Biblical (24 page)

“But a broken arm?”

“We are clearly dealing with extreme forms of hallucination,” said Macbeth. “It could be that an unusually severe movement or muscle spasm caused the fracture in a disease-weakened bone. Have you checked for an underlying medical problem? Osteoporosis, Paget’s Disease, osteosarcoma?”

“Of course we have,” said Newcombe. “The patient is in otherwise excellent health, added to which the fracture was comminuted and impacted, suggesting force trauma. And she had abrasions and a laceration on the skin consistent with having been hit by something large and irregular-shaped.”

Macbeth shook his head. “This is all very difficult to believe.”

“We all agree, but it’s happening,” said Gebhardt. “Dr Macbeth, will you join our team?”

“There’s something I have to tell you first,” said Macbeth. “In addition to feeling the earthquake just like everyone else, I’m pretty sure I’ve suffered from at least two, maybe three, minor hallucinations where I’ve seen people or things that weren’t really there. If this is a virus, then I’m infected.”

“Last night, my husband brought me a cup of coffee in my study,” said Margaret Freeman, who had been silent till then. “My husband died three years ago, Dr Macbeth. Everyone in this room has experienced a dubious percept in the last week. If this is a virus, then we’re all infected.”

Although he was pretty sure no one could see him, Fabian decided to keep out of sight, edging around the settlement, using the long beach grasses as cover. The feeling of déjà vu had gone, but this place, this time persisted. Everything around him, his experience of the world, had become crazy; but Fabian knew he was not insane. Or maybe that’s what it was like to be crazy: to think everything else around you was mad and not you.

Fabian now had a clear view of the settlement and its central square. The woman had returned to the village, the empty leather bucket swinging at the end of her slender arm like a bell on a rope. A group of village men had gathered in the square, all dressed in clothes that Fabian found difficult to date. He guessed they were early medieval, but this was no finery: no silks or fine linens, instead robustly woven fabrics of simple design. The men wore rope-belted, yoke-necked shirts, formless pants gathered at the shins into leggings which were in turn held in place by crisscrossing hide ties. They were outfits that could have belonged to any period from the end of the Stone Age to the Middle Ages. Whatever the era, the villagers’ clothes were the practical, resilient wear of the yeomanry. These people were peasants.

One of the men, younger than the others and wearing a mustard-colored shirt, broke off from the group and went over to the woman Fabian had first observed. They stood talking for a few moments and Fabian watched them, detached and involved at the same time. From her hair being tied in a knot behind her
head, Fabian knew the woman was married and he could see that she had little time for the youth. It struck Fabian that their entire story was laid out before him to be read. Then a thought struck him – he had known the woman was married from the way she wore her hair – how had he known that? Had he read that somewhere and forgotten he had read it? Why was it that Fabian, a stranger in this time, seemed instinctively to know so much about it? Why did this experience seem so much more real than the fourteen years he had spent in that other reality?

His thoughts were interrupted when a man in his thirties, long-bearded and armed with spear and shield, came into the village. Fabian realized that the older man – and he was the oldest person he had seen so far – had come in from the direction of the promontory. He walked up to the youth who had been dallying with the woman and began to berate him loudly. Fabian found it odd that he was hearing a language he had never heard before, but there were many words scattered through it that sounded like the Frisian he and his family spoke. The younger man offered apologies and bowed his head, the older thrusting shield and spear at him to take and pointing back towards the promontory. The youth in the mustard shirt shuffled off shamefaced, some of the other men jeering at him as he went.

Fabian followed him out and along the promontory, no longer attempting concealment from people to whom he was clearly invisible. There had been something about the dejection of the young man that had inclined Fabian to follow him into his solitude. They were now near the end of the promontory, where the lighthouse should have stood but didn’t. The young man stood, spear in hand, gazing out over the sky-flattened silk of the sea. Fabian grasped the significance of the youth’s scolding: this was some kind of sentry duty and he had failed to turn up for his allotted watch. But watch for what?

