The Reluctant Berserker by Alex Beecroft Page A

Vikings were growing ever bolder. No longer content to harry the seashores, they pushed their way further up every river every year. One day soon, he might have the chance to repay his lord for all the time and wealth squandered on him—the chance to stand in his defence and kill or die for him. Wulfstan believed he wanted it, but he could not believe he wanted it as much as some of the others, who spoke of the Norse raiders the way a man would speak of a half-cooked steak, longing to have his teeth meet in it and feel the blood drip down his chin.
    Despite his temper, which came upon him from the outside like a bolt of lightning—as though it was as the old folk said, an inspiration from Woden, the touch of a god’s hand and not his own spirit at all—Wulfstan did not relish war. This… He slid to a stop in the centre of a great sheet of ice and looked out at clear deep-blue sky and the sunlight coming up yellow from the silvered land, at the trees with ice as thick on their branches as a flock of white butterflies, and the air scouring and tonic. This he liked better. There was something about the world when it forced mankind indoors and he was alone in it, that inevitably turned his mind towards God and glory, white and gold and clean things. He felt, on a day like this, as though he could get his fingers underneath the lid of the world and prize it up, and see all the unseen things that spun out the fabric of the world under its roots.
    He took a deep breath of exhilaration that stabbed him in the nose with its cold, and as he did so a mass of wet snow hit him in the back of the head. Sliding around, not allowing himself to shudder or cough, he caught the glint of Cenred’s winter-sun hair. Ducking down beneath a boulder on the lakeside, he pushed off and gathered snow as he glided closer, and when his friend stood to take aim at him again, Wulfstan got him in the face with a double fistful.
    That was the end of peace and contemplation for the day. Cenred came after him, roaring, and they hunted one another across the lake and out into the surrounding trees. There, Cenred stumbled on a root, and Wulfstan, his blood hot, leaped at him before he could scramble back up. They both went sprawling into soft snow, laughing, Cenred trying to get Wulfstan into an armlock, Wulfstan trying to pin the slighter man down with his weight. He got an arm across Cenred’s throat, grinning, sure Cenred would have to yield, but the sly snake, by some new trick, managed to slither out from under him, hook a leg around his and flip them both.
    He found himself lying surprised in a nest of pressed snow, looking up at a smile that had turned strange. Instead of slowing, his heart sped, or perhaps the normal flow of time slowed down. Cenred’s guarded eyes and Wulfstan’s flush caused such a warmth about them he wondered they did not melt through to the forest floor.
    Cenred had stopped fighting a dozen heartbeats ago, but Wulfstan couldn’t bring himself to take the advantage, twist and pin his opponent and claim his victory. This felt so much better. Held down, he felt grounded, completed in a way he couldn’t explain. As if of its own accord, his head tilted and his mouth fell slightly open. He watched as Cenred licked his lips and made a little darting movement forward, not quite daring to touch, and he knew he should surge up to meet it. He should claim dominance, or at the very least equality, he should not simply accept a kiss like a blushing maiden.
    There was a puzzlement in the back of Cenred’s eyes now, and for a moment he was sure the man had noticed his surrender and understood it. The fear moved him to grab two handfuls of gilded hair and surge up to crush his mouth against his friend’s, using his moment of shock to gain the upper hand and roll himself back on top. Cenred laughed and bit him hard, kneeing him in the hip, while his hands—as if driven by an entirely separate will—were fumbling to untuck the swaddled