Could the spirits of those dead warriors be responsible for this sabotage?
On the other side of the heaving oceans, in the beer halls of Ostgarde, Olaf Hadric would have spat at the rafters at the suggestion; but now, deep inside him, below the practical exterior of the man, that ancient fear of the dead and of the revenge they could reap was surfacing rapidly and possessing his arrogant soul.
‘We should not have landed here,’ he murmured, but because of his growing fear his voice was loud and all heard him.
‘Let’s sail while we still may,’ cried a voice, and a murmur of assent rippled through the gathered ranks of the invaders.
But even as the suggestion was carried away on the gentle wind, a figure appeared before the brighter clouds to the west, above the dark ridges where the moon hovered full and bright, shining silver behind the heavy sky-fog that hung over the inner lands. A woman’s figure, Hadric realised: long hair, flowing robe, a tall and slender shape with its arms raised towards the heavens. She stood there, quite motionless, and all who gathered among the tents on the beach were immediately aware of her.
She seemed to glow with a blue light, a light that spilled from the darkness
beyond the clouds. As she glowed they all imagined they saw her face, and her face was that of a young woman, full-cheeked and firm-fleshed, red lips pouted in the eternal gesture of the temptress and seductress of innocent mortals.
Her eyes were pits that saw into the seething, blood-spattered lands of the underworld, and, though this figure was Celtish, all the Norse recognised the sister of Hel, that dark lady who guarded the dark places of the dishonoured.
‘A prophetess,’ said someone near to Hadric.
‘A witch!’ cried another.
‘She directs the forces of the Celtish slut-gods at us. Odin, help us!’
‘Thor!’ cried a hundred voices in disharmony, and eyes turned up to the rolling clouds, but no sign of the great god showed itself.
‘Odin, save us,’ murmured Hadric, sensing disaster as he stared at the shimmering blue witch and watched her hands marking out the sky runes that meant she was sending a spell towards them.
Behind them, splashing gently into the lapping waters of the sea channel, the remaining long ships slid unprompted away from their sandy berths. No one moved to stop them, but all the warriors watched as their means of escape from these violent lands floated silently out into mid channel and stopped there, turning as if spun by ghostly hands, so that the fearsome heads carved upon the prows watched the Norsemen, no longer part of the Norse strategy of fear, but used against the very men whose brothers had carved the terrifying masks of the raiding ships.
No fires burst into life this time, but the ships were as good as destroyed if the enigmatic witch on the hill had decided that the Norsemen would no longer be able to use them for escape.
As the Vikings watched, the figure vanished and dark clouds rolled across the moon, increasing the darkness, compounding their fear.
Hours passed.
The sun broke above the horizon, a warm wind dispersing the coldness of night. A thin mist hung across the water of the channel. The surviving long ships floated in the middle of this fog, an occasional prow or mast showing through the whiteness. Eventually the summer breezes took the mist and scattered it in that nether land where the fearsome manifestations of the night disperse for the daylight hours.
Three hundred cloaked and armoured Norse lay or squatted on the sparsely vegetated ground above the sandy beach, but not a face smiled, not a voice was raised in jest. To these men a fight was the stuff of life – a clash of swords and spears, a death or a vicious wound were the raw materials of jokes and sagas and they were content to take their chances on the field of battle no matter what the odds. If they deserved to survive, then Odin
would protect them; if they were fated to die, then they would die with a smirk of triumph on their lips and a curse directed at the sword-wielder who dealt the death blow.
This they expected; this they looked forward to; this was their life and death.
What they could not contend with were the immortal forces of the gods, be they Norse, Saxon, the naked and wild gods of the Celts, or the strangely benign god of the Christians. There was a place for the power of the supernatural and its place was not on the field of battle, on the death-lands of men and sword.
For Odin to bless a battle was fine; for Thor to protect a warrior already wounded in a previous skirmish was perfectly acceptable; but when the supernatural intervened to destroy the life ships of the Vikings, then somewhere someone was spitting in the face of valiant men, and no Viking could contend with that.
