The Last Berserker Read online

  The Last Berserker

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One One year earlier…

  Chapter One The fate of a murderer

  Chapter Two A mismatch in the marketplace

  Chapter Three Mountains made by men

  Chapter Four A forest of bones

  Chapter Five The Fyr Skola

  Chapter Six Into the Fyr Pit

  Chapter Seven A little help from a friend

  Chapter Eight The forging of a Rekkr

  Chapter Nine The trumpets sound for war

  Chapter Ten A shock for a sleepy sentry

  Chapter Eleven The bloody gift of Tiw

  Chapter Twelve ‘We shall oblige your king’

  Part Two

  Chapter Thirteen All roads lead to Aachen

  Chapter Fourteen The palace of the king

  Chapter Fifteen A matter of faith

  Chapter Sixteen Blood on the sand

  Chapter Seventeen A very special scara

  Chapter Eighteen In the queen’s chamber

  Chapter Nineteen A blade in the darkness

  Chapter Twenty A night to remember

  Chapter Twenty-one The never-ending forest

  Chapter Twenty-two The Beast awakens

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-three A walk in the woods

  Chapter Twenty-four The Spring Market

  Chapter Twenty-five The long road back

  Chapter Twenty-six Return to the Groves

  Chapter Twenty-seven A council of war

  Chapter Twenty-eight The paths of peace and war

  Chapter Twenty-nine The price of treachery

  Chapter Thirty Nose to nose with the future

  Chapter Thirty-one The battle to end all battles

  Chapter Thirty-two The life of just one man

  Chapter Thirty-three The reckoning

  Epilogue One month later

  Historical Note

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  For Daisy D, the berserkest

  Prologue

  The Rekkr limped towards the village, the butt of his long-handled axe dragging a furrow in the sandy soil. He hummed to himself as he approached the gate in the fence that surrounded the tiny settlement by the sea. It was a simple four-note tune, rhythmic, repetitive, hypnotic. An ancient melody. The vibration deep in his throat suppressed the frailty of his much-wounded body and coaxed the Beast once more from its lair within his heart.

  He was a huge man, his scarred face toad-ugly under a greasy fringe of hair; his heavy shoulders made bulkier by the fur cloak draped over his back. The filth-matted fur vambraces, which protected his forearms, made his upper limbs appear absurdly large, particularly when combined with the ropes of coiled muscle on display. A loincloth and a pair of leather greaves, sewn with iron strips and strapped over his boots, completed his costume.

  Fifty paces from the rickety gate, he hefted the axe on to his shoulder and broke into a lumbering trot, increasing to the full charge as he neared the wooden fence. The humming rose in pitch and volume to become a terrible keening screech, and then an open-throated, piss-curdling scream. At a full sprint, he threw his massive body against the collection of sun-faded sticks held together by thongs and hemp-twine and crunched through the gate, bursting out the other side, into the village itself, in a shower of debris.

  The two gate guards, village men armed with no more than fishing spears and wicker shields, were already running by the time he had brushed the splinters from his fur-cloaked shoulders. The Rekkr threw back his head, lifted the axe high in both hands and roared with mingled rage and triumph.

  Then he set to work.

  He strode to the nearest house, a slumped hovel of wattle and daub with a sagging turf roof. He ripped the leather curtain aside, swung low and sank his axe into the groin of a man who lunged out at him with a bait knife in hand. He booted the collapsing man’s body back into the cottage and, chuckling and calling out a jovial word of greeting, he followed it inside.

  The air was ripped apart by the sounds of violence – shouts of anger first, then squelches and cracks, then screams of pain. Finally a woman’s voice pleading, begging – cut horribly short. The Rekkr emerged a few moments later, spattered all over with gore, and laughing like a donkey.

  He shook the axe head free of its slick coating, droplets scattering, and stumbled on into the heart of the village. A bitch, a big mongrel with a good deal of wolfhound in her, barked at him, and circled, growling, sensing his evil. The Rekkr leapt, fast as a snake, and the animal was swatted away with a single blow, half her ribs crushed. She whined, staggered and fell.

  A shield wall had formed, halfway up the only street in the settlement; a dozen men, all the males of fighting age within the village. They huddled together, trembling pitifully, behind three round, lime-wood shields. A few wavering spears and five or six swords pointed in the Rekkr’s direction. The intruder loped eagerly towards them, gathering speed, chuckling and swinging the long bloody axe in ever wider loops around his shaggy head.

  The shield wall fared no better than the gate. The Rekkr smashed straight through it; then, he hacked left and right, killing with practised ease.

  He took a sword thrust to his left side, the steel scraping over his naked ribs, but paid not the slightest heed – the Beast possessed him now and he had no understanding of pain. The long axe hissed through the air and plunged into living flesh. Again. And again. Blood spraying in wider arcs as the blade sank into human meat and was swept back for another strike.

