One King's Way

Chapter Eighteen

A man stood at the perimeter of the camp, fully armed, a short staff in his hand: a marshal, come to call them to the dueling ground. Shef rose to mask Cuthred from him, jerked a head to Brand to do the talking.

“Are you ready?” called the marshal.

“Ready. Let us repeat the terms of the duel.”

As the others listened, Brand and the marshal went over the terms of the agreement: only hewing weapons, champion against champion, free passage staked against return of all those alleged to be thralls, at the disposal of the winner. As they heard that condition laid down, Shef felt the tension rising among the English, men and women.

“Win or lose, we aren't having none of that,” Osmod muttered. “All of you, keep your bows and bills right handy. You women, hold all the horses' bridles. If our man goes down—which he won't, of course,” Osmod added, glancing hastily at Cuthred, “we're going to try to bust our way out.”

Shef saw Brand's shoulders tense with disapproval as he heard Osmod's unsporting orders, but he continued talking. The marshal, unable to speak any English, paid no attention. Cuthred grinned even more widely than before. He was behaving with a strange restraint for the moment, back on his stool, making no effort to show himself. Either the familiar ritual of a duel-morning had gripped him, or else he was relishing the surprise they had planned for Vigdjarf.

The marshal turned away and Brand walked back to the group, already prepared to move, horses loaded, packs strapped. At the last moment Cuthred's eye fell on the small hatchet they used for firewood. He twitched it from its strapping, passed it to Udd. “Put an edge on that with your file,” he ordered.

The party led on through the short village street, already deserted. In the small square outside the temple clustered not only the entire population of the little town, but also scores more, men, women and children from the length of the dales, eager to see the clash of champions. They had left the one street clear for Brand's party to enter by, but as they passed through men with spears and shields moved to block further exit from it. Osmod looked round with calculating eye, trying to spot the weakest place in the circle surrounding them. Saw none.

Immediately facing them, outside the temple door itself, scarlet cloaks marked Vigdjarf and his two seconds. Brand looked round, eyed Cuthred carefully, nodded to Osmod and Cwicca either side of him. “Wait,” he said, holding up a finger. “Wait for the call.”

Cuthred took no notice. He had taken the sharpened hatchet and was holding it in his left hand, along with the shield-strap. With his other hand he had begun to flip Shef's cutlass into the air, letting it turn over and over in its unbalanced way, seizing it by its guardless hilt every time it came down. Murmurs were beginning to run round the crowd as some of them recognized him, realized it was the mill-thrall, speculated what it might mean.

With Shef at his side, Brand began to walk out to meet the others. “Should we have tried to get some armor on him,” muttered Shef. “Your mail? A helmet? A leather jacket, even? Vigdjarf has everything.”

“No point with a berserk,” said Brand briefly. “You'll see.”

He halted seven paces from the others, raised his voice for the watching crowd as well as the challengers.

“Ready to try your luck, Vigdjarf? You could have tried me years ago, you know. But you didn't feel like it then.”

“And you don't feel like it now,” replied Vigdjarf, grinning. “Have you decided who's going to try me? You? Or your one-eyed friend bare-handed here?”

Brand jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “We thought we'd try the one in the green tunic behind us there. He's very keen to fight you. He really feels like it.”

Vigdjarf's grin faded as he peered across the square to where Cuthred stood, now clear of the others, standing out in plain sight, still tossing the sword up and down. He had started now to throw the hatchet from hand to hand as well, tossing it left to right and back again while the sword was still in the air.

“You can't send him out to fight me,” said Vigdjarf. “He's a thrall. He's my own thrall. You must have stolen him in the night. I can't fight my own thrall. I appeal to the marshals.” He looked across to the two armed and armored men waiting either side of the square.

“You're very quick to call people thralls,” said Shef. “First you say some travelers are thralls, and they have to fight you to prove they're not. Then when someone wants to fight you, you say he's a thrall too. Maybe it would be simpler if you just said everyone was a thrall. Then all you'd have to do would be make them act like thralls. Because if they don't—they aren't.”

“I won't fight him,” said Vigdjarf positively. “He is my own property, stolen in the night, and you are all night-thieves.” He turned to the marshals, began to protest again.

Brand looked over his shoulder. “If you won't fight him, that's up to you,” he remarked. “But I can tell you one thing for sure. He's going to fight you. And anybody else who gets in his way.”

