speak in justification. I would tell ye a few things. In that far place
she had seen but few men, only woods and trees and natural things. The
man to whom she was betrothed not against her will--I will be fair--was
little more than these to her in that dreamy place. Slow and dull, he
had nothing to answer in her own-taught beauty. When we came, she did
love me, truly, but in her kindness, she would stay his wife. She had
Freya's soul. Her father's brother liked me. Thus things were when the
night came of our leaving.
"One more--I had never asked her to be not true to her betrothed, so, I
was dreaming, my soul drawn all one way.
"That night when I sang her the love-song--oh ye men of my house, have ye
never done wrong? Are ye sure that the souls within ye would stand firm
while they were pulled with mighty cables? Have ye never had an evil
thought? Have your spirits always been level within ye? Can ye never be
mad, and rock to the torment of it? Do ye understand?
"Well, the music went out of my harp, and tore me--Are ye stone walls,
that ye would not have shaken down like the leaves of trees? I could
have wailed like a child for its mother, or, like a hammer on beams,
crushed a man's head with my hand.
"Are ye more than are men? Have ye never done any ill? I say, I stood
there, dreaming, playing; my soul drew her to me; I stood there playing
the old love-song, in agony. Then there was a noise of voices, and we
went to the ship, and were many days coming home, being becalmed."
He stared straight before him--a wakening came into his face--he on a
sudden raised his hands in the air, and, the shaking fingers widespread,
called through the hall in a strange voice. "Oh great Gods, come!"
We sat silent in the lit hall, and the call died away into silence.
"Shame!" cried a woman's voice; "ye are not men!"
We stirred not even at this reproof from a woman.
"I will go!" cried the voice again, and one of the women who helped in
the cooking stood forward with her great ladle held like a sword.
"Ay, and leave the ladle for the men to manage!" cried a second, a
bare-armed, laughing woman, ranging herself by the other one, and
turning a saucy face on my lord.
"Will ye lend us your swords, stay-at-homes?" called a third from beside
the fire.
"We need not your help to shove the ship off the beach," said a young
girl, haughtily, as she swept forward to the others and looked up at my
lord from her little height.
There was stillness in the hall, while the three women stood looking up
at my lord. Then some of the men got up, and frowning, hesitated, and
then said they would go. Six of them. We others sat silent. The women
fell laughing and pointing at us, and the lights flared merrily.
The next morning we watched the ship hauled down the beach and put out.
And when she passed round the trees going by the shore, we lost her
suddenly.
For months we waited--for a year. She did not come back. Did they find
the hall lost beyond the waters? Did my lord marry the maiden? Or were
they drowned or lost?
I an old man write this now in "justification," as my lord said.
THE LAST VOYAGE
The ceiling was broken through in the corner over our heads, and
clean-tongued splinters pointed downward; the big room was smoky from
the roaring fire, and the table was covered with bottles; around sat
some forty men. We were in our armour, except our head-pieces, for we
had ravaged the country round, and had killed or driven away all living
things. All but one; for the old woman of the house stood even now
grinning in the corner. Round the walls were piled plate and beautiful
armour, such as we had never seen before, and there were gold crosses
and gold pots and chains; yet the men grumbled, till at last one threw
his little cup into the fire and strode heavily to the door. He kicked
it and it tumbled outward on one leathern hinge. The rest of us looked
lazily up. A brown expanse of burnt vinelands, and in the distance a
broken-roofed church and the black walls and chimneys of a few cottages
that looked ugly and lonely and pitiful against the blue depth of the
sky. The thought came into the minds of all of us I think, to leave this
brown path that we had trod free of grass, for our ship lay only one
day's march somewhere westward, and the half of our number again cursed
the lots that they had drawn as they waited; but the old woman, who
always grinned, poured yellow wine into our cups and took the old ones
away, and we drank, and it made us courageous, so that we spent the
evening wrestling by the firelight.
