Harald didn’t stop. He charged on up the ridge, and when he came up to the towering wolf he stared straight into its glowing eyes, oblivious of the hungry mouth and the stench of death that came from its lungs. He raised his sword …
‘No!’ cried a voice, and Harald hesitated for just a second, confused, unsure, in the strange emotional state that was half Berserk rage and half human desire to kill the haunter of his dreams, unsure from where that voice had come.
But he recognised it.
‘Sigurd!’ he yelled, staring round quickly, searching for his friend. ‘Sigurd, quick. I kill the wolf. Help me.’
Then he rammed the blade between the strangely passive wolf’s ribs, and drew it out quickly, jumping back as the wolf’s great howl of pain deafened him.
‘Harald, no!’ cried Sigurd.
‘Where are you?’ shrieked Harald, turning round and round, searching the bloodstained snowfield and seeing nothing. Was this another of Odin’s tricks? Was he losing his mind?
The great wolf writhed and kicked, as blood erupted from the wound. It seemed that it would survive and Harald ran at it again. He thrust his sword once more into its body, so that a great red tear spilled the wolf’s blood in a boiling flood, and the snow sizzled and melted beneath the heat.
‘SIGURD!’ cried Harald, as he killed the wolf. ‘WHERE ARE YOU?’
‘You kill me,’ moaned Sigurd, and Harald stopped in the middle of his third thrust, and stared wide-eyed and frightened at the squirming beast before him.
Silver sparkled on the wolf’s skull. The muzzle faded and a familiar bearded face, twisted with pain, stared at him.
The great dark body shrivelled and shrank and a fur-clad warrior lay there.
Sigurd Gotthelm, clutching the gashes in his chest, stared up at Harald through eyes filled not with hate, but with sadness.
Harald screamed and dropped his sword staring at the dying warrior, almost incapable of thinking clearly.
‘By Thor’s great swing, what have I done? What have I done?’
He dropped to his knees and cradled Gotthelm’s head in his arms. Blood dribbled from the corner of the warrior’s mouth, and his pain-filled eyes were dull as he stared up at Harald.
The bear writhed in merriment, rolled around and laughed, but crept back into his mind and left the freezing human to cope with the situation.
Gotthelm smiled, shallowly. ‘I thought this might happen.’
‘Sigurd. My good friend … the wolf … I thought …’
Gotthelm shook his head, hushed the younger man. ‘You couldn’t know. And when we rode together and the wolf haunted your dreams, not even I realised what it meant.’
‘You were with me,’ said Harald, feeling tears sting his eyes against the cold that stang them perpetually. ‘How could the wolf have been you …?’
‘You dreamed of destiny …’ said the warrior, gasping with pain. ‘You saw destiny and it came to you in dreams. The wolf and the bear …’ He grinned. ‘The wolf and the bear … I didn’t realise it when I saw the Keeper … it never occurred to me …’
Harald was confused. He shook his head. Gotthelm tensed and relaxed as pain racked his body.
He said, ‘The Keeper gave me the means to follow you as fast as you Berserks ride, which is unnaturally fast. A wolf. It was the best way. Only a wolf could match your pace. I followed you and you outwitted me. My cry couldn’t penetrate your skull. But until we met on this ridge the transformation was permanent. You would give me release, and I would give release to you. I forgot the bear, and the fear it holds for the wolf of the north …’
‘Sigurd, Sigurd …’ Harald wept openly as he held the man to his breast. ‘
You
… you all the time … I could have met you at the cliffs … I could have waited for you anywhere, but I feared you.’ He looked up into the clouds. ‘Odin, you make fools even of friends!’ he cried. ‘Truly your evil is greater than the Evil One himself!’
Thunder rolled across the heavens, god-wind howled with laughter, hysterical laughter, the One-Eyed demon prancing with pleasure as he watched the scene below him.
Gotthelm reached up and removed his silver skull helmet. ‘See?’ he said, and Harald took the helmet from the older man and looked to where, once, there had been a bear and a wolf in deadly combat.
Now there was just blankness, bare metal, gleaming.
