Free Berserker (Omnibus) by Robert Holdstock Page A

outside.
    Where were the six Berserks? It was they who had done this, it had to be. He had angered them with his arrogance, and they were punishing him by invoking their master to kill him in a way more terrible than the dry mouth fear of battle.
    The unpredictable warriors and the unpredictable god. Between one moment and the next their mood of placid contemplation had changed to one of violent aggression. At any moment they might change again, the wind might die, the unpredictable, unreadable wind, at once a bringer of hope and a carrier of death …
    ‘Run!’
    The voice, in the chaos of darkness and wind, was shrill and agonised. Sigurd Gotthelm, summoning every last ounce of strength, had exhorted Harald to escape, and in that one cry Gotthelm had told Harald much – of his fear for the youth’s life, of his fear for the life of the hold if he stayed, of his desperate sadness that their friendship, brief yet so eternally long, should now be ending …
    Harald ran to Elena and picked her up. Her face was a mask of terror, and she stared at Harald through eyes almost expressionless, yet alive and shining with the great fear that had possessed her.
    Moist lips moved in the darkness and Harald pressed his own againstthem, lingering on her softness, touching her body in places he had deliberately fought against touching in his earnest desire to know her only when they were bonded for life.
    The Innocent.
    Kissing an innocent girl in the shadow of Odin, feeling the magnetic tug of the dark spirits dragging him upwards and inwards, as a lodestone pulls the singing blade of a metal sword.
    ‘Wait for me …’ he whispered, and she cried, bitter tears that broke from her mind and her eyes as she herself broke from her paralysis of terror.
    ‘What’s happening?’ she sobbed, and a howling wind blew them towards the wall as if to answer her question.
    Harald looked to the door, still clutching the trembling girl. Then he pushed her behind a hanging seal-skin drape and kissed her one last time.
    Gotthelm was still, and may have been dead. His strange helmet gleamed in the faint light that spilled in from outside, the glow of the moon behind thinner clouds, the burning eye of the Bear god.
    Harald walked to the door of the small hut and peered out, looked up. Froze.
    It towered over the palisade, huge and featureless in the darkness, shifting from side to side as its great head turned this way, that way, searching the darkness of the hold for a sign of Harald, or perhaps for life of any sort.
    The great single eye came to regard Harald and immediately the ursine monster opened its hideous, dripping muzzle and growled in pleasure. A wave of stinking breath consumed and choked Harald, the stench of dead flesh, decaying tissue, fecal matter chewed and vomited as the Scavenger of Valhalla nosed and rooted for every last fragment of mortal life among the wasted bones of the dead.
    Scattered light on razor teeth, the flickering of a moist tongue already tasting the juices of the young innocent who would soon be in the beast’s power.
    Harald drew his sword, kissed the rune his father had made upon the hilt, and waved the point towards the towering shape that reached towards him.
    One great fist began to scatter the poles of the wall. The beast’s roar was thunderous against the wind, howling through the night, sending the dark clouds racing to more peaceful skies. For a moment the moon emerged between the grey blanket that obscured the stars, and the full might and fury of the god-beast was shown to Harald as he bravely, foolishly, stood his ground, sword in hand, heart in mouth.
    Monstrous, black as the blackest bear but mud-streaked, blood-streaked, matted fur covered with twigs and dead leaves from its approach through the high forests of the land. The beast’s muzzle seemed to pour the glistening silver juice that told of the madness of the manifest god – like a rabid dogrunning ravening through the stark cold mountains,