The Great Pagan Army Page 5

  “I know you doubt the gods, Hammerhand,” Bjorn said. “I know you speak of your courage, your luck, as if these things come from the iron of your own will and not the touch of Odin.”

  “Men make their own luck,” Ivar said. “So damn you and your Odin.”

  Bjorn’s small eyes burned with fanaticism. “You are afraid, Ivar Hammerhand.”

  Ivar drew himself up and barked laughter, spewing more drops of blood and sweat.

  Bjorn motioned his men. Two berserks shoved forth Heming and held him fast. The wolf-capped berserk glided near. He held a hooked dagger and touched the blade against Heming’s cheek. Heming pressed his lips together as his knees threatened to buckle.

  “Your whelp fears,” Bjorn said.

  Ivar barked another harsh laugh. “I do not hear him beg for mercy. Give him a sword and—”

  Bjorn gripped Ivar’s face. The fingertips dug into slick flesh. “His will be the hard path, Hammerhand, the grim road to Valhalla. He is my sacrifice to Odin and birthed by your treachery. Tonight he will face the Valkyries.”

  Ivar shook his head with a roar and snapped his teeth, barely missing Bjorn’s fingers.

  Berserks shouted with rage. The noose tightened, throttled the Hammerhand. He turned red, purple and his eyes bugged outward. With a crash, he fell to his fat knees.

  Bjorn towered over him. “You might have been a berserk, Hammerhand. You have the fury. Despite your unbelief, you are worthy of Odin. And that old crippled monk yonder... the wizened Churchman…” Bjorn grinned. “I heard he lifted a sword against impossible odds. He, too, I deem worthy of Odin.”

  Ivar’s eyes glazed as the rope dug into his fat neck.

  Bjorn waved his hand. Berserks wrestled Ivar onto his feet. The one holding the leash loosened the throttle. Bjorn wrenched his axe from the tree and returned to the head of the Twelve.

  ***

  Late in the afternoon, they stumbled upon a glade. Towering oaks surrounded a carpet of grass. The most seriously hurting sank against the mighty trees, wrapped themselves in cloaks and nodded off. Other berserks took out axes and reentered the forest. Their thuds and thumps produced a heap of mossy branches, which they piled in the center of the glade.

  Fear consumed Heming. It ate at his soul. The knot in his gut had long ago turned sour and then vile. The back of his throat burned. He yearned for life. He dreaded the knife or… He tried to moisten his lips. He felt half in his body and half out, dazed, unable to collect his thoughts.

  “F-F-Father,” he whispered, “will they burn us?”

  Ivar Hammerhand sat like a statue. His cheeks sagged and his staring eyes had become hollow. His color was corpse-like and flies crawled across his bloody back.

  Berserks used flint and tinder, lit torches and then the logs. The crackle of them woke Ivar from his stupor. He frowned, moved his lips. Then he whispered, “Laugh when they kill you. Spit in their face.”

  Bjorn loomed before them. Heming flinched at the sight of him. The berserk squatted beside them, full of life, vigor and expansive confidence. “Yes, that is well spoken, Hammerhand. Mock death as it mocks you.” The crease in his low sloping forehead, the heavy horizontal line, deepened. “You, however, have also mocked Odin. You think to play King Vikar.”

  Heming feared to look up into those small, eerie eyes.

  “They say King Vikar prayed to Odin for a favorable wind,” began Bjorn, speaking earnestly. “The wind came, they sailed, and upon landing the King and his men drew lots to see who among them should pay the sacrifice for the aid. The lot fell upon the King. He, a doubter like you, Ivar, persuaded his men to make a mock sacrifice. They set King Vikar on a tree stump and looped calf intestines around his neck. The men bent down a young tree and tied the intestines to it. A berserk among them, a true man of Odin, stepped up to the King and touched his chest with a rod. The berserk said, ‘Now I give you to Odin.’ At that moment, the Lord of Asgard showed them what he thought of such mockery. The soft calf intestine turned into tough rope. The rod turned into a spear and pierced the King in the chest. The tree shot upward. So indeed did King Vikar hang dead from the Odin Tree and the sacrifice was completed, the bargain kept.” Bjorn breathed deeply. “He who calls upon Odin must pay the price. You have lived with courage, Ivar Hammerhand. You have borne much luck and have taken great booty. Now it is your time to hang upon the Odin Tree.”

