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,
“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
“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
