His blade rose, came round to rest against Niall’s taut belly.
‘You are dead if the boy’s blood spills!’ shouted Amalgaid mac Eochu. His blade came up above his head, ready to strike his half brother. Tualaith, still cowering beside her cubicle watching, screamed. Gormgal glanced at his brother for just an instant, then drew back his arm and would have thrust the blade through his captive’s body.
But Niall the Mad Bear screamed, suddenly and loudly, and the scream – no human cry but the agonised howl of a wild beast – stopped Gormgal’s killing motion and made him blink with surprise; and in that moment he was lost!
The boy’s right fist flashed up towards Gormgal’s throat, and all who stood around the fire saw the dull glint of light on the thin blade that the Mad Bear held. The shaft of the dagger buried itself in Gormgal’s throat, probing upwards through mouth and palate and into the soft tissue of the brain. Gormgal tried to scream, but the force of the youth’s blow had pinned his jaws together and he staggered and fell backwards into the fire, still holding Niall by his hair.
As the giant warrior rolled in the flames Niall tore the dagger from his attacker’s throat and cut his hair so that the man’s grip on him was removed. Then, unbothered by Gormgal’s terrible screams, and the fixed and ferocious gaze that the warrior directed at him, he leaned forward and wrenched the big man’s head around – ‘This for the bear you killed and bragged about!’ – fighting against the threshing body as beard and eyebrows ignited in the flames.
With a sudden flexing motion Gormgal cast the boy off his body and staggered to his feet. His head was burning fiercely, flame covering his face and licking up to the dry rafters and thatch which began to spark and ignite.
As he stood there, horrifyingly silent now, beating at his charring head, Niall the Mad Bear calmly used Gormgal Dubhfasog’s own blood-blackened sword to disembowel the big man with a two handed blow that would have made even a well practised warrior proud.
Still clutching the sword the boy ran from the house and out into the windy night.
Four winters chased across the land, each culminating in a brief but heavy fall of snow that left the fort and settlement invisible in the white plain that ran from mountain to mountain and to the sea. The children, thick and dark in furs, darted about the inside of the palisade, chasing the sleek-bodied hounds and playing their games of war with slush missiles made of new fallen snow. At this time, during the last winter of the four, Niall the Mad Bear fashioned himself a sword out of the snow, crouched apart from the other children against the steeply rising north wall, where white stone from a nearby rocky beach had been used to strengthen the earth barrier. Smoke rose from the round-houses, and the sound of laughter and storytelling drifted from his father’s great house. The family heads of the small tribe were gathered there to listen to a visiting storyteller from the high fort of Cruchain, where the great Ailill Molt lived, eight days’ run to the east and south, beyond the forest of the goddess Danu, Faraois na Danaan, where only filid dared venture in their search for ancient magic traditions.
Watching Niall, as he worked, was the old filid, Cathabach, who called himself Druid na Fiachrach, the Druid of the Fiachrach, because the visiting Gaulish Druids practised an art – the casting of spells – that he, unlike the other filid of the tribal lands in this backwater of the province, also practised. A true filid was merely a law-giver and medicine man; a Druid was all these, but was also a student of magic. The draoi, the true magicians of Connacht, men who were not Druids or filids in the true sense, were hard to find, living nomadic lives and hugging the edges of the sprawling forests where the spirits of the great tribe of Danu, dead to the last man this thousand years gone, could still be seen riding between the trees, between their great
sidhs
, the mounds where their mortal remains glowed golden on every first day of every season.
As the children of the fort played their war games, Cathabach observed the shaping of the snow sword at the hands of the Mad Bear. It was an arm’s length from hilt to tip of blade; a hand’s span across the gently curved shaft. The hilt was decorated with dung jewels dropped from the goats, and the pommel was long, richly carved by Niall’s thin fingers.
Several boys raced by him, calling him cu mire, cu mire!, Mad Dog, Mad Dog!, something more familiar to them than a bear. Niall ignored them, watched them darkly until they had finished their taunting, then returned to the decorating of his snow sword.