  Bjorn leaned nearer, with his eerie eyes alight. “Long ago you slew my brother from behind, Hammerhand. Know then that your death seals your son’s fate. The cup of Attila speaks to me his punishment. You loathe berserks. I will make your son fiercely berserk. I will shape him in my image, Hammerhand. He will howl at the moon. He will gnash his teeth and rave, and on the day of battle, he will take up the axe and dash naked upon his foes. No more will he draw a bow. He will become berserk, a beast, one of the chosen of Odin the Slayer.”

  Ivar bellowed and his great shoulders strained. A vein rose on his forehead. He twisted within his bonds. Berserks piled on him, raining blows and kicks, subduing him into a panting, gasping heap of quivering flesh.

  Heming leaped up. With a shout, he lowered his head and charged. Laughing, the brutally strong berserks caught him. Though he twisted, squirmed and tried to bite their hands, they held him fast. The lean berserk, he with a wolf-headed cap, the one who had first tripped him in the apple orchard, held his head and made him watch what transpired.

  They looped a heavy rope around Ivar Hammerhand’s neck, the free end thrown up and over a thick branch in a giant oak tree. Four berserks took that end and hauled on the rope. At the last moment, Ivar awoke to his plight and tried to run at them. They heaved, and up Ivar went into the air. His massive legs kicked. The rope dug into his neck and the oak branch creaked ominously.

  “Higher!” Bjorn shouted.

  The four berserks hauled again, and Ivar Hammerhand jerked higher up into the tree, awful wheezes and croaks coming out of him. He thrashed. His eyes bugged horribly outward.

  “I give you to Odin!” Bjorn hurled a spear into the mass of flesh.

  Ivar grunted like a pig.

  “No!” Heming screamed.

  8.

  A bonfire roared. Crickets chirped and night-bugs spiraled around the fire, diving in with a sizzle. In a stupor, Heming blinked at the flames. Five times, with a dagger at his throat, he had sipped a black and syrupy draught. Each time it had gone down like fire and numbed his thoughts. The berserks had cut his bonds and he sat now before the flames, hypnotized by them. Then he stirred. On the other side of the fire rose a beast haired like a bear. A human face peered out of the beast’s jaws. The head in the jaws spoke in a deep and rhythmic voice:

  “He has left his old life. He is stripped of his former ranks.”

  All around Heming men leaped to their feet. They reached for him. He shrank back. Strong hands tore off his tunic and breeches until he stood naked before the fire.

  “You are Odin’s by right and by curse.”

  A man buckled a leather sword-belt around his waist, cinching it tight. Heming blinked in his stupor. The fire, the trees, they swirled and canted at odd angles.

  “Odin will be Wod unto you. He will give you blinding and freeing fury.”

  A man pressed a spear into his right hand. Heming’s fingers curled around the ash haft even as he peered at it dumbly.

  “One of his secret names is Ofnir. By your shout you will entangle men in fetters of panic and fear.”

  They thrust a spear into his left hand.

  “You may call him Drauga Drottin, for he is the Lord of the Dead.”

  Someone dropped a fine silver chain over his head. A lump of silver, an amulet of a hag riding a horse, dangled from the end and felt cool on his chest.

  “To you Odin may send his Choosers of the Slain, the Valkyries of the white breasts. If you are brave and die in battle, one of them will be your wife on the other side of the grave.”

  They pushed him and made him stagger. Then a man leaped
over the flames, landing before him. The man threw back his head and howled. In another bound, the man jumped back across and crouched hidden from view. Others leaped over the fire, staring silently at him, and then they, too, leaped away and rolled out of sight.

  Heming grew weary of it. He looked away, and his eyes chanced to fall upon the Odin Tree. His father dangled from its branches. Ivar Hammerhand wore a spear in his side. Beside him dangled a white-haired abbot with arrows.

  “No, I’m not… Not like any of you. You are beasts, monsters.”

  “Odin!” the bear shouted. It stood across the fire. “Odin! I give you Heming Ivarsson. He has drunk your mead. We tore his old life from him. He holds the twin spears and on his chest is his luck. Give us a sign, Drauga Drottin.”

  Heming’s vision swirled; his thoughts were a jumble. He shook his head and thereby lost his balance and staggered into the fire. He leapt back with a shout. For that instant, the stupor left him. He saw Bjorn in his bear garment and wearing an old furry head. He saw the berserks. They grinned like fiends, like monsters. These monsters had hung Ivar Hammerhand in a tree. Now they sported with him. They treated him like a fool.