So they sat or stood, grim-faced and tense, watching the ridge between them and the valleys and hills of the ancient warrior race where their foolhardy leader, Hadric, had brought them. The fight, the campaign against the northern Celts, was some miles up-river and across the forested lands of the north – three days’ walk perhaps.
Most of Hadric’s warriors now felt such a battle was beyond them, that they would be spirited away long before they ever got to smell the blood of battle in their noble cause of conquest.
A year ago, or in a year’s time, they might have marched into the nearby ancient lands and looted the tombs and caves of the dead race with not a thought for supernatural consequences. Circumstance dictated the pattern of aggression. Now, this year, even the land and the sea were against the Norsemen. Destiny would be discovered on the tight curve of the beach and the lapping waters of the channel, into which no man would set foot to drag back the ships.
Shortly after dawn a foul smell on the air brought the warriors to their feet, staring expectantly inland to where the nearest ridge was a dark line across the bright blue sky. Blood and excrement, the typical smell of war, of slaughter, the sort of smell they expected to leave behind, or to carry with them if the fight had been particularly fierce and the odds well matched.
Now that stench drifted down the shoreline and all knew what it meant.
Men approached. Bloodstained warriors, triumphant, perhaps, from some skirmish further north, were creeping now towards the channel where Hadric’s men lay trapped and helpless except for the strength of their arms and the resolution of their swords.
Three hundred blades hissed from their scabbards, sparkled in the sunlight like three hundred points of fire.
Seven shapes appeared on the ridge, huge shapes, like shaggy animals, like bears … but not bears.
They were men, who stood there, surveying the beach and the gathered army. For a long time there was silence but for the occasional rustle of wind and the clank of shield against metal links.
Staring hard into the brightness of the sky, Hadric regarded the seven grotesque figures, his nostrils twitching and balking at the foul smell that spilled towards them.
‘Berserks, by Odin,’ he said at last.
No sword slipped back into its scabbard. Somewhere a young warrior fresh from his farm, new to fighting, asked why weapons were kept at the ready, why the Berserks were regarded as enemies …
Another Viking curtly told him; told him that these seven might attack for no reason if their blood lust was strong enough, if the need for death was in their minds. They might not recognise the Vikings as brothers, and though the odds were high in favour of the army, one could never be sure of victory. The Beserks were well nigh invulnerable when aroused to the height of their rage.
So the swords stayed out in the sunlight, and the Berserks walked slowly down the hill into the natural ditches that ran parallel to the shoreline.
At length they stood just a few paces from Hadric, looking about them. They grinned at the unblooded men before them, and then all ceremoniously spat on the ground.
The fever was not with them. There would be no killing.
Hadric sheathed his sword, removed the dull metal helm from his head and shook out his sweat-soaked hair.
By Loki’s guts, he thought, these creatures are fearsome.
Their stench was abominable; their leader, a great man with a necklace of bear and human teeth, was completely caked in the dried slime of spilled viscera, almost as if he wore the layer as an extra coat. Despite the hot day all seven wore thick fur garments, increasing their appearance of being giant men. Tangled beards hung low on their chests, save for one younger-looking Berserker whose wild appearance was less pronounced and more normal than the filth of the other six.
This younger warrior caught Hadric’s attention and he found his gaze drawn deep into brilliant eyes that peered steadfastly at him. There seemed to be a sadness there, a sense of urgency, a mannerism of face and mouth that suggested a lack of the blood-spilling arrogance of most Berserkers.
A young man, then; a newly initiated bear-warrior, perhaps stolen from his farm to boost the numbers of the almost invulnerable beast-fighters.
Looking back at the great bear who was the leader, Hadric said, ‘Where are you from? You have the smell of slaughter about you.’
The leader laughed. All the Berserks grinned, black teeth still flecked with the traces of raw meat they had consumed.
‘We have survived the skirmish at Armagh. Our blades have hewn more heads than the dead of our own army, but still the numbers of the Celts were too vast.’
‘Gudrack? Is he destroyed, then?’
