Berserker (Omnibus)

by Robert Holdstock

  He was aware of the girl deftly loosening his belt, and a moment later the cloth of his trousers slipped away from his body; her hands, and sharp-nailed fingers, were painful and thrilling touches on his rising flesh, and the blood in his head began to surge and beat; the room swam around him as his body resigned itself to the ecstasy of the girl’s touch; his hands rested easily on her shoulders, feeling the creamy suppleness of her skin, and the thinness, the slimness of her flesh. In his mind he could visualise picking her up by her arms and holding her tight against his torso as he slipped her gently down on to his member and breached her there and then; but he restrained himself, for he could not, with his upbringing as a Coritanian, take a girl of his own age, or nearly, who had not been known by an older man first.

  Her lips touched his shaft and he reached down to grasp her hair and pull her up, not willing to allow his defences to be battered any more.

  ‘You are too young,’ he repeated.

  ‘I know what to do,’ she said. ‘I have been told.’

  The repetition of the words struck a false chord in Swiftaxe’s head. He stared into the girl’s beautiful green eyes, felt her slim, hard breasted body against his, and recognised the influence of some spell other than her enchantment with his male physique. The girl was not excited at the thought of his lust taking her maidenhead … she was excited because someone had fed her a potion, or a spell … this was not natural desire, but desire by design.

  He pushed the girl away roughly. Her eyes widened for a second, then half-closed suggestively. She licked her lips elaborately. ‘But I want to taste you before I give my body to you.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘She is my daughter,’ said someone from behind him. Swiftaxe turned quickly, stepping out of the gathered cloth of his trousers and reaching for a small knife he had been using for his food. The girl cried out and reached down for her robe, backing into a corner of the room.

  Swiftaxe, seeing that the woman who stood before him was unarmed, let the knife fall back on to the low table. His eyes lingered on the shape of his great axe, gleaming redly in the firelight, resting near to where the woman stood.

  She smiled as she realised at what Swiftaxe stared, then she came further into the room and drew the curtain behind her.

  She was truly magnificent, an older, more mature, more experienced version of the girl who now cowered, terrified, behind the Berserker.

  Instantly Swiftaxe knew whose daughter he had come close to possessing. He dropped to his knees, acknowledging her royalty despite their tribal differences. ‘Boudicca,’ he murmured, ‘Great Queen. Fast flying of the air and the birds of the air. Swift flowing of the waters and the fish that swim in the waters.’

  The woman smiled. ‘Strong running of the man, and strength to his sword arm.’

  Swiftaxe looked up, looked into the woman’s eyes, and at her full and sensuous mouth. ‘You are even more beautiful than the bards in my village told us.’

  She frowned. ‘I dislike manful flattery of my female attributes,’ she said. ‘In other words, shut up and keep your lusting to yourself.’

  But what lusting Swiftaxe felt!

  Boudicca stood as tall as a man, and as broad, and yet the shape of her body was softly curved as a woman’s should be, and not harshly knotted and gnarled as a man’s. Her hair, red like her daughter’s, flame red, like burnished copper, fell half-way to her waist, and about the crown of her head it was curled and twisted into spikes that had been stiffened with some colourless grease. Her face was lean and hard, though softness existed in her eyes; her cheeks were high, slightly flushed, and her mouth was wide and full, every bit the classical dream of the Trinovantian warrior from a song that was popular at the time.

  She wore a simple garment of red and green cotton, that displayed the width of her hips and the strength and fullness of her breasts. About her neck she wore a gold torque, and beaten silver bracelets adorned each of her wrists. Over her left breast she wore a wide, green-jewelled cloak-brooch, and gold and silver curled from this ornament in a semblance of hair, the hair of all she killed, the symbolic trophy of her activities on the war field.

  Her cloak she carried across her arm; she held Swiftaxe’s short, Roman sword, completing the return, to him, of his weaponry.

  Swiftaxe rose to his feet as Boudicca approached him. The woman glanced at her daughter, then frowned. The Berserker said, ‘She is drugged.’

  ‘Dress, girl,’ she said, and as the young girl hastily pulled her robe across her lissome body, Boudicca shook her head. ‘Not drugged. A spell is on her.’

