by Harold Lamb
Stopping the weapons, he offered them to Leif. With a shake of his head, the shaggy man refused them. "That was a small trick. I will do a greater one."
Starkad's teeth clashed. "Can you not see we grow strong with Ber- serksgang? At such times we pull trees from the earth."
Leif did not seem disturbed. "It would be a more remarkable feat to pull down this house. Aye, that would be something to boast of."
Hrolf snorted. "Eleven men lie out in the cattle pens because one said a hard, quick word to me."
"Eleven is a small number."
Hrolf stared, voiceless. Around him, the gray men pushed close to Leif and the girl, and still Leif did nothing but watch them, while she waited for the first to howl.
"I will tell you," Leif observed, "something worth hearing. My nature is more than berserk, for I am a hamrammir man. My guardian spirit is a bear, and in the time of darkness this bear's spirit is apt to enter my body."
He shook his head, glancing at the scars on his hands, and the eyes of the Berserks went to those scars. They listened, breathing heavily.
"So I rise up in the darkness with the bear's strength in me, but I crawl like a beast, seeking something to devour. Aye, at such a time my shape is changed to a beast. After the fit leaves me," Leif went on, "I am in my own shape again, but feeling weak."
While he spoke the light failed in the hall. Outside, the pale night of the north had begun, and some of the Berserks noticed this, whispering to Hrolf, who stared at the shaggy Leif silently. Around the high seat the shadows were closing in, and, wrapped in his bearskin, Leif's outline grew dimmer.
"Easy to say," replied Hrolf slowly, "but I would like well to see this happen."
Crouching on his seat, Leif said nothing.
"Starlight begins," went on Hrolf, "and so now we will go outside the house. We will know that you are indeed a hamrammir man if we hear after darkness the growling of a beast and see the shape of a bear come forth. That would be something to see."
He touched the quiet girl on the arm. "Come, Brana. No woman should see a hamrammir change his shape."
Some of the Berserks were moving toward the back door of the house, and some out of the front of the hall. They went readily enough, gripping their weapons and looking back.
Brana did not stir.
"Come you on," said Hrolf again.
"Aye," growled Leif. "Better for you to go, girl. I feel strength coming into me."
Stepping away from them, Hrolf looked back once. When Brana did not run after him, he went out the door, closing it behind him.
The two of them sat together in the empty hall, with the bones scattered along the ground, and the fresh oxhide flung into a corner. Leif sighed, drawing the drinking horn to him and looking into it. She saw his face change in the twilight. He looked thin and tired.
"Well?" she said softly.
"Not well." Leif shook himself restlessly. "Why didn't you go with the warfarers, Brana?"
She could not say why. She wanted to stay here at Leif's side, to feel him near her. Pouring beer from the jug, she offered it to him, but he pushed it away moodily.
"Perhaps a hamrammir man may not drink beer," she whispered.
Leif looked at her and went to the opening in the wall by the door. Already the glow of the cooking fire outside picked out the figures of the armed men in mail grouped in a half circle beyond the door, waiting. At the back he saw the same thing, only not so clearly.
"I thought so," he muttered. There was no other way out of the house. He stopped in front of the quiet girl. "Get out," he told her.
"No," Brana whispered. "While I am here, they will not slay you."
"If you are sure of that, it is more than I am," Leif grumbled. "Are you afraid of me, here in the dark?"
Brana shook her head. She came closer, to touch his arm, and felt his lips against her hair. "Outside there," he whispered, "they are no Berserks. Well do I know the Berserk rage. They go about in wolfskins spreading the tale of their anger, and plundering and slay as if they were true Berserks. Aye, Hrolf has hit upon a good plan. If everyone on this coast is afraid of his anger, he can get together a great treasure. He will go far."
"I know," Brana nodded, "but I cannot bear for him to touch me."
"He will do better than I."
"I know." Suddenly Brana laughed. "Much do you know of the spirit lore, Leif. But Ingiald told me years ago that a hamrammir never is conscious of changing his shape."
