The Reluctant Berserker (16 page)

As he passed through the little holdings, the hundred-man of each would come running with beer and bread and soft cheese. Honey, sometimes. They would greet him and wish him well, and direct him swiftly on his way. To the eyes of a scop, he felt sure his pilgrimage would have seemed a blissful thing, scarcely worth the turning of a tuning peg.

Yet every time he passed through the habitations of men—every night he begged shelter and received unquestioning hospitality—his sin followed him. It curled up beside him beneath the softest of blankets. It sat at his shoulder at the board and turned his meat into ash. When he wasn’t looking, it crept up tight behind him and whispered in his ear.

As it was doing now.

Fealo, Wulfstan’s horse, froze once more, tugging the bridle from his hand, making him fall forward, his right leg sinking deep into mud, his sword hand grazing the surface of the water. He looked past the mirror of the water’s surface, into the brown dim beneath, and he saw it, the sinuous thing, wrapped around Fealo’s shins, sucking the horse down into the hell-murk below.

“Lord!” Wulfstan cried, dread like iron swallowed in his throat. “Save me. Lord, mercifully save me.” It had him by the ankle too. He pulled and wrenched and could not move. His fiend had whispered to the land spirits, turned them against him. Now they too saw what he was, and they were driving him out of this middle earth, unmaking him, unravelling him from the web of the world.

But he was a warrior. At the stab of terror, his veins flooded with fire and hard-won strength toughened his sinews. He drew his sword and stabbed down, again and again, and at last something beneath him yielded. He was able to haul his foot out of the grip of the thing, though it tried to suck off his shoe. He kicked it off and fought his way back to where the horse stood with its eyes all white and its ears flicking with fear.

Feeling down past Fealo’s shins, parting the veil of brown leaves on the water, he got his fine linen sleeves as soaked as his trews. Though the fire of battle was on him, it was hard to reach down blindly, knowing that at any second he could touch something uncanny—a wyrm of the water, perhaps, with eyes like silver bowls and teeth as long as his arm. Even that would not be so bad as touching his own nature, his remorse, turned into flesh and dogging his every step.

He found he had paused. Cursing his fear, he breathed in, gritted his teeth and lunged down. Urgh! Something slippery, something ribbonlike and cold, unyielding as wood.

Fealo tried to rear. His cheek pressed to the long bones of the horse’s leg, Wulfstan felt the hoof move, and the thing beneath his hands rocked, just like wood—just like two tree roots entwined together, through the gap in the middle of which Fealo had stepped, and which his startled recoil had locked together around his ankle, pinioning him.

At such a foolish end to all his fear, Wulfstan laughed, but the sound had too much weariness, too much madness woven into its weft. The strength of terror left him, ebbing away while he cleaned and sheathed his sword. By the time he had drawn his seax from its scabbard at his back, hacked through the water and into the root, covering them both with mud and sap, he wondered if perhaps this relief was not the cruellest part of the punishment. To be constantly alert and afraid with a fear that turned beneath his hands into strength—this was the warrior’s way and he was used to it. He was not used to being tossed, like a child’s ball, between the extremes of dread and the hot embarrassment of another false alarm.

There was something in Fealo’s eyes of the same weariness, as though the horse’s spirit too had grown thin with so much travel and labour, with being apart from all fellowship and friends. When the horse’s feet were free again, Wulfstan led them both to the nearest long-grassed hummock of dry land and allowed his mount to graze, while he stood with his arm about the gelding’s warm shoulder and closed his gritty eyes a moment, wishing for sleep.

Now they were still, the sounds of their own movement silenced, the world closed in about them. As he willed his tight chest to loosen, his lungs to take in air, he smelled hot horse and leather, the churned-up sourness of the sludge drying on his shoes, garlic and cress and alder leaves and the shameful reek of a coward’s fear.

Had it been real? The thing in the swamp that he had felt pushing aside the water. Had it turned into roots when it felt his gaze on it? If so, had his cutting it apart killed it?

