Part 16

“It would not be difficult for me to hide among these trees. For another reason I am pleased with myself for thinking of this disguise. Without it, I should never have been able to pass out of the hall unmarked. For two days now there has been a gray-cloaked beggar hanging around the doorstep,—a fellow too ill-natured to speak even to the women who gave him food, but so prying of eye that I have felt his gaze from under his hat-brim every time I went out or in. Why, even you could not pass last night without arousing his curiosity! He was staring out of the western gate after you, as you and the good father came up the lane towards me—”

“Staring after me?” Curt as man’s to man was the Songsmith’s voice. “And you have not told me of it before!”

She started at the change of tone. Then she said gently:

“I forgot him in—in the other things we spoke of when we met, my friend. And it did not seem in any wise important to me. A wandering beggar could not know you for a prisoner escaped.”

He did not tell her that a suspicion had risen in him that the beggar was not a beggar. He did not tell her anything for a space, but rode staring fixedly between his horse’s ears. Her question was twice repeated before it reached him:

“What harm could spring from it, Randvar?”

He said, slowly, then: “You saw the fellow more than I, though I have seen him twice. Did it ever cross your mind that he might be Olaf, Thorgrim’s son, lying in wait for me when I should come healed out of your bower?”

She cried out in mingled amazement and assent: “Olaf! Then he carried his news straight to the Jarl! Before we had crossed the first hill, guards were spurring after us!”

The whiteness of her face, as she peered back between the flowery branches, brought him out of his musing. Pressing forward, he took the hand she had involuntarily put out.

“Never will Helvin Jarl send guards after me, that I have reason to know for certain. Have faith in my assurance, and no fear.”

To get his eyes away from hers, he bent over her hand and touched it with his lips. Whether or not she read his secret dread that Helvin himself would be the pursuer, he could not tell. She made no other answer than to give back his hand-clasp firmly, then turned and urged her tired horse forward.

Falling on the velvet sod, the hoofs brought forth no sound. With the ceasing of their voices, silence like a great sea closed about them. Whenever it was rippled by the splash of wind in the tops of the pines or by the soft trill of a bird, the song-maker knew a sense of relief. Nerve and sinew, he was strained forward towards the moment when they should have won through this scented and smothering stillness to some elevation from which he could look back over their track.

So gradually the slope arose that he might not have known when they reached the crest if he had not seen the bright head before him beginning to descend, sunlike. His nails sinking into the leather of his saddle from the force with which he gripped it, he turned and looked back.

Nothing to be seen amid the white drifts of the thorn-trees. Nothing among the furry gray willows bordering the brook. His eye leaped on down to the bottom of the hollow, carpeted with the white flowers of wild berry vines,—and leaping, lost a moving dark shape even as they caught it, a moving slinking shape. It might have been a skulking wolf,—and it might have been a man!

The girl riding ahead heard his voice just behind her, speaking with chill quietness:

“As soon as ever you come to that black-budded bush, turn to the left. I remember that a trail begins there. It does not matter where it leads to. It is not a beaten track; hood your head and bend low, if twigs catch at you.”

If she wondered why he did not go first to break the road, she did not say so. “Yes,” she answered as quietly as he had spoken, and obeyed him as she answered.

Even before the leaves closed on her bravely carried head, his eyes had lost her through the mist that gathered in them. “For her sake!” his heart cried out a prayer to the old gods and the new. Then he had plunged into the thicket behind her, his hand clinched in agony upon his empty sheath. Riding with one ear set over his shoulder, he still kept on telling himself that it was impossible that it should be a man; that no man without the scent of a beast could have followed their trail, even if human limbs could be strong enough to overtake them.

Because his attention was held so fast by what lay behind them, he gave no heed to the sinister road they were flying over, to its blasted bushes and the bone-white trench of a dead brook that cut again and again across it. He leaped in his saddle at a sharp cry from Brynhild before him.

“Randvar! What place are we coming to?”