Leif sighed. "I thought I told a good lie. I wanted to get my crew away from these manslaughterers. It was the only way I could think to do it." He chuckled, remembering. "I think well that half Hrolf's men believed the tale."
Before long he stopped chuckling. A dull thumping sounded against both the doors-a thumping and a creaking. Listening to it, Leif went and pushed the narrow front door. Hard as he pushed, he could not move it. He stepped to the opening.
"Hrolf," he called. "Will you let the woman out of this hall?"
Although Brana could make out the gleam of Hrolf's arm ring where he stood among his weapon men, she heard no answer to this. The noise at the doors stopped but a faint stirring and crackling began.
The faces of Hrolf's men stood out more clearly in the half light of the sky, and they seemed to be growing red. Their mouths hung open, their hands moved restlessly, holding shields and weapons. Suddenly Hrolf's sword struck his shield with a clang of iron.
"Loud growls the man-bear," he chanted, making a song, "caught in the trap. Now feels the man-bear the sting of his death."
The red glow shone brighter on the men waiting expectantly outside.
"He sings well enough," Leif muttered, as the clanging of iron grew louder, "but it is a sham and a counterfeit song. Your inlaws yonder have no wish to hear what we may say. They have it in their minds to do more than manslaughter."
"What?" Brana asked, her throat choking. Something bitter caught at her nostrils.
"Something that will be hard for you to endure, girl." Leif thought about it and nodded. "Hrolf has murdered your uncle Orn. Now have you the right to speak against him and demand atonement. So he will slay the two of us, and my shipmates will not be here to bear witness against him. Yea, he will say that he killed only a hamrammir man. He has thought out more clearly than I have what he must do."
Leif sniffed the air, and looked up carefully at the thatch of the roof on the great crossbeam over their heads. The sound of crackling and snapping came from up there, at the front. Then red sparks dropped down, and Brana knew that the men outside had set fire to the thatch on that side.
Her house was burning over her head, while those men in wolfskins waited, and she thought that after the burning there would be no evidence against Hrolf, and no voice to speak against him. She caught Leif's hand, holding it tight.
"You do not weep now," Leif said.
She gripped his hand tighter, for comfort. He was shivering, sweat shining on his face. An ember stung her bare arm and she pressed herself against him.
All at once Leif cried out, as if his body had been wrenched. His shaggy head thrust down between his shoulders, and the wood of his ax haft creaked when he picked it up. Smoke rolled down on them, and Leif hacked with his ax at the window opening. At the second blow of the ax a spear clanged through the opening, past Leif's shoulder.
Then he stopped working at the wall. Crouching, he glared up through the smoke. It seemed to the girl that this was not the flesh-and-blood Leif of a moment ago, but a man gripped by some other strength. Tears flowed out of his staring eyes down his cheeks, and quick groans came from inside his body. He did not seem to know that he was crying.
Embers dropped with black soot along the front of the hall, and the flames hissed overhead. Leif was staring up at the great center beam when he leaped back. Straining, he shoved the long table back against the far wall.
Here, in the smoke, he jumped up on the table and began to chop at the end of the heavy beam where it met the wall. Fast and s
killfully, his ax edge bit into the wood, and long chips fell.
"Come here," he croaked, and Brana stepped close behind him.
His ax smashed up into the shaking beam. Bits of burning thatch dropped down around him. The beam cracked loud, and Leif smashed at it with the butt of his ax.
With a splintering sound the end of the beam came down, breaking the table. Leif jumped clear, moving with frantic haste. Catching up the wet oxhide from the ground, he threw it over Brana's head, gripping it close around her.
The roof was falling in now.
Flaming thatch rattled down, and hot air seared Leif's throat. He kept moving. Over one shoulder he swung the roll that was Brana in the bloody oxhide. Holding fast to his ax, he stepped up on the beam's end where it lay in the wreck of the table.
The beam sloped up to the front wall where fire smoldered. Above that upper end, he could see a dark patch of the sky. At that point the burning thatch had fallen down to the floor of the hall. And up the sloping beam Leif was hurrying, balancing with the ax and Brana, his chest straining not to breathe in the air that would strangle him.
