Berserker (Omnibus) (65 page)

Every fibre of Swiftaxe’s body tensed with excitement. His heart surged. His face stretched in a delighted smile and he reached out to grip the girl by her shoulders, shaking her as he cried, ‘Then I
may
be released! I
may
know peace again!’

The girl laughed, her eyes sparkling. ‘The
Wuutinathi
is a primitive magician; its knowledge is stolen knowledge. Alas, our own knowledge is much decayed with time. Nevertheless, the magic of the
Wuutinathi
is limited, and of an elementary nature. Once you are equipped with the correct knowledge you will be able to fight it on its own terms.’

‘Then wait no longer! Equip me!’

The girl settled back on her haunches and shook her head teasingly, staring Swiftaxe in his wide, excited eyes. She said quietly, ‘A part of the
Wuutinathi
anima is in you, held there by a spell that is bonded in a complex rune. Break the rune, or erase it, and the spell is broken, and the anima drained.’

Swiftaxe shrugged. ‘It sounds too easy for words. This axe can erase a mountain. Erasing a rune should be child’s play.’

‘Put the weapon down,’ said the girl, not liking the way the huge blade waved above her head. Swiftaxe grinned apologetically and placed the axe by his side.

He was so close … he could almost smell freedom … he was like a child,
excited at the thought of a visit to another settlement … he wanted to giggle and slap his hands together … he wanted to make jokes, to hug the girl … he wanted freedom, and freedom was close, and he didn’t know what to think or how to behave in this time of his triumph.

Then the girl said, ‘Swiftaxe … you are misunderstanding!’

‘How so?’

Storm winds … the scream of dead … the sudden agonising howl of a slaughtered dog … his moment of pleasure slipped from his grasp as violently as an arm severed from the living body …

‘You cannot fight Odin in this time,’ she said evenly, ‘Or in this place, or in any place beyond the gate that is in this time.’

Agony!

Swiftaxe clenched his fists, and his teeth and his eyes and tried to swallow the sudden rising anger, the surging gorge that threatened to spill his abrupt and agonising disappointment in a bilious flood.

‘Tell me, then …’ he managed to say, trying and failing to keep the awful bitterness from his voice.

‘He must be fought at a time when he is closest to the overworld himself, and confident enough to become bound to a people who make constant demands upon him for help in return for their subjugation. From the glimpses I have already had of your strange past, there is only one time that is correct. The time of your first birth, the age of your first life.’

Swiftaxe felt the blood drain from his face. ‘Then I cannot after all finish my quest now, and return to my own people, the Coritani!’

He cried out in anger and smashed his fist to the furs beside him, jarring the room and the girl and even his own body. When he lifted his face again there were tears of rage in his eyes, and the skin of his cheeks was lined and tensed with bitterness. ‘Don’t you see? The past is
dead
for me. It comes to me in nightmares, unreal dreams! The real world, the world I desire to make my own when freed of this curse, is that very world beyond the gate that you now deny me! My world is a world of Romans and druids and tribes and war and despair, and I can help my people to fight those forces that strive to change them! By Taran! I have no desire to return to a nightmare, to a dark vision in my skull. I wish release from this ghost so I can live in the hills of the north again …’ Again he screamed incoherently, subverting his need to strike in anger with a cry of anger that made the girl turn white as she watched with sympathy and with concern. He said, ‘By the deep waters, is there to be no end to this? Will I never ever know peace?’

He began to slap his open hand against the stone of the floor, loving the pain, feeling each jarring shock reach through him, easing the awful pain of disappointment. It was not finished … it would have to begin again, all over again, in another time, with another people, and another life of violence and
blood lust that would leave him feared and hated even if he did manage to remove the demon from his body and mind.

The girl’s touch on his hand was gentle, and he let the rage subside, stared at her.

