Berserker (Omnibus) by Robert Holdstock
But that would come.
There was movement behind him and he turned quickly, but saw only the night, only the star-shadows of trees and rocks, and the distant whites and greys of the tents, illuminated eerily by the night fires.
Shrugging the movement off, thinking it made by an animal, Swiftaxe sat on a boulder and caressed, for a moment, the ring that adorned his middle left-hand finger. He could see the stars reflected in it, and wondered about the power of this ring that could put him in touch with the dead.
He had hoped never to use the ring, to keep it only as a reminder of what had been, and what could never be again … those years as a child when he had hunted hare and dove in the magic valleys of the Coritani tribal lands, chasing over rocks and through thinly wooded glades … the months he had known Aithlenn the Hag, and had shared bright moments of laughter and magic with her …
It reminded him, too, of the scraps and mock duels he had fought with Bedivyg, his brother, as they had ridden their ponies out of the valley and explored a land that had seemed a hundred miles wide to their young minds, but had been just the rim of the country around the river, and the Wall of Llug that had protected their people.
All that was gone, now, and in the ring was his sole reminder of that special power his people had had, thanks to the guardian spirits of the rock caves, the Hags. How his people had despised them, those three old women. And yet how much they had depended on them! And when the goddess had decided it was time the play was ended, how swiftly his people had been absorbed back into the reality of flesh and bone and spilled blood.
He kissed the ring and held it close to his lips.
For a while he couldn’t bring himself to say the words, mindful of what Aithlenn had told him … her warning in the cave that final day.
But at last he found his courage, and called through the darkness of death, the bitter black crystal in the metal frame. ‘To the jade, Aithlenn. Your spirit to the crystal.’
At once the black jade began to glow with a fringe of yellow; Swiftaxe held the ring away from him, the hair on his neck prickling with the anticipation of what he would see. His eyes seemed to be drawn deep into the fabric of the crystal, as if he looked through a gate into another world, and helplessly followed the direction of his gaze.
Shapes moved there, strange shapes, hulking past, shambling and shuffling in the shadow land of death.
‘Aithlenn,’ he whispered. ‘To the jade. Your spirit to the crystal. Aithlenn. Where are you? Show yourself!’
A wind began to blow from the ring, the wind of winter, of death; it cooled his skin, and ruffled his hair. It carried with it the scent of decay, but this was no new smell to the Berserker, and he leaned closer, looking deeper into the dark world beyond the stone.
One of the shapes came forward, hooded head bowed as it approached the ring.
When it was so close to the window into Swiftaxe’s world that just its head was framed by the jade, the figure looked up, looked out, looked at Caylen Swiftaxe!
Death regarded him: a decaying skull, watching him through its orbless sockets; it grinned at him in that most humourless of smiles. Shrivelled flesh and tatters of muscle clung to the prominences of the bone, and things crawled among this rotting tissue, feeding to the last on the flesh that had been killed in the cave, so many years before. Wisps of grey hair blew from beneath the cowl, and when the corpse of Aithlenn drew back her covering, Swiftaxe saw the way the Roman sword had sliced through her skull, taking her life.
‘Why do you disturb me?’ asked the ghastly figure, its voice a hiss of air, the jaws parting slightly allowing Swiftaxe to see the squirming things in the vault of the mouth.
‘I am Caylen, the boy …’
‘I know you, Caylen, and I remember you. Even in this dark world of shadows, heartless through decay, mindless through putrefaction, even here I often think of you with fondness. Regard not my hideous features. Close your eyes I beg you. And tell me what you desire …’
Swiftaxe closed his eyes, but found his attention drawn back to the foul face that watched him from the jade; again his lids flickered open, again his eyes searched the dark sockets of the skull for some sign of the Hag he had known and been so fond of.
‘I still seek the key to the gateway in the stones. I am at Mona, the sanctuary of druids. But whom do I seek here? Which among all the thousands will help me?’
