Berserker (Omnibus)

by Robert Holdstock

  He sat up. He felt cold. (It was too late in the year to venture out in the night with not a stitch of clothing on his body.)

  A sword blade pricked his chest and he realised that in the darkness of the hold people were gathered. Beartooth, grinning down at him, wielded a great broadsword and prodded him back into a prostrate position on the soft ground.

  Dawn was breaking over the eastern horizon as Harald was eventually dragged to his feet and held prisoner by two of the Berserks. Sunlight spilled across the low hills, brilliant yellow behind thin clouds. Across the fjord, now visible through the shattered palisade, a heavy mist was being chased before crisp off-shore winds blowing down through the valleys where wild goats grazed and dying autumn grasses.

  The people of the hold were gathered about, pale-faced, tired from the long and sleepness night, and contemplating their fate and the mutilated bodies of the dead. They watched Harald now with all the expression of a placid cow, eyes dulled, mouths slack.

  The Berserks strutted and laughed, Beartooth himself walked among the frightened farmers, growling and hitting at any younger man who seemed to be making threatening motions. There were warriors among them, but the power of the Berserks, the fear they could instil in all hearts, young and old, had made quiescent their fighting spirits, even that of Bluetooth, Harald’s father, the once proud jarl.

  Bluetooth, his clothes stained with blood, stood near to Harald and held Elena in his arms. The girl wept silently and seemed unwilling to look at Harald who found himself longing for her gaze, for a sign of love from her. He imagined that she already sensed the change in him, the impending fate that would take him out of mortal society and into that dim hinterland between earth and the great country of the gods. There he would walk among the demons who had been thrown down from Asgarde, and the rabid wolves and the glistening snakes that were gathering ready to fight the final battle. There, too, could be found the ghosts of warriors who had died dishonourably, or with mercy written on their lips. Among all these foul and frightening visages, in that lost limbo beyond the furthest hills, the Berserks of Odin trod a careful path, not yet ready to enter Slainhall, and no longer a part of the society of the northlands. Outcasts in every sense, they did the deeds of Odin, acted out his whim. They were used by the Norse kings who hated and mistrusted them, but employed them as the devastating war machines they were.

  Harald was almost one of them and, if the sacrifice was accepted by Odin, then soon – unless fate or some sudden change in mood intervened – in his blood would flow the blood of the bear-men, the haunting spirit of the one-eyed japer himself! And Elena, perhaps, sensed it, and was mortally terrified of what Harald would become.

  As Beartooth walked among the people of Urlsgarde, so Harald’s father cried out in anguish, ‘Leave us in peace! In Odin’s name, leave us in peace!’

  Beartooth roared with laughter and cuffed the old man quiet.

  ‘It’s in Odin’s name that we act now, old man,’ he shouted and stood for a moment, looking around him. A wind blew cold and the children huddled together, the only humans present who allowed emotion to show upon their faces.

  ‘A sacrifice is needed,’ said Beartooth, grinning as he let his gaze linger on Elena. Bluetooth held the girl tighter, more protectively.

  Harald struggled against his captors. ‘Not her!’ he screamed, as he failed to shake off the two Berserks.

  ‘She would make a good sacrifice,’ said Beartooth, looking from the darkness of his soul at the struggling Viking, and smiling as he guessed the agony he was causing. ‘We could strangle her with her own intestines. Odin always enjoys that. Or we could impale her upon a broadsword and wait until she died, which shouldn’t take more than a day.’ His laughter was colder than the fresh autumn breeze, setting Harald’s hair on end.

  But there was something about Beartooth, about the way he looked at Harald and didn’t move, that told the young warrior that his woman was not to be sacrificed. He felt relief, felt the blood drain away from his head, the thundering of his heart growing less pronounced.

  There was a scream from the small hut where Gotthelm lay, perhaps now dead and cold.

  One of the Berserks appeared, dragging the young bondwoman behind him. Her golden hair had fallen over her face as she struggled and twisted in his grip.

  No one shouted, no one screamed at the man to stop, for of all the people of the hold this girl was valued least of all, and her death would not in any way require retribution.