She said, ‘Then there is another way, that will in no way affect the
Wuutinathi
, save to make it flee your body into the body of another. It is also the most difficult way to release yourself, but if you succeed then you will indeed remain within the framework of your own time. It does, however, require your death in a very special way …’

Swiftaxe nodded almost imperceptibly and as he stared at her he felt his mind drawn into hers; her eyes became deep pools of the water of knowledge in which he basked and bathed, and the churning of blood in her was the thunder of a voice that spoke to him of what he must do to retain his hold upon this time in the land of the Belgae, even after his death and rebirth in the very body he inhabited …

Timeless, bathing in the sensuous aura of her body, the words filtered into his mind, burned there …

Your body must be marked with the symbols of rebirth, and you must mark your opponent’s body with the symbol of the Wuutinathi, and then block it!

Signs and symbols whirled before his mind’s eye, and some he recognised while others caused an uneasy stirring in that deeper part of him that still remembered the millenia before the advent of iron and bronze.

With a blade, inscribed with the Runes of Passing, you must strike your opponent a blow that deeply wounds, but does not kill. The Wuutinathi will pass between you, drawn by the symbol on your opponent’s body, but because the symbol is blocked it will be trapped in the blade … as the blade corrodes, so will the spirit within it …

And then I shall be released for good, for ever, completely …?

No. In order to chase the shadows of the Wuutinathi from your body completely you must be purified by death and rebirth in the way you know so well: you must accept a mortal blow. If the Wuutinathi has left you then you will survive that blow, protected by the symbols of rebirth on your body. You will be reborn as you are now, in this time. If the Wuutinathi remains within you, however, then you will again be at the mercy of the Storm God, and will be reborn in another time.

The mind contact broke.

The girl stared at Swiftaxe a moment, then said, ‘The power in you is enormous; though it will be a mighty duel, you are surely marked by the gods as he who shall win …’

Swiftaxe felt momentarily unnerved as he drew out of the girl’s mind; he stared at her and found her eyes wide and compassionate, gazing at him, a look about her that told of deeper hungers, perhaps unaccustomed hungers.
As she grew familiar with her illusory body perhaps she began to respond to its physical needs. Swiftaxe wanted to reach out and take her, but something held him back …

She said, ‘Your opponent must be selected carefully, for part of the duel must be a duel of emotion; the link between you must be more than the edge of a blade and the free flow of blood … it must go deeper … come close to me and I shall explore your mind so that we can determine who your opponent must be.’

Before Swiftaxe could speak, the girl had leaned forward and pressed her lips against his, and her darting tongue had entered his mouth taking her warmth and her softness into his body.

Encompassed by her sexual aura he responded almost mechanically, tearing the gown from her, reaching round her haunches to the warm and sensual clefts in her. She wriggled with pleasure, undoing the belt that girded him, and tugging the coarse trousers down from his hips so that his member stuck up straight and bare. Her touch indicated her lack of familiarity, and with all his strength he picked her up bodily and held her above his shaft, easing her gently down so that he pierced her with as little pain as possible.

She screamed as they came together, her face contorting with the agony of the breaching, but then she was breathing softly, and quietly singing her pleasure as they rocked backwards and forwards, and she drank his mind as well as his seed.

At last she said, ‘There is only one who is right … it must be your brother, Bedivyg. When you go back through the gate you know what you must do. First you must mark your blade with the spell that will trap the god. But not yet, not yet …’

She finished whispering but remained locked upon him, legs stretched around his waist, her body held tightly and securely against the ridged and scarred muscles of his chest.

Swiftaxe passed back through the gate, and left the warm and sunny valley abruptly behind. His head swirled as he made the transition, but there was none of the sudden and intense disorientation that he had known on passing the gate for the first time. He was back inside the circle of stone, pleasantly surprised at the warm wind that blew against his skin. The sky was bright, though overcast, with fast-moving clouds promising – at the moment – neither fine nor miserable weather.

He was glad that the rainy chill of the previous days had gone. The smell of grass was on the wind, and something else …

He searched the land beyond the stones, staring hard between them, as far as the hummocky horizon with its burden of graves. He saw no sign of movement, no sign of life.

Where was Gryddan? And the girl?

And what was that faint, and faintly disturbing, smell … like blood …?