With a hoarse bellow, Cuthred had stepped away from his handlers, was walking forward across the square. His eyes were set and unblinking, and as he came he began to sing. From his brief career as a minstrel, Shef recognized the song. It was the old Northumbrian lay of the Battle of Nechtans-mere, where the army of the Northern English had been wiped out by the Picts. Cuthred was singing the part where the valiant retainers refused to fly or surrender, but formed the shield-wall to fight to the last man. Hastily Brand and Shef moved out of his path, saw him go by, still walking slowly but braced for a pounce at every step.

Vigdjarf, facing him, grabbed at his second's cloak, waved again to the marshals, saw them all back away, leaving him face to face with the enraged man he had gelded.

At five paces range, Cuthred charged. No feinting, no feeling-out. No defense. The attack of an enraged churl, a swineherd or a plowboy, rather than a king's champion. The first blow started with the tip of the curved cutlass touching Cuthred's spine and came down in a sweeping arc at Vigdjarf's helmet. Reflex alone would have served to block it, for any but a joint-locked grandfather. Vigdjarf, still yelling protests to the marshals, had his shield up without thought, took the blow full on the shield-boss.

Dropped almost to his knees, driven down by the sheer weight of the blow. And the second one was already in the air, and the third after it. Making no attempt to guard, Cuthred danced round his enemy, slashing from every angle. Splinters flew from the iron-rimmed and bossed linden-shield at every blow, in instants Vigdjarf seemed to be holding only a hacked remnant. A furious clang echoed round the square as for the first time Vigdjarf managed to get his sword up for a parry.

“I don't think this is going to last very long,” said Brand. “And it's going to be nasty when it finishes. Mount up, everyone. Shef, get some rope.”

Cuthred's attack had not slowed at any moment, but Vigdjarf, a veteran, now seemed to have pulled himself together. He was using both sword and the fragment of battered half-moon of shield left to him to block strokes. He had also realized that Cuthred never parried, never got into a position to do so. The shield in his hand might as well have been there only for balance. Twice in quick succession he lunged out of a parry, stabbing for the face. Both times Cuthred had sprung sideways already, angling for another cut.

“He's going to get one home,” muttered Brand, “and then…”

As if remembering his wits, Cuthred suddenly changed tactic, instead of hacking at the head and body, stooped, slashed backhand at the knee. Vigdjarf had seen that many times, far more often than the crazed attack he had just survived. He leapt over the stroke, came down crouching and swung in his turn.

With a groan of dismay the English watching saw the slash come down full across Cuthred's thigh. They waited for the spurt of arterial blood, the last agonized stroke, easily blocked, the sideways topple and the killing slash or stab. This was how it always ended. Vigdjarf's teeth showed across the square as he waited for Cuthred to crumple.

But not this time. Cuthred sprang, whirling the sword at his enemy's head and in the same clumsy movement lashing out with the hatchet in his shield-hand. There was a single meaty thud, and the hatchet was buried through helmet and skull.

Cuthred had let go of the hatchet and grasped Vigdjarf's sword-wrist with his shield-hand. As Vigdjarf clubbed desperately and unavailingly at him with his broken shield, he stepped in, drove the cutlass home under the mail, started sawing deliberately back and forward. Vigdjarf began to scream, dropped his sword, began to try to claw the cutlass away. Cuthred was talking to him, holding him up now, shouting words into the dying face.

Horror-stricken, not at death but at loss of dignity, the marshals and Vigdjarf's second rushed forward. In the circle Shef realized that prudent men were starting to hustle their wives and children away, back through the narrow streets or into doorways. Still bare-handed, he stepped forward, shouting to the marshals to stand back.

Cuthred dropped his still-bleeding enemy on the ground and without warning charged again. One of the marshals, still holding his staff out and trying to shout some warning, dropped, cut from neck to breastbone. As the sword jammed on bone, Cuthred swung his shield for the first time at the other, knocked him staggering backwards, seized the sword from the dying marshal's hand, and slashed the second's leg off at the knee. Then he was in motion again, charging without pause or hesitation at the crowd of Vigdjarf's supporters grouped outside the temple.

A spear flew to meet him, a heavy iron-shod battle-spear thrown with full force at ten feet range. Straight for the center of the body. Cuthred dropped the case-hardened shield across his heart. The spear met it full on, did not sink in, dragging down his shield-arm, bounced back as Gungnir had when Shef had first tried the metal.

A yell of surprise and alarm and suddenly all that could be seen were turned backs, Cuthred slashing at them, men falling or fleeing, the shout going up: “Berserker! Berserker!”