‘Not my death,’ said Gotthelm. He smiled. ‘I’m grateful Harald. I thought that picture showed my death and I feared it. Now it is gone, and I will still live to fight another year. Don’t worry over me …’
Harald dropped the helmet to the ground and hugged his friend. He had forgotten that Gotthelm’s destiny was to live until the scenes depicted on his helmet were all played through.
He would live. The terrible wounds given him by the Berserker would not claim his spirit for the dark benches of Valhalla.
‘Release me, then,’ said Harald, knowing that Gotthelm understood the way that Harald would escape his curse.
Gotthelm eased his sword from its sheath, and Harald laid him down on the snow, among the red crystals of his own blood. Gotthelm pressed the point against Harald’s chest. ‘There? Will that be a mortal and yet allow you a chance to survive?’
‘What choice have I but to find out the hard way?’
‘Then make ready for my steel, my strong young Innocent … make ready …’
But before he could thrust, his gaze went beyond Harald, his eyes widening in shock.
‘Harald! Watch out!’
Too late.
In the moment’s shock the blade shifted. Then a heavy body slammed against Harald from behind, and he felt himself impaled on Gotthelm’s blade while a razor sharp knife slashed agonisingly across his throat.
He twisted, feeling the life pump from his neck in great spurts, feeling the cold metal draining his soul from his severed heart.
Gotthelm was above him, weeping. The girl’s manic laughter echoed in his ears.
Blackness took him …
A hand grasped his hand, as he had grasped the cold fingers of his father. Gotthelm’s voice was a haunting cry. ‘I shall not forget you … I shall not forget you … May merciful gods guide your quest.’
Stars spun; a great dark vortex sucked him down.
His cry, then, was the first cry of a new-born baby; but for a while, for many years, Harald Swiftaxe would lay dead in the void between ages, sensing nothing, but preparing to begin his quest again, in whatever world the gods saw fit to take him to.
This is for Bryn and Greg and Simone and Sheila
Who climbed the ramparts of Dinas Powys with me,
and we were Kings of the Castle.
Dyfed,
AD
492
This was the end, then! After seven days at sea, weakened by hunger and exhaustion, he was to be smashed to pieces on the rocks of the very coast that had been his destination, all that time ago.
How sour the humour and whim of fate could be. To have fought so hard for his Warlord, to have discovered so much, and to have come so close, so near to bringing his news to the very fort from which he had been dispatched – and then to be cheated by those seas in which he had swum as a boy – to be killed by those rocks from which he had dived as a youth, when the war with the Saxons had seemed so far away, so many years distant!
What wouldn’t he give, now, for the strength of that great warrior across the sea, the invulnerable warrior, the Mad Bear who could mean so much to the Briton’s cause against the advancing heathens!
But he had no strength, not now, not any more; and there was no way of letting Arthur know of his plight, and of what he had discovered, far away, in the boglands of Eriu
…
Crouched on the cliff top, overlooking the narrow, rocky cove, a small boy watched as the tiny long boat was swept through rain and billowing waves towards its inevitable destruction.
The cold autumn rain drove from the sea and almost blinded him. He huddled lower and swept back his long, black hair, peering out across the violent sea in his efforts to try and discern the vessel more clearly. There was a man lying in the bottom of the boat, and the boy could not tell at this distance whether he was alive or dead.
Waves broke against the soft, grey sand and already wood and fragments of leather equipment were washing on to the beach; soon the boat would smash against the dark, crystalline rocks that poked above the waves like teeth, and then the beach would become littered with the remnants of this strange arrival.
Before the boy could find his legs, however, and run to the beach ready to pick up the pieces, two brown-robed monks appeared at the far end of the grey sands and came swiftly towards the rocks. They lifted their skirts high, bare feet and white legs moving fast and urgent as they covered the
ground towards where the boat would soon be pitched ashore by the storm winds.
The boy huddled deeper into his sodden wool garments, feeling the icy rain send chill fingers deep into his flesh. This first rain of the new season had come inland swiftly and taken him by surprise, and only the sight of the helpless boat had kept him by the shore, looking outwards, yonder, to the invisible land of the Gaels – Eriu.
He recognised the monks and immediately shivered with something more than cold.
