Part 3

"If this black-haired thrall is guilty of aught then am I, for I too say, 'If Sigurd was Jarl only because of his strength,' another than he might lead us in battle. Every man has two strong arms. So strong arms are many, but wise heads are few."

Now this was a good word, and Sigurd was well pleased, as indeed he ought to have been, for it was a great compliment to himself. But it seemed to him that it would be well for him to say next a word which might show that he was worthy of such praise. So, after he had thought a while, he said,

"Ulf goes free. He has done no wrong. Thorold should learn that a warrior who does not think as well as strike is good only for rowing. Now, this is my word to thee and to all my small people. Jarl Swend well says that strong arms are plenty, but heads to plan are few. Let us raise up more good heads. Twelve moons from now I will call you together. On that day the boy who brings to me the most wonderful thing which he has made with his own hands, planned out by himself, shall receive a prize worthy of a jarl's giving."

He paused, and looked thoughtfully at Edith Fairhair's eager face. Then he said,

"If the girls wish to try it like their brothers, they too shall have a prize of their own to win. And those who do not win it will yet be none the worse for trying."

Then Jarl Swend laughed as he looked at Sigurd, and said,

"Truly, it is not for nothing that men call thee Sigurd the Wise; now I see why the young men who sail their longships from your vik are luckier than other men." And Sigurd was satisfied.

But when all the other lads had gone, and the sunset flush had faded into grey, Ulf lingered, then went up to the high seat, and said, boldly,

"Jarl Sigurd, thrall am I, yet a chief's son also. Is the offer open to me?"

Sigurd looked at a scar on his arm and laughed. Then he nodded kindly, and said,

"Thrall thou art, and a chief's son also. Win thou the prize and thrall art thou no longer."

Then Ulf took a long, long look at the Jarl, a look which somehow included Edith Fairhair also, and went away.

SPARK V.

HOW THE STAR FLEW INTO MANY PIECES, AND WHAT CAME OF IT.

What a glorious thing it is to be young and full of life! Ulf went out of the long hall so delighted that he hardly knew whether his feet did not have wings; and he went straight to the shore of the vik, climbed up into one of the longships, made his way to the lofty prow and sat down to think it over. That prow curved upward and over like a great swan's neck, with a dragon's head carved on the end, and he noted with curious eyes how here and there could be seen a splintered scar and in it perhaps still the arrow-head that made it. He dug one out and looked at it, with a sniff of contempt. He knew he could make a better one himself. He did not know that that arrow-head was made in a faraway island, called Britain, where traders went to buy tin. British arrow-heads have been great travellers.

The sight of the weapon, however, and the hole it had made gave Ulf just the tail-end of an idea! He began to think, oh, so hard!--to think and to plan.

Up in a sheltered corner lay the Iron Star, just where it first had been flung down by its weary-armed bearers on the day when it reached the vik. Ulf's first free act had been to arrange a few bits of bark over it to keep it from the weather; and, being out of sight, of course it was forgotten. But Ulf remembered! That Star had always been the good fortune of his family. Could it not help him now? So he sat and planned, till the grey gulls ceased their restless circling over the waters of the fjord and went to rest. But while he thought his hardest, still through it all he seemed to hear, like a golden hum woven in and out of the fabric of his dreamsong of freedom, the voice of Edith Fairhair.

Of course the young folks of the vik were all in a thrill of excitement. Such planning, and telling of plans, and not a little boasting! But Ulf the Silent watched the sheep and kept apart. One night, however, when the men were leaping, wrestling and trying other feats, Thorolf the Strong had beaten many, when Ulf suddenly said,

"One thing, Thorolf, I would like to see done. Under yonder bark lies a black stone. I do not think the man lives who can break it with one blow of a hammer."

This he said craftily, for he did not know just what spirit might be angered by the blow, and if evil came of it, it was better that it came to the captor than the captive.