It was just before sunrise that I stirred sleepily and raised myself on
my hands and knees. In a moment I heard clank and clash coming from the
darkness all around me, then silence, but my mind saw grey things that
crept in nearing circles. Ay, grey as sleep, around the house. As I woke
my companions shaking them by their sword-belts, there broke out on the
stillness of the night a loon's cry, from beyond some bushes by a narrow
pond. We were lying outside under the overhanging front roof of the
inn. We crept through the door, our swords in our hands, and each man
hastily buckled on his armour. When we were ready we turned. Before the
fire stood some twelve mail-clad men, with curious helmets and coverings
for their elbows, and their swords were long, reaching from their
shoulders to the floor. We stood looking each other in the face for a
long time, then we backed slowly to the door and out of it, still gazing
at them, into the pale uncertain light of the watery dawn, leaving them
standing there in front of the glowing embers. We stole toward the
narrow path in the growing light, and waited there in the bushes for
sound from the house, our cross-bows strung. At last, as we waited and
watched, a crouching figure ran hastily round the corner of the house to
the doorway. After this we waited for a very long time till the east was
all gold, then suddenly a file of men, in plate to the waist, with long
bows in their hands, stepped forth from the bushes on either side of the
door.
Men who had grown up on these ravaged vinelands, and who had come from
nowhere on vengeance they were; and as they grouped themselves around
the corner of the house a sudden flare of red came through the doorway,
and we could hear the crackling of lit wood from inside. Then there were
shouts from our men in the upper chambers, and we heard their steel
shoes on the stone stairway. There came the clank of steel on steel, and
the steps on the stairway ceased. Now the smoke came from the windows in
the upper chamber, and in a moment we heard a great rush across the
upper floor--a rush that ended in falling bodies, and yells, and the
breaking of wood, and three of our men broke through the doorway. In a
moment they were down, each man with a goose-shaft in him. The bowmen
closed in the doorway, and the house was filled with a roaring as of
bulls, and the clanking as of a thousand anvils in caves; and the flames
poured from the chimney. Now came the old woman who always grinned,
rushing out through the doorway, but as she came, one of the
men-at-arms who stood behind the others raised his bow, and she fell
kicking over the pot-helm of one of our men. Last, came six more of our
men, their clothes singed off outside their armour, and their faces deep
red. They came through the door sideways, their sweaty swords turning in
their hands as they struck, but in a moment they fell also, two by two;
and then the tumult within the house died down, but the flames roared
through the crumbling rafters, and the burning wisps of thatch lit up
the distant poplar tops where the wide road curved in the distance. So
we crept away over the burnt fields, crouching in ditches, with our
swords drawn; we had no water all day, but we passed many cottages where
no one came to the doors to stare at us nor smoke rose from the
chimneys, and there was no waving of yellow grain on the hill-tops. We
passed the bones of a horse, and after, part of the armour of a
man--rough armour--and as the sun sank we passed a woman's head-covering
lying dirty by the road. It was after the dusk, which comes stealing in
these countries, and blinds you from behind, sudden and soft, that we
smelt the sea, and we stumbled forward hastily over a charred hillside.
The ground grew softer as we descended, though now we could see nothing.
Soon we were on level, and our feet sunk in the sand, and we heard a
rustle and a whispering just before us. We ran forward and waded to our
waists in the unseen water. Ah! 'twas good. Then we crept back to the
hillside again, where we lay until morning in a hollow, covered with
dead leaves; and in the morning we were awakened before the sunrise, by
the strong salt wind in our faces, and the lashing of what last night
had been dainty with playfulness. The beach was brown with seaweed cast
up, and the spume of the light waves that broke on the shore retreated
in streamers and circles far out from the land again. The keen wind
whistled on the edges of our armour and sang round us, and we turned our
faces from it, and it blew our long hair into our eyes, stinging us.