So like a bolt it fell upon him that he had pushed into the open after her, and checked his horse beside hers, before he himself realized to what goal the unused trail led. Even then it was not he who put it into words, but she, with her distended eyes upon the pond of murky water in the ring of gray tree-skeletons.

“The Black Pool! Where my father got his death! It is an omen!”

He spoke no word either of denial or of comfort. Throwing himself from his horse, he snatched her from her saddle, half carried, half dragged her to where a pile of bowlders rose like a cairn amid the dead trees. Upon the earth behind it, he pushed her down.

“Hide there!” he told her hoarsely. “Whatever happens, hide there,—and _keep your face covered_! He comes now whom I would die sooner than that you should see.”

The warning came too late. While he was still speaking, he heard the horses behind him snort and run, saw her eyes flash past him. With a shrill cry, she staggered from her knees to her feet and stood as one frozen there, one rigid arm thrust out in pointing. As an echo to her cry came from the blasted bushes of the trail a note of low laughter, deepening suddenly to a throaty gurgle that was of neither man nor beast.

To that whirlpool of horror, the Songsmith’s mind was drawn in. Reeling with its madness, he plunged forward, bruising his fists on the trees in the effort to rouse himself out of it, dashing his hands against his eyes to break the spell of that blind dizziness. As through rents in a veil of blindness, he saw Starkad’s son creeping towards them, saw wolf eyes glaring above a frothing mouth. With a final despairing effort, he brought his fist down where the jagged stump of a branch stuck out before him; and pain broke the spell. The strength of desperation on him, he leaped forward and closed with the rearing form.

But even as they grappled, the curse-ridden man sought to free himself, loosing a sudden cry that was half a pealing laugh and half the bark of a wolf. Hurling the song-maker from him upon the earth, he was gone on a bound to some dearer prey beyond.

Struggling to his elbow, Randvar stared after him. Among the trees beside the black water had come in sight a horseman wearing the gray cloak of a beggar but the livid face of Olaf the French,—livid, sweating, from the haste with which he was spurring Towerward by the only path he knew. Now creeping, now bounding, the madman had reached him. Springing upon him with outflung claw-barbed hands, he had dragged him fighting from his saddle and flung him upon the ground. Snarling, he dropped upon him and buried his teeth in the upturned throat. An instant of gurgling gasping noises, and he was up and gone into the forest, sounding his terrible cry; and Olaf lay dead even as Starkad Jarl had died, from the fangs of the demon wolf that was the Other Shape of Starkad’s son.

XXIV

“_He is happy who gets himself fame while living_” —Northern saying.

It was two Norse weeks after the death of Olaf, and it was nearly two-score miles south of the Black Pool. Filtering through the dark forest, a long ray of sun lay on Freya’s Tower and revealed it as a sanctuary embattled. Here, from the lengthening shadows, the bright beam picked out a circle of shaggy deerskin-clad foresters hammering arrow-heads at a forge made of bowlders. There, in touching the earth, the slanting ray touched another brawny group squatted at knife-sharpening. Yonder, the light streaming golden down a tree-aisle broke over a deerskin-garbed sentinel pacing to and fro. Now the murmur of blended heavy voices and heavier laughter swelled like the noise of the breakers,—until some one’s exuberance betrayed him into a burst of over-facetious song, when he was silenced by nudges and missiles and thumbs pointing Towerward. Now the lull that followed was broken by scattered hails and chaff, as a Skraelling burdened with a double string of glistening fish came like a shadow up the path of sunshine.

Making his way gravely between the jovial groups, the red man gravely evaded the jesting hands stretched out towards his treasure, and stalked on to the Tower. At the foot of one of the gray columns, he lowered the silvery mass to the earth and stood awaiting a chance for speech with his white brother’s new wife.

In the dim ground-room there was the flutter of a blue robe—the glint of red-gold hair—and she had appeared in one of the rude archways. Against its gray gloom, the glowing beauty of her face was like a fire; while the stark pillars were a foil for her body’s soft and flowing curves. Without speaking, the savage stood gazing at her,—even as every woodsman within eyeshot had stopped short in speech or work to gaze. It was she who spoke, composedly, giving him thanks for his gift, then went and poured him a horn of wild-grape wine and brought it to him.

Even while his mouth busied itself with the drink, his eyes stared at her over the silver rim. But as he gave the horn back, he spoke in broken Norse:

“Say to the white chief that the men of the stone-axe race have set up their houses around him. Say to him that they turn their weapons whither he points. Say to him that they will bring him the white sachem’s red scalp whenever he gives the sign.”

The hand of the white sachem’s sister made a convulsive movement that lost her the horn, but her brave gray eyes continued to meet his steadily.

“I will tell him,” she answered. “His heart will be thankful towards his friends.”

Though his face remained set in her direction, the Skraelling turned the rest of him and moved away as he had come, until his dusky shape was lost in the dusky wood.

Gazing after him with unseeing eyes, she stayed a moment in the archway, while—mute and motionless as so many bowlders—the foresters stayed gazing furtively at her. Then a curly-headed boy in a page’s ragged dress of blue came out of the Tower and broke in upon her thoughts, as he bent to pick up the forgotten cup.

“How clumsy in their manners such creatures must look to you, Jarl’s sister, it is easy for me to understand, for in former days they went against my taste also. But when your experience of life has been as broad as mine has, sooner will you choose their ugly worth than the fair falseness of the Town-people. I say it, though I am hard to please!”

A note of unsteady laughter shook the long breath with which the Jarl’s sister straightened; but her arm lay lightly around the boy’s neck as they went back in-doors, and he expanded under the caress as a bantam that is about to crow.

“It is my wish that you should always lean upon me! I told my mother this noon—when she asked me to fetch you the fowl and the loaf—that it was in my mind to visit you as often as I could find time. And I told her that I meant always to wear these fine clothes so that you should feel at home with me, and not feel that I had grown savage and terrible like the others around you. And perhaps it will also help you to lose it out of your thoughts for a while that you are poor, with no one to wait on you.”

Though she laughed again, the sound was more soft than a caress.

“Poor?” she repeated. “Listen, little Viking! Once I was poor, when I thought there was no more to the world than the few hedged roads I knew, and my life was but an empty round that others marked out for me, and I had nothing but ring-bought gifts to give my friends. But now! Now when each hour some wondrous path undreamed of is opened to me—Now that my life is a fabric I weave myself till from the roots of my hair to the soles of my feet I thrill with the joy of the work—Now that my breast is so full of love that ofttimes it aches with the burden and yearns for a worldful of folk to lavish it upon—”

Her ecstasy mounted higher than her words could follow. While it soared, she stood silent. When, because it was of earth, it sank again earthward, she spoke under her breath:

“Only shall I be poor, Eric, if the Fates take from me the man who has wrought this change in my nature. If it happen to him to meet with—with my kin—some day—and the same overtake him that overtook Olaf—”

Her hand gripped the boy’s shoulder so that he would have cried out if he had not guessed from the whitening of her lips how much harder Dread was clutching at her heart. Gritting his teeth, he supported her manfully.

“There is no man like Randvar in all the new lands,” he panted, “and I would fight for none as I would fight for him.”

Loosening their hold, the fingers rose and swept his cheek fondly, and the Jarl’s sister moved away and bent over the smouldering fire to stir it. Though she did not turn again, her voice came to him with its wonted gracious composure.

“Have thanks for your friendship, little friend! And give my thanks to your mother for her good gifts; and tell her that if she does not come oftener to visit me I shall take it as a sign that because she has gone to live in Snowfrid’s booth, she feels that I have crowded her out of her home. Will you bear that in mind?”

For the fourth time since he had begun to think of tearing himself away, Eric picked up his feathered blue cap.

“Naught shall be forgotten, Jarl’s sister,” he reassured her. “And now I fear that I must in truth take leave of you. With Bolverk so often away on hunts, I find that the wants of Snowfrid and my mother put not a little care on my shoulders; and my intention is that they shall never lack for anything now that I have come home to take care of them. Jarl’s sister, I bid you farewell until to-morrow.”

The purpose of the plumed cap became apparent as by its aid he added elaborate flourishes to his bow. Then fixing the bauble upon his curly head, he went away hurriedly, as became one weighted with responsibility; and as became one torn between love and fear, the Jarl’s sister went up the ladder-like stairs with a hand pressed to her heart, and crossing the strange little fur-hung bower, dropped down beside Freya’s window to watch as Freya before her had watched.

Higher and higher slanted the long rays, until only the tree-tops knew their golden glory. The horizon became as a band of red fire behind the black net-work of the woods. The lower that fire burned, the farther the great outside world seemed to fall away from the little world of the Tower. As though to make a stand against impending isolation, the foresters drew their circle closer and beaconed it with cheery fires. Over the young wife’s vigil crept a spell of awe, so that though she leaned wide-eyed upon the sill she did not see the one for whom she watched when presently he came up a twilit trail, a spear gleaming on his shoulder, Bolverk’s brawny bulk looming beside him.

It was he who espied her—her bright head like a star hung low in the gloaming—and slackened his pace to stand looking at her.

Following his friend’s gaze, Bolverk spoke with his buoyant laugh: “Small wonder you stare, comrade, at seeing Freya’s ghost filling Freya’s blue kirtle!”

The song-maker roused himself with a deep breath that was like a sigh. When he moved forward again, the springiness was gone from his step.

“Would that I did not see the ghost of Freya whenever I looked at my wife!” he said. “Like goblin-bells they start out of space and clang in my ear, the words Erna spoke that night by the Tower fire,—‘Freya loved Rolf in spite of all, but it was the effort of doing so that wore her out before half her life was lived.’”

A second time Randvar came to a stand-still; and as the sun from the wood, so had the light fled from his face and left it a place of shadowy dread.

“Suppose,” he said, “that my quarrel with—the Jarl—come to no round end one way or the other but, as oftenest happens, drag on and on in uncertainty.... Suppose the Jarl’s sister wearing out year after year between these walls of solitude ... eating into her memory, the murder of her father ... burning into her eyes, the thing we saw at the Pool ... gnawing at her heart, her fear for me.... Suppose it should not be her love that gave way—”

“Nor her life!” Bolverk finished hastily. “Nor her life!”

But the weight did not lift from the Songsmith’s bent shoulders. He said slowly: “When grisly thoughts had dwelt long enough in her brother’s mind, it was not his body that they killed, but his reason.”

Gasping a dread word, Bolverk caught him by the arm. In heavy silence they walked the rest of the distance that lay between them and the cordon of fires.

Giving them greeting and at the same time demanding their news, a score of voices broke in upon their reverie. In a moment, the song-maker was the centre of a cordial group that listened eagerly while he told how the Skraelling chief had received him, and approved boisterously the new trading treaty which the chief had granted to the new colony at the Tower.

“No better pleader than you was Njal of Iceland!” growled the veteran in bearskin. “Next spring we shall send to Nidaros a richer ship than ever sailed from Norumbega; and no less a man than you shall stand by the steering-oar.”

“Yes! Yes!” the chorus gave jovial approbation, and made a jesting onslaught as though they would have raised him to their shoulders. But his expression grew in grimness as he motioned them back.

“A ship that had a corpse on board would get better luck than one that had me at the steering-oar,” he said. “I have told you without deceit that I stand so with most Northmen that my name and the word traitor has the same meaning. Never make the mistake of thinking that I shall let you put me forward where I should draw down hatred and failure on your heads. When you have lent me your weapons to guard my wife, you have done me as great a service as a man can do another, and I have reaped all the good of your love that I can bear. Never can I repay you as it is!”

He broke off abruptly. Perhaps they were glad that he did not wait for them to answer, but leaving them strode on towards the Tower. Yet it would have been no unworthy response if they had put into words what spoke from their hard faces as they watched him gain the firelit archway and take his young bride in his arms. To search with passionate anxiety the eyes she lifted to his, he held her there, forgetful of all the world beside; while her hands betrayed a passionate eagerness to clasp his hands, to cling to his deerskin-sleeve, to feel him safe and whole.

It may be that when life is at its fullest, the need of words falls away like a husk that is shed. By-and-by when the two had gone in to their rude hearth, tongue-speech grew less and less frequent between them, less and less until—like candle-light into sunshine—it faded into the perfect communion of silence.

Bringing the fowl from its bed in the hot ashes, the bread from its birch basket, the wine from its cask, the young mistress of the Tower moved to and fro in the firelight. Resting on a fur-heaped bench in the shadow, the young master followed her every motion with worshipful eyes. Sometimes, as their gaze met, the gracious gravity of her demeanor sparkled into a moment’s playful mimicry of some pompous servitor they had known in the pageantry of the Jarl’s house, and their laughter, bass and treble, blended in a full chord. Sometimes it was his hand that encountered hers, and closing on it with an inarticulate cry, put it to his lips in place of wine, and pressed it there while for them both Time ceased to be.

And then again, a moment came when for him all jest went out of her service, when to see her waiting before him in Freya’s faded robe of blue was a thing he could not bear. Rising, he took horn and trencher from her hands and flung them aside, and almost roughly placed her on the cushion-heaped bench, and placed himself on the cedar mat at her feet.

“One high-seat you shall have, and one thrall!” he said fiercely; and drawing his harp towards him, he played for her as he had never played for himself nor yet for the Jarl in all the splendor of his feast-hall.

She made but one alteration, stretching out her hand that it might thread his hair as his head leaned against her knee; then with eyes softly closed and lips softly parted, she rested listening.

Floating through Paradise on the wings of the music, she knew nothing of it when the circles of the outlying camp-fires were thrown into commotion as reeds by an incoming wave. Only when Randvar plucked a twanging discord from the harp-strings, and then flung the instrument from him, did she start awake.

One hand stretched behind him to grasp her robe, and one hand thrust across him to clutch his knife-hilt, he had risen to his knee before her. Over his shoulder she saw what he saw—a brass helmet glowing in the firelight where the path gave upon the open, more brass helmets glinting like fire-flies far up the dusk of the trail. Now four figures separated themselves from the throng, and pushing through the wavering rank of foresters, came Towerward,—two figures in dark robes and one wearing the plumed cap of a courtman and one clad in shining mail.

“Mord—and the Shepherd Priest! Gunnar—Visbur!” the Songsmith told them off mechanically.

The arms Brynhild had locked around his neck tightened as she whispered at his ear: “God be praised, Helvin is not there! Love, if they meant us ill, they would not have fetched Gunnar and the Priest, who are our friends.”

But Randvar’s voice was harsh as he loosened her hands that he might rise. “If they mean us well, why do they come with a troop of armed men at their heels?” Never quitting his grip on his hilt, he strode forward and stood a pace beyond his threshold, awaiting them.

Glancing down at her poor attire, it seemed for an instant as though the Jarl’s sister would have shrunk back into the shadow; and then as one would catch up a deserter she caught herself, and holding her head high, moved forward until she stood at her husband’s side.

At sight of the Songsmith, the sentinel of the path cried out earnestly: “We let them through, Rolf’s son, only because they pledged you peace. If they have spoken false—”

He did not finish, but it was not needful that he should. Around the ring of hunters, like the light of a moonbeam, sped the glint of steel. And still beyond that, where wood encompassed the open, there passed of a sudden a noiseless stir, as if from every tree-shadow there had glided a lithe and dusky body. Joining soundlessly as shadows blend, the dark mass drew nearer, until here the firelight was reflected in rows of glittering eyes, there through the gloaming gleamed the pale shapes of stone axes uplifted. It is no shame to the courage of Gunnar the Merry that his handsome face blanched as his glance made the circuit. Mord spoke sternly when they came to a halt before the young master of the Tower.

“What right have you to speak of peacefulness, Randvar, Rolf’s son, that surround yourself with outlaws and savages of the wood, ready to do murder at your bidding?”

Even in the twilight it could be seen how the blood mounted in the Songsmith’s brown face, but there was no wavering in his mouth’s steady line as he answered.