudly, sensing death looming near. Niall himself looked at his snow sword, overgrown and still out of reach where it was thrust into the soft earth; but he felt no panic, merely the lust for death, for blood on his fingers and in his mouth, a lust that – but for Conan bringing him live animals – had been denied him for so long …