  Standing alone, as the Berserk released her, the girl straightened and swept her hair back from her face, which was dirty and bloody where she had been struck on the mouth. Her wild eyes – blue eyes, the colour of the shallow water of the winter fjord – searched the northmen for a sign of someone springing to her help. She soon realised that they welcomed her sacrifice as much as Odin might, and she tried to run, her buxom figure lithe beneath her thin, green dress. The Berserks closed in on her.

  She shouted abuse in her strange, yet oddly familiar, southern tongue and Harald heard the name of Donar. For a moment the sky darkened and he wondered if the great war god would come to her rescue and perhaps induce the Berserks to pick on his own Elena. But the darkness was just the rising of dark snow-clouds in the distance, covering the bright dawn sun.

  Beartooth stepped forward and grasped the girl by the throat with one of his huge, filthy fists.

  She struggled in the strangling grip, beating at his wrists and trying to reach for his eyes. Yet she failed to make any impression on the great beast-man and slowly, inexorably, as the people of the hold watched in guilty silence, the girl’s life was squeezed from her body.

  She was lifted from the ground, her legs kicking as her eyes closed and her scrabbling at the Berserker’s hand grew weaker and weaker. Her skin turned blue, foam and spit flecked her mouth. Her lips and tongue, swelling so that they protruded, lent a fearsome expression to her once beautiful face.

  Lifting her higher and higher, Beartooth’s own face became contorted with exertion as he channelled all his strength into the throttling and at last the audible snap of bones reached Harald’s ears and made his knees turn weak. The girl’s body went limp and liquid trickled from her feet on to the muddy ground.

  ‘For you, Odin, our master!’ roared Beartooth, staring up into the skies. Then with his free hand he tore the robe from the dead girl’s body and drew out his crusted knife, cutting through the flesh of her belly so that green viscera slipped out of her body and hung obscenely around her knees. He reached into the cavity and up under her ribs and hacked out her heart, threw the red organ on to the mud some way distant and then flung the mutilated corpse into the crowd, who screeched and backed off from the rag doll that sprawled among them.

  ‘For you Odin!’ cried Beartooth again. ‘Give us this boy! Possess him! Curse him!’

  ‘She was just a slave!’ shrieked Harald, desperately, his voice fleeing after Beartooth’s into the darkening skies. ‘Just a slut! They have insulted you!’

  A meaty fist slammed into his face and he sagged in the grip of the Berserks, mind reeling. He stood, shakily, trying to clear his spinning head. The pain of the blow was awful, and he felt his mouth bleeding and swelling.

  ‘The silver-helmeted warrior himself had fallen into her trance!’ shouted Beartooth. ‘Heimdall’s spawn would have loved her. She was no slut, she was the lover of the mysterious one! Odin, accept our sacrifice!’

  Had Gotthelm really become entranced with the girl? Harald found himself looking at the tiny hut, wondering whether Gotthelm lay within, heart broken as well as spirit, his body wounds now no greater than the great wound of his love slaughtered.

  ‘Odin!’ screamed Beartooth, walking forwards towards Harald and drawing his corroded sword. His face was distorting into a mask of anger, and Harald knew instinctively what was in the warrior’s mind; if Odin deserted them, did not respond, then he would have Harald’s head and burn it, rather than have his soul for a year or even a thousand y
ears. He would cut him down quickly too, for at any moment Odin’s displeasure might flame them all, making ash of them, condemning them to darkness for eternity.

  The Berserker’s eyes narrowed and a bitter smile crept on to his lips; his unshaven and filthy jowls trembled with tension and in his eyes the swelling red of blood told of the approach of a rage, and that might mean slaughter for everyone about him.

  Harald struggled to shake himself loose from the two animals that held him, but he couldn’t move. His hands were numb where the circulation had been cut off by the pressure of fingers gripping his arms.

  ‘Leave us, Beartooth,’ he cried. ‘Leave us and go fight your angry fight elsewhere. You’ve had your pleasure here!’

  Furious that his sacrifice seemed to have been ignored, Beartooth closed in on Harald and slowly shook his head.

