Berserker (Omnibus)

by Holdstock, Robert

Then he squatted down beside them and let the darkness of night envelop the stones, and the sad sight of his dead friends.

  He was here, in the dead stones of another time, at the gateway to the Dark One’s help.

  Strange memories flashed through his mind, memories drawn from another time, from another life.

  There was a flame-haired girl, a girl who had quested through time, just as he, for release from a terrible spell. She it was who had first spoken of the Dark Ones.

  And he remembered a warlock, a vague memory of a vague old man. When he had lived before he had ridden through high mountains at the start of his seemingly endless quest. That warlock, too, had spoken of the enigmatic beings that might control the power and the whim of Odin.

  And now Niall was here, among the stones, among the Dark Ones, and he needed only to call upon them.

  Strangely, knowing how close he was to release from Odin’s curse, Niall remained calm, mourning his dead friends, feeling in no great hurry to call the Dark Ones to him. Even though the Bear in his head prowled restlessly, roared and snarled at him and tried to make his eyes see red and his mouth taste blood, even so young Niall remained calm, and grieved the loss of Grania. He was in full and complete control of his body for the moment, the spiritual strength of his possessor having been waned by its earlier feast of blood.

  There was ample time for everything that the Berserker wished to do that night. Ample time.

  A torch was struck in the darkness. The night was moonless, and the torch was an enigmatic flare that moved around outside the sombre ring of stones. It was carried by a tall man, dark and featureless, and the flame bobbed as he walked, the yellow flare streaming and flickering as the man explored this bizarre temple to some ancient god.

  At length the torch was held steady. The man who walked there had seen Niall, crouched by the stone, above the body of Grania.

  He came forward, through the stones, until the torchlight showed Niall who it was. Arthur, battle weary and blooded, his face, now, a solemn mask of anger.

  Niall said, ‘I thought it must be you.’ He turned his gaze back to the bodies, reached out to brush stray hair from Grania’s face. He shook his head sadly. ‘They killed each other. There was nothing I could do.’

  Arthur walked slowly towards him, his sword held tightly in his hand. Niall rose, sensing the menace in Arthur’s whole bearing. His left hand rested lightly on the hilt of his sword, ready to twist the weapon from its scabbard at the slightest hint of attack. But the menace faded, Arthur’s gaze lowering so that he contemplated the Erisman and his dead queen. His sword drooped in his grasp and the red-stained blade burned bright in the torch light.

  ‘Was the battle won?’ asked Niall.

  ‘Neither won nor lost,’ said Arthur tonelessly. ‘There will be many such.’

  ‘Alas,’ said Niall, ‘I shall not be with you to shift the odds. This place, this stone henge, is the place of my destiny. Here, somewhere beyond the mortal veil, there lies the answer to my quest for release. I must take advantage of that. At dawn, friend Arthur, I shall summon the Dark Ones, and rid myself of this Bear forever, and of this impossible strength, and this frightening power.’

  Arthur stared at him, his dark eyes intense with interest. A slight smile touched his lips. He struck his sword into the ground, then, and drew an amulet from his belt, passed it to Niall. He seemed brighter, somehow, as if the momentary shock at seeing Grania dead had passed. ‘You should be wearing this when you realise your destiny,’ he said. ‘It is only right.’

  Niall accepted the bull amulet and felt a surge of warmth and confidence as he recognised the amulet he had carved so many years before. He slung the ivory carving about his neck, caressed the smooth curves of the beast and smiled.

  He looked up at Arthur, who held the torch to one side, while with his other hand he leaned upon his broad sword. ‘Owain, then, is dead?’

  Arthur shook his head. His leather armour creaked as he moved, and Niall found his eyes drawn to the smears and streaks of blood and dirt upon the overlapping strips of hide. He wondered if Arthur was wounded.

  The warlord said, ‘No. He survived the battle. He fought well and will be a valuable warrior to me. I asked him for the amulet since it was I who gave it to him. Somehow it meant less to him, since his sister’s death, than it had before. Owain came to me with his head full of legend. Suddenly he is just another bloody fighter, struggling against a common enemy. ’Tis a shame in one sense, but in another it’s far more practical. A man who knows that his death will go unremarked will fight the harder to stay alive; martyrs, on the other hand, men full of their own importance after death, they will struggle less intensively to remain alive, because of their pretension.’

