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 drengr, that was my opinion. And now it’s been the death of you.”
“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.