  He noticed the spears in his hands. “I will slay you all!”

  “Odin be praised!” Bjorn roared.

  “A sign, a sign!” the berserks shouted. “We have been given a sign.”

  Heming leaped across the flames. He stabbed at the monster man, but Bjorn wasn’t there. The bear ran around the fire.

  “Chase the bear!” the men shouted. “Kill it, slay it.”

  Heming shook the spears. He leaped over the flames. Around and around the bear ran. Louder and louder the chant rose. Heming panted as he tracked the beast. Sweat slicked his naked body. He gnashed his teeth. He howled in growing rage. A grim desire to slay the furry beast filled him. Then something occurred to him that he didn’t understand. Spit and foam bubbled from his mouth. The fire and night turned hazy red. A strange and delightful ecstasy filled his being. He shook the spears and it felt as if he could slay the world.

  “Odin!” he howled.

  Around him in the darkness, man-beasts took up the cry.

  He repeatedly leaped across the fire. He stabbed, slashed and slobbered in fury. Then the tide of beasts fell upon him. They tore away his spears and bore him onto the Earth. Heming raved. He threw off several. They pinned him. A knee crushed his left wrist against the ground. A bony projection in the knee (it must have been broken before) dug like a spur in his flesh. Heming struggled and screamed and he chewed on hot flesh. With his teeth, he tore off hunks of bloody meat. He ate like a beast. When they shoved a nozzle into his face, he gulped cool ale.

  Then, with a shudder throughout his entire body, the fit passed. It left him shivery, cold and weak. He felt terribly tired. He saw now that it wasn’t a berserk he had feasted upon, but a haunch of pork that a man had held before him.

  Bjorn loomed above. “Odin has accepted you.”

  Heming spit the bloody meat out of his mouth.

  “You have sworn to kill me,” Bjorn said.

  Heming spoke no threats as hatred poured out his eyes.

  Bjorn’s grin widened. There were spaces between his thick square teeth. “Ivar Hammerhand failed to slay me, whelp. How is it that you think to succeed?”

  Secret cunning stole upon Heming. They thought to use him; he would use them. He said slyly, “Will you teach me how to become a warrior of fury?”

  “Yes,” Bjorn said, “I will teach you.”

  “And I will learn,” Heming said.

  “So that you may slay me?” Bjorn said.

  Heming said no more, but he thought, so someday I may hang you in the Odin Tree.

  9.

  Stiff, sore and terrorized, Peter waited until twilight before he dropped out of the ancient apple tree where he had hidden. The guttered monastery reeked of soot, while dangerous, gray shapes slunk around the corpses. They feasted on the dead flesh.

  Despite a terrible dread that Northmen hid nearby, Peter crept to a corpse. A long, gray shape rose up and bared bloody fangs. Peter snatched the corpse’s dagger and held it in his trembling hands. The wolf growled and slunk into the gloom.

  That gave Peter guts enough to prowl the fleshly wreckage. He unscrewed a canteen, gurgled water and bolted down coarse bread. He had witnessed the horrible fight: the axes, the maddened bellows… How did men become so barbaric? He dunked the canteen into the cold brook and listened to bubbles rise. He stuffed a sack with cheeses, smoked herring… and buckled on the Northman’s dagger belt. He also found an axe. The ash haft was four feet long, the sharpened head like a razor. It was a Northman’s weapon and utterly against his vows to swing it at another man. He was a monk; and the butchery he had seen, the blood and the screams… If the wolves lost their fear of him, at least he could defend himself.

  He laid the haft upon his least hurt shoulder and with looted Danish sandals on his feet set out for Willelda’s village.

  ***

  Every wise and learned man knew that the world ended with the great Day of Wrath. That calculated date was one thousand years after the birth of Christ, a little more than one hundred years hence. Peter was thus all too aware that Time wound down. Mankind shrunk in ability as wickedness vomited itself onto the Earth. Evil spirits roamed the night and hunted for souls to possess. It was pitch black in the forest and Peter kept considering these things as he blundered into trees or tripped over roots. He finally crouched beside a mossy boulder and pulled out his cross, kissing the smooth wood as he stared about wide-eyed.