  ‘Your Christian warriors, then, are less valuable to you than a pagan such as myself.’

  Arthur shrugged. ‘All men who believe in the gods, any gods, will believe in their own semi-godhead after death. It is not the belief but the manner of the belief. All Christian warriors believe in life after death, but it will be no life at all worth living if they die in battle when, with a little more effort, they might have survived. There is good and bad in all the supernatural.’

  Niall could not deny it. He turned from Arthur, fingering the amulet and staring into the darkness to where the dark shapes of the stone rose into the night, dimly lit by Arthur’s firebrand.

  ‘This, then, is where we say goodbye, friend Arthur. This is where we part our ways.’

  ‘Regrettably yes,’ said Arthur, but something in his voice …

  Betrayal!

  Niall froze, still staring into the darkness. The hair on his neck pricked and tingled. His heart beat fast and hard.

  He realised what Arthur was about to do.

  There was a sound like wind passing through a narrow crevice in rock, the sound of a blade being swept up for a blow.

  Niall screamed, and drew his sword, crying, ‘By all the gods, Arthur, no!’

  And an instant later Arthur’s blade thrust through Niall’s body, driving the Erisman to the ground with a blow that sent an arm’s length of blood-stained iron probing from his chest.

  He clutched the blade as he sank to his knees, and sobbed. ‘Why?’ he cried, and gasping, ‘Arthur … why … what do you gain?’

  Behind him Arthur’s voice rose shrill and triumphant, a bizarre animal cry that Niall recognised so well.

  The blackness took him, a dark vortex sucked him down.

  So unfair … so unfair … so close, so close … why did he do it? … why?

  Arthur’s cry of triumph faded into the darkest night imaginable and for Niall Swiftaxe, the Berserker, the Mad Bear, there were spinning stars, and the spinning void between the ages.

  His cry, then, was the first cry of a new born baby. But for what seemed like an eternity, the soul of the Erisman, cheated again of its release from Odin’s curse, floated in the emptiness of death. He sensed nothing, yet a memory remained … the memory of a ring of stones, a circle of stone henges, standing in a barren plain and concealing a secret greater than the greatest magic the earth possessed. It was a memory that would be reborn with him, that would direct his life when he began his quest again, in whatever world the gods saw fit to bring him to.

  Kei Ironhand and other of the élite horse warriors of the Britons, came to the ring of stones as the pale autumn sun was beginning to show through the rising dawn mist.

  As the battle-weary man rode between two of the great standing stones, he saw Arthur squatting on the ground, leaning on his sword and gazing across three prone bodies stretched out side by side.

  ‘Arthur …?’

  The warlord glanced up, then rose to his feet.

  ‘I am ashamed,’ he said, staring down at Niall’s body.

  ‘For all the knowledge that I possess, I do not know how to honour a man who has done me more service than he ever knew. I can’t honour him as a Briton – it would be an insult. But the way that the Erismen prepare their dead
warriors is something I have never observed.’

  ‘I have,’ said Kei. He rode around the bodies, then trotted back to the edge of the circle of stones. ‘You must sever his head and place it on a small mound of earth, facing towards the sunset.’

  Arthur tugged his sword from the ground and did this deed.

  Kei brought his warlord’s horse towards him and after a moment spent contemplating the blindly staring eyes of Niall Swiftaxe, Arthur jumped into the saddle and threw back his head to laugh heavenwards.

  Kei was taken by surprise and watched the man, puzzled.

  Arthur finally ceased to laugh, but he remained staring into the sky, as if he saw some sign there, some token that boded well for him.