  The five unwounded men of the shield wall now ran for their lives, scattering – and the Rekkr let them go. Seven men were curled on the bloody earth, coughing, bleeding, dying. He stamped on a twitching fellow’s head, crushing the skull like an egg under his iron-shod boot. Then, unexpectedly, the Rekkr stooped and picked up the dead man’s sword in his free hand, an ancient one, but well made by a craftsman; he gave it a few trial swishes.

  He smiled.

  The Rekkr then set to work on the houses, zig-zagging across the street from one to another to make sure he did not overlook any victims. At each dwelling he kicked open the door, pushed inside and killed, sword in one hand, axe in the other. He slew the old, the young, women and their children.

  Slathered in gore, like a dread creature from a nightmare, the Rekkr approached the last and biggest building in the village, a timber longhouse.

  The fur of his great-cloak was now utterly soaked; his vambraces were soggy and glistening red. Of the heavy features of his filth-caked face, only his cold dead eyes could be distinguished along with a glimpse of yellow teeth in his mad, almost jubilant smile. He stood for a moment outside the gable-ended longhouse, looking up at its stout beams, and the oak-wood door, no doubt barricaded by now. The window shutters were all closed too, barred from the inside. Blood dripped from the Rekkr’s weapons, held loosely in both his hands, pattering like raindrops on to the dust below each blade.

  He began to hum once more.

  Inside the longhouse, the survivors of the village, no more than a dozen folk, mostly women and children, were gathered on the far side of the hearth. A grandmother clutched two of her dead son’s children, a girl and boy, no more than ten and eleven years old, one under each arm. She squeezed them tight, crushing them to her, and tried to still their whimpers.

  ‘Hush now,’ she said. ‘He cannot get in. He will soon be gone.’

  The boy threw off her arm and ran to the side of the house where, after rummaging among the pots and pans, he unearthed a small eating knife.

  One m
atron seized a yard-long cooking spit from the hearth, and swept its iron length clear of soot and grease with one motion of her hand.

  Then they heard it. A drone like a swarm of angry bees. Very close. Just outside the door, but now moving – there! – over by the east wall.

  An eerie scraping sound; a loud scratching.

  ‘Get gone, demon!’ said the matron. ‘We’re not frightened of you.’

  A crash. Another. A splintering.

  The girl let out a shrill little wail. The humming grew louder.

  ‘Hush, little one,’ said her grandmother. ‘He cannot get inside here.’

  The Rekkr hacked apart the rough wattle-and-daub exterior of the hall with the axe, kicked through the thin inner planks and burst into the hall. It took him no more than a few moments, and his huge fur-clad shoulders were erupting in the gloomy interior, like a monstrous chick emerging from the egg.

  His humming had reached the pitch of fury.

  A doddering greybeard tried to stand in his way and the Rekkr skewered him through the loins with the ancient sword and, turning and swinging the bloody axe with his other hand, he hewed the head clean off the howling matron who tried to stab him in the belly with her roasting spit.

  The rest of the inhabitants cowered by the long rectangular fire-trough in the centre of the hall, resigned to their fate, all except for a white-faced boy, who charged at the Rekkr from the shadows, yelling shrilly, the sharp eating knife in his hand. The Rekkr killed him with a sideways flick of the axe, a casual, almost friendly blow, which smashed the little boy’s right cheekbone into several pieces, driving the shards deep into his small skull.

  The Rekkr loomed over the last few folk huddled by the long hearth, breathing from his exertions. His gaze crawled all over them like a fly on a freshly made corpse. Then he fixed on one of the older girls, a pretty blonde.

  ‘Freya, my sweet,’ he said. The words were clogged in his throat, as if they were too large or too jagged to come out. ‘I have come… for you.’

  Part One

  One year earlier…

  Chapter One

  The fate of a murderer

  The hemp noose around his neck was as prickly as a bramble. His hands, still crusted with flakes of brown blood, were bound in front of him, uncomfortably tight. The stool under his dirty bare feet creaked alarmingly with the slightest shift of his considerable weight. Very soon, they would kick the rickety wooden seat away and he would drop a few inches and begin choking to death, dangling from the broad limb of the ancient sacred oak, until the final darkness came upon him.

  Nineteen summers was a pitifully short span for a young man to walk this green Middle-Realm. Indeed, although he was fully grown to look upon, tall and broad, slabbed with springy muscle, he still felt himself to be little more than a bewildered boy – a boy who would never grow any older.

  Neither would it be a good death. This was no glorious battlefield; he held no weapon in his bound hands; there was no circle of slain enemies around his feet. No wingèd sword maidens would swoop down to gather his broken body and take it to the Hall of the Slain for an eternity of feasting, ale and laughter. Instead, he would be slung in a hastily scraped hole on the outskirts of his village and left there to rot, if the foxes did not dig him up and feast on his corpse. That would be the last of Bjarki the Fatherless.

  He was a murderer, twice over. He had not even bothered to deny it at the gathering of the Bago village elders, the Thing, which had met that morning to settle the matter, and now he must pay the price for his actions.