He lifted his head and saw, as he had seen all day, the tangled web of branches that held darkness in their cage, trapped it down here to lie on the still water. No, to kill a demon was not so simple a thing. He could sense it, flickering in the corner of his eyes. There! A movement. Something darker than the shadow slid into the shade of two trees as he turned his head.

Dragonflies skimmed over the pools, clad in colours too bright to be named. The ever-present cloud of midges eddied like a stain in the air, and at the borders of all the pools, the reeds bowed their feathery tops and hissed. The jangle of Fealo’s harness was like a dropped plate on a flagged floor as he tossed his head up and snorted, the only sound in a world struck dumb.

The hairs on the back of Wulfstan’s arms and down his spine stirred and stood up as a new wave of fear curled around him. His hand fell without his thought onto his sword-hilt. He kicked the instinct down. No. He had fallen for this before. Again and again Saewyn’s spell had him stabbing at shadows. Perhaps the fiend was doing something to his eyes, to his mind, making him see things that were not there, wearing him out with his own strength. This time he would not—

She had him so twisted round he thought it was a star at first—a star which detached itself from the sky and hurled itself at him. His body turned, leaped aside, threw out a hand and caught the flung spear behind the head, all by itself. The sting of the shaft in his hand and the thrum of it, travelling up his arm, woke up fully those parts of him that had been drowning in bad dreams.

He turned and hurled the spear back whence it came. He could see, now, the shape of the outlaw who had attacked him—a lean and tall fellow, so streaked with mud the patterns of his shape broke up beneath the moving leaves. His face was green and tan and grey as wood bark. His eyes showed startlingly white and blue in their mask, opened wide as his returned spear ripped through his sleeve and buried itself in the trunk of the tree behind him.

He turned to try and tug it loose, and Wulfstan lunged for the shield strapped on Fealo’s back, only to have the nervous horse kick up its heels and bolt out over the weedy sunken path and into the mere itself. Damn! Deprived of his shield, dismissing the lost horse from his mind, Wulfstan drew his seax in his left hand and turned, scanning the shadows around him. A single ruffian would not have dared challenge a seasoned warrior. He knew there would be more.

There were. The first left off tugging at his spear, drew a langseax of his own. Another stepped out of the chestnut coppice beside him, this one stockier, more elderly, his yellowed hazel eyes harder to see against the moving yellow-green light. He bore a sickle in one hand and in the other a threshing flail.

Across the path a third man appeared from a clump of alders. Hatless, he was black haired like a raven, and the tricksy light painted him with a magpie sheen. It drew no glint from the stave he held, though—a long staff taller than himself.

There was a fourth at the foot of the slight hill behind Wulfstan, and as he half turned to examine that one, a fifth waded slowly down the drowned path the way he had come. He must have walked straight past that one, senseless.

“Well,” this final ruffian said. Surprisingly, he was a youth, and looked well fed, better groomed than his companions. Scion of some noble house gone to bad, Wulfstan thought, and knew he was facing what could have been his own destiny, if only his lord had not been merciful. If the boy was noble born, he would be warrior trained. He would be the one to take out first. Then the one with the staff.

“As you see, you’re outmatched. We have your horse already. Throw down your weapons, strip and place your clothes and belt on the branch of that tree. It is possible that you may live.”

Wulfstan laughed. “Boy, I have known beggars comb from their hair and snap between their thumbnails things more frightening than you.” He did not roll the sword around his hand to show his skill—such unneeded flourishes got a man killed—but he was tempted. “That was a no, child, in case you were not sharp enough to spot it.”

The youth gave a humourless, wolfish grin. “As you like,” and gestured.

As all five closed in on him together, cautiously, none of them quite wanting to be first, Wulfstan sprang forward, ran straight at the youngster, hoping to catch him by surprise, bear him down by the weight and ferocity of his charge. He feinted with the sword, brought the seax up and slashed at where the boy should be if he had twisted away as Wulfstan supposed he would. But he had not.

