Reread of the Hawk: Berserk, Volume 1

What Happens

The Black Swordsman
Guts, the Black Swordsman, kills some thugs in a local tavern in order to provoke their lord, the Baron of nearby Koka Castle, a mysterious man who eats the flesh of women and children sent by the town as tribute in order to guarantee its safety. The Lord Mayor tries to explain the town’s innocence in the incident to the Baron, only to find out the latter never had any intention of honoring their pact.

                In his cell, Guts is healed of the wounds he sustained after his arrest by Puck, a fairy-like elf whom he (indirectly) saved from the thugs in the tavern. Puck is horrified that Guts would sacrifice the entire town to pursue his own goals, but the latter brushes it off, saying those too weak to defend themselves don’t deserve to live. Puck then notices a strange mark on Guts’s neck, which the latter calls the Brand, and when it starts to bleed he knows the Baron has arrived.

                As the men of Koka Castle rampage through the town, Guts appears and proceeds to dispatch them in rapid succession with his repeating crossbow and oversized sword. Then the Baron appears and we find out he’s something called an Apostle, but Guts seemingly dispatches him as quickly as his men. Only for him to re-appear as a giant cobra/lizard-like monster who promptly gives Guts a sound thrashing, declaring himself unkillable by mortals. But Guts reveals you just need to get creative, and that he conceals a hand cannon in his artificial arm, as he proceeds to blast, cut in half, and skewer the Apostle before trapping him under a burning beam. He asks the still-living Apostle the whereabouts of a group called the Godhand is, which the former insists he doesn’t know – although he does recognize the mark on Guts’s neck as the Brand of Sacrifice. Unable to find out what he wants to know, Guts leaves him to burn to ash and departs the ruined town.

The Brand
Puck continues to follow Guts, insisting he finds the former’s experiences to be interesting – like something out of an epic poem, only real. Rain starts to fall, and they are offered a ride by a priest in a passing wagon. Guts tries to warn the priest that traveling with him is a bad idea, but the priest won’t hear of it and he reluctantly assents. Waking up from a nightmare, Guts reflexively kills a strange creature, which he recognizes as one that takes shape by feeding off the souls of those who died in a state of hatred, and realizes something must be nearby, which is confirmed when the Brand begins to bleed again. The horses begin to act spooked, and the priest’s daughter jumps out of the wagon to help calm them, only to be killed by a skeleton rising out of the ground. More begin to emerge as Guts realizes they’ve stumbled upon an old battlefield and tries to fight them off, in the process having to dismember the girl, who has risen as undead herself and killed her father, although he hesitates until she actually stabs him and the act makes him visibly sick. As dawn breaks, Guts has finally vanquished all of the undead, and appears tormented over the fate of the girl, while his restatement of his philosophy on those too weak to defend themselves rings hollow. Disembodied voices taunt Guts, insisting that he can’t escape his fate, but he fires his cannon into the air to silence them and walks off, while Puck comes to realize just what sort of life Guts leads.

The Guardians of Desire, Chapter 1
In another town, a woman is executed as a heretic despite her protestations of innocence, the fifth one in a month, and the priests expresses fears that they are being excessive to the local Count, who insists it is all for the safety of his subjects. Meanwhile, the head rolls into the crowd and Guts picks it up. He tosses it to the Count, who finds the Brand of Sacrifice painted in blood on the woman’s forehead – and recognizes it.

                Wandering about town, Guts is accosted by soldiers, who try to arrest him on suspicions of heresy. A brief fight ensues, and Guts and Puck are seemingly outnumbered, but the intervention of a short, hooded man allows them to escape. The man, an out-of-work physician, takes them to his underground laboratory, which is packed with suspicious paraphernalia. He asks if they have a feud with the Count and reveals that he wants them to kill him, showing them his mutilated face and missing legs, which the Count apparently cut off and ate. At first he thinks Guts doesn’t believe him, but the latter says he not only does, but knows what the Count is, at which point the physician shows him a hidden room containing a strange, egg-shaped object with lopsided facial features, which Guts recognizes as a Behelit.

Commentary

I hope you weren’t expecting friendship and magical ponies, because those are in short supply here. And even if they weren’t the ponies would turn out to be man-eaters. Anyways, what we’re treated to here is some seriously unpleasant, even downright disgusting stuff. We’ve got gory dismemberment, torture, cannibalism, massacres, cobra-lizard monsters, the undead, pretty girls getting impaled and coming back as vengeful undead, and, because the Middle Ages wouldn’t be complete without one, a good-old fashioned (and probably one-sided) witch trial (sure, those were more of an Early Modern phenomenon, but let's go by popular conception here). There’s not much in the way of plot here, and if this is your only exposure to the series it’s easy to assume it’s nothing but mindless brutality.

Our, ahem, “hero” Guts, the Black Swordsman (even his name sounds unpleasant) doesn’t help either. He’s a loner and a killer, carrying, in the words of the jailer, “enough weapons to start his own war.” “Crazy bastard” is right, and one who’s willing to let an entire town burn if it’ll get him what he wants to boot. Empathy, what’s that? Even his one seemingly good act, saving Puck, is much more of a happy (for Puck) coincidence. But wait; might there still be hope for him after all? Consider, he hesitates to (re)kill the priest’s daughter even though she’s already dead and possessed – she has to actually stab him first. Afterwards he looks visibly guilty over what he’s done, and since he just sacrificed an entire town to achieve his goal it’s not like he has a policy of not killing civilians or something. Where before his speech on how the weak deserve what they get made him seem callous, his visible regret over his actions makes it ring false this time, like he’s trying to convince himself of it, and like an attempt to cope with what he’s seen and done. Whatever’s happened to him, there’s still a shred of humanity in there.

As mentioned, there isn’t much in the way of story in this volume (more on that in a minute), but we do get a few details, most notably that Guts is looking for certain someones called the Godhand. There is also an obvious connection between them and Apostles, and whatever connection they have with Guts, it doesn’t seem to be too friendly. And speaking of the Godhand, we’ve had a number of terms dropped, all of them religious in nature – Apostle, Godhand, and Behelit (the latter based on an old Aramaic word for a Duke of Hell, itself related to a Hebrew term that means "Covenant"); even the Brand of Sacrifice seems to be connected to this spiritual dimension given its links to the supernatural and the obvious connotations of “sacrifice” with “religious sacrifice.”

All told, this volume serves primarily to establish the tone of the story and setting, and it’s an undeniably dark and gritty one, and not a place you’d want to live in, or even visit. Here, choices are often a matter of bad and worse (witness the dilemma of the Lord Mayor – periodically condemn a few women and children to be eaten and keep his town safe, or refuse and have everyone killed; he wasn’t exactly privy to the knowledge that the latter was only a matter of time regardless), the supernatural is all too real – and eager to kill you, and atrocities are committed in the name of peace, justice, and the common good (according to the Count, the criteria for being a heretic boils down to “anyone who looks suspicious”).

Personally, however, I really like the chapters in this volume, specifically the first two, which are highly atmospheric pieces that work well as stand-alones and capture the feel of a dark, wandering swordsman on a mysterious mission in a bleak world. They leave me intrigued and wanting to know more about Guts and what seems to be his one-man war with the supernatural. It's a glimpse of what’s to come, and if they peak your interest as well I suggest you stick around; it's a long one, but well worth it. But if grim isn't your cup of tea, they also serve as a fair warning to look elsewhere.

Volume 2 will be up in a few days