  Swiftaxe said, ‘A simple druidic spell, then, that can be broken at the snap of a finger.’

  ‘I shall snap all the druid’s fingers … after he has removed this love spell from the girl. The man is called Crichabar, and he is a Catuvellaunian who came to my fort some years ago when his own people grew tired of his tiresome attentions to their young girls. I cured him of his bad habit, and took him under my protection, but his spells have failed, along with those of my own druids, to allay the wasting disease of my husband.’

  ‘Prasitagus lies close to death?’

  ‘The king will die within a few days, aye. I shall then be a woman alone, but a queen of my people.’ Her eyes, as she met Swiftaxe’s gaze, were bright with anger and with the sparkle of war. ‘These Romans shall not know what has struck them.’

  ‘Lady,’ said Swiftaxe nervously, ‘you forget that I’m half-Roman.’

  She smiled and shook her head. Her fingers reached out and ran down his cheek, scraping the stubble on his skin with an elegantly trimmed nail. Her expression was half-amusement, half-enticement. ‘Because you carry this?’ She lifted the Roman sword. ‘I suspect your motives for carrying it are more than allegiance to the empire whose foundries forged its iron. You used your head to escape the Roman arenas. You use your head now, for you bask under the protection of the Eagle … waiting your moment, I am sure, though your moment for what … of that I am unsure. You are no Roman, and you well know it. Admit this to me quickly.’

  Swiftaxe shook his head. ‘I dare admit nothing,’ he said. ‘I am confused and frightened – I know that I am uncontrollable in battle, but what the Britons would see as a strength, and the Romans see as an amusing game, I’m afraid the soldiers of the Roman army would see as a weakness; I am predictable in my fury, and a wildly slashing blow is the easiest to deflect. I think I am kept here, like this, a semi-prisoner, simply so that they can use me for my fear value. I don’t think I am rated as a highly valuable war device.’

  Boudicca shrugged and traced an inquisitive line with her finger down Swiftaxe’s chest as far as his groin. ‘You are a man of great physical power,’ she said. ‘And by the stories, you wield your axe with more skill than a northman from beyond the Gothlands to the east. I hear little of your prowess with women, but imagination has answered my questions.’ She grinned mischievously, the hardness of the warrior in her gone for a second as the sexual desire of the woman broke through. Then she frowned, shook her hair and her head as if shaking away stray and irrelevant thoughts.

  ‘You were to be used to kill me. The Romans may be good war strategists but they are unsubtle in their politicking, and I see through the Centurion’s devices immediately. I was to find you loving my virgin daughter. I would have tried to kill you. You would have killed me with this insatiable blood drive of yours. Only the plan went wrong. Crichabar the druid, for all that he is under the Roman thumb, could not flee into the fens without first easing his conscience about what he had been made to do. He let me know … indirectly, of course. I’d have killed him there and then if he’d told me himself.’

  Swiftaxe reached down to his clothing and quickly dressed. He buckled his thick leather belt around his waist and gratefully slotted the Roman sword into its slings. Boudicca watched him thoughtfully all the time. The Berserker said, ‘You are obviously a threat to the Legions and they want you out of the way. That much is obvious. And if t
hey’ve tried once, lady, they will certainly try again.’

  Boudicca shrugged. ‘They have now lost the initiative. They must use subtlety, and not directness, or they stand to lose the peace of these lands. Their main Legions are away in the far west, pitted against the Ordovici and Deceangli, fierce mountain and coastal tribes who will give the Romans a great weight of iron to ponder. This eastern province is what the garrison commander refers to as the soft underbelly, and he knows, as we all know, that it is highly vulnerable and could not sustain a combined attack from the tribes without losing its entrails. So they must keep the peace; they must do nothing overt for the moment, nothing that will arouse the hostility and anger of the Britons.’ She smiled. ‘So I am not afraid for the moment, but I must fetch back Crichabar and hide him somewhere. Much though the Romans scorn our witches and druids, they use their magic whenever possible, and I need a defence against that magic. I need my own druid and only Crichabar is now left who fears sufficiently for his life that he will do as I say, and not as the Romans say.’

