“_Once must every man die_”
—Northern saying.
It was a radiant earth that kindled into color with the coming of the
light. Dipping from a hill-top into a little valley abrim with the
yellow of hickory buds and the new green of maples and the red-and-pink
of budding oak leaves, the girl on the roan horse spoke dreamily:
“Once you told me that trees put on their brightest hues in the autumn
as warriors go bravest clad to battle. Now it seems to me as if the
spring world had put on its showiest garments to welcome you and me to a
new life.”
“May that become a true omen!” the man who rode behind her responded
absently.
To turn and scan from under his hand the country they had passed over,
he had drawn rein upon the crest. On the gray anxiety of his face
confidence dawned as slowly as rosy day upon gray night.
Smiling, the girl looked around at him. “What are you doing back there
where I cannot see you, my friend? Since daybreak have you made me go
first, even when the path was broad enough for two. What masterfulness
is that for a man but six hours wed!”
“It must be looked for that a man would be tempted to make the trial of
mastering you,” he answered as lightly as he could. “What I am doing
back here is to watch the haughtiness of your head making derision of
your thrall-garb.”
“I think thorns are making derision of the fine wedding clothes I sewed
for you,” she laughed. “It was quite another place that I expected you
would wear them in. Yet it pleases me also that you should go fine while
I go plain, for in the realm of the forest are you not lord and I the
most lowly of followers? Saw you ever a raw man newly come to the
body-guard that bent his neck better to orders?”
A note of laughter was silvering her voice, but passionate earnestness
was in his as he spurred abreast of her and leaned over to murmur at her
ear:
“Never did woman so stoop to man since the Valkyria came down to Sigurd!
How ill do I deserve such love who doubted that love!”
The smile with which she had welcomed him deepened into laughter as
tender as the murmur of the brook flowing beside them. “My dear one, if
you but knew how warm it lies at my heart—my victory over your doubt!
For the first time, I feel myself worthy of your love.”
She pressed her face to his, and so they rode a while, cheek to cheek.
His arm tightened around her with feeling how she drooped against him in
the weariness she was too proud to own. He said under his breath:
“I would give all I hope to possess in the world to spare you this. My
one fear is that you will come to repent the choice you have made.”
She said without lifting her drooping lids: “Freya came to Rolf over the
bodies of slaughtered kin, yet she did not repent it; and between you
and me there is no shadow.”
He was thankful then that her eyes were closed. Before she could open
them and catch the dread which he felt drawing at his mouth, he had made
the narrowing of the trail an excuse to draw away and rein back to his
post in the rear.
Narrowing to a thread between leaf-walls, the trail wound through a
copse of thorn-trees in blossom. The blending of her kirtle with their
woolly branches seemed to give Brynhild’s thoughts a new turn. Over her
shoulder, she opened conversation again:
“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.