The figure was silent for a moment, and Swiftaxe heard the hissing of its breath. Then: ‘He is called Gryddan. Stand on the hill of the severed heads and turn to the east. A shallow valley is there, winding into the land of the druids, and at the head of the valley is a small settlement. Gryddan lives there, with another. He knows the key. Show him the ring, speak the calling spell, but with the jade covered. He will help you then. But be swift. The shadow of death threatens all who live there.’
‘I shall,’ said Swiftaxe, and touched the jade. ‘Aithlenn!’
‘What now?’
Swiftaxe shook his head, feeling the sting of tears in his eyes. A summer wind blew through his mind; Aithlenn’s laughter as he sprawled whilst in pursuit of a hare was loud in his ears; her touch on his grazed knees was so real, in memory, that his skin tingled. ‘Why darkness?’ he asked softly. ‘Why not a place of brightness and laughter? Why this shadow world? What did you do to deserve this?’
Aithlenn drew her cowl across her head, hiding her face. ‘I gave you the ring,’ she whispered quietly.
Swiftaxe was shocked. ‘Then I shall destroy it at once. I shall bury it in the earth, close to the goddess.’
‘Not yet,’ said the dead woman. ‘Not yet. Only when the time is right. It was my gift to you, and I did not give it without knowing the consequences. Only when the time is right must you destroy the ring.’
The vision of the dead faded, then, and the black jade twinkled in the starlight.
Swiftaxe rose to his feet and breathed deeply in the gloomy night.
A sword blade pricked blood from the back of his neck and he froze.
CHAPTER 7
‘Kill me, or identify yourself,’ he said, with all the calm he could muster.
The deadly point was removed, but aware that it hovered very close to his head, Swiftaxe behaved carefully. He turned to face the man who had crept up behind him. He found himself facing Bedivyg, his own brother.
Neither man said a word. Bedivyg, in the stiff and gleaming armour and uniform of a Roman legionary, glared at his brother through dark, narrowed eyes. There was no flicker of a smile upon his face, no warmth, no sign that he still loved his brother.
The short, square-bladed sword he held slowly lowered, and finally he sheathed the weapon. He removed his helmet, shook out his blond hair, growing again after he had had it shaved in accordance with military regulations. It was the one aspect of his Celtic upbringing that he could not reject, though in every other way he had become a soldier of Rome.
He looked proud in his uniform. He looked elegant and strong. He looked … right. He held himself stiffly to attention, and he cradled his helmet in the crook of his arm rather than slinging it across his shoulder by the straps.
Swiftaxe grinned at him. ‘Every bit the follower of Nero. Do your own people mean nothing to you now, nothing at all?’
‘Of course,’ said Bedivyg quietly. ‘And when they are fully aware of the glory of the Roman Empire they will mean even more. I don’t believe in clinging to the muddy past, Caylen. I believe in progress, and as a Province of Rome our lands will flourish, will progress.’
Unable to resist the jibe, Caylen Swiftaxe sang a brief stanza of a song he and Bedivyg had often sung together as boys: ‘See the young Coritanian sell his sword for a passage to the sea coast, anxious to know what lies beyond the deep waters of his home; see the Coritanian warrior dressed in the green clothes of a wanderer, exploring the hills around his home, until he finally loses his way back.’
Bedivyg smirked as Swiftaxe finished the lament. Another sign of his British upbring
‘I care not,’ said Swiftaxe. ‘I still love you, Bedivyg, and I fear to see you lose your way so.’
‘I shall not lose my way, Caylen. My way is as clear and as straight as the stone roads of my new people. You would do well to think seriously about committing yourself more fully to the cause of assimilation.’
‘Assimilation? You mean butchery and barbarism.’
Bedivyg shook his head. ‘I should kill you now. I know how little you care for Rome and how much you care for preventing the army subduing the tribes.’
Swiftaxe shrugged. ‘My main concern is freedom of a more personal nature. You must have ridden fast to arrive here so far ahead of the main troop.’