Now, we knew that the ship lay somewhat to the north of us, for our
lord had said that she should not pass a certain great rock, round whose
top many gulls circled, but stay to the northward; so we tramped the
heavy sands the gathering wind at our backs, and we stumbled over the
piles of slippery seaweed and passed round the promontory, where was the
Gull Rock. So it came to late in the afternoon and we were very weary,
having had no meat or drink. Yet we kept on in silence, bending as we
pulled our heavy feet from the sucking sand-holes. The spume blew in our
faces now when the waves broke; the beach was narrow, and to our right
were rocks which rose up straight into the air. So, as I say, it came to
late in the afternoon. We were walking, each man in the other's
footsteps, and I, being the largest and having the largest feet, went
first. Suddenly I heard a sharp sound from one of the men in the line,
and turning, I saw that the last man of us was on his hands and knees in
the sand, with his head lowered. I ran to him. Sticking from the side of
his back was a great goose-shaft, the feather and some three inches of
the wood showing; and when I raised him till he came to his knees, I
saw the point coming out at his armpit, for he wore no back-plate. We
laid him on his side under the rocks and waited till he died. It was not
long; he rolled himself as I have seen an acrobat do, talking hastily of
small affairs of our old hall. So we left him on the sand and tramped on
under the rocks. We turned a point where the beach ran out a little and
the great waves reared themselves like angry clouds, on end, and then
another man fell with a sharp sound as of the bird who pecks on the side
of trees. It was a cross-bow bolt that had hit him in the side of the
head. Even as we were turning from him the man next to me gave a sharp
cry and put his hand on my shoulder, and pointing upwards to the heights
above, spoke in a trembling voice, "They have found us." He had a long
arrow shot through his right forearm just above the wrist, where there
was a space between his leather glove and the sleeve of his chain-shirt.
Then we went on, with him cursing and groaning and he pulled off his
glove and emptied the blood on the sand, and it dripped from his fingers
as he plodded along leaning on my shoulder. Then another man fell, this
time quite dead, shot between back and breastplate, for he had no
chain-shirt. Then the four of us, one behind the other hurried cursing
along the narrow beach, catching occasional glimpses as we glanced
upward, of brown and grey figures running, against the torn clouds of
the moving sky. Soon another man fell, shot through the leg and not able
to walk. There was no carrying him, and we could not leave him there,
for there is torture for the sacking of churches and burning of towns
and the razing of homesteads; so we told him this; and he asked us to
lift him and bring him and put him in the edge of the sea where the
white foam would break over him; and we did so and drew back and stood
in silence. In a moment he turned to us, and with a word--"Farewell"!--he
drew his dagger, and as the green of the surf curved over him I saw it
go under his shoulder that he had bared, and when the green of the wave
had changed to the retreating, and whispering spume again, there was
only something dark in the wash of the water. Then we three others left
that place and staggered on over the sucking sands. There was a headland
before us, from which great fragments of rock had fallen and blocked the
beach, and we could hear the sea dashing and roaring and moaning among
the hollows, and see the great waves strike and leap up and scatter in
sunlit spray. When we saw this bar across our path our hopes sank low,
and we hurried that we might die like men or perchance get over it, and
ever as we followed the curve of the beach the sputter of cross-bow
bolts came from the sand behind us, and twice long arrows whizzed from
my breastplate and glittered into the sea. At last we came to the rocks.
I went first, climbing, my sword in my hand as a staff. We fell over the
great blocks of dripping black, and we slimed our hands and armour on
the seaweed that lifted with every wave; our clothes were heavy with
water, and the wounded man who leant on my shoulder groaned as I
hoisted him up and down. At last we gained the top of the largest rock,
the outermost black fragment on which the great waves rent themselves. I
knew we must not linger, and sliding down the side with my other
companion, I turned for the wounded man, but he sat upon the rock his
face drawn all sideways with pain, for he had raised his helmet for
breath, and there was a cross-bow bolt sticking firmly out from one of
his eyes. One glance was all; then the world was a green fairyland with
rushing music and the noise of mighty crowds; then a soft rolling as in
tons of fleece, and then the air again, and sunlight.
The rock was bare. We staggered up, and crawling over stones like
children before they have learned to walk, came at last to the sands
again, the seaweed hanging from our shoulders and a weight as of leaden
anchors driving us down.