His stomach tensed, his heart beat fast; he felt the thundering of blood in his skull, and the cold prickle of fear on his skin. Easily, and slowly, he reached for his axe.

The wind blew gusty and warm, whipping his hair about his face and he brushed it back in irritation, searching every nook, every gap in the towering, dark-faced stones. For a moment his attention lingered on the tall megaliths which, hours before, had been transformed into the bizarre creatures that still, he supposed, inhabited them; beyond those drab and scarred faces lay the Originals, resting after thousands of years of life. Watching him?

He felt no discomfort at the thought.

Something was wedged in the narrow gap between two of these grey stones; wispy fabric blew from it, and Swiftaxe stepped towards it, intrigued to know what it was. He saw blood, and stopped. Instantly, then, he recognised what the object was.

Edwynna’s severed head, stuck in the niche, watching him with glazed, half-closed eyes!

He screamed out of anger and with sadness, whirled about, sensing his loss of control to the blood-thirsty spirit within him. Odin, the bear that so delighted in these sudden shocks, padded forward and laughed as it stared from Swiftaxe’s eyes, and worked the muscles of his face into the mask of a beast. The Berserker’s cry of anger changed to a throaty growl of pleasure,
and with the enhancing of his animal senses he noticed the stink of men, and the heavy aroma of anticipation.

There were men hiding behind the stones, waiting to attack.

‘Gryddan!’ he called, desperately, the human in him finding voice through the whirling mania of the god. He was afraid for the druid who had so helped him.

His answer was a gusting wind, and the twang of a bow that launched an arrow into his chest. He staggered backwards with the force of it, seeing the quivering shaft of the weapon, and feeling the agonising pain as the metal head rammed deep into his flesh. It had struck him through the leather of his shoulder belt, and when he pulled the arrow from his muscle it snagged and snapped, leaving the blade stuck in his clothing. He felt the warm trickle of blood, and the infuriating throbbing of the wound, but instinctively he knew he had only been nicked.

Angry, almost insensate in his desire to kill those men who hid so cowardly from him, he ran towards the stones.

They came out of hiding and, screaming, attacked him.

Perhaps twenty Romans, young to a man, and with the fear of death in their eyes. They descended upon the Berserker and discovered the short road to their gods. Most of them wore no more than leather armour over cotton tunics, and though the beaten iron of their helms protected their heads, their limbs and entrails could not survive against the scything axe, and the manic figure of the Berserker who fought them.

They circled him, and they soon formed a circle of dead, and when the Berserker grew weak, and there were still spears and arrows thudding into his body, an enormous wind began to blow, gusting against the Romans even though they stood on all sides of him. In the centre of this bizarre storm Swiftaxe was a screeching animal figure, darting from man to man, quickly to open him with the warm edge of his red blade, then back to find another. Each man felt blood and dust blown into his eye, and above the shrieking of the wind the Berserker cried a name.

‘Aithlenn!’

And he cried it with love, for the human within the Berserker recognised the assistance of the Hag so long after she had died, so far from her place in the shadow world.

A legionary came at him, then, and rammed his sword hard at the Berserker, hoping to catch him unawares. The bizarre wind that so confounded the Romans seemed not to affect this armoured man, who glared so intensely from behind his iron cheek-guards.

As Swiftaxe avoided the blow and made to strike back, so he recognised his brother, and pulled the blow so that the axe blade merely grazed the other man’s flesh.

‘Bedivyg! Help me!’ cried the Berserker.

‘Help yourself to this!’ screamed the Roman, picking up a fallen spear and thrusting it between Swiftaxe’s ribs so that the Berserker screamed in pain and had to throw himself backwards to avoid a deep wound.

The three surviving legionaries closed in on Swiftaxe and grasped his limbs, holding him steady, though he threshed, while Bedivyg closed in and raised his sword to cut through the sinews of his brother’s neck. He grinned.

‘You’ve been asking for this. Hold him steady! I owe him at least the severance of his arrogant head in a single blow.’

The wind was blinding the men who held him, but Bedivyg was not a Roman by birth, and the ghostly promise, once made by Aithlenn, was ineffectual against him.