  He said, ‘By all the gods, Kei! By all the gods that live in our sky, and in our earth, and in our wind and rain, and in our swords and our breasts … by all those gods, and all the great wonders they have brought to the people of this land, I feel that I am invincible! At the moment of his death … of Niail’s death … I felt … possessed, yes, possessed! As if some great god had entered me, as if … as if some all powerful being had slipped along the blade of my sword and entered me, bringing power and invincibility! By the gods, Kei, by all the gods, I believe I am the most powerful man on Earth, the most powerful man that ever lived; I am invulnerable and invincible, Kei … I do believe, by the gods, that I am God Himself! Does that appal you, Ironhand? It appals me too. But I feel it! Damn the Saxons, by all that’s Holy; damn the world! I am Warlord of the Britons, and I shall live forever! I shall, Kei … I shall live forever!’

  Kei shook his head and grinned, waited for Arthur to calm down before he said, ‘By those same gods, my friend, but you’ve become one hell of a braggard!’

  He turned, laughing, and rode back to the waiting horsemen. Arthur looked once more at the staring head of Niall Swiftaxe. Then he laughed and twisted in his saddle, shouting after Kei, into the wind, into the crisp and misty dawn, ‘Time will tell, Kei, by the gods! Time will tell all!’

  THE HORNED WARRIOR

  Dedication

  For Rosemary,

  who wins all her battles.

  Author’s note

  In 60 AD, those Celtic tribal kingdoms mentioned in this book were broadly distributed as follows:

  The tribes of the Iceni in the area of Norfolk.

  The tribes of the Trinovantes in the area of Suffolk and North Essex.

  The tribes of the Catuvellauni in the area of Bedford and Hertfordshire.

  The tribes of the Ordovices in North Wales.

  The tribes of the Deceangli along the coastal valleys of North Wales.

  The tribes of the Silures in South Wales.

  The tribes of the Cornovii in Cheshire and Staffordshire.

  The tribes of the Belgae in Wiltshire,

  and the tribes of the Coritani, to which my hero belongs, in the area of

  Leicestershire and Lincolnshire.

  The island of Mona is the Isle of Anglesey.

  PART ONE

  The Red Queen

  CHAPTER 1

  The hidden lands of the Coritani, AD 55

  As fast and sleek as a hound racing across the moor, as difficult to see as a forest sprite, the boy darted through the edge of the wood, circling the strange figure that stood on top of the knoll.

  Out of breath, wet with sweat and fear, the youngster finally dropped to his belly in the leafy undergrowth and stared through the fern and bracken at the clear grassland, sunlit and bright, and the motionless man who quietly, solemnly watched the distant river, and the bare ground where the village and the fort lay concealed behind Llug’s Wall.

  The boy grinned, knowing that it would take more than eyes to see the town. Not even the Earth Gods could spot the defended settlement of Bragdanobus. Not even the Crow Queen, screeching in her battle anger, could see the town clearly enough behind its veil of mist to drop her bloody corpses on to the houses and claim the spirits of the warriors who lived there.

  That sudden thought of gods made the boy’s skin grow chill. Nothing about the man who stood on the knoll was familiar, not his clothes, not his helmet, not his wrist decorations, not his sword … he was not even tattooed, or painted, or even smeared with some abusive colouration, telling nature with his blues or reds or greens that he was his own colour, the colour of man, and not to be interfered with by the colour spirits of the woods and grass.

  The man, the boy realised guiltily, was not a man at all. He was a god. But what sort of a god?

  He walked out of hiding, wiping the sweat from his blue-streaked face, brushing the leaf and twig from his blond hair. He felt ashamed to be greeting a god without lime and clay stiffening his hair to hedgehog spikiness. He felt naked after his long, luxurious swim in the winding river, upstream from the lair of the river goddess Banua who so liked to seduce young boys, and then to wash out their skulls with the icy water of her domain.

  Hoping the god would not object to his irreverence, hoping that his simple trousers and checked cloth-shirt were sufficiently clean to be pleasing to the god’s eye, the boy dropped to one knee and touched his lips and forehead with his left hand, speaking the divine greeting: ‘Shade and sun, wind and rain, may your fearless stride carry you from one to the other without pause, without breath.’

  The god turned to stare at the boy, and a narrow smile touched his human-like lips.