"Behold the man now!" said Thorolf, loudly, and kicked away the bark, then looked foolish as he saw the Star, while all the men around sat down and laughed. But Thorolf brought a hammer and struck a great blow. Sparks flew, and that was all, except that Ulf caught his breath and winked. He really could not help it that first time, and felt very much ashamed. Fortunately, every one was laughing at Thorolf and did not see him. That strong man tried again, with as little result, and all laughed harder, even Jarl Sigurd.

This was more than Thorolf could stand. Rushing to a smithy he brought back the largest hammer in it, swung it twice round his head, then brought it down with a crash on one of the many lumps that studded the Star; and this time he broke it clean off. Again and again he struck, furiously angry, breaking off lump after lump, and when the laughter became cheers he flung down the mallet and was well pleased when the Jarl said,

"By the Hammer of Thor! Thorolf the Strong is well named!"

But Ulf was still more pleased; and when all had gone away he stored in a safe place all the bits of the Star which had been broken off--to tell the truth, when Thorolf ended little was left of it but bits.

From that time on, Ulf spent all his spare time in the smithy. It was not regularly in use at that period, and few cared to ask what he was doing. Now and then a boy looked in, but all he saw was that Ulf was forging the bits of iron into slender spindles and had a heap already done. Such spindles made good fish-hooks, when bent and pointed, and they were well content when he gave them one or two. Much of his time while sheep-watching he was busy also; and one day Edith Fairhair found he had not forgotten her. She came running to the Jarl to show him a great treasure.

Sigurd looked it over curiously. It was the long shank bone of an ox, polished till it was as white as ivory, and carved in quaint patterns. Then on one side two figures were scratched in quite skilfully; one evidently a captive holding out chained hands, the other a girl holding up a knife. On the other side were the same figures, but the chain had been cut in two. Something rattled within the bone, and taking out a pretty stopper the Jarl let fall in his lap five slender, shining rods of steel, so beautifully round and smooth and glistening that he cried,

"Well done, Ulf! When the year is ended I think none other will surpass this."

And, indeed, in all the village round the vik there was not another such a set of knitting needles.

But Ulf the Silent looked fearlessly up at Sigurd and said,

"Needles are women's tools. The son of a chief is worth a greater price than that."

And Jarl Sigurd as he looked at him could think of nothing but of how in his own young days he had caught a baby falcon, and of the scratchy time he had in taming it. Yet, when he had taught it to love him in its own fierce fashion, not one of his other good things pleased him so well as his hawk. Perhaps here was another hawk as well worth training.

As for Edith, she hugged her new gift over and over again; she was as delighted a girl as ever stood on one foot because she was too happy to stand on two, and finally off she rushed to show her treasure to her mother.

She had dreams of prizes, too! Out in the flock there was a white sheep which she called hers, since she had brought it up as a lamb when its mother would not own it, as is sometimes the way with sheep-- silly things! It was shearing-time now and she wanted that wool.

Sheep-shearing is not an easy thing for a girl to do. But she got Ulf to wash the animal under a near-by water-fall, and to tie its feet, and after about a day of it she sheared it quite nicely; but it would be hard to say whether the sheep or Edith was the more weary of it when the task was done. She could say how she felt, and spoke her small mind about it with great freedom. As for the sheep, it gave a bleat, a skip, and went off with a great tail-wagging, and would not come near Edith Fairhair for a week, which is a long time for a sheep to remember.

Meanwhile, Edith had the wool.

What a snowy, fleecy pile it made, to be sure! And what fun it was to take up a handful of it, roll it into a string between her fingers, then twist one end of it around a spindle which she would throw out in the air with a twirl that would make it spin. Of course this would twist the wool into a thread, fine or large, according to whether the spindle was twirled strongly or not.

