Berserker (Omnibus) (20 page)

He rode along the base of tall cliffs, seeking a way out of the lower lands of the ocean shore, and into the colder world of scattered farms and distant mountains. Then he slept in the shelter of a rock overhang. He awoke during the night as something cried to him in his dreams, and sat there, staring into the pitch blackness, seeking even a solitary star beyond the dark veil of cloud; but the winter storms were too close and the land was closed off from light, and not even the glow of a distant fire could relieve the sombreness of that absolute black.

It came again, the haunting cry, the howling of a wolf, but distant, very distant. It came from where he had been, miles to the west, against the shores of the fjord. Had the wolf circuited the deep fjord so quickly, then? Had it followed his smell on the wind to the small village and found him gone?

A third time the wolf howled. Harald imagined he could hear his name in the hair-raising cry of the great beast as it raised muzzle to sky and let its voice carry as far as the wind would take it, upwards, towards him.

At dawn, covered in thick frost, frozen and hungry, Harald rose and stared about him.

The ground dropped away behind him in a steep slope that rose into low hill after low hill, sparsely covered with straight, bare pines. Although it was cloudy, in the extreme distance, he could see the gleam of the fjord he had left and a thin column of dark smoke rising into the air. Perhaps the smouldering remains of the ship; perhaps the remains of the village itself.

The cliff behind him was sheer and dark, and above him roots and grasses dangled and blew in the wind.

A vile smell tickled his senses and he again searched the lowlands over which he had ridden.

His heart stopped for a moment, then raced with fear, with panic, with excitement. Beartooth was riding across a ridge and his five Berserker brothers were close behind. Three or four hours’ ride away; no more, certainly.

They had found him with horrifying swiftness, and Harald had no doubt at all that the old man in the village had been induced to tell of Harald’s quest by the most offensive of means.

Harald climbed back into the saddle and urged his steed along the cliffs. The dark rock, the darkness of horse and his own clothing, might have lent a certain invisibility to him, but he was not counting on Beartooth’s eagle eyes being deceived for very long.

At last he found the way up through the cliffs – a steep gully, filled with loose stones and rocks across which he led his horse, which slipped and snorted with the effort of the assent.

They arrived above the cliffs and, without even a glance backwards, Harald rode hard across the jagged land he found there.

Ahead of him, far distant, towering into the billowing clouds, were the dark shadows of mountains, and they filled Harald with unease and yet a certain joy. As a youth, even as a man, he would never have dared to ride so arrogantly into those mountains, for fear of the wrath of the creatures and strange men who lived among them, and for fear that his destiny might be altered by supernatural forces.

Now he rode towards them. Only when he felt his steed sag with weariness did he stop for rest.

Thus he covered vast tracts of land, and by the end of the day he had come further than a normal ride of two days would have taken him.

In the stillness of the night creatures moved about him, eyes dull in the darkness, breath foul as they peered closely at the tense Berserker who gripped his sword in his hand ready to strike the moment one of the inquisitive night walkers came too close. A nomadic band, they passed onwards into the darkness, moving, perhaps, to some rocky crag a few days’ walk to the south where they might winter in crannies and caves until the bitter snows of the coldest season made their natural home among the tallest peaks a more comfortable place to return to.

By day he rode through thick woodlands, weaving between the pines and darting from sunlit glade to sunlit glade. He was conscious of the watchers of the wood regarding him, following him curiously but discreetly, unwilling to attack because of the sense of power he radiated. The bear’s ferocity perpetually surfaced as a body odour detectable by animals if not by men; the sudden growl of the bear was uttered as he slept in the saddle and the bear prowled forward to see if there was blood on the wind.

The woodlands were left behind and he rode higher into the hills, along razor-backed ridges and across thin, ice-cold streams of glittering water at which he refreshed himself and tried to wash the blood from his sword. But the blood was too caked, and the smell of it, and the stink of the bear, remained about him, a tangible cloak of menace.