  The boy looked up, afraid now, for the god had not responded. The boy’s neck tickled. He hoped he would not have to offer his head to dangle from the god’s belt. He glanced sideways, to where he could see the thatched roundhouses grouped, like river snails clustered on a rotting branch, about the steep slopes of the fort that had been built on higher ground. It all seemed very peaceful down in the valley. The god turned to follow his gaze, frowning as his eyes saw no more than river and woodland.

  The god was a fearsome sight. He was dressed in bright silver and dulled bronze armour; his kirtle was of leather strips, hanging loose against an undertunic of red cotton. His legs were bare to the knee, but his calves were sheathed in carved and patterned bronze greaves. His head was encased in a brightly polished metal helmet, from which a plume of red fabric rose proudly, god-like, above his head. He wore a thick leather belt, from which hung a short and square-hilted sword. He was a powerfully built god, in this human manifestation, and he seemed angry, and yet thoughtful.

  The boy stared at the sword and realised that this was a glaimda, a sword demon. He felt cold again, the cold of fear, of apprehension. But the glaimda turned to him and smiled. ‘Are you afraid of me, boy?’ he said, in an accent richly strange, and strangely attractive.

  ‘My neck is in fear of you,’ answered the boy with all the bravado he could muster. He realised that this, a simple challenge, would result either in his immediate decapitation, or else in his survival, for if the demon let him live, then to kill the boy at a later date would be to invite engulfing by the Queen of the Dead, the black-skirted crow that the boy could see hovering, watching, in the nearby woodlands.

  The glaimda laughed. ‘You believe me to be a sword demon?’

  ‘Are you not?’

  The strange man shook his head, sat down awkwardly on the grass and patted the turf next to him, inviting the boy to sit too. As the boy knelt uneasily by the heavily armoured man, so the man drew his sword and showed it to his young acquaintance. ‘Have you seen a sword like this before?’

  The boy shook his head, reached out to touch the straight blade, the highly silvered surface, the precise point of it, and the square and ugly pommel and hilt. It was an unpleasant sword to touch, and to feel, not at all like the subtle, smooth-bladed swords of his own people. He was not surprised that it carried no lock of hair sewn into the wood of the hilt, nor was it engraved with a personal and secret name at the base of the blade. He drew back his hand, looked up into the clear blue eyes of the man.

  Another thought was vying for position in his mind. He must have looked worried because
the man said, ‘What ails you, boy? Have you seen a ghost? And what’s your name by the way?’

  ‘I am called Caylen. I am also called Swiftaxe, because I am swift and skilled with the single-bladed axe of my people.’

  ‘Well, Swiftaxe, who do you imagine I am?’

  ‘Our bards talk of dark-haired invaders from across the great sea that have conquered the lands to the south and east of here. They are ferocious animals disguised as men, half-human, half-dog, with short-cropped black hair and a merciless way with the weak and defenceless. They stand more than twenty feet tall; most of them have just one leg, one eye and one ear. They say their leaders have forty rows of teeth, all of which must taste flesh each day to keep them satisfied.’

  The strange man laughed, exposing twin rows of sparkling white teeth. ‘I have just a man’s complement of fangs,’ he said. ‘And two legs, two arms, two eyes, as have all men. Do I take it, then, that you do not believe me to be one of these horrendous invaders?’

  The boy shrugged uncomfortably, kept a wary eye on his acquaintance. ‘They are just stories,’ he said. ‘No one really believes that the invaders are so frightening. But they are … dark-haired … I have never seen black hair on a man, so I think I would know an invader instantly.’

  Again the man smiled. ‘You are a boy with a fine, strong heart, and a man’s courage. You virtually challenge me direct, knowing that should I be such an invader I would be here to kill you and your people.’

  Caylen’s hair stood on end, and his heart thundered. Was he being a little too brave for his own good?

  Before he could speak, or even move, the man had reached up and removed his helmet. Blond hair, greaseless and unlimed, fell to his shoulders. It smelled of sweat. ‘There,’ said the man. ‘As blond as you. In fact, I come from a village that lies no more than four days’ ride south of here. I am, Caylen, a countryman of yours. Are you happier now?’