A giant, knotted ash tree was formed, into the clutches of whose branches Harald was dragged. Each Berserker was then caressed by a branch, and Harald too was entwined by the woody feeler that snaked around his legs and his waist and squeezed him tightly.
At once, rising from his feet towards his groin, he felt the power. Unlike anything he had ever experienced before, he stood and sensed the strange possession with a mortal fascination that caused him to hold quite still; foot to leg, leg to penis, penis to belly, belly to throat, throat to mind, the surging power of Odin consumed him, filled him, took control of his every fibre …
At once blood rose in his eyes, in his senses – he smelled it, tasted it, imagined it flowing from the biting edge of his blade, singing life-taker. Behind the blood, emerging out of a darkness that had never before been part of him, came the bear.
It reached into him, following behind the great surge of power, and Harald, helpless to do anything, allowed the beast to possess him.
His arms became the arms of the bear, his fingers its claws …
His body became the body of the forest killer, powerful, black-furred, heavy with muscle; its ecstasy at possession was his own ecstasy at being possessed.
His teeth were its fangs, and his gums ached as his canines grew and his mouth watered to the taste of blood, his own blood, his own pain.
His eyes were the eyes of the bear, his voice the bear’s voice and he growled and snarled as he twisted in the branches of the magic ash tree.
He only vaguely heard the screams of a woman he had once loved; the shouts of a man whose seed had given him life; the cries of fear of a people, for so long innocent of the wrath of the gods, now fully consumed by that unpredictable anger and in terror for their lives.
He tore away from the branches of the ash, snapped them like twigs, twisted out of their embrace and turned and gazed through red-rimmed eyes at the cowering host of farmers and their sons and daughters …
The Berserks grouped around him, and he recognised the bear in them all, the rising jissom of fury. His excitement grew with theirs, and his yet human features distorted as their distorted, until the skin and the flesh were twisted into the mask of the Bear god in whose power he now found himself.
A girl broke from the arms of an old man and ran into a dark, long house. He recognised the girl, recognised her as an undefiled village girl, whose body would soon have been his to claim for his own, but who had denied him the sweetness of her flesh.
He loped after her, naked and erect with his consuming excitement and bursting sexual energy. The old man tried to bar his way and he knocked him aside and kicked and screamed at him. Then he burst into the long, dark hall where the girl cowered in a corner, screaming and regarding him through eyes wide with fear.
He reached for her, snarling with pleasure, body trembling with excitement as he grew near to achieving that possession for so long denied to him.
‘Harald! Oh no! no, not that! Not this way! Oh sweet Freyja, NO!’
But her fear just added to the pleasure. The beast within him writhed in ecstasy, growling, close to that blood rage out of which it would emerge fully satiated, and yet happy, for the moment, to allow the human desire to have its final expression, the conquering of the innocent girl before him.
He reached for her, tore her gown from her body, cutting the material with a knife where it refused to tear. Exposed her body, curled up with fear, white thighs locked together in a last desperate attempt to preserve her honour, arms wrapped across her full, firm breasts, head lowered, hair falling across her shoulders and eyes, as if trying to blind her to the rearing, gorged horror that was about to violate her.
She sobbed.
The Berserker, Harald, the puppet of Odin, just laughed, growled and then screamed. His scream caused the girl to scream, and that was when he reached for her again and pulled her upright, dragging her to the solid oaken table and throwing her backwards upon it, falling upon her.
Fingers dug into her breasts, teeth bit into her shoulders. He raked his claws across her stomach, used his legs to force her own legs apart, and pushed against her, harder, harder, more brutal with every failure to enter her body, until at last she opened and broke and he consummated that which was to have been their very personal gift to each other.
Innocent and innocent, loving together, each for the first time, and this is how it was. Only now she screamed. He laughed, bit deeply into the firmness of her breast, drawing blood which served only to increase his rage, the rage of his passion, so that he thrust into her bleeding body with greater and greater anger, until she fainted, and he finished with her with a final howl of achievement and satisfaction.