We pressed the water from our eyes and turned and looked at each other,
and then turned to the beach again; and gave a great shout, for our
ship lay high on the sand, and we could see the heads of our men over
the bulwark already watching us; then an arm waved, and down the gale
came a fine sound of welcome in our own language. Heavy as we were we
could not run, but we stumbled forward as an old horse to stable, and
after we had crossed the beach, without a sound my companion fell
against me, and when I held him from me and held him up, and saw the
goose-shaft through his neck, I dropped him on the sands, and, cursing
as I hobbled, broke into a shambling trot, using my sword as I ran. The
arrows struck against my back-plate as I bent over, but I had no time to
look above, and the cross-bow bolts whizzed and volleyed past my ears,
and sang, but I came to the ship at last and was lifted in, for I could
not climb myself, and there I fell down between two of the rowers'
benches and hid my face in my hands, while the arrows sang over us from
the cliffs and the men looked up wondering as they crouched inside the
bulwarks.
But soon they came and whispered to me for news of the expedition, and
when I told them that of our lord and his forty men I only would stand
before them, they groaned as men who have no to-morrow and who know not
what to do. This could not go on. The bow of the ship was feathered with
arrows and they began to strike into the benches and the after-deck.
"Can we not shove off?" I asked.
"Look at the sea," answered the oar-captain pointing; and as he pointed,
his hand was broken by a cross-bow bolt. "I shall never hold oar again,"
he said. No more.
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.
I was very weak; now they brought me meat and strong, flame-coloured
water to drink; and the meat did me much good, but the flame-coloured
water sent me to sleep under one of the forward benches, out of the
arrows' flight. And when I waked a new dawn was breaking, and I heard
the shouting of men outside the ship, the shouting of men in the
language of those countries; and I lifted my sick head and gazed at
them, but they curved and numbered and unnumbered themselves, till at
last I heard in my brain a twanging of bows, and looking upward to the
fore-deck, I saw our few men gathered there, crouching, and sending
their arrows fast. The sea had not gone down, but the wind did not
whistle, and in the west the clouds looked like heavy rain and thunder.
As the mist that is over the sea-beach in those countries in the morning
cleared off, I looked again, and I found that the men who disputed with
us from the beach were few, they being but six knights in half-armour.
Now, lying and watching, for I felt that I could do nothing till the
world was level again, I saw the fifteen of our men jump from the
fore-deck at a word from the oar-captain, and thrusting the long oars
over the sides, strain on them in the sand as each wave came in, and as
they strained upon them the ship would lift and glide out more, and
faster; till at last we were quite afloat and the great waves took us,
and turned us about, like a piece of bark. Then the men fell into their
places and we headed the white seas, the half-armed men on the beach
riding knee-high on their horses into the foam, and calling curses at
us. So, after weary rowing, and every man of us wet as the sea, we came
out of that bay and rode the great smooth waves that had been white the
day before.
Well, we kept far from the land, only seeing, one dusk, a white cliff on
our right from a distance; then the gale took us again and drove us
westward and then northward, till the men would throw down their oars
and cry out to the gods of the sea, to say which one of them should be
sacrificed to their hate.
We were half mad with the drink we had in the ship--for we had no
beer--and as we lurched and swayed in the depth between two seas, or as
we climbed up sideways and balanced for a moment while the foam flew and
then surged down with sick motion, the men would trail their oars on the
water and sink their heads on the handles. So, for many days we were
driven as the wizards drive the storm-ships across the face of the icy
moon, as the waves kiss her wet sides and the clouds break over her. So
northward we went, till the cold struck into our bones and we ate fried
fat like the savages of Finland; and we passed great ice-fields
sometimes, at night, when the moon shone on them for miles and gave them
smoothness which the sun took all away again, and made them grey and
rugged and small.
