R. V. Risley

“ But, dominating all in its hugeness, striking the men before it, making a glory with its flying axe—enormous, irresistible, clothed in red, seeming to shake the air with the roar through its skin, yet utterly silent—Lord Snorē, gone mad with the combat, striking with the strength of a falling tree—sweeping out the hall before him!
The door is open! The men pile up on the threshold; the door grows high—is darkened—is full. Grows open—men whirl along the floor under the axe—the wave breaks, it recedes, it runs away into the corners, it dissolves and runs away in foam—the door is empty. ”

“ The fight goes on; it goes on for ever and ever it seems; and the world in the smoke and the noises and sounds of the combat grow farther and farther away; they come to me unreally, in a far-off roar, like the sea.
I hear the sound of waves; the water roars, and roars, and roars—farther and farther—then nearer again; the ship moves and heaves and turns slowly round under the motion. And now I hear the sound of my harp playing, coming through the sound of the water; that ceases, and I hear the sound of Snorē’s and Helga’s voices speaking softly. ”

“ We are bound in by the ice, and the ship lies high in the bow, white, like a lord’s tomb in the snow. It has been snowing all day, and the oar-captain makes us tramp one after the other round the half-buried ship till we can walk no more, when we sleep in the skins under the fore-deck till a comrade shakes us, and we groan and rouse and walk again. The dull sky has turned to the colour of ashes. Sometimes the air lifts for a moment into a slight wind that sends the frost-lace scurrying over the ice-blocks, and then falls still again. Our feet leave great tracks ”

“ How such a maiden could be the daughter of such a feeble, timid, dainty old man as Lord Raud, I could never know. As a child pretending to ask for forgiveness was her face—half-laughing and half-sorrowful. Her moving was like a ripple of blown cloth, it was so springing graceful. And her eyes, when they occasionally looked at you, had a woman’s innocence, never a man’s straightforwardness.
It was sunset three days later. Walking on the beach I could see my lord and Hildur pacing slowly, he laughing, along the grass that stretched by the path to the houses in the wood. ”

“ Soon we were at the ship in the darkness; we shoved her off in the darkness; we men hoisted the mended sail in the darkness; we heard the water begin to sound under our sides, then—a faint roll of thunder from far away, a long flicker of light across the sky. We saw my lord standing alone on the hind-deck, the beach, the lights of the hall—the lightning gone, and we heard the water rushing around our bow in the darkness. ”

“ The smoke comes down; again they come. The fight closes in again the struggling forms striking over the table, I catch dim sight of swift grey shapes and the flashing of swords high in the air. Our men are panting like bulls; I hear the straining of their leather coats as they lean, striking into the mist. Bodies of men come shocking against the table; there is roaring, and trampling of feet, and banging and clashing of armour, and breaking of wood, and the sound of Lord Snorē’s axe falling regularly comes through the darkness. ”

“ My lord was silent. It was not at noon the next day but toward the dusk when the darkening trees began to seem familiar, and the coast-line stretched in remembered curves, and the ripples along the icy beach seemed home-like. In the dusk, as we plodded crouching behind a drift of snow that ran along the hillside, there rose before us something gaunt and white and very tall and very still in the valley below us, and we stopped, for we saw it was a building: it seemed a keep of the old days that they build no more now. ”

“ The mast bends, the bows shoot the spray up into the winds, where it is whirled away before us. The water hisses; the wind moans and sings; and the ship is full of the rattle of the oars along the benches. [120]
It is evening. The moving sky is as black as the water between the foam-streaks, by which we rush; through a vapour-veiled hole, dimly, the pale sun is going down. Men shout to each other in the dark, and the water splashes in waves along the benches. My lord gives orders for the sail to be rolled fast and that all men shall come off the fore-deck. ”

“ One day, when the noon held all the fields in stillness and the little singing things were silent in the grass, I walked—for the day was too warm to work in the mid-day—slowly, along one of the forest paths, just shut off from the glare of the sun in the open by a screen of trees whose leaves hung still in the silence. Then, far before me, I saw at the end of the path two figures, and stopped, I do not know why. I saw who the figures were—my own lord and Hilda, the betrothed of his friend. ”

“ It is morning again, and the clouds rolling and flying in jagged flags in the wind, are broken at sunrise, and the wind sings now, not roars.
The ship shows, a bare-sided, dripping, unfamiliar thing beneath the morning light; full of wreckage and ropes, the sail lying, and the yard gone, the bunch of ropes at the top of the mast. The pale men that have ceased to laugh now, untie themselves from the bulwarks and creep stiffly forward to the food-chest. ”

“ While they were binding his hand, I crept to the bulwark, and raising a shield between my head and the cliffs, looked past the stern of the ship at the white waters that reached for us, and the brown arms that opened to us, and I thought of the suffocation of the sea and of its indifference in its anger, and of its beautiful white carelessness, as I went down—down—down—to the bottom-most seaweeds, where the eyeless cold things crawl. ”