  Yet he had not expected this, this slow strangling in the shade of the ancient oak dedicated to the Old One, the All-Father, in the beaten-earth circle where the village collected to see justice done. Outlawry was the time-honoured penalty for murder – a terrible fate, nonetheless. The outlaw was expelled from society, none would aid him, or shelter or feed him, and any man might kill him, like a wild wolf, without cause or penalty.

  Olaf Karlsson, the headman and local hersir, had spoken vehemently against him at the Thing. Bjarki was no better than a mad dog, he had thundered, waving a finger in the air, an indiscriminate killer of men, one who must be put down lest he endanger them all. Outlawry would not serve.

  Only the ale-wife, Fulla, had spoken in his defence. She suggested he should be branded on the forehead with a hot iron and exiled from the Mark. But no. The Thing decided, in its collective wisdom, that it must be death. Only that finality would keep them all safe from his murderous ways.

  Bjarki could feel the prick of tears welling behind his eyes. He had sworn that he would not weep. If he must depart this Middle-Realm it would be with courage. But this unmanly sorrow was threatening to overwhelm him. ‘All-Father, mighty Odin, give me the strength to die well,’ he prayed.

  He glared fiercely, and very nearly dry-eyed, at the assembled villagers, his friends and neighbours – well, neighbours; he had few friends in this fishy mud-hole – who had gathered this spring morning to watch him die.

  The village lay in the centre of the island of Bago, a mere flyspeck of low-lying land, barely a mile across, which was one of hundreds of islands of varying size that, together with the Jutland Peninsula to the west and the settlements on Scania in the east, made up the realm called the Dane-Mark.

  Almost all the denizens of Bago had gathered to see him swing; some sixty people ranging from babes-in-arms to hobbling grandfathers were spread out in a loose semi-circle on the southern side of the ancient oak. Some passed sloshing ale flasks from hand to hand, others chewed on fresh-baked oatcakes sweetened with honey. It was a kind of entertainment, this hanging, for many of them a blessed relief from the back-breaking struggle to wrest a poor crop of barley or rye from their small, often flooded fields; or from the endless casting and hauling of heavy fishing nets.

  A miasma of rotting seaweed and burnt fish oil permanently hung over the settlement. Bjarki sucked it in through flared nostrils, savouring the odour like perfume. His last precious scents on this earth. He looked up at the pale yellow disc of sun through the leaves, feeling its small warmth a final time.

  The half circle of familiar faces was a smear of white and pink and grey. There was Olaf Karlsson, the hersir, his dark pitted face twisted by hatred, staring directly at him; beside him stood his one remaining son, Freki, smirking, as pleased as a man who’s won a wager. He would be the heir now, to Olaf’s house and his land. Perhaps, he would be the hersir one day, if he petitioned Siegfried, King of the Dane-Mark, to grant him the title.

  Fulla the Simple was smiling at something inside her own muddled mind. Her baggy body was festooned with leather flasks of freshly brewed ale on cords of twisted hide. From time to time, she passed one over to a thirsty villager, and made a cut on her tally stick with a blade, to record the sale.

  There was Thialfi looking sullen; he had lost a morning’s fishing to attend the Thing, which he was bound to do as Bjarki was in his charge, his apprentice. Yet he had not spoken up decisively either for or against the boy. He did not care much for Bjarki. He stated only that he had not seen what occurred in the dunes as he was busy mending his nets on the west beach, and while he knew Bjarki had a temper, he had never known him to kill.

  There was one face Bjarki did not wish to see; his eyes skidded over it, only noting the bone-white cheeks and blue eyes reddened from weeping.

  He fixed his gaze instead on a tall, lean, one-eyed man in a fine leather-lined woollen travelling cloak and hood – a stranger to the village, but one he had seen here a few times before. He was a trader from somewhere up north, perhaps from the land of mountains and fjords, the Little Kingdoms, as the remote settlements across the straits from the tip of Jutland were called. Or maybe he came from the dense forests of the Svears and Gottars further east, or perhaps from the frozen Sami territory beyond even those far-off exotic realms, where the reindeer herds ran in their thousands upon thousands and the sun only peeped above the horizon for half the year.

  Bjarki could
not recall the old man’s name only that he wandered widely and dealt in small items – beautifully carved bone pins and dainty gold and silver broaches, fine silk threads and colourful ribbons, necklaces of glowing amber beads and precious stones, excellent steel eating knives and powerful magical amulets – perhaps in slaves, too.

  He had one beside him now. A skinny thrall of perhaps seventeen summers with knife-cropped spiky red hair, a tiny, elfin nose and a small mouth clamped shut. A look of compressed fury blazed in her bright green eyes, as if she wanted to slaughter the whole world and piss on its grave.

  The one-eyed trader – Valtyr, the name came back to him – had his hand on the shoulder of the slave, a symbol of possession, and perhaps a safeguard, too, against the girl attempting to flee. Though there was nowhere to run on Bago, and nowhere to hide either. No place where the fugitive would not be captured within a day or two, and then bound, imprisoned and handed back to her master with a reward for the captor. A savage whipping, or even a small mutilation or branding, would be all the slave could expect.