‘I did,’ said Bedivyg. ‘The main troop from the east will not arrive for two days yet, even though they walk ten hours in every day. But a small patrol of us came on ahead to bring news of Prasitagus’s death.’
‘Dead? Then now Boudicca is queen.’
‘In a sense. When she was taken back to the settlement at Venta she was flogged for her disobedience in leaving the garrison. Now she broods and it will not be long before she rises against the Legions. The word that the troop brings is that you must be killed immediately, for you have sided with the Queen. You are known as a traitor to Rome, and your head is in demand.’
‘And you have come to fetch it?’
But strangely, Bedivyg shook his head. His face grew dark, and he frowned. He reached out and grasped Swiftaxe by the shoulder. ‘The men who rode with me, ostensibly to bring this information ahead of the main troop … well, an unfortunate accident occurred in the lands of the Cornovii. I came alone, weary and bloody, from the skirmish. I brought only the news of the death of Prasitagus. Caylen, flee while you may. Your life is forfeit now. Flee north, or south to Briton-held lands, or find a curragh to take you across that ocean. There is a land there where all the honour and pride of our peoples exists unblemished and unchallenged. Go there …’
Swiftaxe, darkly, said, ‘My brother, I have been. I cannot go again …’
And I left that land, he thought, to come to the land of the Silures and it was a strangely empty land, a land of Romanised men and women once again discovering their origins, only to lose them in battle after battle against the flaxen-haired tribes from the east. There would, it seemed, be no end to the bitter conquest of these lands by those who owed their homelands no allegiance and sought only fresh pastures to lay waste with their heathen cultures.
Bedivyg said, ‘My patience grows thin. I am weary of you, Caylen. Take my gift of freedom, use it. If you stay here, among the Legions, I must kill you, for you are a threat, now, to everything I hold dear … go!’
Without waiting for Swiftaxe to move, or respond, Bedivyg turned on his heel and strode into the darkness.
He would go all right! But not south, and not north in the sense that his brother had meant it. He would cross the waters into Mona, now, tonight, before the Legions crossed the straits in force and laid waste the sanctuary forever.
The talk in the camp was that the invasion would wait until the day following that day which was about to break, but Swiftaxe had heard too that the hundreds of rafts were now ready, and that the complex behaviour of the tides and currents in the straits had at last been understood.
He was not convinced that the invasion would wait as long as thirty hours. He sensed it was impending.
As he slid and slipped down the slopes of the hill towards the water, Swiftaxe imagined that the druids on the opposite banks knew also that the invasion was coming. A hundred lights moved there, torches held by running, screaming women, who wore black robes that concealed all but their faces in the night; and in the pale glow of their faces their eyes blazed bright and angry in the flickering light of their beacons.
Running along the beach, a shingle beach, slick with weed and mud, he came at length to the first of the rafts being prepared for the crossing. Two men worked on it, by the signs of their activity doing no more than fixing metal grips to the planking for the men to hold on to. This was a small raft, and could carry probably twenty men, propelled by oars at the edge and defended by archers and spearmen who would line up along a short barricade at the fore.
Swiftaxe, fighting back his sudden impulse to kill the men, knocked them senseless and dragged the heavy craft into the water. It made loud noises as it rattled, on branch rollers, across the shingle, and caused a wide, white-flecked wake as it plunged into the water itself. Swiftaxe leapt upon it and reached for an oar, used all his strength to send the raft out into the channel.
The current took him and span him once, and then he had learned the knack of controlling the awkward vessel and kept its fore pointing towards the island. Though he drifted to the left, he made strong headway through the waters, and passed midstream without trouble.
A hundred yards from the shore he became lodged on a mud bank and stuck, and that was that, for he had not the strength to lift the raft.