“ Though my hall stood far to the west on the main, where even the sight of the sand-hills could be found from the highest tower, yet there were trees and gardens on the other side, and paths ran down to little ponds, and cattle browsed over rich uplands and sheep grew fat. There were sixty men in my hall; heavy men and slow, but slow to change, and as their fathers leant before them, so they leant also from the worn castle windows, and the window-sills were smooth with the rubbing of their elbows. ”

“ The man next to me leans back suddenly just as my bow twangs; arrows strike into the bulwarks.
Fierce faces and bent bows send their sound of shouting and twanging at us over the close side of the enemies’ ship. We thrust with our oars that slip along the timbers; the arrows sing and streak past, their long feathers grey like storks.
Then the ship by us turns off into the fog with a dash of oars that sends the white spray flashing for a moment; it is a shadowy form in the mist; a tall brown thing disappears beside it; we are alone on the smooth water with the ship we have come to help. ”

“ The last of the smoke rolls around under the roof, the walls rock with the reverberation, and the sounds of our voices [33] calling to one another are lost in the echoes. The hall heaves, the sounds die, going out with the smoke under the roof; and the pale light of the daybreak falls through the long windows. The candles gutter and go out, falling down from the walls, from the burned-out spikes. We stumble over the table, on, over the broken benches, and over the bodies.
It was a good fight, O king, when Lord Snorē swept his hall! ”

“ Then I went up to Him slowly, and whispering to Him, “I was the husband of Elsa, and you broke my life when you were young, and now that you are old and I am dead, I shall kill you here where the wolves stand”; and with that, lightly, that I might not strike Him down, I hit Him on the cheek.
For an instant He stared at me, one side of His face white as the other grew crimson, and His old eyes flashed for a moment, and His shoulders squared themselves; but His arms, after one quick motion, hung still at His sides, and I heard Him murmur again, “I will not fight!” ”

“ Stooping, I put my hand over its mouth and over its fat chest. There was a drawing up of legs and something like a laugh, deep in the throat. Then Father Peter died.
The snow chunked under our weary feet and our staffs were useless in the thaw, and ever behind, when the wind was still, and when there were no pines near us to whisper as of safety, we could hear the sound of the horses, and we would look at each other and step higher, and take longer strides for a few yards. ”

“ They run along the table striking. The smoke comes in my eyes, and the forms grow dim.
Now they go back leaving us, and a tall man dressed in strange armour, breaks through them, and stands, banging his leg with his sword.
“I am Swend, kinsman of Rudolf of Lolland; and I came and found his hall ashes. Say, dost thou think that a ship [28] with the dragon beheaded, can sail where it will and no man be the wiser? And who was it, think you, that drove your ship—laughing?” And he stood, snarling and digging the floor with his sword-point, like a wolf in his anger. ”

“ Now began to come wounded men in pairs, stumbling groaningly over the side, and soon with these began to come back other men out of the darkness, unwounded, but bloody enough, and these waited in a little crowd outside the ship panting, and wiping the sweat from their foreheads, and leaving the prints of their hands on the planks where we found them next morning. And, last, with a little knot of unwounded men around him, came Lord Snorē walking heavily, swinging his axe, with the blood dripping from his shaggy foretop and from the ends of his hands. ”

“ The [78] women lifted a great cauldron on to the fire, that glowed like some sprites’ cauldron of black-art; it held fowls and green things floating in the midst, the gravy sizzling at the sides. Then the old woman who had lit the fire went to the doorway and took down a great sea-shell that hung there and she blew a hateful blast that broke the very air, and all the men came trooping to their meat.
That morn was the holy morn of Easter, and Cefron came to share our meat, his elbow sideways over Heinrick’s shoulder. ”

“ Suddenly, from behind a point of jutting woods round which the fjord ran curving, grew and took shape a something long that the sun shining on made painful for the eyes—a long, low something that, curving in again, glided between me and the dark green point of trees. It was the ship! The young lord sat up on the grass, and putting his hand on the carcasses of the deer, rose to his feet. “It moves too slowly,” he said. ”

“ Thus the evening passed, and the men went home to their beds early, save for a few who sat down with made-up indifference and talked, while their beer-mugs stood on the benches till they grew warm in the firelight.
So the next six days we worked and made ready, hewing and smoothing new oars, and whetting our knives on the grind-stone; and at sunrise on the sixth day, with a long crowd of men and women on the strand and the rain pouring down out of the misty brown sky, we hauled our ship down the beach and setting ourselves in our places rowed splashingly away from the castle ”

“ A crowd of men struggling and falling over each other against the great door; the flashing of armour, swords thrown in the air, clenched hands raised and falling, the end of the hall full of tumult of arms and legs and bodies, as the men rush and surge over each other against the outlet. ”

“ After dinner they called on my lord for a song. He took down his harp from where it hung on the back of his chair, and striking it three times—I remember all these small things—bent his head for a moment as if listening. Then turning, and facing down the hall, he lifts his head; and, playing softly, his voice rings out in a love song, that brings the tears into the eyes of the women by the fire in a moment. As it rises, it wakes even us men—what was that? ”

“ I and another swing on the steering-oar, and the men run along the decks with glad faces.
It is afternoon. The ship lies on her side; the flying water runs over as it goes by. Dark clouds have come out of the east, and are streaked from their low-lying bank in long streamers along the sky. ”