Berserker (Omnibus) Read Online Free PDF

killers.
    Bodies littered the stone pavement between the four houses where the families had lived. Severed limbs and twisted torsos lay in profusion. The stench was appalling, worse even than the stench of battle. A woman’s head stared obscenely from a spear that had been pushed into the mud from around one of the stables; Harald recognised her and felt sickness rise in his throat. Her eyes open, her long fair hair hanging limp around the gashed neck, she seemed almost to be trying to speak. Her body lay elsewhere, with the bodies of the other women, naked and sprawled, bellies and thighs covered with blood from the final rape with a short broad-sword.
    Harald climbed down from his horse and the beast whinnied and cantered away from the scene of murder, perhaps to escape the foul smell of decay.
    ‘By all the gods,’ cried the youth. ‘If Elena is dead …!’
    ‘Berserks,’ said Gotthelm indifferently. ‘I recognise the style.’
    ‘Elena … Elena! …’ Harald searched among the defiled corpses, pushed into the smallest long house, and appeared again, shaking his head. ‘She isn’t here. Elena isn’t here. Pray Odin she’s been spared.’
    He ran across to the largest house, then stopped. Puzzled, he stared at Gotthelm. ‘Berserks? But why? Why such a tiny settlement as this? Berserks are warriors …’
    ‘They’re beasts,’ said Gotthelm. ‘In some parts of the land they’re feared more than wolves, or even bears from which they gain their strength. Did you see them fighting in that first campaign against MacNeill? Remember those creatures who led us into the fray?’
    ‘Like mad men,’ said Harald, remembering. ‘Screaming, cutting themselves with their own blades … I’d never seen such warriors before.’
    ‘Imagine that sort of mindless kill-Iust pitted against forty or fifty innocent, unarmed farmers. Harald, this is the work of Berserks. I know the signs. Did your Elena come from here?’
    Harald nodded, bitterly, glancing around again at the mention of her name. Then he looked up at the more experienced man.
    ‘But … but Sigurd, why? Why would trained warriors just attack for no reason? Why kill their own countrymen?’
    Gotthelm smiled grimly, looked distantly to where dark mountains were shrouded in cloud. ‘They can’t help themselves. Harald. And these were not their countrymen. A Berserker has no countrymen, but his own kind, and hell is his resting place. My young friend, you still have a lot to learn.’
    Harald pushed through the wicker door into the main long-house. It was dark inside, the shutters being still closed. On the open hearth, at the far end of the single room, a spilled cauldron lay across the body of the old woman, Ingredd. Harald remembered her tales, tall and not so tall, of the days whenthe gods had walked these desolate northlands as men, dressed in golden armour and wearing helmets with bulls’ horns that were wider than a man’s reach. He wept as he crossed to her ruined body, and saw the terrible wound in her chest. It had been quick, and she had not been defiled, and for that he was thankful. But what meaningless slaughter! What tragic incomprehensible retribution from so innocent a community!
    Gotthelm called to him, and he ran, thinking perhaps that the older man had discovered another girl’s body, terrified that he would soon gaze down at Elena’s soulless form. But the discovery was of Bjorn the Axe, the elder of the settlement, a warrior of old who could still have boasted prowess with his double axe, even though long years had passed since the steel blades had last taken life. The old man’s glorious dark brown hair, always his most prized clothing, had been tied around a high, wooden spar in an open stable, and his naked body had been used for javelin practice; seven great tears in his torso told of the seven well-aimed throws.
    ‘Something put them into a rage,’ said Gotthelm, as they looked at the corpse hanging above them. ‘But by