  Swiftaxe pulled on his leather cuirass and fastened the knots down the front. He walked to fetch his axe and wielded it a few times, getting the feel of the weapon again. The blade struck a roof beam causing the whole place to shake. Spiders and straw drifted down from the thatch. He said, as he pulled on his horned helmet, ‘I need the services of a druid myself.’ As he spoke he glanced at the polished ring he wore. ‘I am half-afraid to use more subtle means to gain the information I need.’ The frown passed and he walked to the curtained doorway, pulled back the drapes and peered into the corridor that ran past.

  Boudicca had disrobed behind him and when he looked around he saw her wearing just a short tunic, drawn in at the waist with a princessly belt from which was slung her jewelled sword. She fastened her cloak over this, and tightly bound her tall, leather-trimmed boots, ready to do some running. When she darted past Swiftaxe towards the outside of the great house, the chequered cloak swirled about her long legs, making her seem as some fast vanishing forest shape.

  Her daughter ran with her, the light of love and desire still strong in her eyes when she looked at Swiftaxe; but this was false love, and only Crichabar could remove the shadowy spell from her.

  ‘This way,’ whispered the Icenian woman, and tucking her brilliant red hair into her cloak she ran lightly through the mud of the compound, hiding behind animal pens and soldiers’ tents so that the Roman legionaries, stationed here by mutual agreement, would not see her. The main Roman observance force, some twenty men, was across the town, in their specially constructed barrack. On this side of the fortress there was a small gate which gave access to the marshes. Two Britons guarded it from the palisade walkway, and when they saw their queen approaching they turned their backs and walked away from the portal. One of them half-raised his shield and Boudicca immediately dropped to a crouch and edged forward. Peering from behind an animal corral she hissed with anger.

  ‘By the sword of Llug!’ she murmured, ‘they go too far!’

  The legionary who stood there, watching two women distantly, probably was unaware that his presence at the gate ran contrary to the agreement between Briton and Roman in this part of the Province. He lazed at his post, taking his weight on his cumbersomely large spear. He never saw the blow that struck his wits from him, and left him happily unconscious in a stack of straw beneath a nearby canvas canopy.

  Swiftaxe slipped the bars from the gate, and the three of them darted through the wall and ran carefully down, and then up, and then again down the steep walls of the ditch. They raced for cover among the sparse tree growth some yards away, and waited for a while, listening for sounds of alarm. None came.

  They ran through the marshes for what seemed like hours. Boudicca demonstrated her own hunter’s skill in sensing the approach of a Roman foot patrol some minutes before it appeared through the woodlands and gorse, keeping to the slushy trackways that generations of farmers had beaten out of the hostile land. A marsh fog drifted up from the soggy ground towards dusk, and though Swiftaxe felt ill at ease in the confining whiteness, Boudicca relished this extra security.

  When they rested, at a moment when instinct told Swiftaxe the sun was just then setting in the far west, Boudicca said, ‘By now they have discovered we are missing. They will take little action against me; I suggest you say that you pursued me, charged with passion after I had taken my daughter from you without bloodshed. You may not be all that valuable to Silanus, but you are too valuable to waste. Our druid lives yonder, see?’

  Swiftaxe stared into the greyness of dusk and fog, but saw nothing.

  The Queen grinned and rose to her feet. ‘Follow what I do. Your life depends on it. I know this druid, and his sanctuary, and I know the traps he has laid for the unwary.’

  She ran across the fen and Swiftaxe could see how she stuck to the greenest parts of the land, avoiding the darker, more saturated marsh on either side of the ridges of firm ground that she used for sure footing. He followed her discreetly, and carefully, and then saw her run in a circle. ‘Like this,’ she called, her daughter close behind. Round and round they ran, the circle getting tighter all the time.

  Abruptly they vanished.

  ‘Come on!’ called Boudicca, her voice emanating from the mire into which she had been quickly sucked.

  Swiftaxe, trying not to think about what he had seen, followed the curved course of her passage, following the footmarks in the muddy ground. As he ran in a close circle he felt his skin tingle, and abruptly Boudicca was there before him, standing before a low, miserable looking skin tent, and a feeble, frightened man dressed in grey robes, with a pointed cowl drawn across his whitening locks.

  ‘This is Crichabar,’ said the Icenian Queen, her hands on her hips as she faced the cowering druid, ‘who betrays trusts, and casts dirty spells on innocent girls.’

