At a word from Hadric they began their chant, beating out a fierce and endless rhythm of sword on shield. Its dull thunder echoed across the channel and up the narrow river valley to the green lands beyond.
The Berserks walked behind the ranks to feed and drink after their journey south, knowing that they – as usual – would be placed at the front of the army.
Soon, heralded by a flight of black and screeching birds, figures rose upon the ridge. A line of stark and well armed warriors, staring at the invaders, estimated the number of minutes it would take to accomplish the wholesale slaughter and thus end this abortive and ill-timed mission of conquest for many seasons to come.
As Beartooth described the new leader of the Celts, the young Berserker, whom Hadric had noticed because of the desperation in his eyes, had turned to look at the older warrior. It was as if, Hadric thought, from arrogant contemplation of the fated Norse skirmishers, the young Berserk had begun to learn something he had not known, and the information about Deirdre of the Flames had struck a note of interest outside that of the Berserker spirit which possessed him.
Retreating behind the formed lines of the Vikings, the seven Berserks gathered about a low fire where the remains of salted beef hung on a small and rusted spit. Whiteclaw stoked the embers and fresh fire rose, sending flurries of dark grey smoke into the summer air. Beartooth growled as the new heat, burning the meat on the spit, made the flesh emit succulent smells. Impatient to eat, having not eaten for three days, not since they had consumed Oengus mac Nial, he tore the remnants from the metal spike and ripped it three ways, gave a piece to Whiteclaw and another to Erik Bloodeye. He grinned at the others as if to say, not enough – find your own.
All but the young Berserker prowled off around the several camp fires, some way behind the motionless lines of Norse, and scavenged for meat. High on the ridge the gathering Celts began a weird ullulation, a war cry, perhaps, or a loud prayer to their war gods.
The Norse began their own chant, still beating sword against shield, maintaining the thundering echo across the beach. There was no doubt as to which side seemed the more professional. The armoured, blue- and black-garbed Norsemen stood firm and ranked and apparently full of professional confidence, whilst the Celts were a ragged and substantially naked army, strewn along the hill top, the sun gleaming off weapons and the occasional short-horned helmet.
Among them, in the middle, a woman stood, leaning arrogantly on a tall, metal-bladed spear. A short sword hung by her naked thigh, a wide belt of throwing knives slung across her jutting breasts. She was otherwise as naked as many of the men who grouped around her. While the young Berserker stared at her, her wild, red hair blew in a sudden gust of warm wind and reminded him of something …
Of being carried in a net of golden hair.
Of death and rebirth at the whim of Odin.
Of a village in the highlands of the north, and a girl.
The sudden incomprehensible thoughts surged through the young
Berserker’s mind and he cried aloud at the familiarity of them. Rising to his feet his cry of despair echoed across the shore above the chanting cry of the Norse. The Vikings assumed merely that the Berserks were beginning to work themselves into that rage that would turn them into near-invincible war machines, and a small channel through the black-clad ranks appeared, the nearer warriors casting uneasy glances backwards to where Beartooth still chewed noisily at the decaying meat, watching the younger man with some surprise and not a little irritation.
‘Not yet,’ he shouted, spitting fragments of meat at the young Berserker. ‘Sit down. These sea-sluts won’t attack without us.’
But it was not the fury of war that was surging through the Berserker’s mind. It was a fury of memory, a sudden recollection of a life led from birth until the manly age of eighteen summers, and of that life suddenly swamped by a terrible initiation, an act of revenge, a stealing of his soul by the puppet warriors of the demon god …
On the hot beach, bloody from war, minutes away from an almost certain rout by a vaster force of Celts, Harald Swiftaxe re-emerged from behind the shadow of the bear!
Two seasons he had been chained, on the verge of unconsciousness, deep in the darkness behind the Berserker soul, the spirit of the mad bear and Bear god who had directed his sword hand and the ridged muscles of his thighs in tireless pursuit and merciless slaughter. Two seasons! The winter, through snow that had lain waist deep across many of the lands the Berserks had covered, snow that they reached and left spattered with blood and churned with the fury of killing. The spring, and a long journey across the vast ocean, the docking against dark rock cliffs of the fertile land of the Celts, and then the fighting – the true fighting, the battles and skirmishes at the head of the invading, consuming forces of Gudrack.
The memories of his months as a Berserker did not desert him but, whereas for those months he had been almost asleep, now he half woke. Fragmented images of his previous life came back, vaguely formed, uncertain, but the memories of a pleasant and peaceful existence in the northlands.
Still the fury of the bear dominated his awareness, but now he saw those times of killing in a new perspective, almost as if for a while he could draw back and see, as from a distance, the cruel machine of war that he had become, the unpredictable and rage-possessed warrior, feared by all men, even those for whom he wielded his singing life-taker.
There was sickness in his stomach as, from behind his shield of crusted blood and unkempt yellow beard, he remembered the slaughter of innocents:
At a village, near the southern coast of his own land, they had scented
blood on the crisp winter wind. Riding across a narrow ridge they had discovered a duel of honour being fought, and one of the duellists already half-dead from axe wounds as he floundered in the deep snow. The rest of the village watched in a tight circle, but when they saw the Berserks appear against the sky line they had all, the two fighters included, run screaming back into their long houses, shuttering doors and exhorting their hearth spirits to rise and protect them.
Drawing their swords and screaming like some troll impaled on a mountain peak, the Berserks had ridden down the ridge and at the outskirts of the village had jumped from their horses and begun to run amok.
For the first time since his possession Harald felt the rising of saliva in his mouth, the ache in his gums where his teeth pushed forward during the slight, yet fearsome, transformation into the mask of a beard. He growled his throaty roar, the bear voice screaming its Berserk pleasure, and like a huge bear he lumbered through the flagged streets, bursting into houses and stables, seeking out life and feeling his body spin and turn, thrusting and hacking at everything that moved.
Redness rose before his eyes; heat consumed him; his skin burned, his mind burned, fire leapt through his skull, wind howled from his lungs, light flashed from his scything blade …
Like a scything summer wind, blowing a field of corn, reaping an invisible harvest of dust from the ears of wheat.
His laughter was the worst to recall, the maniacal scream that accompanied each head hacked brutally from soft white shoulders, each arm split from its socket. The thrashing corpse was dispatched then, with two swift cuts to the tender underside of the jaw.
And the feasting, the carving of red flesh and the consuming of it, to satiate a hunger that was not a human hunger, but the eternal starvation of the Bear god for the flesh of innocents, the warmth of gentle Norse folk …
Riding on, calmer by now, the fury having passed, they had crossed the ocean in a shallow dragon ship, crammed into the prow and watched by dark-eyed thanes, not a man at the oars or crouched in the bottom of the ship prepared to close his eyes and sleep with such as these aboard.
How many days had that crossing been? Too many, too many days on salted beef and stale rye bread. Too many days of salt water flaying the skin beneath their beards, crusting their eyes and not a drop of fresh water to spare for the rinsing of their caked features. Salt was worse than blood, for it irritated the skin and blinded eyes already narrowed with the brilliance of sun and water.
Seven times during the long spring campaign Harald could recall that same fury, emerging from deep within him to take absolute control of every fibre of his body. He could sense each burning madness, each whirling,
screaming, flashing attack on human life. His eyes, as he killed and violated, had focused on no mortal thing, but on some supernatural darkness, so that the cries of mercy, the innocence of his victims, the quietness of their lives, mattered less than the burning desire to amuse his master.
As abruptly as they had come, the rages had ended, but Harald, until a few minutes ago, had floated in a dark void, mostly unaware of what he did. In the long periods of calm he walked or ran with his companions, hunted, ate, followed or walked ahead of the main body of the Norse invaders, and if thoughts filled his mind, they were thoughts of filling the emptiness of his belly, relieving the surging passions of his loins, seeking new meat for his blade to cut. No human thoughts, but animal desires, desired by the young bear that possessed him.
Yet more and more, here on this final beach, facing the gathering army of the Celts, Harald emerged to take possession of his body again and, more importantly, of his thoughts.
Tears rose in his eyes and fleeting memories of people he had once known flashed before him … an old man called Bluetooth, a woman with white hair and a folded green robe, who caressed him and kept him warm … a younger girl … and as he thought of this girl, of her beauty and her softness, so he seemed to see her face screwed tight in agony, and was aware of his carnal knowledge of her, across a table in his father’s hall …
He closed his eyes and tried to drown the memory, but what he had done would not go away. It came back, item by item, stronger and stronger, like the wind from the sea, blowing the stink of fear up the rise to where the sword-sluts of Deirdre of the Flames waited their orders to charge.
What have I become?
he thought, and it was a question asked with a bitterness prompted by hidden desperation.
Neither man nor animal … what have I become?
Again he felt panic rising, the stirring of the bear within his mind, growing as it felt itself threatened, and the human, in control even if only transiently, knowing that at any moment he must be submerged again, lost in the darkness whilst madness dictated his actions.
What have I become? By the singing of my blade, what sort of monster have I become?
The wind grew strong; the sun rose higher, and half-way to zenith the first signs of attack from the Celtish army drew a repeated and much stronger cry of war from the Norsemen.
The Berserks rose and brushed grease from their lips. Harald stood among them and looked at them, then down at himself, at the filthy furs, the stinking animal hides that bound his body, the crusted blood and gore adding their own bizarre patterns to the uniform of the mad warrior he had become.
‘Berserks!’ cried a voice from among the ranks of the Vikings, and Beartooth led them up the beach and between the lines of armoured men.
Hadric faced them, fearlessly, back turned arrogantly to the slowly advancing Celts. A few sling stones clattered off shields and helms. This was to be a close battle, not a detached war of stone and arrow. The strange war cry of the enemy, an ullulating repetition of some magic word, reached Harald’s ears above the shield-banging and chanting of his own side.
‘You will fight at the point,’ said Hadric, ‘Fight as furious as you have ever fought and perhaps your rage will win us the day.’ The jarl grinned, but behind the grin was a mask of fear, for he knew – he sensed, as perhaps all the Norsemen sensed – that by sunset their flesh would be covered by the creeping crabs that preceded the evening tide, and by dawn their bones would be washing among the bones of their long ships, still floating out of reach in the channel.
Quite suddenly the red-haired Celts began to run, the sun catching their waving swords in a single sheet of brilliance that seemed to set the flame-haired warriors to a new sort of fire. Leading them, running fast as a deer, hair streaming behind her, breasts swinging, ran Deirdre, and Harald saw that her mouth was open as she added her own particular cry to the war cry of the men who owned these shores.
Harald took up position with the Berserks, and the lines of Norse dropped back to form the wide-angled point and shield-wall that would divide the Celts into two steams. A moment later the screaming horde was upon them. Sword met shield and flesh, and the clash of metal rang loud and shrill across the bay.
A naked warrior struck at Harald and his sword sunk into the thick fur of Harald’s shoulder, bit the metal links below and stopped; Harald’s own blade thrust swift and sharp into the man’s groin, drew upwards so that a great spill
of entrails tumbled from the man’s body. The sudden stench of blood set Harald’s mind spinning …
The bear reared and roared, opened its mouth so that fangs gleamed in the sunlight. Harald’s body burned – heat consumed him – his skin burned, his mind burned, fire leapt through his skull. The smell of blood was sweet in his nostrils; the sound of screaming was a frantic and exciting song that filled his head; pleasure surged through his loins, consuming his every fibre. His heart raced; his mind was a whirlpool into which all superficial and irrelevant thoughts drained, and a single concern emerged: satiation of the appetites of the beast he was, and the god who drank his pleasures through the limbs and senses of the Berserker warrior himself.
The Berserker rage grew, matured, evolved from simple pleasure into a shrieking anger, a furious desire to achieve more destruction than a simple swing and thrust of a blade could achieve in any one second. And as the limitations on his body’s usefulness were realised, the anger grew worse, so that Harald – and all the others – became driving, whirling, mad things, abusing even Odin as they carved a path through the semi-naked warriors who opposed them.