  ‘Before Odin strikes me down I shall have the gizzards of you and your woman. I shall burn you as you burned our brother …’

  ‘Let me fight you,’ said Harald, his voice loud in the stillness. ‘I’ll fight you man to man, warrior to warrior, and if I win, then the rest of your band must leave.’

  ‘He bargains with me,’ sneered Beartooth and the Berserks laughed, closed around the young Viking. ‘He bargains, but he doesn’t realise that all I want is his head to carry with me wherever I go. Yes. I shall carry your head by your long, fair hair, and then you can watch life from your dead eyes, and see the fun of living from the prison in your skull … hold him down while I strike him …’

  Harald felt himself pushed to his knees, and a rough hand gripped his hair, swept it from his neck. Elena screamed. Beartooth raised his arm, the red blade gripped firm and ready to strike.

  There was a great gasp from the crowded farmers, and Beartooth hesitated, turned to see what the disturbance was.

  ‘Odin has accepted!’ he cried delightedly, and again Harald was pulled to his feet. ‘Look. The sacrifice pleased him!’

  Where the girl’s heart lay on the ground the mud now boiled and bubbled and a strange, unnatural mist rose from the spot. The heart vanished, but from the ground where it had lain, after a few moments a sprig poked through the surface and reached up into the light.

  Harald watched in sombre fascination as the plant grew inch by inch, swelling before his eyes, twisting as it grew, reaching branches out towards the people who stared at it.

  When the strange tree was no more than three hands tall it seemed to transform, to ripple and change. A moment later an old man stood there, still growing, his feet rooted in the mud, his arms the branches, his fingers crowned by green, broad leaves. His body was naked and bowed, and as gnarled as oak. His eyes were open and a grin spread across his face as he grew to the height of a child, then to the height of a woman, then to that of a man, and kept on growing, turning as he grew, his wrinkled skin taking on the texture of a tree, his dangling member stiffening and knotting until it appeared as the severed stump of a thick ash branch.

  And when the old man towered four feet or more over the tallest Berserker who gazed up at the grinning face, so the transformation occurred again and the tree-ness returned, the man’s arms turning back to branches, which divided and curled over to touch the ground; seven branches, knotted and twisted, and his feet were thick and writhing roots that broke the mud and soil of the hold as they reached around towards the people, who slowly backed away.

  A giant, knotted ash tree was formed, into the clutches of whose branches Harald was dragged. Each Berserker was then caressed by a branch, and Harald too was entwined by the woody feeler that snaked around his legs and his waist and squeezed him tightly.

  At once, rising from his feet towards his groin, he felt the power. Unlike anything he had ever experienced before, he stood and sensed the strange possession with a mortal fascination that caused him to hold quite still; foot to leg, leg to penis, penis to belly, belly to throat, throat to mind, the surging power of Odin consumed him, filled him, took control of his every fibre …

  At once blood rose in his eyes, in his senses – he smelled it, tasted it, imagined it flowing from the biting edge of his blade, singing life-taker. Behind the blood, emerging out of a darkness that had never before been part of him, came the bear.

  It reached into him, following behind the great surge of power, and Harald, helpless to do anything, allowed the beast to possess him.

  His arms became the arms of the bear, his fingers its claws …

  His body became the body of the forest killer, powerful, black-furred, heavy with muscle; its ecstasy at possession was his own ecstasy at being possessed.

  His teeth were its fangs, and his gums ached as his canines grew and his mouth watered to the taste of blood, his own blood, his own pain.

  His eyes were the eyes of the bear, his voice the bear’s voice and he growled and snarled as he twisted in the branches of the magic ash tree.

  He only vaguely heard the screams of a woman he had once loved; the shouts of a man whose seed had given him life; the cries of fear of a people, for so long innocent of the wrath of the gods, now fully consumed by that unpredictable anger and in terror for their lives.

  He tore away from the branches of the ash, snapped them like twigs, twisted out of their embrace and turned and gazed through red-rimmed eyes at the cowering host of farmers and their sons and daughters …

  The Berserks grouped around him, and he recognised the bear in them all, the rising jissom of fury. His excitement grew with theirs, and his yet human features distorted as their distorted, until the skin and the flesh were twisted into the mask of the Bear god in whose power he now found himself.