Stepping on the top of the beam, he gave a yell and leaped out.
Now Hrolf and his men, watching with satisfaction, beheld this shaggy figure leaping down in the smoke and the fire glare, with a mass of oxhide upon him. And for a second astonishment held them still. They heard a faint echo of the yell.
The figure landed on its feet and rolled, and the oxhide rolled away from it. They saw then it was Leif, with Brana in the hide.
Starkad, the one-eyed, stepped toward him, swinging high his sword. Leif saw the iron coming down, and whacked with his ax at Starkad's knee joint. The ax blade cut away half Starkad's leg, and Leif rolled to his feet, pulling up his ax.
His face was twisted out of human semblance. Tears streaked his cheeks.
"Berserksgang!" a weapon man shouted, watching him.
"Fools!" Hrolf shouted.
With his shield before him, and his sword point out, Hrolf ran at Leif. And the ax swung low at his knee, as it had done with Starkad. Jumping aside, Hrolf kept clear of it. And the shining ax swung wide.
Gripping it with both hands, Leif let it swing and hurled it at Hrolf. It flashed over the shield into Hrolf's face. It smashed the bones in his head, and he dropped there, where he stood.
Leif did not wait for him to fall. He caught up his ax and rushed at the weapon men, smoking as he was. Beating down their swords, he leaped among them, and they closed their shields together, crouching, afraid of the anger of this lank man. They had seen Starkad and Hrolf smashed down, and they were afraid. So they pushed close their shields, trying to crush him.
Then they heard running feet. Spears and axes struck their backs, while voices shouted Leif's name. Twenty Leifs seemed to have come out of the darkness, in the smoke. Here the weapon men had caught Leif, and he had multiplied himself into twenty maddened fighters. The glare of the flames made it hard for the weapon men to see these new Leifs.
"Peace!" they yelled-those who lived-throwing down weapons and shields.
So they begged for their lives before they realized that Leif's men had come back to the burning homestead. Those shipmates had heard Leif's yell, and they had run to him fast, out of the darkness ...
A week later Leif himself was fitting a new steering oar on the aft deck of Hrolf's dragon ship, which he had appropriated because it was better than his own vessel.
Now that he had washed in fresh water, cutting his hair, and putting on new wool garments, Brana, who sat with him, knew that he looked like any other boy of the quiet Viking coast. Yet he was making ready to go on the West voyage toward that unknown land of his as if it were no more than a jaunt down to Gothland.
"Leif," she said, helping to hold the pole he was shaping with his ax, "you have a fine new ship, with plenty of gold and silk and precious things in it. Stay here, then, in my place and we will build a new homestead."
On the shore by the landing, the people who had survived in Orn's Firth were tending the cattle again, around the black ruin of the hall. Troubled, Leif leaned on his ax, looking at them.
"No," he said, "I must get to the Green-land before the winter storms."
Brana took his hand, with the scars of work on it. "Then tell me-do you remember nothing at all of how you killed Hrolf?"
"Nothing." Leif frowned, trying to think.
"The men say you went berserk."
Leif shook his head. "I remember a spear that flew by me. And then I felt anger."
"Why, Leif?" she breathed softly.
"They were hurting you."
Gripping tight his hand, Brana closed her eyes. When she did that she felt safe. And she knew she had found what she had been searching for. No matter upon what unknown seas Leif chose to steer, Brana would be there with him.
The first thing I noticed was her red hat in the crowd when the ship came in. It was a red beret, pushed back from a slim, pale face that seemed to be made for laughter. The beret had a feather stuck in it, and the girl wore a jaunty karakul jacket. But her young face was tense with a kind of hunger, and her gray eyes, slanting a little, never left the transport coming in to the Haidarpasha landing by the bridge-the place of honor, you know-horns playing somewhere because the Turkish brigade was coming home. The survivors had been relieved, after heavy losses in Korea. The thing that struck my mind about the girl in the beret was that she had been starving for a long time until that transport docked.