All the ladies that Edith Fairhair ever saw had just such spindles and used them, too. Her mother had one of pure gold, which had been made for a queen, and which the Jarl had brought from a far country; and in the long winter evenings, when the storm howled without, and the huge logs were piled on the fire, it was a beautiful thing to see the little flashing darts flying out from the white hands toward the darkness, each held by a white cord; and foot by foot, as the strong yarn grew in length, it would be wound for safe keeping around the little cross on the large end of the spindle until it would quite hide it from sight. Then a slender stick would be bent up like a "U" and tied so; and the yarn would be wound around the two arms in long loops, all ready to be dipped in dye to colour it. If any one wanted still finer thread, they could take this yarn and spin it still more, and with stronger fingers.

Edith Fairhair's spindle was made out of a bit of that wonderful Star. Ulf made it, and gave it to her in his silent, boyish way. Many and many a yard of warm, thick yarn she had spun with it before the early winter came. Then came out the precious knitting needles; and really it seemed as though there was magic in them, so all the women said. The yarn slipped along them so smoothly, never catching and only now and then dropping stitches! Altogether, it was a very happy winter, and a very busy one for Edith Fairhair; and if her mother helped her now and then over the hard places, what then? Is not that what mothers are for, and what they love to do? Still, the most of the great work Edith did herself. She only asked to be shown how, and very contentedly did the rest.

Then, winter was the time for weaving. This Edith could not do, as yet. She was not quite strong enough. One had to sit in a frame that had a row of threads stretched across it, with another row running the same way but so fastened that at one end they could be either raised up above the level of the first row or dropped beneath it. Sitting at the tied end her mother would throw a little wooden boat skimming between the two sets of threads, from one side to the other, the boat being laden with a spool of yarn and dragging a thread behind it. When the boat reached the other side, the thread would be drawn tight. Then with the foot in a strap the loose bar would be drawn down, taking one set of threads with it, and there would be the boat's thread caught as in a trap. Then the boat would come flashing back on its return voyage, up would go the bar again, and that thread would be fast, too, just as the other was; and so the cloth would grow, by just the width of the boat-thread, with each trip.

It was slow work, to be sure; but then, one had plenty of time. Then, too, it was such pretty work! One could have several little boats, each laden with a differently coloured thread. By using two at a time, going opposite ways, the cloth would have a "pepper-and-salt" mixture of colour, as we call it now; or by using one for a time and then the other, it would make broad stripes of colour, which was thought very fine. Yet, after all, Edith Fairhair thought nothing could be prettier than pure white--if only it was kept white. But, white or coloured, she never tired watching the flying shuttles, as we call the little boats to-day.

Meanwhile, all through the winter, merrily rang the smithy with clink of hammer on heated steel. After that gift to Edith the Jarl told Ulf he might take all the time he needed for his freedom-work; and he took it. Pounds of steel needles had been made and stored away. He had tried to remember all he ever heard about how to temper them, and he already had learned to watch the glowing steel slowly change its colour from dazzling white as it cooled to rose red, and at just the right moment to plunge it into water. But he only tried it on one or two bits, as yet, just to make sure he was right; and these utterly astonished him by their hardness. No iron that he had ever seen was like it. Of course he laid it all to the magic of the Star, as many a warrior did in after years, not knowing that in that kind of iron there is often a small mixture of nickel, such as our five-cent piece is made of, and that steel made from such a mixture is harder and tougher than any other kind. Bicycle-makers have found this out for themselves, and know the reason of the toughness, but it was a great mystery to Ulf.

It made him very happy, however; and blithely clinked his small hammer as he worked away, weaving a strange kind of cloth that was not made of soft wool, nor was it woven in a loom with flashing shuttle. Instead, inch by inch of it, as it grew, was thrust into the glowing coals and heated; first in the shape of slender steel needles, which were cut off and twisted into tiny rings, dozens of them; then these were hooked into each other, ring into ring, and hammered while still hot till each was solid, and as though it had never been straight in its life or anything else but a ring, without beginning or end. Then came the great thing--the tempering. How anxiously he watched it! How carefully he blew the fire as the strip of iron cloth lay in the coals! Then what a hissing it made and what a shout of triumph Ulf gave when at last the perfect temper was reached and the strip was bubbling the water! Many such strips lay piled in a dry place before spring came, and with it the time for joining them all together.