The children were re-enacting the heroic deeds of the Ulsterman, Cuchulainn. Feradach, elder brother of the Mad Bear, was playing the hero’s role, stripped naked against the snow, skin white and goose-pimpled, but every muscle in his body taut and tense as he ritually beheaded each man who came at him, crying, as Cuchulainn had cried four hundred years ago when the warring between the provinces had been fierce and unjustified, ‘Two heads are better than one, oh men of Leinster, but a hundred heads are
far
better than one!’
As Feradach feigned the famous warp-spasm, Cuchulainn’s bizarre fury, twisting his body, blowing the muscles into great balloons, narrowing one eye and widening the other, Niall laughed at the sight of his brother deforming himself.
Feradach sprang at him, furious at being mocked, and his left foot flew upwards to land, flat-soled, against the Mad Bear’s forehead, knocking Niall back against the stone wall. A woman came out of the low store room in the wall and shouted at them to take their childish pranks elsewhere.
‘I am the Warlord’s son!’ shrieked Feradach, furious, narrowing his eyes and pointing at her, ‘And at my slightest word my father will strike your hand from your arm!’
The woman drew back into the tiny place in the stone structure, dropped a thick linen curtain across the hole. Feradach stared down at his brother and grinned. ‘The Mad Bear laughs at me because I pay tribute to a great Eris hero. Does the Mad Bear think he can dodge twenty spears thrown at the same time? The great Feradach, son of Amalgaid, spirit brother of Cuchulainn, true son of the mother whose least impressive bitch birthed this Mad Bear,
he
can dodge them as they go to strike his body, and clutch them, two to a finger, and send them back!’
He turned, snapped his fingers, and two of the children flung their stick javelins at him. He snatched them both from the air, whipped them behind him and sent them back between his legs. Each javelin struck the man who had thrown it, despite the owner’s frantic attempt to avoid being struck.
‘The Mad Bear,’ chided Feradach, ‘plays with a sword of snow; the sword will melt in strong sun; as with the Mad Bear, the time of the sword is very short. Both will soon drain life into the earth. The sun will take the sword, and Feradach will slit the throat of the Bear when he is allowed to change his practice sword for a weapon of carboned iron, with a bronze hilt studded with the finest green gems. Such a sword. Mad Bear, such a sword has not yet been fashioned for there has not yet been a warrior – save Cuchulainn – who could have the strength and stamina, nor even the skill and determination, to use it. Dread that day, brother; fear it. You shall be my first head.’
He ran back to his friends, and they continued their game. Niall the Mad Bear stared at his brother for a long time, and Cathabach, a few paces away,
sheltered from the bitter wind beneath a leather canopy, saw the terrible emotion that passed through Niall’s face, and guessed what was in his mind.
He wrapped his white fur robe about him, made sure his tall boots were well bound, and waded through the snow to where the snow sword lay before the strange boy. Niall lifted his gaze to regard the Druid as he came to kneel beside him.
‘It’s a proud sword,’ Cathabach said, ‘But so short lived.’
The snow sword was indeed a proud weapon. Every detail was right, and the edge was as fine as the finest seven-forged iron, sharp as the golden dirk that Amalgaid used to cut the heads from the girls sacrificed to Lug at Lugnasid and Beltaine.
Niall smiled, the first time for hours that his sallow, pale-skinned face had broken from its fixed expression. His green eyes sparkled, and blond, clay-greased hair fell across his features as he looked down and ran his finger along the ice blade. ‘This is my sword,’ he said. ‘There is no other sword for me.’
Cathabach stared at him, noticed the tears forming in the corners of his eyes. Niall pulled back his long hair and tied it in a loose knot behind his neck, staring at the antics of his brother. Cathabach stared at the sword again. ‘You have put your soul into the snow sword; you have put your heart into the fashioning of the pommel, your strength into the cutting edge of the blade. This is the sword of a great man, who is destined to great feats, and to a great death.’
Niall slapped his hands together and began to tremble, staring at the white sword, his breath frosting and filling the air before him. The tears ran freely from his eyes. Cathabach touched the tears and smeared them along the blade of the snow sword.
‘Does it frighten you to believe in death?’
‘I believe in death,’ said Niall. ‘I am frightened only of the darkness in my mind.’