The young man laid shield and lance on the grass and sat
down, cross-legged, resting his forearms on his knees. It was a relaxed pose, but Fabian noticed that he kept scanning the empty horizon. Whatever the threat was, it was real enough to keep the village slacker attentive.

This could not all be in his mind. Fabian had been here, in this world, this time, for thirty-five minutes. No delusion or fantasy or trick of the mind could be sustained for so long. A panic rose in his chest at the thought that he might be trapped here; it wasn’t the idea of being imprisoned in this time that troubled him, rather that his confinement would be solitary – invisible and intangible in a half life as a phantom. He stood up suddenly, trying to calm himself. Maybe it was as simple as him dreaming: maybe he had fallen asleep while resting against the stone and had dreamt everything that had happened since. If it was all a dream, then it was like no other he had ever experienced – more vivid, more convincing, more sharply defined than his waking life.

He decided to walk over to the youth and touch him on the shoulder, to shove him and see if he reacted. But before he could, the youth jumped to his feet, leaving spear and shield on the grass. Flat-hand-shielding his eyes against the brightness of the huge sky, he peered out over the waters, his attention locked on some distant, fixed spot. Fabian followed his gaze but could see only the vague shimmer of water and sun, fudging the line between sea and sky. He turned again to the village youth, just in time to see his posture become even more rigid, intense: whatever he thought he had seen before, he clearly knew he was seeing it now. Again Fabian followed his line of sight and again saw nothing. He echoed the youth’s posture and shielded his eyes, narrowing them against the glare. Now he saw them: three indistinct, vague smudges on the horizon. Whatever they were, they were heading towards the promontory, avoiding the Waddenzee mudflats.

Boats. But boats without sails, lying low in the water.

The youth on lookout duty turned on his heel and ran back towards the village as if fleeing from the Devil himself. And he yelled. A desperate scream of a single word. It was in a long-dead language yet that single word was one that Fabian understood clearly and unequivocally. A single word unforgotten from a forgotten time; a word that had passed through the generations, more than a millennium of history, and still had the power to terrify.

And to thrill. Now Fabian knew why he was here, what it was he was here to observe. He didn’t run after the mustardshirted youth towards the village; instead he stood on the promontory and watched the three smudges draw nearer, take form, grow more distinct.

The masts, articulated and until then lowered on their pivots to make the ships more difficult to spot from land, were suddenly hoisted, as were the huge square sails, a single one on each ship. Like the legs of huge sea beetles, ranks of oars stretched from each flank and bit into the sea, the three ships picking up pace, cutting mercilessly through the waves towards the promontory.

Standing there, an electric thrill coursing through every fiber, Fabian made out two things at the same time: the giant black raven embroidered on the red pane of the first longship’s sail, and the running village lookout shouting again, desperately, his single word warning.

Vikings.

*

There was no fear. It wasn’t that Fabian felt detached from what was happening in the way he had always felt detached from events in his everyday waking reality. He felt excitement. Added to which he had no reason to believe the approaching Vikings were any more likely to be able to see him than the others he had encountered.

Fabian knew that he now stood in a world and at a time where every certainty he had grown up with, every rule of conduct, every constraint, no longer held sway.

The ships were things of great beauty: sleek, elegant slivers of clinker-built oak, each twenty meters or more in length, which seemed to glide towards Fabian as if just touching the water’s surface and no more. The black Raven of Odin loomed at him from the billowing sail as the first longship, driven by oars working like synchronized pistons in a time long before the idea of a piston had even been conceived, slid past where he stood on the promontory. He could see the round shields arranged along the rowlocks, the gleaming, spectacle-visored helms of the warriors. Forty, maybe fifty men.

The second longship glided past. As in the first vessel, one man stood at the bow, holding the slender, arching neck of the dragon-headed prow and leaning forward to check the water’s depth, guiding his ship into the narrows beside the promontory. Fabian, who had read countless books on these Norse marauders, knew that they would beach the ships, which were double-headed and could be rowed back out to sea without having to be turned. He ran along the promontory, keeping pace with the last of the ships, waving and shouting excitedly to the Vikings who could neither see nor hear him.