  Daylight found him groggy and his hair jutting in disorder. He hurried through the forest, although at every strange sound he stopped and listened intensely. When he passed a birch with planted crosses, he stepped off the path and winced at every leaf crackle. He wasn’t a woodsman, but he knew pigs should have been rooting nearby. He tested the air. There was no familiar wood smoke, but… his stomach tightened. He smelled burned hay, thatch.

  He crawled over rotting leaves, and with great care and at the edge of the forest he bent back a branch and peered at the village below. The empty fields circled the dwellings, each patch cultivated by one family or another. Some fields were fallow and weedy, others stubble and clod-filled. Chirping sparrows flittered about. In the village below an outer hut smoked. The sooty thatch crinkled with red-glowing embers. A dead hound lay in the hut’s doorway. Peter scanned back and forth. He saw no people and, blessed Savior, no corpses.

  He pressed his cross against his dry lips, muttering, “Grant me courage, Saint Martin.” Then he straightened and headed down slope. The Northmen must have passed through, but somebody might be in trouble, in need of aid. After ten steps, he halted, horrified.

  A reaver swaggered out a hut. He wore a blue cloak. Rust stained it. No, that’s blood, Peter realized, his gore rising. A taller, shirtless Northman staggered out next. His skin was sunburned and peeling.

  Like a stone, Peter dropped to the ground. He lay quivering, wondering how he could have been such a fool. He pushed up his torso and let himself drop back down as three braying Northmen rounded a corner. They passed a clay jug, each taking swigs. One spoke. Then all three roared as they walked out of sight around a different corner. Peter scrambled up, dashed bent-over and plunged into the forest. He trampled old brittle leaves. He huffed, puffed, fell onto his knees and clawed out his small wooden cross. He kissed it repeatedly. “Hail Mary, full of grace. Hail Mary, full of grace.” He vomited onto his hands.

  A branch snapped.

  Peter whirled around. His terrified gaze went from beech to bush, to birch, to— a stocky man leaned against an oak. The man grinned, and exposed a mouthful of black teeth.

  10.

  “You’re the luckiest, stupidest bastard I know,” Lupus whispered. “Follow me.”

  The barefoot Lotharingian glided soundlessly. Peter hurried to catch up. After forty paces, Lupus halted, eyed the big axe and met Peter’s eyes. “Got my deniers?”
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  “What?”

  “My coins, Irish, you promised me five deniers.”

  Peter could only gape.

  Lupus dug out the parchment scrap. “Don’t think you can weasel out of this just because some Northmen showed up.”

  “The abbey’s destroyed. All the monks are dead.”

  “All I need is a Churchman who can read. Then you’re in trouble.”

  Peter was bewildered. “No. You need someone who knows I wrote it.”

  “You plan to lie about this?”

  Peter sagged against a tree. “Why are you here?”

  Lupus took in that big axe again as he tucked the parchment into his pouch. “I’m here because I was duped. I ought to have marched into your abbey first thing. Instead, I waited; figured a bumbling idiot needed time to steal a few deniers.” Lupus shook his head. “Where did you get that axe?”

  “Same place you picked up your hatchet.”

  The eyebrows rose. “You slew a sea rover?”

  “What happened here? Did you warn the villagers?”

  “Me?” Lupus asked.

  “They took you in. Willelda’s father trusted you.”

  Lupus scratched his jaw. He had rugged good looks if he kept his mouth closed. “You’re a lucky Irish devil, you know that?” Those mean eyes turned suspicious. “Maybe it’s more than just luck, eh. Maybe you’re more a sorcerer than I realized.” Lupus took in the axe. “Maybe it’s not bumbling. What it is—you’re an apprentice. Don’t know how to use all your spells, so you’re always making mistakes, but in the end, you mumble magic. Is that why the abbey burned down? You didn’t want anyone powerful knowing what you’d done to the girl. So you slew your sorcerer lord and spelled forth the fires of hell to cover your tracks.”

  The Lotharingian’s logic sickened Peter.

  “If I could burn down an abbey with spells,” Peter said, “why wouldn’t I have conjured five deniers for you?”

  “Why wouldn’t you have hexed me is more like?” The thought seemed troubling, until a sly smile stole over Lupus. “Ah… this here note is why. You gave the girl power over you with some secret magic, and she in turn gave you what you wanted. Well, well… this is finally starting to make sense. You can’t hex me as long as I have the note.”