He drew out of her, and then watched as Beartooth entered the hall, uncovered himself and lay upon her for long minutes, grunting as he thrust, laughing as she woke from her faint and screeched when she realised what was happening to her. She cried Harald’s name one last time, but Harald was beyond her now, whirling and spinning his singing life-taker, given back to him by Beartooth. He took the lives of two young farmers whose pitiful attempts at defence with axe and sword left no mark upon the young Berserker’s body, only inspired him to such great fury that his blade hacked heads from shoulders in two swift cuts, then split the dead skulls and spilled pink brains on to the mud.
He ran then into the small hut and stopped by the pallet on which Gotthelm lay, staring at him without speaking, without moving.
The bear within him reared and roared, directed his hand to rise, wielding singing life-taker to strike this strange warrior. The bear recognised something about Gotthelm that Harald was unaware of, recognised something it feared, something that was better dead; and so it tried to kill the old man.
But Harald emerged from beneath the fury for just a second, recognised a friend of old, and fought the spirit of the bear, swallowed his screams of fury.
He backed off from the warrior, who visibly relaxed, subsiding on to the bed, though without letting his gaze leave Harald.
‘I’ll find you …’ he murmured, and pain creased his face, stopped further words. ‘Wherever you are,’ he finally breathed, a whisper, just a whisper, ‘Wherever you go … I shall find you …’
Harald, Berserker, ran from the hut, the bear trying to obliterate failure from its mind. Bloody sword raised to the skies it emitted a fearful growl of pleasure from the glistening lips of the young initiate.
From the long hall came the repeated screams and moans of a woman being mercilessly abused. From the darkness of his mind Erik Bluetooth watched his son pulling clothes and furs on to his body from the scattered corpses of those who had been struck down. He saw the human shape of his son and felt a great hatred rising within him; he could not see the Bear God that pulled the muscles of his son, could not see the evil that had taken control of him, nor could he see the terrified Harald who lurked, imprisoned, in the dark Hell of his own mind.
As yet, Harald looked a mere boy, possessed of a ferocious and inexplicable blood lust. It would be many weeks before his appearance matched the savagery of his action.
At midday the Berserks rode from Urlsgarde hold, leaving the stench of blood thick in the autumn air behind them. A fire burned high where the long hall had been set to the torch, and in that fire a woman’s spirit died, although her body lived.
The Berserks rode south, back to join the long ships that were readying themselves for the next campaign.
Drifting slowly out into the channel, the longship burned with an almost supernatural brilliance. While flame ate through the sail lashings, the great striped sheet unfurled and flapped loosely about the single mast (which had not been stowed), and soon fire licked and consumed it, great burning fragments falling into the dark waters, spitting and sizzling as their radiance was extinguished.
As the ship drifted away from the sandy shore, and from the terrified Norsemen who watched it from their night camp, so the hull spun slowly round and the great, grinning figurehead came to look at the men who had sailed the vessel across the raging northern seas. A moment later the head, darkly silhouetted against the flames behind it, itself burst into light. The great oaken keel burned and blackened and even below the water line it seemed to fragment and fall into flaming shards.
The warlord, jarl Olaf Hadric, came running from his tent, wearing just his linen under-britches. His eyes, wide in the darkness, burned with the light of his flaming ship. He disappeared for a moment, back into his low tent, and re-emerged pushing his simple metal helmet on to his head, and buckling his sword scabbard about his naked waist.
‘Who struck the vessel?’ he shrieked. His blade sang from its sheath as he ran down the dark sand towards the water’s edge. ‘Where is he? Is he dead?’
‘No man struck that ship,’ called a voice from among the ranks of silent raiders. They crowded the water line, staring at the strange and terrifying sight. ‘No man passed the line; no man swims. The fire struck of its own.’
‘
Someone
struck the ship, you fool, and he can’t be far away! Find him!’
