Berserker (Omnibus) Read Free Page A

at the other man, he had only just managed to stop himself from killing; Gotthelm stood there, breathing heavily, bleeding from a vicious wound across his left cheek, below the face-guard of his strange, skull-like silver helmet. The man stank of blood and excrement; his hands shook as he touched Harald and smiled.
    ‘The young Innocent,’ he said, mockingly, but grinning again. ‘You spared that woman. Why?’
    ‘Why not? I have Elena at home, in the hills, and she is everything I need in a woman.’
    A group of Celtish farmers ran past them, pursued by a shrieking Norseman who gave up the chase and darted into the blazing house that Harald had just left. A moment later he appeared again, looking around, searching through smoke-darkened eyes for something to kill.
    A spear clattered noisily on to the flagstoned pathway and both warriors ducked and withdrew from this open place.
    The horn sounded the instruction to re-group, the job of pillage having been completed.
    ‘I dislike this raiding tactic as much as you,’ said Gotthelm. ‘But it’s your right to take: to take life, to take women, to take a child and sacrifice it. It’s your right, Harald.’
    ‘It’s my right to choose what I take, then.’
    ‘Frey’s phallus!’ moaned Gotthelm. ‘Too bloody innocent!’
    Innocent.
    As they rode, months later, through the cold lands of his home, this night of the full moon and the high, white clouds that rolled across the stars in gentle waves, so that fight and Gotthelm’s exasperated rebuke came back to him.
    Innocent of faith and innocent of sex. But a warrior none the less, and fierce and bloodied, and very very proud!
    The wolf stalked.
    Harald sensed it, and with each hour, with each pause for rest as they urged their horses on through the long night, across moonlit ridges and through sombre woods filled with the screech of owls and less familiar night life, so the sensation of fear grew stronger.
    At times Harald stopped and rose up in his stirrups, turned to stare into the land they had covered.
    Light sparkled on a river – a shadow passed across that river, but perhaps just a cloud …
    Trees lined the ridges in stark formation, reaching towards sky and earth; they seemed to move, to shift position as a restless sleeper shifts position during a haunted night. But just wind, perhaps. The gods were sleeping too, and surely had no enthusiasm for wandering abroad at this depressing time of year.
    Something howled in the darkness. A dog? A wolf?
    Tensely, Harald sat in the saddle and spurred his horse forwards.
    He sensed the wolf, sensed the pursuer, but did not fully understand what that beast was, and why it stalked him. And yet it was there.
    Twisting in the saddle he stared into the night.
    Diamond eyes watched him as from a great distance; lost among the stars they seemed to flicker between the trees and the clouds, to rise from the earth and to recede from him. Watching.
    Fear dried the wetness of his mouth, wetted the dryness of his palms. He rode on. The beast followed.
    The wolf might not have been seen by human eye for it was not yet manifest in this fleshy, earthy world of sword and conquest. It pursued Harald from the nether world, running sleekly along the edge of the great chasm that led from the place of gods to the place of man. Its saliva was the wetness that fell on the young warrior’s brow; its breath was the cold wind that froze his bones and made him draw a short cloak about his thin body; its padding was the thunder of sky and earth; its howl was the scream with which Harald awoke from his dreams to find Sigurd Gotthelm pressing him gently back to the blanket, calming him, smiling warmly as he recognised the symptoms of a haunted man.
    ‘It pursues me, Sigurd.’
    ‘The wolf?’
    Cold wind at the mention of the name. The stars above him seemed to wheel and revolve, as if dancing in ecstasy at the coming of winter. Tall, bare trees framed the sky as he stared upwards; clouds rippled