  ‘I was in fear of my life,’ said Crichabar miserably.

  ‘Your life is in my hands now,’ said Boudicca. ‘That I choose to let you keep it is only due to your good fortune and not to the intervention of Ogmios, whom I know you invoke whenever you’re in trouble. He would like to guide my sword into your treacherous throat, but Boudicca the Queen is compassionate. Hold out your left hand.’

  Crichabar wailed, but amazingly did as he had been told. Boudicca calmly, quickly, snapped the little finger of that hand; the sound was like a twig cracking in a dry summer. The druid screamed horribly, cradled the damaged limb, but then fell to his knees before the Queen. Boudicca touched his head. ‘Now break that spell before I decide to snap more of you.’

  Crichabar stood and after straightening his broken finger he turned to the girl. Waving his good hand in a simple pass before her, he murmured a short verse that Swiftaxe found incomprehensible. The girl, who had stood huddled and miserable quite close to the Berserker, suddenly straightened and blinked.

  She was taken by surprise at her surroundings and ran to Boudicca, throwing her arms around her mother. Boudicca said, ‘Take a look at the man who stands yonder. The Horned Man, who may well be Cernunnos himself …’ she smiled.

  Her daughter appraised Swiftaxe coolly.

  The Berserker shrugged, unable fully to hide the fact that his maleness was attacked by the girl’s refusal to fall instantly in love with him in a more natural way. He had expected no different, but his optimism was running high in the company of this magnificent Queen.

  ‘In two years,’ said Boudicca, ‘you will appreciate those fine muscles the more for having had your belly filled with weaker, punier males of less local descent.’

  ‘Is that a prophecy, mother?’ asked the girl stiffly, ‘or another of your fantasies?’

  Swiftaxe laughed involuntarily at the girl’s forwardness. Boudicca drew her daughter away, leaving the Berserker alone with the druid, who regarded him cautiously, his attention flickering between the warrior’s eyes and the axe that he held as if it were no more heavy than a straw.

  Swiftaxe noticed that the bla
ck shadow around the druid’s broken finger had gone, and the man was flexing the digit as if it recovered from no more than a bruise. He had repaired his bone with a silently voiced spell, while Boudicca’s attention had been elsewhere.

  Smiling at that, the Berserker finally caught Crichabar’s gaze. ‘Will you help me?’ he asked.

  ‘If I can,’ said the druid. ‘I see you wear the ring of a Hag. Can you not summon help from her?’

  Swiftaxe stroked the polished black jewel. ‘She died, I am sure, and I am afraid to summon her until I absolutely have to. For four years I have worn this ring, and many times I would have loved to have talked with Aithlenn …’

  The druid’s hand closed over the ring, and the fingers that stroked the jewel. ‘Say not a word more,’ said the old man. ‘I understand, and sympathise with you. Aithlenn will not thank you for summoning her from the deep waters of her spiritual life. If I can help you I shall.’

  Swiftaxe squatted and leaned on the haft of his axe, wearied from the running across land that lent little support to his muscles.

  ‘I seek the words to enter a gate. The gate is in the form of a ring of stones, each pair of stones being capped by a lintel. An outer ring stands tall and proud, around an inner ring that shimmers green and blue on certain nights of the year; at one end of the circle there stand five mighty henges, one taller than the rest. Once before I was there, and a warlord killed me before I could discover that I had not the words to enter that gate. Where do I find the words?’

  Crichabar looked blank, shook his head slowly. ‘I cannot help you. Such knowledge is held by only a few men, and a few women, and has been lost to this part of the land for generations.’

  Swiftaxe closed his eyes, breathed angrily. ‘I am plagued by this … always, wherever I go, whoever I see, always the knowledge has passed away … it seems I can never find a place or a time where the knowledge exists as openly as the grass on the fens.’

  Crichabar grinned and patted the Horned Warrior on the wrist. ‘The knowledge most surely does exist,’ said the druid. ‘There is one place where our traditions in magic reach back to the beginnings, when our people came out of the eastern lands where now only desert exists. This place is an island, in the far north west, the island of Mona. It is guarded by hostile tribes. Go there, my friend, and among the sanctuary guardians you will find a few who possess the knowledge of the gate words you require.’