Fantastic? Well, it might be. Man does not live by bread alone. Tell me a man's dream, and I'll tell you what kind of person he is. Soldiers of any nation can usually get themselves food enough-after two World Wars I can testify to that-yet most of them carry some pin-up pictures, or letters, or even a card with a Hail Mary. Why?
By coincidence I ran into the girl in the red beret again the next day. Having made a hobby of legends and what people call antiquities, I'd managed to be stationed at Istanbul, the old city, whereas most of the Army group of AMAT-American Mission for Aid to Turkey-had duties at the new capital of Ankara. And usually after lunch I walked down the boulevard with the trams to the Aya Sufia, which is what they call the oldest standing church on earth. It's in the parkway where the palace used to be, and it has been made into a museum, so I would find only a stray tourist or a class of schoolkids there. Well, as I reached the gate a polished limousine pulled up at the curb, the driver slid around to open the door, and out stepped the girl who had been waiting at the dock. She went straight into the courtyard of the church.
She had not been alone in the car. In the back sat a solid youth in a camel's-hair coat. I knew him-Masur Aridag, the son of a member of Parliament, and the successful head of one of the new motion-picture studios. We exchanged the usual bows and how-are-you's, but Aridag stayed put in his car and I went on in. The girl was no longer visible. That surprised me, because she had been only some thirty paces ahead of me. And the carpeted floor, bright with sunlight, stretched clear without partitions or furnishings to those incredible marble walls, fourteen centuries old.
The next day it rained. When I took my walk past the Aya Sufla, there was the black limousine parked again at the curb with the driver dozing and young Aridag reading a newspaper. Did you ever stop to think how we take for granted that the strangers we meet are doing the most ordinary things, like catching trains or going to the movies? They might be on their way to rob a museum or to hear a doctor's diagnosis that meant life or death. Well, here was matter-of-fact Aridag waiting like a businessman on Fifth Avenue for a very attractive girl who might be his fiancee to come out of St. Patrick's doors. I told myself that, and then remembered the strange hunger in her face when she watched the transport coming to its moorings.
I would have bet dollars against piasters that she was inside-but where? People don't usually vanish when they step into St. Patrick's. Even Cinderella had to go away somewhere. This time I wandered around the dim walls, passing an attendant who tried to keep warm
in his overcoat, and a stocky Turkish infantryman who got up to salute me, or rather my lieutenant colonel's insignia. Turkish soldiers are not allowed to wear service ribbons or bright metal insignia of rank.
I heard the faint tapping of small heels on stone, not far off, but evidently not from the carpeted floor within sight. It took me a moment to place the sound overhead and to realize that there must be a narrow gallery above the massive pillars of the ground level. Going back to the entrance I found a stone stair, almost dark, leading up. Then I remembered Byzantine ladies had used the galleries to be secluded from the men below.
Perhaps I should not have gone up-a middle-aged American officer, merely curious about what seemed odd. The girl was waiting by one of the narrow windows close to the stairhead. Almost she ran at me, holding out her arms, her face a white blur. Before she touched me she stopped, rigid, saying something I didn't understand, and then in English, "Will you please excuse me? I did think you were somebody else."
Probably I had been the only person to climb that obscure stair after her, and Cinderella had sighted my uniform in the dim light. The way her eyes strained up at me showed she had had a shock. She kept on talking in her careful, learned-at-school English, "We always did come here before. In his letter Karal wrote how, if I did not find him at the gumi-the ship-come here or he would send me a message."
I broke off a stupid apology, realizing what was back of her words. The girl had not expected to see Karal at the ship. Still, she came to this gal lery to wait, as his last letter had asked. To hold on to a last link with her soldier, who was probably reported missing. "Did they report him missing, Miss ..."
"My name is Lailee Baibars ... No, sir. They said he must be killed: but they did not recover his body."
After that, I didn't try to go away. This Turkish girl, lightweight, dark hair, and gray eyes, had taken two beatings already-one watching troops at the dock, the other when I blundered up the dark stair, an idiot more than twice her age. Her lips quivered over those last words, tension in her was near to breaking. I knew the symptoms, and also that there was a mighty slim chance of a combatant missing in action in Korea turning up again.