It was a great day for the young folks of the vik when the contest was to be decided. Half-a-dozen longships of other jarls happened to be in port at the time and Jarl Sigurd was not sorry to let his visitors see what his young people could do. Wonderfully well made were many of the trials. One boy showed a bow of two great horns joined together, which only Thorolf the Strong could bend. Another showed an oxhorn, with the tip cut off and ornamented, and the whole horn carved in spiral grooves; and raising it to his lips he blew a blast that could be heard a mile! There seemed to be as many different things as there were boys and girls to make them; and Jarl Sigurd was pleased indeed when the other jarls with one voice said that among the works of the girls the finest and most useful of all was a snow-white garment like a knitted jersey, made from the sheep's wool by Edith Fairhair. How her cheeks glowed bright red, and how bright her eyes shone, when she had to wear it before them and say who made it! What was the value of the prize compared with the look her father gave her! yet, those bracelets were of pure gold, and came from far across the seas.

"But where is Ulf?" said Sigurd, suddenly. "The lad is proud, and I hope he has not failed."

"My thrall does not fail in what he tries to do!" said Edith, and the jarls all laughed, save Sigurd, who shook his head with smiling reproof, saying,

"The thrall waits till after the freeman, and that is well. Now, some one call him."

Then Ulf the Silent stepped forward from behind the throng, and laid before the jarls a package that was carefully wrapped in deerskin. It gave a soft, musical tinkle as he laid it down and vanished in the throng again. With laughter Jarl Sigurd stooped forward, saying,

"The lad was braver when he sent an arrow through my arm than he is to-day," and untied the package. "It is not light, jarls. What!--by Thor and Odin, and all the gods of Valhalla! when did man ever see the like?"

Oh, what a rare sight it was!--thousands of tiny rings of steel, cunningly woven together by the hand of one whose father and whose father's father had worked in metal, and who had taught him all they knew! The light rippled across the folds in flashes like molten silver; the loose links along the edges rang like fairy bells, and not one jarl in all his travels had ever seen a more beautiful shirt of mail. A king of kings might be proud to wear it. Yet it was made by Jarl Sigurd's thrall!

"No! by Tyr, thrall is he no longer! Stand forward, Ulf. Choose thou; wilt go back to the Forest? If so, I will send thee with a guard of honour. Wilt stay in my household? Then thou art as my son, and in days to come a longship will I give thee to command."

Then Ulf the Silent, with a sidelong look at Edith Fairhair, said, "I thank thee, Jarl; at the vik I choose to stay." And great was the laughter and applause.

But when the strangers had sailed away, Jarl Sigurd brought out that shirt of mail and tried it on, but found it all too small for him, and said,

"Thou crafty one! Tell me, didst make this small that thou mayst the younger hope to wear it?"

Then Ulf broke silence, and told the wondering Jarl the story of the Star, as far as he knew it, and how, as a family matter, it appeared to be better that Ulf alone should own the mail; to which the Jarl shudderingly agreed, for, brave though he was, he feared witchcraft. Then Ulf set the mail on a post and bade Thorolf the Strong send a spear through it if he could.

Scornfully the giant hurled a javelin at the mark, and gasped as it fell shivered like glass at the foot of the post. On the armour, not a scar!

"It is dwarf-worked; elves did it!" he cried. And for a like reason many a sword and suit of armour has been thought to be made by magic by men who did not know of nickel steel.