The older of them carried a small crucifix before him, lifting it above his head with his right hand, whilst with his left he grappled and clutched at his robe. His bald head, not even rimmed by a thin circle of hair, glistened in the rainy daylight; water ran from his beaked nose, made him appear to be crying voluminous tears.
The younger monk, a taller individual, dark-haired save for the small shaved patch on the crown of his head, reached the shoreline first, and stood in the incoming tide watching as the boat smashed and shattered.
When the occupant was thrown from the craft and floundered helplessly in the churning waters, this younger religious plunged into the sea and a few minutes later dragged the drowning man on to the beach.
The stranger lay on his back, his eyes closed, his mouth open as if he were drinking the driving rain, washing the salt from his throat; his arm was across his face and he lay senseless.
Even from his vantage point, high above, the boy could discern the richness of the stranger’s apparel – bear-fur jerkin and thick, leather leggings; he wore jewelled rings on his fingers and the stones sparkled in the fragmentary light like the white-flecked ocean. A pendant that hung around his neck seemed to be of a carved ivory animal, and ivory was a rarely seen jewel in these inaccessible parts of the country.
The boy dropped to his stomach, wondering who the shipwrecked man could be. The monks too seemed to be puzzling over the stranger, but his clothes and general appearance marked him out as a man of Powys, a mountainous province to the north, and the interest in him did not last long.
The older monk knelt on one knee and blessed the exhausted man repeatedly. The younger monk reached down and pulled the warrior’s short-bladed sword from its slings.
As the crucifix was held above him so the young monk thrust the sword into the warrior’s belly and swiftly, then, they stripped the corpse of clothes and jewels. When the body lay naked and bloody, the sword still erect and deeply embedded in the man’s gut, the two monks blessed themselves and the sea and ran, skirts lifted high, but staggering beneath their cumbersome
armfuls of loot; they were soon gone, back to the tiny monastery on the cliff, half a mile from where the boy still lay and watched.
The rain washed the blood from the man’s body; the sea nudged the spreadeagled limbs, moved the corpse inland as the tide edged further up the beach.
Then the body reached up and pulled the iron blade from its flesh, cast the weapon away and began to moan.
At the moment when his own sword was thrust deeply and agonisingly into his belly, Uryen of Powys had remembered what the village seer had told him when he was a child of twelve: you will die, when you finally die, by the hand of God.
As a Roman Christian by birth, Uryen had welcomed the prophecy, if only because it was easy; as a quiet believer in the old gods he had welcomed it because this Christian God was gentle, and he had always secretly desired a gentle death; as an emissary of the war chief, Arthur, however, with news that might mean the end of the Saxon advance, he did not welcome that prophecy coming true, not in this angry way, not at this desperate time.
He fought to keep the life spirit in his body, struggled to retain consciousness, to hold back the departing vital force that threatened to slip from his corpse like the blood from the sword wound in his stomach.
The rain might have drowned him, or the sea carried him outwards when the tide turned, but a small boy came to his assistance, adding his thin-armed strength to the great strength of the dying warrior; suddenly Uryen was being hauled up the saturated grey sands and into the dry shelter of a rock overhang.
There he relaxed, his hands clutching the gaping wound in his body, his eyes watching the frightened, yet dedicated youngster, who made him comfortable and then ran away, shouting back that he would get help, that his father would help him.
Even if Uryen had wanted to shout his thanks he couldn’t have; but he sensed the genuine concern of the lad and allowed unconsciousness to take him, and the last he heard for a while was the crash of the autumn storm sea and the dull sound of rain pelting across the beach.
When he next opened his eyes he was in darkness; he could hear rain, distantly, but he was warm now; the bitter cold of the sea and of his saturated clothes was gone. There was the hardness of a wooden pallet below his back, and the softness of fur coverings across his body, drawn up to his chin.
He could smell food, meat smells; and the tang of ale, which made his mouth water after so long drinking sea spray.
There was a movement beside him and when he stared at it he saw a
small girl, backing away from him, open-mouthed, wide-eyed. She was about ten, and dressed in a ragged but adequate woollen dress that hung from a neatly tied cord around her neck down as far as Uryen could see, somewhere below her knees. He thought she looked starved; her face was thin and framed by ratty hair, drawn and twisted into shapeless plaits. But she was clean.