“Well, now,” said Brand, looking round at the suddenly-deserted square, “I think if we just ride away very very quietly… Perhaps pick up some of these useful bits and pieces scattered around, like that sword there—you don't need it any more, do you, Vigdjarf? You were always a bit too hard on the thrall-women for a proper drengr, that was my opinion. And now it's been the death of you.”

“Aren't we going to bring poor Cuthred along?” said Edtheow indignantly. “I mean, he's saved us all.”

Brand shook a disgusted head. “I think we would all be better just having nothing to do with him.”

Cuthred was lying motionless in the mud fifty yards down the street on their way out of the town, two heads lying by him, their long hair twisted in his grip. Shef was suddenly pushed aside by Hund who stared in fascination at the left thigh where Vigdjarf's full-blooded slash had gone home.

A deep, deep cut, six inches long, white bone glinting at the bottom of it. But like a cut in dead meat, only the barest trace of blood.

“How has that happened?” asked Hund. “How could a man not bleed from that? Keep walking with the muscles severed?”

“I don't know,” said Brand, “but I've seen it before. That's what makes a berserk. People say that no steel bites on them. It bites all right. But they don't feel it. Not till later. What are you doing?”

Hund had produced needle and gut thread, was beginning to stitch the edges of the great gash together, stitching large at first, then turning and going back over with small precise movements like a tailor. Blood began to seep and then to well from the wound as he did so. He finished, wrapped lengths of bandage round and round, rolled his patient over, turned back his eyelids. Shook his head wonderingly.

“Put him over a horse,” he ordered. “He ought to be dead. But I think he's just fast asleep.”

He had to use his knife to saw through the hair of the severed heads to get them out of Cuthred's clench.

“Yes,” said Brand judiciously. “There're lots of theories about berserks. I don't take much notice of most of them, myself.”

They were riding along the crest of a ridge, as they had been for some days now, first winding up, then seemingly more or less on a level, now perhaps with the down-stretches lasting longer than the ups. To their right lay a long sweep of valleys with water glinting in them and here and there the bright green of fresh grass. To their left the land fell more sharply, into a waste of fir and pine, and they could see little ahead but the ridge rising and falling, with chain after chain of blue mountains lifting into the far distance. The air was cold and keen, but filled the lungs with life and the sharp smell of the pine-woods.

Behind Brand and Shef, and the interested Hund riding close beside them, a string of ponies stretched out for a hundred yards, with people walking here and there among the riders. More people than there had been when they left Flaa the week before. As the English had made their way through a now-deserted countryside, a countryside that emptied before them, figures had crept out to join them, emerging from the woods by the road, stalking softly into the firelight when they camped: runaway slaves with the collars still round their necks, most of them English-speaking. Drawn by the rumor of the free folk moving through the land, headed by a giant and a one-eyed king, and guarded by a mad berserk of their own race. Most of the ones who had come in were men, and not all of them thralls or churls by birth. It took determination and courage to break free from one's masters in an alien country: and when they could get them, the Vikings were very ready to enslave former thanes or warriors, valuing them for their strength. After brief debate, Shef had agreed to accept all those who could find their way to them, though he would not search farms or pursue their owners to liberate the countryside. Men who could break free, and women too, might be an increase in force. There was no hope any more of passing unnoticed.

“Some people say the word really means ‘bare-sarks,’ ” Brand went on. “ ‘Bare-shirts,’ that is, because they'll fight in their shirts alone, with no armor. I mean, you saw our mad friend back there—” he jerked a thumb at Cuthred, who now, amazingly, was well enough recovered to sit on a pony. He was riding near the back of the cortege, well-surrounded and escorted by those he seemed able to tolerate. “No defense at all, and no interest in it. If we'd put armor on him it's my belief he'd have torn it off. So ‘bare-shirt’ makes a kind of sense.

“But there's others say it's really ‘bear-sarks,’ like ‘bear-shirts.’ Because they act like bears, that just come at you and can't be frightened off. What they mean is that they're really, you know—” Brand looked round cautiously and dropped his voice, “like Ivar, not men of one skin. They change into another shape, sort of, when the fit takes them.”

“You mean they're werewolves,” suggested Shef.

“Were-bears, yes,” Brand agreed. “But that doesn't make sense, really. The were-shape runs in families, for one thing. But a berserk can be anybody.”

“Can this condition be created by drugs?” asked Hund. “It seems to me that there are several things that can take a man out of himself, can make him think he is a bear, for one thing. In small quantities, the juice of the nightshade berry, though that is also a deadly poison. Some say you can make an ointment of it mixed with hog-lard, and smear it on. It makes people think they are flying out of their bodies. And there are other growths with similar effect.”