He rode even after the light of day had fled into the west, and only when his horse stumbled, several hours after darkness had descended, did he stop and contemplate the third night asleep in this barren land.

A bird shrieked above his head, wings cutting the stillness in a dull and familiar beat. For a moment he searched the heavens for a glittering pair of eyes, and his heart stuttered with youthful expectation. Deirdre … Deirdre … his mind spoke the name over and over, his eyes wide while he scanned the rolling night clouds.

She would be far and away above him by now, among the Sky Riders and their starry kingdom, seeking her own man, her love of centuries before. But for a moment it amused and thrilled him to imagine that she was with him, watching him, ready to cast a simple spell for his protection.

The bird vanished, screeching away into the dimness, and Harald turned back to regard the invisible lands ahead of him.

Water rushed, noisily. He eased the horse towards the babbling stream, and allowed the steed to drink.

The horse backed off and Harald, puzzled, dismounted and tasted the water himself. It was unusually bitter, but tasted unpoisoned. He slaked his own thirst, then left the horse by the stream to drink if it wanted to, or not if it sensed some unpleasant metal in the water and disdained to partake of the icy refreshment.

Harald rolled in a tight ball and slept by the water’s edge. In the morning he awoke from a violent and bloody nightmare, rolling into the cold stream and splashing noisily about, screaming his shock.

He laughed as he realised what had happened, and scrambled up the bank, shaking his head to get rid of as much water as he could. Then he looked back at the stream.

‘Thor’s Spit!’ he cried, delightedly, jumping to his feet and running again into the bitter water. His face broke into a huge grin and he astounded the steed that watched him, by dancing in the stream and splashing the fluid all over him, and laughing and kicking and finally emerging on to dry land, shivering and giggling and stripping off his clothes to dry.

Naked he again stared at the shallow river, but this time he peered up along its winding length to where it vanished among the hills and ridges, moving as an arrow into the mountains, towards the pass that he sought.

The bronze river!

Icy, bitter to the taste, but the most wondrous thing that Harald had ever seen. It wound away from him, and rushed in the other direction across the lowlands and then into some dark place in the ground where it bubbled on, beneath the rocks, away from the eyes of man, emerging into the sea at some unknown place along the steep cliffs of the northland shoreline.

He had found it, though, and by finding it had come within a finger’s breadth of his salvation, for all he needed to do now was follow the strangely golden waters until he found the pass shown on the dirk.

And the warlock would do the rest, from the calling of Harald to the dispersing of the curse.

The air was freezing, and Harald’s skin began to turn blue. Eventually he tugged on the damp clothes for what tiny extra warmth they could give.

He ran, for a while, leading the horse behind him. The exertion warmed him a little, and helped in the drying of his clothes. But after a few hours a fierce wind, blowing between the hills, dried him fully and saved him from a freezing death at the hands of the elements.

He rode into the glittering yellow waters and splashed his way upstream, leaving the current only when the waters grew too deep for comfort.

Now, at last, he dared to look back along the way he had come, seeking a trace of Beartooth or the giant wolf that pursued him so relentlessly.

He saw nothing and, if he felt a slight disappointment, it was merely the repressed agony of the bear spirit locked within him, sensing that in Harald’s activity there was the inevitability of its own death, and this it feared.

Without the presence of prey or battle it was hard for the bear to emerge and possess the human spirit that fought so hard for release. Just one mountain farmer, one nomadic family, one hermit eking out an existence on the sparsely vegetated slopes of these uplands, and the bear could fight for its own survival.

But for the moment it was confined to the darkness of Harald’s mind, locked in, chained down, unable to do more than growl and slaver and express its annoyance.

And Harald just laughed.

He rode on, higher into the mountains, through rain squalls and dark fogs that descended upon him as if to mask the passing of shy creatures whom he could hear murmuring and stumbling in their enveloping cloak of mist. At such times he held the horse still, leaning forward in the saddle to pat the creature’s muzzle and prevent it from uttering any sound. He didn’t know what it was that was so carefully picking its way down the mountain side, but many of the mountain dwellers, especially the trolls and dwarves, had a habit of behaving very bad-temperedly towards strangers. It was best that they be allowed to continue on their way in ignorance of the mortal invader to their ancestral lands.