Even at a sprint, Fabian only just reached where the first ship beached as the Vikings spilled out. He had expected to hear them yell battle cries, but they disembarked swiftly and silently, obviously unaware that they had been spotted and had lost the element of surprise. Within a couple of minutes, one hundred and fifty men were landed. Sword blades, spear tips and shield bosses glittered and gleamed sharp-edged and bright in the sunlight. Fabian was aware how crisp and clear everything was; much more than it was in normal life, as if his vision – all his senses – had been enhanced, or as if someone had photo-edited reality, turning up the definition, intensifying the colors, refining the contrast and sharpness. He was surprised to see that the Vikings were not the tangle-haired wildmen he had always thought them to have been: they were groomed, beards trimmed and combed, helmets and ringmail burnished to gleaming.

Except for one group.

Twenty or twenty-five Vikings from the first ship stood apart from their comrades and Fabian sensed instantly that there was something strange about these men. Strange and intensely dangerous. To begin with, they were dressed very differently: where the other men wore ringmail or quilted doublets, these heavily muscled men were bare-armed, their torsos covered only by waistcoats of thick, brown-black fur. Some didn’t have helmets, instead wearing the cured heads of wolves or bears on their heads, a curtain of pelt over their necks and shoulders. The faces of all were blackened, as if with ash or fire-soot, and the masks of darkened skin emphasized teeth exposed in twisting snarls, tongues that lolled red from gaping mouths, the whites of eyes that were wild and darting. Mad.

Fabian noticed that these men also wore more marks of battle than their comrades. Their naked arms were covered in the ugly welts of ill-healed wounds, some ancient, others still raw and red. Their faces too, beneath the dark staining, were swordscarred and battle-deformed; one warrior lacked much of the left side of his face, which had a deep cleft, as if ax-struck, running from brow to cheek and only one white eye gazed out battle-tranced from the mask of black soot.

To Fabian, these men looked as if they belonged to another species, unrelated to their shipmates and completely inhuman. Also unlike the others, they were not quiet, but making strange sounds: grunts and moans as if in pain or frustrated by confinement. Animal sounds. Fabian noticed that the other Vikings took care to remain behind and a little distant from these men. With each second, they seemed to become more agitated and restless and Fabian noticed they all had leather pouches that hung from hide straps around their bare necks. Every now and then, one of them would use his fingertips to spoon some kind of green-gray pulp from the pouch, shoving it into his cheek. One of the men fell to the ground, pounding at the earth with
his fists and issuing a high-pitched screech through gritted teeth. His frenzy seemed to intensify the dementia of his companions, increase their growling and moaning. Fabian saw another of the men, the one closest to where he now stood, place his knife in his own mouth and bite down on it, blood streaking his ash-blackened beard, his round-eyed stare insane.

Fabian felt the thrill in his chest intensify. He knew who these men were – if you could call them men – what they were. He understood the reason their comrades stood behind them: you held a deadly weapon by the hilt, not the blade. These were furies about to be unleashed. They were the shield-biters, the demon warriors. The rough fur they wore on their naked skin gave them their name: the bearskin shirt that was called a
ber serkr
in their own language.

These were the Berserkers. And they were about to be let loose.

For some reason he could not fathom, Fabian felt the same pain of unbearable impatience, of a great pressure within crying out to be released, and let out a howling yell that echoed the growing cries of the Berserkers. He let it die when he saw the Berserker nearest him, the man who still held his blade between clenched, bloody teeth, turn in his direction. He looked straight at Fabian, his wild, maniacal eyes suddenly locked with his.

He could see him.

Fabian froze. The Berserker’s face lost, for a moment, the unfocused, insane stare and tilted slightly sideways, bloodflecked drool tracing its way down the inclined edge of the knife in his mouth, as if he was trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Fabian’s euphoria evaporated too and was replaced with a raw, real fear that he was going to die here and now, in a place and time he did not belong.