Even on such soggy footing, the boy had leaped from a standing start straight over the blade of the sword, kicking out as he did. His heel caught Wulfstan’s jaw, snapped his head back and around. Following the direction of the blow, Wulfstan spun, his two blades encircling him in edges of steel. As the youth came inevitably down again, it was into the path of the sword blade. Wulfstan lunged, felt the point jam into the open armpit, and pulled down—slicing open the skin over his ribs. The youngster reeled away, buckled to his knees. Wulfstan dismissed him from his mind, sloshing over the slightly firmer ground of the path to tackle the man with the staff on the other side.

The outlaws had begun to close in now. As he caught the swinging end of the staff on his sword blade, praying it would not shatter, he was aware of the man who had been under the hill running in to help his comrade, the two from the chestnuts wading towards him from the right.

Keeping the staff trapped between his blades, he ran straight up the length of it, drew the crossed blades over the man’s hands where they held tight as he tugged on the end. He tightened the lock and then drew the blades smoothly apart. A fountain of crimson hit him in the face as the well-cared-for steel severed the man’s hands and life’s blood pumped from the wrists.

He turned and faced the next. As he did, something picked him off his feet and flung him to the ground.

What?

Rolling back up to his feet, he tried to raise his sword. His right arm would not follow the commands of his mind. Puzzled, he looked down, and there by his feet lay a francisca—the long-bearded throwing-axe of the Franks. He hadn’t seen it coming, and now his arm was cold where blood from his wound had begun to seep down the fabric of his shirt, trickle off his fingers.

Everything stilled in his mind. There were three more to come, all of them fresh to the fray, and he could only move his seax arm.

He was going to die. At the thought, despair robbed him of his remaining strength—to die unshriven, with his pilgrimage uncompleted, unredeemed. To die with his sin dogging him. It would be to die forever—to go to Hell. “No!”

The terror and the panic took over—things became strange. He was peripherally aware that he had jammed his useless arm through his belt to keep it out of the way, dropped the seax and transferred the sword to his left. The man who had thrown the francisca scrambled away from him, trying to fend off the sword with a smaller axe while drawing a handseax at the same time.

Wulfstan caught the beard of the axe on the blade of his sword, twisted it out of the other man’s grasp and punched one of the slender quillions of his hilt into his opponent’s unsuspecting eye. Then he doubled over, fighting for breath. The tendrils of his strength unwound and slipped away from his grasp. His knees had turned to soup.

He staggered forward, turning to face the final pair of outlaws, and his foot turned under him, making him lurch to his knees. Trying to hold himself up out of the water took all the strength of his one remaining arm.

“Come on!” he yelled at the two of them. “Slave-bellied brothers of dishonour. Come and finish me off if you dare.”

They looked at one another. The spearman had finally recovered his spear from where it had been wedged in the tree. Now he leaned on it, with a calculating look in his eye. The man with the flail doubled it up and tucked it into his belt. For a moment Wulfstan thought they would take the coward’s way and simply wait for Wulfstan to fall on his face from blood loss. It seemed for a moment they thought so too. But the temptation to hurt him was too much, and perhaps they thought him harmless now.

When they come within reach, I will burst up inside the range of the spear, break the spearman’s throat with my shoulder and stab the scythe carrier in the side.

He tried it, and he was a man made out of custard—his limbs flowed away beneath him, planted him in the path’s edge, his mouth half underwater, half under silt. Scalding laughter surrounded him as he flopped like a landed fish back onto the hummock of dry ground. His battle madness was ebbing, and his shoulder felt capped with red-hot wires.

As he lay, gaping, the spearman leaned over and prodded at his weapon hand with the head of his spear, leaving three wounds like little mouths. Wulfstan fancied he heard them joining in with the outlaws’ mockery. That seemed an unlikely thing to be true. So, because he was hearing falsehoods, he also thought it a waking dream when a flash of light hit the man beneath the chin and left him with a comb of feathers sticking out of his neck.

As the outlaw clawed at his throat, sinking to his knees and toppling over sideways in the muck, the man with the scythe took to his heels. Two more arrows like thunderbolts came streaking from the woodland shadows and hammered the man in the back.