Bragi went down, locked to an opponent. They broke, shoving each other away as they stood, but the Dane had snatched the old warrior’s knife from his belt. Bragi reacted immediately, driving his head forward into the man’s face, sending his opponent crashing over the rail of the ship into the sea.
Vali seemed to catch the idea. He tossed two men over the rail into the water and turned to face the rest. The Danes fell back, a half-circle of them around Bragi and Vali, too scared to come on but with nowhere to retreat to.
Bragi was unarmed, all his weapons gone in the fight and his right hand a bloody ruin, as was his face. He smiled at the prince. ‘All my life I’ve dreamed of doing this with you. You’re a great scrapper, as long as you concentrate on the enemy. But you want to watch those berserker mushrooms.’
Vali swayed uncertainly in front of him.
Bragi put a hand on his shoulder.
‘I’m proud of you, lord. You’re a mighty man, and it does my heart good to see you fight like that. I’d have lost my hand before if I’d known it would have that effect on you.’
And Vali took him, leaping on him like a wild animal and tearing out his throat with his teeth. Bragi instinctively reached for his sword with his bloody hand and for his knife with his good one, but they were gone. He staggered back, his blood engulfing him and engulfing the prince. Vali shoved him to the deck, where the old man lay writhing, his hands tearing at his belt for the weapons that were no longer there.
The Danes around them seemed to decide as one they wouldn’t take on Vali and scrambled onto Bodvar Bjarki’s crippled ship. The pirates on the other ship took this for a renewed attack and came pouring over in numbers themselves. Feileg fought hard and lost track of time, then he saw Vali leap back onto the centre boat with a terrible snarl.
Some of the Danes seemed transfixed, stopping as if turned to stone. Feileg had heard his father tell stories of this — the battle fetter — where Odin descends and strikes the enemy motionless. Others, though, were not affected and came forward to meet Vali. The fighting was terrible. Men lost their footing and were stabbed or trampled on the blood-slick boards; friend struck friend in the confusion but Vali seemed untouchable. Opponents fell back from him as if blasted by a gale, pushing back to their own ships. Some made it. Those who didn’t were crushed, torn or broken by Vali’s merciless attacks with teeth and hands.
Feileg took a blow across the shoulders and staggered, but then his opponent was down, felled by Bjarki. He was not berserk — he hadn’t had the time to chant his chants and consume his brew of mushrooms — and when he spoke Feileg recognised what he said for sense.
‘We have to take one of their boats. Leave him here. He is berserk like I’ve never seen and will harm us as much as the Danes.’ Bjarki was no fool and realised that a common enemy could make for strange friends. He pointed to the ship where Bragi lay.
Feileg nodded and jumped across. He went to Bragi. The wound at his neck was terrible and his eyes were dim. He was reaching around, searching for something. The wolfman instinctively knew what to do — he had spent his earliest years with berserks, after all. He picked up a fallen spear and pressed it into the warrior’s good hand. Bragi’s fingers curled around it and he drew Feileg to him. His voice was hardly audible and Feileg had to crane down to hear it.
‘I taught him many things,’ he said, ‘but I never taught him that.’
Bragi began to laugh and then stopped. Feileg touched the old man’s face. He had died as the men of his people would have wanted to, thought Feileg, with a weapon in his hand and a joke on his lips.
Only a few of the Danes remained on the boat and the fight had gone out of them. Seeing the berserk and the remains of his crew climbing across towards them, they rushed back the other way to join what was left of their comrades on the far boat. Only Vali remained between the two groups on the middle ship. The Danes knew they were facing a monster rather than a man and had already started cutting the ropes they had lashed to Bjarki’s ship at the start of the encounter.
On the oarless ship, red with blood, surrounded by bodies, Vali was suddenly still, looking about him as if slightly puzzled. A pair of eyes appeared above the rim of one of the barrels. Someone was still in there, Feileg realised.
‘Now or never Veles Libor,’ shouted Bjarki.
The merchant stood in the barrel looking at Vali. He trembled as he stared at the prince. Even from twenty paces away Feileg could see him shaking.
Veles looked towards Feileg’s ship, his movements very slow as if he feared he might draw attention to himself. Then, with a very surprising turn of speed, he levered himself out of the barrel, ran to the rail of the boat and rolled over to join the wolfman and the berserk, flattening himself to the bottom of the boat as if he was still in the middle of an arrow storm. Bjarki gave a snort of contempt but Feileg was minded to throw the merchant into the water. Luckily for Veles, the wolfman had other things to think about.
‘Can we take the prince with us?’ Feileg asked Bjarki.
Busy cutting ropes, the big man shook his head. ‘He’ll still be berserk. We’ll follow the current and try to keep him in sight.’
‘And if we lose him?’
Bjarki shrugged. ‘We’ll pick him up easy enough if we let ourselves drift. If I stay tied to him I’ll have a mutiny on my hands. He’s bewitched and the men won’t stand for it.’
The fog came over them again, the taunts of Bjarki’s crew following the Danes as they disappeared into it. Vali was only a shadow on the corpse boat, though one last rope still connected it to Feileg’s ship.
The rope was cut and the boats began to move apart. Feileg looked at the body of Bragi. Then he turned to Bjarki. He pointed to the old warrior’s corpse. ‘Tell tales of him,’ he said, and then jumped to join his brother as the fog bank swallowed them.
37
It had been three days since Vali had woken and he felt very strange indeed. He was uncommonly energetic, hardly slept, felt stronger and had no urge to eat at all.
The scents of the night were enthralling to him and he would sit under the stars breathing in the many odours of the boat while Feileg chewed dried fish from the Danes’ provisions. The days seemed alive with sensation: the sun on the water was a field of diamonds, the sky a limitless and entrancing blue and the wind, when it came, brought a bounty of scents in a thousand varieties he had never noticed before — beach tar and wet stone, bird droppings, stranded fish — each one containing its own notes, its fascinating signature. When the skies bloated with cloud he could smell the rain coming in and sense which way the wind would turn. None of this seemed strange to him, or rather he was aware of his heightened perceptions as something new but they didn’t feel wrong or unusual. He felt more comfortable with his new senses than he had with his old ones.
He thought of Bragi — sometimes he could think of nothing else. Had he killed him, as Feileg had said? The wolfman had called him ‘battle blind’ but would not explain further. Vali felt so distant from his old self that it almost seemed possible… No, the wolfman had got it wrong. Feileg had mistaken what he had seen. The mess of battle had confused him.
Then, in a rising sea, his eyes confirmed what his nose had told him — land, a strip of rusty red cliffs against the iron black of the ocean. He took the rudder, saved from the side-swipe of the pirate ship by the curve of the hull, and tried to turn landward. It was frustrating work. The current was pulling across the shore and the ship responded sluggishly when it responded at all. Feileg was no use, slumped in his usual position, sat with his head between his legs, staring at his feet. But they were getting closer.