“Maybe,” Brand said. “But you know that wasn't the case with our madman. He'd had nothing but what we ate, and he was as mad as ever before we even fed him.

“No, I don't think it's really very hard to understand at all. Some men like fighting. I do myself—not as much as I used to, maybe. But when you like it, and you're used to it, and you're good at it, the noise and the excitement lifts you, you can feel it swelling inside you, and at its peak you feel you are twice as strong and twice as quick as you usually are, and you do things before you know you've done them. Being a berserk is like that, only much, much more. And I think you can only get to that if you have some special reason inside you. Because most men, even when they're caught up with the excitement, remember somewhere deep down what it feels like when you get hit, and how you don't want to go home with just a stump, or what your friends look like when you shovel them into a hole. So they keep using their shields and their armor. But a berserk's forgotten all that. To be a berserk, deep down, you have to not want to live. You have to hate yourself. I've known some men like that, born like that or made like that. We all know why Cuthred there hates himself and doesn't want to live. He can't bear the shame of what they did to him. He's only happy when he's wiping it out on someone else.”

“So you think the other berserks you knew had something wrong with them too,” said Shef thoughtfully. “But maybe not in their bodies.”

“That was the case with Ivar Ragnarsson,” Hund confirmed. “They called him the Boneless, from his impotence, and he hated women. But he was normal in body, I saw that for myself. He hated women for what he could not do, and he hated men for what they could do that he could not. Maybe the same is true with our Cuthred, only with him he was made like that, he did not make himself. I am amazed at the way he healed. That cut was all the way through the thigh and into the bone. But it did not bleed till I began to dress it, and it has healed like a surface scratch. I should have tried tasting his blood, to see if there was something strange in it,” he added thoughtfully.

Brand and Shef looked at one another for a moment in alarm. Then their attention was distracted. The ridge-path made a sharp turn to the left, by a cairn of stones, and as they followed it round the land seemed to part before them.

There, down far below, was a deep valley with at the end of it a new and silver gleam. Too big for the mountain streams they could see everywhere, a gleam that led widening out to the horizon. On it, for those with the far-sight of seamen, little flecks of color.

“The sea,” muttered Brand, reaching out and gripping Shef's shoulder. “The sea. And look, there are ships riding at anchor. That is the Gula-fjord, and where the ships are is the harbor for the great Gula-Thing. If we can reach there—maybe my Walrus will be there. If King Halvdan did not take her. I think—it's too far away—but I could almost think that one moored far out was her.”

“You can't tell one ship from another ten miles away,” said Hund.

“A skipper can tell his ship ten miles away in a fog,” retorted Brand. He kicked heels into his weary pony's barrel sides and began to plunge forward down the slope. Shef followed more slowly, waving to the rest to close up.

They caught up with Brand as his overburdened pony flagged, and managed to persuade him to halt as night came on, still several miles from the site of the Gula-Thing and its harbor. When they finally rode or walked next morning into the half-mile wide cluster of tents, turf booths, and temporary shelters, all of them leaking smoke into the Atlantic breeze, a small knot of men stood to greet them: not warriors in their prime wearing armor, Shef was concerned to note, but older men, even greybeards. Spokesmen for the community, the counties served by the Thing, and the kinglets or jarls who guaranteed its peace.

“We hear that you are robbers and night-thieves,” said one of them without preamble. “If you are such you may be hunted down and killed without penalty by all the free men who come to this Thing, and you have no share in its peace.”

“We have stolen nothing,” said Shef. It was not true—he knew his men stole chickens from every farmyard and butchered sheep for their stewpot without compunction—but he did not think that these petty thefts were the problem. As Osmod said, they would have paid for food if anyone had offered to sell it to them.

“You have stolen men.”

“The men were stolen in the first place. They came to us of their own free will—we did not seek them out. If they have freed themselves, who can blame them?”

The Gula-men looked uncertain. Brand followed up in a more conciliating tone. “We will steal nothing within the circuit of the Thing, and will observe its peace in every respect. See, we have silver. Plenty of it, and gold as well.” He slapped a clinking saddle-bag, pointed to the precious metal shining on Shef's accouterments and his own.

“You will promise to steal no thralls?”

