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
“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.