‘Every man,’ said the Berserker, and again he flashed his black-toothed smile. ‘The fight lasted three days and three nights, and each time the Celts retaliated to our own attack with an attack of their own, and each time a thousand men fell on either side. But the Celts bred new warriors with every retreat, and every day their numbers were vast, far greater than ours. Gudrack sent we seven, with twenty other Berserker warriors, in at the front of every formed attack, and we hewed our way to the tent of Oengus mac Nial himself, and we hacked the man’s body into a hundred pieces, and each one of us consumed him. A very tasty Celt.’
‘Oengus mac Nial has fallen? Then who leads them now?’
‘A woman,’ said the Berserker. ‘And she is one who strikes fear as a sword strikes sparks from a flint rock.’
‘A
woman
leads them?’
In Ostgarde he might have laughed. Now the idea, preposterous though it ought to have been, sent a chill running down his spine.
He had heard tales of the Celts and their warrior women – but they were tales of old! He had heard of the bands of such women that had once terrorised the villages of neighbouring states in the land. He had even heard of the warrior queen who had fought the ancient Romans in the land of Angles and Saxons, where the myth of the Earth Queen, Gwenhwyfar, the queen who was given bodily form as the lover of the great Arthur, still was told.
But this was no myth, no tale of long-dead races and tribes with their strange habits vanished into the clouds of the netherworlds. A woman
leading
the sword-sluts! The ultimate sword-whore, he thought, with a smile touching his lips.
That would be a good jest when he could think of the correct way of telling it.
But for the moment another thought occurred to him. This women, this warrior lady, could she be the same woman they had seen this morning? Were the Celts led by a witch?
By Odin’s eye, such a thought was almost intolerable.
‘What is her name, this slut of the sword-sluts?’
A ripple of confident laughter ran through the ranks of the Norsemen.
The Berserker grinned. ‘She is called Deirdre of the Flames, and not a man lives who has lain with her, for her knot is untied and her valley unbreached.’
‘How do you know this?’
Even his own band were watching him with interest, as if they did not share this knowledge. Beartooth looked pleased with himself. ‘I wandered the field of battle and heard from the lips of a dying Norseman. While we had fought elsewhere, this woman had led the main army of the Celts in a final overwhelming charge. They had chanted her name as they came, and she herself, as she slaughtered, had shouted in Norse. What she shouted is what I have learned. She fights with the smell and lusts of her body as well as with dirk and broadsword. She snaps her fingers and blue light charges the air around her. She winks her eye and no man can see beyond the whiteness of her naked breasts and the darkness between her thighs. All men want her but none can have her; for while you move in to love her she slits your belly and dances among the spilled entrails until you scream for a kiss, a dying kiss, from the witch who has bewitched your heart. Then she kisses you and where her lips touch your skin your face burns and they say that the blistering heat can never be shaken. You carry it with you even until Ragnarok, where the burning warriors will fight for the wolf and not the gods.’
‘That’s quite a woman,’ said Hadric after a moment’s thoughtful silence. And quite a speech for a dim-witted Berserker, he added to himself. ‘So Gudrack is dead, and his army with him. And we are caught here unless someone can go and tow in the long ships.’
‘By the time you reached them the Celts would be on you,’ laughed the Berserker, and spat noisily on to the ground. He turned and waved his dull sword up towards the ridge. ‘They lie not a mile away, beyond the hill, and they come fast, like all Celts, running naked many of them, and silent as the wind of time.’ He grinned, and his six blood brothers shuffled restlessly as if sensing bloodshed in the near future.
Hadric took the news calmly and turned to his army, scattered across the beach. ‘The Celtish sluts approach. We make our stand, and if a weakness shows in them we shall try and force our way round them and drive them into the sea. Odin guide our swords! May the wolf take them!’
His voice carried through the still air and the raiders pulled leather-rimmed helmets on to their heads, buckled jerkins and belts tight about them. They formed into several lines of gleaming, tense men, shields lined up in front of the ranks, a solid wall of dull leather and sparkling metal rims. They watched the distant ridge for the first signs of the enemy.