“We will steal no thralls and harbor no thralls,” said Brand firmly, waving Shef to silence. “But if any man following us or here already wishes to claim that any of our company is or ever was his thrall, then we will make counter-suit against him for enslaving a free man without right or justice, and claim against him for every injury, blow, insult or mutilation suffered in the course of that slavery. As also for each year spent in slavery, and for loss of rightful earnings during that time. Furthermore…”

Knowing the intense glee with which the Vikings pursued legalities of even the most trivial kind, Shef cut him off. “Adjudication to be settled by stated champions on the dueling ground,” he added.

The Norwegian spokesmen looked at each other with some uncertainty.

“Furthermore we'll be out of here as soon as ever we can,” offered Brand.

“All right. But don't forget. If any of you gets out of hand—” the old man looked over Shef's shoulder at the lowering figure of Cuthred, slouched on his pony with Martha and Edtheow gently patting an arm each “—then you will all be responsible. There are five hundred men here. We can take you all if we have to.”

“All right,” said Shef in his turn. “Show us where to camp, show us the water place and let us buy food. And I need to hire a forge for the day.”

The spokesmen parted, let the little cavalcade pass through.

King Alfred's good silver pennies met with immediate approval inside the Thing-ground, and within hours Shef, stripped again to the waist and wearing a charred leather apron, was beating out metal at a hired forge with borrowed tools. Brand had headed straight off to the harbor a mile away, the rest had been told to establish a perimeter with stakes and rope and not stray outside it. Cuthred had been settled down with a carefully-organized team of minders. His likes and dislikes were well-known to everyone by now. He responded well to Udd, for some reason, probably because of the little man's total lack of any threat, and would listen for hours to Udd's boring monologues on the subject of metal-working. He liked the motherly comfort of the older and plainer women. Any sign of sexual display or intimacy from one of the younger women, even an accidental turn of hip or glimpse of calf, was likely to set his face in murderous lines. He tolerated the weakest of the thralls and freedmen, obeyed Shef, sneered at Brand, bristled at any sign of strength or competition from other men. If Karli, young, strong and popular with the women, so much as came into sight, Cuthred's eyes would follow him. Shef, noticing it, had told Karli to keep well away from him at all times. He had also told Cwicca and Osmod to set up a rota: two men with crossbows to watch Cuthred at all times, without being seen to do so. A tame berserk was valuable, especially for crossing hostile country. Unfortunately there were no tame berserks.

As some form of protection for their straggle of runaways, Shef had begun by beating out a dozen Wayman pendants. Only of iron, for the silver Waymen preferred had other uses at the moment. But at least they would be distinctive. To make them more so, Shef had made all of them his own emblem, the pole-ladder of Rig. None of the people they had rescued knew what it meant, but they would wear it as a talisman.

His next task was to see every man had at least some form of weapon: not for use, or at least he hoped not, but as a mark of status in a world where every free man carried at the very least spear and knife. Shef had bought a bundle of ten-inch spikes used to fix timber where doweling pegs would not do, and was beating each into a spearhead, to be sunk into ash-shafts and lashed tight with wetted rawhide. They would outfit their newest recruits. The catapulteers still had their halberds, knives and crossbows. Shef had taken back his cutlass from Cuthred, and straightened once more Karli's cheap and ineffective sword. The fight at Flaa had yielded a handful of other weapons, including Vigdjarf's sword, picked up and handed over to Cuthred.

The last of the spearheads done, Shef turned to his final job: converting the case-hardened shield into an offensive weapon for Cuthred. Although he seemed to have forgotten all his training in scientific fencing with shield and broadsword he kept the shield by him at all times. He was parted from it only with great difficulty and stood close and watched as Shef, remembering Muirtach and Ivar's Gaddgedill followers, decided to remove the double leather grips for hand and forearm and put a straight handhold across the shield's center on the inside. Cuthred grunted what might have been approval, then, with great reluctance, let Shef take the shield to the smithy where he fixed one of the ten-inch spikes to its middle on the outside. There was no way of driving a hole through the metal without ruining a dozen punches, so he would weld it on to the case-hardened surface. A tricky job, involving desperate efforts by relays of bellows-men to keep the metal glowing as near white-hot as they could manage.

Straightening, finally, Shef picked the shield up, rotated it from side to side in his left hand, and reflected that what was hard even for his smithy-trained muscle would be light work for Cuthred. He turned and walked out of the borrowed booth. Found himself face to face with a newcomer. He rubbed the smoke from his eyes, blinking in the sunlight, and recognized a grinning Thorvin, Brand just behind him.

“I see you are yourself again,” said Thorvin, gripping his hand. “I told Brand that if you were well we need only head for the sound of the hammer.”