Still we went north; our water was almost gone and we had only the
devil's drinks, and the wet bread and fish. Now, when we passed the
ice-fields the oar-captain would order us to fasten to them, and we
would bring into the ship great chunks of ice and melt them in the
cauldron by the mast-foot. But there came a time when for three days we
saw no ice and the men's tongues were stiff for thirst. Their eyes
looked cruel and sad. Thus, one night, as I lay at my place under the
forward seat, wrapped in a bear-skin, I saw the black figure of a man on
the rail at the other side of the ship. He crept to where the rail ends
in the lift of the fore-deck. Then, dropping to the bench under which I
lay, he crawled to the cauldron where a little water was left, and
putting in his hand he broke off, little by little, pieces, until I
could see by the long time that his hand rested in the cauldron that
there was no more there. Then I reached out and grasped him by the leg
and pulling him off the bench I rolled myself about him and called out
for the oar-captain. The oar-captain came and all the men came after and
they lit a light, and I lay off him, and we saw his face; and the
oar-captain said--and to every man it seemed just--
"You have stolen the last of our water, more than your share, therefore
you shall go to join your comrades under the sea; when you are ready."
The man drew himself up and walked the length of the ship stepping from
bench to bench, we all following, our feet making a clatter as we went.
He came to the upper-deck and climbed up, and went to the rail and stood
there and looked on the moveless sea under the moonlight.
"Are you ready?" asked the oar-captain.
"Get out your oars," answered the man.
Some half of the men went to their places and shoved the oars out.
"When I go, row!" he said, in a loud voice.
Then, climbing across the bulwark, he stood at the edge a moment his
hands on his hips, then suddenly he raised his clenched fists in the
air, and in perfect silence met the sea. As we rowed away, we could see
his dark head in the moonlight as he swam, and until we had shifted the
position of the ship many times we could not lose it, as the men rowed
on, the oars creaking, and the indifferent moonlight silvering their
slow dips.
* * * * *
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; we can hardly see through the white drift, we are
silent in the wonderful white feathers ... and the silence!
Lars puffs near me, swinging his arms. The Icelander is staring out into
the storm, with his hands thrust into his belt. When at last we rest in
our furs, we are huddled, leaning, against one another for warmth. We
cannot see the sunset; only a dying-out of the pale half-light of the
snow-drift. The men grow superstitious, and begin to talk of robbing
churches, and making no restitution to the widows of killed men; and
they mutter about old days--talking crossly of things we have long
forgotten.
On the third night, Kai, a good man, died; on the fourth night three
other men, on the fifth night, none; on the sixth day we had eaten the
last of our fish, and Rudolf of Schleswig went out into the mist with
his cross-bow to see if he could find anything. So, we lost him, for
though he was a very strong man he never came back. It was on this same
day that one of the men, Hans, a man from the south countries, little
liked, went mad, and became a child again, till he wandered off and I
think killed himself by a fall from a great ice-block, for we saw his
black figure there, and then we heard a sound as of something striking
on the ice; then more men died, I do not know, until old Ole, the
oar-captain, and I only were left strong. The rest ate snow and
wandered off cursing the sacking of churches or prattling nonsense of
house affairs; sometimes they would come back, but I do not know if I
spoke to them, for they were very dim.
It was some time in the light, when, after sitting against the side of
the ship for a few moments I got up to walk again, that I saw come
hopping toward me over the snow a white rabbit with white eyes.
He hops almost to my feet and then jumps into the ship; then comes a
snow-ball rolling itself, of the height of a small man, and when it
comes just before me it breaks into smoke and I cannot see through the
smoke for a moment.
Music--light music, daintily, faintly playing.... It comes from far away
... it is just over my head ... then it tinkles, trills, breaks, and
jingles, and falls down into the inside of my head making darkness. Now
comes a long waste of clouds over the snow-fields, and the ship seems to
rise to them as they billow under her bows.
They come, innumerable long fat white clouds; clouds of no shape; clouds
that I hate.
I awake; I am leaning against the side of the ship; I stagger; we are
tramping on the old path. A fine snow sifts down into my neck; my skin
is so hot and my bones are so cold. There is no sky, only something that
moves above there. Then, as I turn to the stern of the ship, I seem to
hear in the distance the sound of great drinking, and the echoing of the
warm beer-tankards as they strike in the air, and there comes a small
and weak voice beyond me neither above nor below: