She nodded, slowly. ‘Your One-Eyed god works your muscles like a Saxon puppet. I’ve seen your kind before, the Berserker warrior-furies, but about you there is something different. For they seem to enjoy their curse, but you fight it.’
‘I wish to rid myself of it,’ said Harald, and on impulse he knelt before her, surprising her so that she sat up from the deep cow-skin bed on which she lay. The blue light spilled across her face, softening her frown to a look of pity. Circles and spirals on the walls, the magic words of great wizards, seemed to move in the blue shadows.
‘Don’t kneel before me, warrior. I’m cursed as deeply as you, and also seek deliverance.’ She smiled. ‘And my deliverance, I sense, is close at hand.’
‘Help me,’ implored Harald. ‘You have great power; I have heard of it and have seen it at work. You can turn blades to water and make the very sea suck a man to his death. How do I rid myself of this demon in my skull?’
She was immediately angry. Fire flashed in her eyes, but she calmed after a moment. ‘Are you here thinking only of yourself, then?’
Harald drew back and again let his gaze wander across her body. He felt the hot flush spread across his face and met her eyes, which at first mocked
him, then invited him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have a strong desire for …’ he found the words catching in his throat, almost embarrassed to speak of what his body wished.
‘Is this the bold and fierce Berserker?’ Deirdre laughed, reclining again. ‘He rapes women and cuts their throats, but when given the chance to love a sorceress he blushes like a youth and trembles like an autumn leaf.’
‘I …’
‘You what …?’ she prompted.
‘I’ve heard tales … stories …’
‘Ah, I see.’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘You’ve heard that my kisses burn like fire, and that to enter my body is to enter the domain of wild beasts and to be consumed by the pit that you plunder.’
Harald agreed that those were indeed the stories he had heard.
‘So you have come here hoping for me to help release you, but without having to pay for that privilege. Is that right?’
Harald was puzzled. ‘Do I need to pay for your help? I have nothing worth trading …’
She sat up straight and her lips parted, her eyes dropping to where his desire stirred beneath the cloth breeks he wore. Then she started at him, urgently. ‘You have much to trade. You can trade me your body for just one hour; your manhood for just one hour; your strength and passion for just one hour; your lips on mine for just a single hour. That is the trade. That is the price of my help.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Harald, watching the lissom woman as she rose to her haunches and leaned towards him. He fought against drawing back, but the sudden fear in his eyes made her straighten and mock him with her smile.
‘What don’t you understand, my young Berserker?’
‘Why your price is such … such an easily obtainable commodity. Why me? Half the army you lead are greater men than me.’
Deirdre laughed, shook her head so that her long red hair waved about her shoulders.
‘I have waited for a special man for longer than I care to remember. My army – those men whom I led yesterday at their own request, and who have now dispensed with me – would not touch me for all the gold in the Slieve mountains. Don’t you know, young man? Haven’t you heard? My lips burn where they touch a mortal man, my womb consumes those who dare to penetrate it …’ She laughed.
‘And
are
they just stories?’
Harald stared at her and desired her with greater and greater urgency. How could any woman so full and voluptuous be anything but soft and draining on the consummatory bed?
‘That is my curse,’ she said softly. ‘No, not stories. Every word of it is true. Any mortal man who touches me, except in combat, is fated to die, any man who receives my kiss – any
mortal
man – will feel the kiss burn through him until he dies as if his body were alight.’
‘Then how can I kiss you?’ said the Berserker, finding his body growing tense as she neared him again. Suddenly, before he could react, before he could avoid her, her hands were behind his neck and her full lips were pressed against his. Her mouth opened and her tongue flickered between his teeth, prising his jaws apart, touching his tongue with the darting tip of hers, filling his mouth with her warm moistness. At the same time her body pressed against him, and even through his thick layers of clothing he could feel the firm mounds of her breasts, and the hard tips of them, pressing against his chest.
She drew away, and there was mischief in her eyes as she looked at him and laughed. He touched his lips, feeling the blood in his face pulsing and burning. But no terrible fire consumed him.
He smiled. She clapped her hands together and laughed ecstatically. ‘Then it’s true, you
are
cursed, and I can be free … I can be free!’
‘Why don’t I burn?’ he cried, sensing some awful truth.
She said, ‘Because you are no longer mortal. You are cursed by the Sky god, and are
less
than mortal, and it is a less-than-mortal who will release me from the hold of Mumaggra!’
‘I came to beg release, not to give it!’ shouted Harald, but his anger showed in no more than the raising of his voice, for the woman’s scent was strong in his nostrils and his body ached for her.
‘I can help you only to know where to look,’ she said sadly, and kissed him again, quickly, before glancing up to the weapons that hung from the corbelled roof of the chamber. ‘Among the weapons there is a dirk and a belt that was given to me …’ she broke off, looking at Harald … ‘a long time ago,’ she finished, almost sadly. ‘After the curse was laid on me I was much as you are now, searching aimlessly for release, not knowing where to go or whom to ask. A Sky Rider, one of a great race from islands beyond these lands, now dead and forgotten these last hundred generations … as he passed, on his way from sea to sky, to die and scatter his dust in the great void between the stars, he gave me the dirk, bade me wear it and ask how to start my quest for release. It is no more than a beginning, but you are welcome to that dirk, my young Berserker lover. You are more than welcome. It will not cure the curse, though, and nor can I. My spells are the simple spells of my ancient race, now lost below the grass and the earth. I come, Harald, from a time before even these great mounds were built, and it has been my fate to search for one such as you to release me from the spell I labour under.’
Quickly, then, as if time might take the words from her mind before she
could speak them, she told Harald of her girlhood, and the terrible plight that had led her to wander these lands of the red-haired Celts. She came from a time when these lands and the lands of the Saxons had been joined by a vast bridge of land, and there too she had wandered, searching for one who was not mortal, who himself rode beneath a great curse, seeking escape.
In her own land, which she called Ortygia, she had consented to being love-bonded to the son of a powerful Earth Master, one of a great élite who could manipulate the raw forces of the supernatural into magic charms and life-forces that could be hidden from the eyes of a mortal man, save when he summoned them for help. Then a Sky Rider, one of a race from above the winds, from a distant land that was incomprehensible to even the Ortygians, had captured her heart and she had run from her betrothed. For a year she had been free in the deserted but sunbaked lands that would one day become the lands of the Western Celts.
The Earth Master, seeing his son’s grief, had spent a year formulating a frightening spell, a magic bond that it was unthinkable to form, for it condemned a man (or woman) to eternal searching, and this was something that was never allowed. Even though the Earth Master, and those like him, played with time and invisible forces as gods in their own right, beneath them, in a place beyond even the supernatural world of ghosts, there existed the Dark Ones, whose angry voices were the storm winds of Ortygia; and whose pleasure was the gentle rain that fell with a sound almost like the music of the Sky Riders, music which could fill the mind with images and senses as real as being in the place imagined.
To appease the Dark Ones, the Earth Master had incorporated a release from the curse he had placed on Deirdre. He had condemned her to eternal lovelessness until a man who was less than mortal released her with his own love. Since only a man cursed in similar vein was less than mortal, and since such curses were virtually intolerable to consider, let alone cast, it seemed to the Earth Master that he was binding the faithless Deirdre to an eternity of isolation, and this had well pleased him.
Her Sky Rider lover was not immune from the burning, consuming effect of her body and he died in agony while she cowered in the corner of their tent and screamed, wondering what had occurred.
And thus for all her life she had searched for a man who had been cursed by one of the supernatural descendants of the Ortygian creations beyond that veil of reality.
Harald was one such, and she felt that at last she could swim the time winds to find her Sky Rider again.
‘The Sky Riders,’ murmured the Berserker in the blue light of the chamber. Deirdre stared at him, her green eyes shining with new-found hope, her body shaking and moist, perhaps with the effort of remembering her long
forgotten past, perhaps with the closeness of the man who could release her from her spell. ‘Where are they now?’
He was thinking of the ghostly Tuatha De Danann he had watched that night, and how they had urged their steeds into the very sky itself, until the glowing moon had swallowed them.
‘Gone,’ said Deirdre. ‘Gone upwards, outwards. But among those weapons is a tiny axe which, if I wear it when I am released, will take me after them. That too was given me by the Sky Rider, the brother of the man who died beneath my embrace.’
‘And the Dark Ones … the Dark Ones … perhaps they can help me.’
She laughed. ‘The knowledge of how to reach them has been lost for centuries. I never knew how, myself, but I do know that scattered across the vast world there are the ancient runes that could be used to bring them out of their veil of darkness.’
‘Where are these runes?’
Again she smiled, ‘My Berserker lover, my great hope … you crouch among them. If you can read them, then you may indeed be saved.’
Harald looked about him, at the strange wavy lines and tight spiral shapes that had been carved into the very rock itself. Everywhere he looked, growing more and more excited, he saw the shapes and symbols of a forgotten race, the ancient language of the Tuatha De Danann, perhaps, or a language even older … a language, at any rate, that he had always thought depicted the exploits and heroism of the mighty spirits that resided in these dank tunnels.
They were meaningless, of course, the strange shapes and fading symbols of the long-dead artists.
He looked at Deirdre; there was anguish in his eyes. ‘How do I read them?’
‘The knowledge of reading them passed from this land only very recently. The understanding of them died centuries ago. There is no way, now, to uncover the wording of the secrets. I’m sorry. Perhaps elsewhere, in the great pyramids of the sandscapes to the south, perhaps there the interpretation of the incantations will be easier. Perhaps if you pray hard enough the Dark Ones will emerge on their own initiative. I will tell you this: the place where they reside, the gateway to their land, is a great stone circle across the sea, deep in the flat lands of the Saxons; it is ruined, now, but the power of the Dark Ones still resides there.’
‘I must go there, then!’
Her gentle hand restrained him. Her eyes glowed green as she sought his gaze again. ‘You must begin your own quest as the dirk directs. It may be that the stone circle is a quest for another time, another year. Harald, for your own sake follow whatever wisdom is given you, in the order it is given. Perhaps the Dark Ones are reaching through to you even now, out of sympathy,
out of love, suggesting through the mouths of others how you should seek the dispatch of this cruel possession. Don’t rush from place to place, never thinking of what you are doing.’
‘I must escape it,’ Harald moaned. How could this woman be of so little help? She even knew his name, and yet he had never given it to her! She was so powerful, and yet so helpless. The curse that held him must have been truly frightening in its strength. He sank in on himself, his head dropping on to his chest, a terrible depression consuming him.
In his mind the bear stirred and its shrill cry was like a mocking laugh.
Harald looked up sharply, bright tears in his eyes, a human mania etched in his face, a perfectly normal anger, not the blood anger of his bear spirit. ‘I
must
break the curse.’
‘Help me break mine first,’ said Deirdre, and a moment later she pulled the robe from her shoulders, allowing the soft material to gather around her waist, caught by the broadness of her hips until she reached down and gently pushed the garment away, exposing the length of her body to Harald’s hungry gaze.
For a moment Harald froze, then passion became his master and he tore his own clothes from his body. He fell heavily against her, pushing her backwards on to the cowskin bed, in the blue-haze darkness of the tomb. His stiff member thrust against her sex, but she reached down and eased him away, kissing his mouth, running her tongue across his lips while she stroked the swollen tip of his penis with a finger as gentle and tantalising as any his wildest youthful dreams had created.
As they clung and rolled together in this sensuous embrace, Harald ran his hand across her smooth belly, sliding his fingers through the sparse silkiness of her pubic hair and finding her moist and open. He teased the fleshy button that was the seat of her ecstasy so that she shifted and moaned beneath his body.
She twisted away from him, her eyes closed, her fingers gripping his manhood almost convulsively in her pleasure. He kissed the side of her jaw and worked down along the curve of her neck, along the hollow of her shoulder, until his lips caressed the huge swell of her breast and finally caught an erect nipple between his teeth, teasing it with short, hard strokes of his tongue.