Half of Harald’s fright, as the mists descended and rolled past him, sprang from the fact that he had never before seen such dark creatures as legend held inhabited the inhospitable uplands and crags. Trolls were beings of folk lore and parents’ tales to sleepy children. Man and troll kept their places; vast areas of land separated them, so that to trolls, perhaps, men were as much story fodder as trolls were to the humans who inhabited the lowlands.

After some hours Harald began to see the gate that the old man had mentioned, and now he truly began to sweat.

At first the gate was difficult to discern against the dark crags and cliffs behind it, split only by a narrow gorge through which the bizarre river flowed. But as Harald rode nearer so he gained a clear picture of the forbidden gate, and his stomach knotted.

The archway was huge, being just three mighty slabs of dark grey rock, two as uprights, towering ten times the height of a man into the air, on either side of the river. The third lay across the other two, an enormous, cracked and crumbling lintel, on which wind-and-rain-scarred runes could just be seen.

Since time immemorial this giant gate had straddled the bronze river, dividing the land of mortal men from the cold, rocky domain of those beasts midway between earth and the supernatural land of the gods. Beyond the gate Harald was an intruder and an invader. His trespass would be punished by death, of that there was no doubt.

Without pause, however, without thought, Harald rode slowly beneath the great lintel, the hooves of the snorting horse kicking up huge sprays of golden water.

When he arrived immediately beneath the gate he stopped, staring ahead along the thin, sheer gorge and the darkness that consumed all detail beyond it. He could hear the hollow booming of the wind along the chasm, and felt the bitterness on his skin, blowing his hair behind him.

The old man had mentioned guardians, and Harald half expected to be struck down where he sat in the saddle. And yet the place looked deserted. There was an air of decay about the gate as potent as the stink of blood.

Moving forward very softly, straining to hear above the rushing water for any sound of approach, he passed under the gate. A cold wind blew suddenly and startlingly and he drew singing life-taker from its sheath and held it ready.

The wind died; the water babbled beneath the horse; the clouds passing overhead cast shifting dark shadows across the surrounding cliffs of the gorge.

Harald smiled.

The river bed tilted slightly.

Part of the rock face that rose before him began to move. The horse whinnied and reared, nearly throwing Harald from the saddle, but he reined the steed about and kept his balance, turning fast to observe what lay behind the huge door.

The rock door opened completely and a gust of foul air blew out of the mountain hollow thus revealed. A great skeleton hung there, five times Harald’s height, slung on the thick cords of a web that was closely woven about the bones, maintaining them in death as the body had been in life.

A troll, an enormous giant of a beast! Once it had guarded the gate and the passage into the lands of the high crags. Hundreds of years ago it had died,
perhaps trying to get out through the very door from which it surprised the unwary voyager.

The vast skull rocked as Harald rode slowly past, staring into the slanted eye sockets, each seemingly as wide as Harald was tall. The grinning mouth, with its pointed black teeth, seemed to part and close as if emitting words, but only the wind and the sound of the river filled Harald’s ears.

The guardian was long dead, only the knowledge of what it had once been surviving. But that knowledge was sufficient for the power of the guardian to have remained, discouraging all mortal souls from setting foot beyond the gate with the cunning mechanism by which the troll had been alerted.

For an hour or more Harald rode along the winding, narrow chasm, the sound of his progress through the deep water echoing loudly and hollowly from the sheer walls that confined him.

He saw no sign of life, but sensed a presence watching him. Sometimes stones and rocks clattered noisily behind him, falling from a great height and hitting the water with loud crashes and splashes. When he glanced up, to where the sky was a vanishing thread of blue, he occasionally saw human-like heads swiftly withdrawn from sight. Not humans, nor trolls, by their appearance. Some life form of these mountains that even folk lore had not heard about.