Crouched behind the raised fore-plankings he watched the torch-lit slopes of Mona. Now he could see the dark-trousered warriors who moved there, digging pits, erecting spikes of wood and bone and iron. They were probably refugees from the tribes of the Deceangli, or were natural inhabitants of the island whose existence had not been known to the Romans. The Legions imagined they were facing only druids and witches, in abundance and armed certainly, but nothing, surely, to worry the trained armies of Nero!
Swiftaxe grinned to think that the invader would get more than he had bargained for.
All along the top of the slopes he could see the solitary figures of druids, their hands upstretched, their figures faintly silhouetted against the starry skies. Their voices drifted on the winds, a hundred voices merging into a single, keening cry for Cernunnos, the Horned God, to manifest himself and ravage the oppressor. It chilled Swiftaxe to hear these men of wisdom calling upon such a fearsome and unpredictable god as Cernunnos. His own people had scorned the god, and had fled behind the protection of the triple goddess to avoid his wrath. Cernunnos was a violent spirit for violent men, and his appetite and demand for heads was overwhelmingly steep, especially to a tribe like Swiftaxe’s, which was more content to fight among its own ranks, and to pay most attention to the fertile earth.
Wrapping his long cloak around his axe-head, Swiftaxe slipped into the water and floated away from the raft. He could feel the mud below him, but after a while this dropped away to deeper water, and the current took him again. Using one arm he struck through the icy straits, and although carried even further to the west, he soon felt the river bed rise to meet him. He stood, shivering and soaked, before walking carefully on to the beach.
He ran quickly into the cover afforded by a gnarled wood copse, and unslung his cloak, wringing out the water with all his strength. His trousers were saturated and these, too, he wrang out before tugging them back on. He mopped the water from his leather vest, then fastened the cold cloak about his shoulders, hoping for a wind to dry him more fully. His hair was not wet, but the sweat was proud and cold on his brow. He took a moment to relax and recover, then placed his horned helmet firmly on his skull and began the climb up the slope.
A strange thing occurred as he reached the top of the land, fighting to control his heavy breathing for fear of being heard. He stopped for a moment and stared into the night, across the rocky, rolling lands of Mona. He was aware that, not far away, a druid was incanting some complex spell to the stars, exhorting a particular god to appear, calling down the elemental forces upon the Roman legions who suffered – by all the signs – from nothing more than a stiff breeze, and an uncomfortably hard ground beneath their bedrolls.
Nevertheless, Swiftaxe knew the power of the druids, and the whim of the gods. The gods and the elements were listening, and they might at any moment choose to pleasure themselves by agreeing to the spell that wreathed around them, not tou
Swiftaxe, as the thundering in his head faded and his blood calmed, heard the weird words of the druid, the dialect difficult to understand, but words that the Coritanian recognised.
Dark-eyed screamer of a thousand deaths
Stag-horned guardian of the night
Walk the deep rivers, flesh knows no cold
Ride the bitter winds, hair and eyes unstung by the nightmare cold
Brooch of ebony, white ivory at your fingers
Cloak of blooded hide, belt of jewel-studded leather
Horns touch the stars, gather clouds
Each point like three-forged iron
Each shaft like spears of alderwood
Walk now through the earth
Walk now through the waters
Walk now through the stars
Walk here among us
Cernunnos, God of Death
Walk abroad this night, and save this land!
Something like lightning fled through Swiftaxe’s being as the words were spoken. His head span, his stomach churned, and he heard – loud, like thunder – the furious riding of a horse, or the sound of a stag leaping a rock as it strove to escape the hunter.
He found himself slumped to his knees as the momentary dizziness passed, and again the druid was crying spells, and calling for the gods. But the moment of disorientation did not return.
Swiftaxe stood again, and stared around him into the torch-lit darkness. Had Cernunnos come for that moment, ridden past quicker, more sleek, than the human eye could discern?
Nearby someone shrieked, a woman … her voice, crying out to the night, was an expression of anger and fury, and it silenced the druid who stood so close to Swiftaxe.