Hadric felt a rage approaching, a deep-seated irritation and fury, almost Berserker-like in its intensity. He stood still and tried to calm himself, feeling his face burning and the blood throbbing in his head. His sleepy guards had allowed some Celtish slut to slip through the lines and fire his leading vessel. He watched, not quite in panic, but in considerable discomfort as the ship – capable of carrying eighty men – turned slowly round and round in the channel and began to sink as the fire burned through its strakes, letting water into the shallow hull.
The smell of animal hair was acrid on the onshore wind. The plugs and lashings were consumed and the vessel began to fall apart, sinking lower in the water, and then pivoting downwards. The great masthead seemed to rise
against the dark skies, still burning, a beacon of Celtish fury in the silent night of the eastern lands south of Ulaidh.
At last the ship sank below the waters of the bay and the fire was extinguished. Darkness enveloped them, covered the secret camp.
He had been a fool to put in here, this shallow channel, where a sandy shore rose into low hills. If they were ambushed here they would stand less chance than he would have liked. He should have pressed on up the river until their camp could have been pitched at some better protected site.
It was too late now.
Jarl Hadric, on his way to join Gudrack’s forces and the new campaign against the northern peoples of this fertile and rich land, felt a moment’s premonition of disaster. He realised, however, with that more pragmatic part of his mind, that in the skirmishes to come they would lose many more than eighty men in honourable battle. The loss of the ship merely meant extra walking for eighty unfortunates on their way to join the great army of Norse – fifty miles away, assuming that the runner’s information was not too long out of date. The men were used to walking anyway, and would suffer the exercise without complaint, following the remaining six ships as they sailed as far up the river as they could.
‘Is he found yet? The slut that fired my ship?’
‘No man fired the ship,’ repeated the guard. Fear made his voice unsteady, but fear of what? Of Hadric? Or of some imagined magic force that had set an invisible ember to the salt-soaked wood?
‘Then how …?’
‘The ship just burst into fire, my lord. As Odin guards my sword, that is what happened!’
‘As mead addles your brain, you less-than-a-Celt, you were asleep on the line!’
Hadric forced his way through the gathered troops, who watched him darkly from unshaven faces and black-rimmed eyes. The journey had been a hard one; their fatigue was evident in their looks and bearing, and Hadric was sure that fatigue had just accounted for the loss of his ship.
He faced the guard and struck him with the pommel of his sword. The man stood straight and solemn and then backed away, drawing his own blade.
‘As Odin protects me, a faithful and honourable sword-wielder of Orndheim,
no man fired the ship!
’
His blade sang through the air and in the darkness there was just the sudden ringing clash of blade against blade to tell that Hadric had deflected the blow. His own sword, flashing in the faint moonlight, rose above his head for a return blow, when:
‘Look! The ship!’
All heads turned; all eyes stared at the second of the dark dragon ships that was run up on to the beach. The vessel was slipping, pulled by no human hand, back into the water. As it bobbed out into the channel the great black sail unfurled, flapping noisily against the mast; the rudder creaked and turned and the ship spun in the water, and a moment later it burst into fire. Flames licked from keel to masthead, enveloping the dragon’s head that turned, as the ship turned, to stare at the Norsemen. Then it was swallowed by the red and yellow inferno that consumed the ship in just a few seconds and finally sent it to the bottom of the channel.
The Norsemen backed away from the water as, for the second time, darkness fell across them, releasing them from the hypnotic fascination of the supernatural flame.
Hadric, a practical man even in the face of the god-whims, turned and stared at the low, dark ridges of the hills behind them; if all the ships were thus consumed, then they would become as sword practice for any Celtish forces that were gathering in the darkness of the haunted, mound-covered ground further inland.
Hadric knew well where they had camped. He had laughed in the face of the scout, the runner from Gudrack, who had warned against pitching cloth tent and easing the sea strain of their bodies in this particular place. Beyond the hills, for as many miles as a man could walk in a week, were the ancient lands of the
Tuatha De Danann
. Their burial mounds, great barrows, green-covered and sombre, were scattered through the valleys and across the tors, waiting silently for the foolhardy to venture among them.