But not all of the Star was used in that suit of armour. Some of it Ulf kept for sword and battle-axe. Some of it went to gentler uses, and some of it in the shape of harpstrings in other days sang a song of liberty to a captive king. But no braver sight the vik ever saw than the one when out through the black wolf's-mouth of massive cliffs one morning a swift longship sped, with the early wind rounding the great sail and helping the rowers with their oars. A line of shields hung along each side, helmeted heads gleamed here and there, and high in the stern the rising sun made a form shine like a statue of silver flame as he waved farewell to those on shore, who cheerily waved and shouted farewells back again. Jarl Sigurd was now too old to take the seas; and Edith Fairhair--was still Edith Fairhair. Ulf the Silent had still his fame to win. But she knew that he would win it.

SPARK VI.

HOW FRAGMENTS OF THE STAR TRAVELLED TO A FAR COUNTRY.

Ulf still had a name to win; but what a glorious thing it was to stand there in the stern of that swift craft and feel it quiver with life beneath him in response to the rhythmic stroke of the oarsmen, as it surged through the heaving water. Brightly the sunlight leaped along the sea. Snow-white was the foam that flashed upward underneath the curving prow, and now and then jetted high enough to come hissing inboard on the wind when the fitful gusts shifted to the rightabout. The men laughed, and carelessly shook the drops from their broad backs when it splashed among them.

What a hardy set of men they were, those Northmen of old! They had no compass; they must steer by the sun, or by the stars, guess at their rate of sailing and tell by that how many more days distant was their destination. If the weather was fine, well. But if the sky clouded over, and sun nor star was seen for a week or more, while the wind veered at its own will, the chances were more than even that they would bring up on some coast where they had never been, with water and food to get, and perhaps every headland bristling with hostile spears. All this they knew, yet out to sea they went as happily as a fisherman seeks his nets. Trading, starving, fighting, plundering,--it was all one to them. On the whole, they seemed to like fighting the best of all, since that is what their sagas told most about.

But Ulf was not by birth a Northman. Yet a rover by nature was he, and chief of all things that he most desired was to explore strange lands, and especially what lay beyond where the sky dipped downward and seemed to meet the sea. Ships came from thence, now and then; ships had gone thence, as he knew, and some had never come back, but perhaps were sailing still from land to land, through the great unknown.

For weeks his ship sailed onward, over a lonely ocean. Now and then the misty fountain sprung upward from the waves where a whale was "blowing," with gulls hovering in the air above his glistening black back. There were more gulls then than now, and more whales also, and often the men would finger their lances wistfully and look with inquiring eyes at their youthful captain. At another time they would not have looked in vain; indeed, in after days Ulf became somewhat famous even among the men of the fjords for the number of whales he brought in. But now his soul was elsewhere. Even the problem of getting back did not trouble him in the least.

Yet it was one thing to start out a-voyaging, sure of bringing up somewhere if you only went far enough. It is quite another thing to be equally sure of finding the way homeward over the trackless sea, without a landmark from horizon to horizon to steer by for weeks and weeks. What seems a sixth sense is given to some of us--the sense of "direction," which the passenger pigeon has and which enables it to fly straight back to its nest, though set free hundreds of miles from home. When of old a young man had that faculty, the chances were that he would become a famous pilot; and sometimes he might be charged with witchcraft as a penalty for knowing too much! Ulf, a son of the trackless Forest, had that sixth sense.

One morning the dawn-light revealed a black spot on the low horizon. A speck that grew larger, with twinkling, fin-like flashes along each side, and in due time it proved to be a galley like their own bearing down straight for them. Nobody stopped to ask any questions. That was not sea-style then. But just as naturally as two men now in a lonely journey would shake hands on meeting, these two captains slipped their arms through their shield-handles, sheered alongside just beyond oar- tip, and exchanged cards in the shape of a couple of whistling javelins.

Up from their benches sprang the rowers. Twang! sung their war-bows the song of the cord, and the air was full of hissing whispers of Death as their shafts hurtled past. Round and round the two galleys circled in a strange dance, each steersman striving to bring his craft bows on, so as to ram and crush the other, while they lurched in the cross-seas, and rolled till they dipped in tons of water over the rail.