Cathabach was surprised by this sudden confession. For ten years the boy had said virtually nothing of his bizarre possession, save to scream on occasion of the Bear in his head, the great black Bear that took control of him at times, and made his hands
its
hands, his heart
its
heart, his teeth
its
teeth. Most of the warriors in the fort had never seen a bear, those great beasts being confined to certain of the northern forests, and the name Mad Bear was often used to cover their ignorance of what made the boy scream so; but from that ignorance came fear, and his possession was fearfully regarded.
‘What darkness is this, Niall?’
Niall let his gaze fix upon the prancing, scrapping boys of the fort. ‘Sometimes a Bear calls me,’ he said. ‘Sometimes my mind is filled with darkness, and I hear strange words, coming as from the darkest night, where no stars
or moon shine, and no sun rises to scatter the darkness. I hear a name, and it shouts at me, mocks me.’
‘What name?’ Cathabach felt his excitement growing.
Niall shivered violently and huddled deeper into his clothes, looked down at his sword. ‘Odin,’ he said. ‘The name is Odin. And a voice calls me …’ he looked at Cathabach, and his eyes were filled with terror. ‘A voice calls me Berserker! And that name terrifies me more than any other thing. I don’t know what it is, but the voice says
I
am Berserker. And then it mocks me with its laugh again.’
The names meant nothing to Cathabach, save that ‘Odin’ was vaguely familiar. Druidic lore spoke of an ancient demonic force, known as Wutaan, that had fallen to earth from a distant star and escaped the confinement imposed upon it by the elder gods. No doubt the similarity of the names was accidental …
A large, dark-furred hound raced about the fort, pursued by the boys; its howling was pitiful to hear. A weak dog, its legs and body emaciated by some peculiar ailment, it was for the spit, and the boys had been given the task of killing it.
It ran to Niall the Mad Bear, and baleful eyes stared at him, but he reached out to slap its muzzle away from him, and a moment later Feradach drove his wooden dirk into the beast’s neck, hanging on as it whimpered and whined, staggering for a few paces more before keeling over and kicking its last.
Feradach rose and wiped the blood from his mock dagger. He had pulled on a short kirtle, but was otherwise naked. He seemed unbothered by the cold as he taunted Niall. ‘This dog was my father’s choice for our low feast. It would not have been mine.’
‘He should have been fostered before now,’ said Cathabach quietly, as Feradach turned away. ‘And so should you, for that matter. It goes against the way of things to have two sons remaining in their father’s house during the training years.’
‘No house would have me,’ said Niall. ‘Not even Ailill with his fifty foster sons. No house will shelter Niall the Mad Bear.’
‘I know,’ said Cathabach tiredly. ‘I was just wishing aloud. This is the root of Feradach’s hatred for you. He should have been taken to the house of Cellach, warlord of the Ui Maine, in the east. But Cellach’s wife would not have him since his blood was mixed with yours. It was a great opportunity missed, for the warlord has seven daughters, all as fair as the snow, and green-eyed like emerald. His friends have gone there, and these boys he plays with are from Cellach’s great stone fort, and the stories they tell him make him wilder with frustration.’
Niall grinned, watching his brother hacking the paws from the slayed hound.
‘He will try and kill me soon, unless I kill him first.’
‘Your father will kill you if you do,’ said Cathabach. ‘Besides, Feradach is as experienced with weapons as the greatest warrior here. You would be hard put to the task to take his head. And at ten years of age, with just two years between you, such a thought is strangely horrid.’
‘If I could wield my snow sword,’ said Niall, brushing the gleaming ice blade. ‘If I could wave this above my head, so that its snow iron gleamed in the sun, flashed from the sun as it struck at my tormentors, if I could do that, I should be invincible.’
For a moment Cathabach was silent, and the silence was filled with his fight to come to a decision. Niall turned his bright eyes upon the old man, and then slowly smiled. Cathabach reached out and, by touching his shoulder, silenced him. He glanced towards the house where the boys could be heard whooping at the curing of the dog.
‘You must not kill him,’ said Cathabach, ‘You must make that pledge. You must not kill him.’
‘I pledge that,’ said Niall, and he could hardly contain his excitement as he realised what Cathabach was about to do for him.
‘Then stay silent while I remember the spell. And never repeat this spell that you shall hear, for the words, coming from your lips, will turn you to snow where you stand. Pledge it.’