  A girl broke from the arms of an old man and ran into a dark, long house. He recognised the girl, recognised her as an undefiled village girl, whose body would soon have been his to claim for his own, but who had denied him the sweetness of her flesh.

  He loped after her, naked and erect with his consuming excitement and bursting sexual energy. The old man tried to bar his way and he knocked him aside and kicked and screamed at him. Then he burst into the long, dark hall where the girl cowered in a corner, screaming and regarding him through eyes wide with fear.

  He reached for her, snarling with pleasure, body trembling with excitement as he grew near to achieving that possession for so long denied to him.

  ‘Harald! Oh no! no, not that! Not this way! Oh sweet Freyja, NO!’

  But her fear just added to the pleasure. The beast within him writhed in ecstasy, growling, close to that blood rage out of which it would emerge fully satiated, and yet happy, for the moment, to allow the human desire to have its final expression, the conquering of the innocent girl before him.

  He reached for her, tore her gown from her body, cutting the material with a knife where it refused to tear. Exposed her body, curled up with fear, white thighs locked together in a last desperate attempt to preserve her honour, arms wrapped across her full, firm breasts, head lowered, hair falling across her shoulders and eyes, as if trying to blind her to the rearing, gorged horror that was about to violate her.

  She sobbed.

  The Berserker, Harald, the puppet of Odin, just laughed, growled and then screamed. His scream caused the girl to scream, and that was when he reached for her again and pulled her upright, dragging her to the solid oaken table and throwing her backwards upon it, falling upon her.

  Fingers dug into her breasts, teeth bit into her shoulders. He raked his claws across her stomach, used his legs to force her own legs apart, and pushed against her, harder, harder, more brutal with every failure to enter her body, until at last she opened and broke and he consummated that which was to have been their very personal gift to each other.

  Innocent and innocent, loving together, each for the first time, and this is how it was. Only now she screamed. He laughed, bit deeply into the firmness of her breast, drawing blood which served only to increase his rage, the rage of his passion, so that he thrust into her bleeding body with greater and greater anger, until sh
e fainted, and he finished with her with a final howl of achievement and satisfaction.

  He drew out of her, and then watched as Beartooth entered the hall, uncovered himself and lay upon her for long minutes, grunting as he thrust, laughing as she woke from her faint and screeched when she realised what was happening to her. She cried Harald’s name one last time, but Harald was beyond her now, whirling and spinning his singing life-taker, given back to him by Beartooth. He took the lives of two young farmers whose pitiful attempts at defence with axe and sword left no mark upon the young Berserker’s body, only inspired him to such great fury that his blade hacked heads from shoulders in two swift cuts, then split the dead skulls and spilled pink brains on to the mud.

  He ran then into the small hut and stopped by the pallet on which Gotthelm lay, staring at him without speaking, without moving.

  The bear within him reared and roared, directed his hand to rise, wielding singing life-taker to strike this strange warrior. The bear recognised something about Gotthelm that Harald was unaware of, recognised something it feared, something that was better dead; and so it tried to kill the old man.

  But Harald emerged from beneath the fury for just a second, recognised a friend of old, and fought the spirit of the bear, swallowed his screams of fury.

  He backed off from the warrior, who visibly relaxed, subsiding on to the bed, though without letting his gaze leave Harald.

  ‘I’ll find you …’ he murmured, and pain creased his face, stopped further words. ‘Wherever you are,’ he finally breathed, a whisper, just a whisper, ‘Wherever you go … I shall find you …’

  Harald, Berserker, ran from the hut, the bear trying to obliterate failure from its mind. Bloody sword raised to the skies it emitted a fearful growl of pleasure from the glistening lips of the young initiate.

  From the long hall came the repeated screams and moans of a woman being mercilessly abused. From the darkness of his mind Erik Bluetooth watched his son pulling clothes and furs on to his body from the scattered corpses of those who had been struck down. He saw the human shape of his son and felt a great hatred rising within him; he could not see the Bear God that pulled the muscles of his son, could not see the evil that had taken control of him, nor could he see the terrified Harald who lurked, imprisoned, in the dark Hell of his own mind.