Openly I now speak
Because I both sexes know:
Unstable are men’s minds toward women;
‘T is when we speak most fair,
When we most falsely think:
That deceives even the cautious.
Hávamál.
This morning there were few travellers upon the Street. South of the
highway the land was held by English farmers, who would naturally
remain under cover while a Danish host was in the neighborhood; while
north of the great dividing line lay Danish freeholds whose masters
might be equally likely to see the prudence of being in their
watch-towers when the English allies were passing. Barred across by the
shadows of its mighty trees, the great road stretched away mile after
mile in cool emptiness. At rare intervals, a mounted messenger
clattered over the stones, his hand upon his weapon, his eyes rolling
sharply in a keen watch of the thicket on either side. Still more
rarely, foraging parties swept through the morning stillness, lowing
cows pricked to a sharp trot before them, and squawking fowls slung
over their broad shoulders. Captured pigs gave back squeal for squawk,
and the voices of the riders rose in uproarious laughter until the very
echoes revolted and cast back the hideous din.
The approach of the first of these bands caused Randalin’s heart to
leap and sink under her brave green tunic. For all that she could tell
from their dress, they might as well be English as Danish. If her
disguise should fail! As they bore down upon her, she drew her horse to
the extreme edge of the road and turned upon them a pale defiant face.
On they came. When they caught sight of a sprig of a boy drawn up
beside the way with his hand resting sternly on his knife, they sent up
a shout of boisterous merriment. The blood roared so loudly in
Randalin’s ears that she could not understand what they said. She
jerked her horse’s head toward the trees and drove her spur deep into
his side. Only as he leaped forward and they swept past her, shouting,
did the words reach home.
“Look at the warrior, comrades!” “Hail, Berserker!” “Scamper, cub, or
your nurse will catch you!” “Tie some of your hair on your chin, little
one!”
As the sound of hoof-beats died away, and the nag settled back to his
steady jog-trot, the girl unclenched her hands and drew a long breath.
“Though it seems a strange wonder that they should not know me for a
woman, I think I need give myself no further uneasiness. It must be
that I am very like Fridtjof in looks. It may be that it would not be
unadvisable now for me to ask advice of the next person how I can come
to the camp.”
The asking had become a matter of necessity by the time she found
anyone capable of answering the question. Three foreign merchants whom
she overtook near noon could give her no information, and she covered
the next five miles without seeing a living creature; then it was only
a beggar, who crawled out of the bushes to offer to sell the child
beside him for a crust of bread. The petition brought back to Randalin
her own famished condition so sharply that her answer was unnecessarily
petulant, and the man disappeared before the question could even be put
to him. Two miles more, and nothing was in front of her but a flock of
ragged blackbirds circling over a trampled wheat-field. Already the
sun’s round chin rested on the crest of the farthest hill. In
desperation, she turned aside and galloped after a mailed horseman who
was trotting down a clover-sweet lane with a rattle and clank that
frightened the robins from the hedges. He reined in with a guffaw when
he saw what mettle of blade it was that had accosted him.
“Is it your intention to join the army?” he inquired. “Canute will
consider himself in great luck.”
“I am desirous to—to tell him something,” Red Cloak faltered.
His grin vanishing, the man leaned forward alertly. “Is it war news? Of
Edric Jarl’s men?”
Before her tongue could move, Randalin’s surprised face had answered.
The warrior smote his thigh resoundingly.
“You will be able to tell us tidings we wish to know. Since the fight
this morning we have been allowed to do no more than growl at the
English dogs across the plain, because it was held unadvisable to make
an onset until the Jarl’s men should increase our strength. It is to be
hoped they are not far behind?”
“You make a mistake,” Randalin began hesitatingly. “My news does not
concern the doings of Edric Jarl, but the actions of his man Norman—”
A blow across her lips silenced her.
“Hold your tongue until you come in to the Chief,” the man admonished
her, with good-humored severity. “Have you not learned that babbling
turns to ill, you sprouting twig? And waste no more time upon the road,
either. Yonder is your shortest way, up that lane between the barley.
When you come to a burned barn, do you turn to the left and ride
straight toward the woods; it should happen that an old beech stock
stands where you come out. Take then the path that winds up-hill, and
it will bring you to the war booths before you can open your foolish
mouth thrice. Trolls! what a cub to send a message by! But get along,
now; you will suffer from their temper if they think it likely that you
have kept them waiting.” He gave the horse a stinging slap upon the
flank, that sent him forward like a shaft from a bow.
Snatching up her slackened rein with one hand, his rider managed to
secure her leaping cap with the other; and after the first bounce, she
caught the jerky gait instinctively and swayed her body into its uneven
swing. But her heart was all at once a-throb in a wild panic. Was this
what a boy must expect? This challenging brutal downrightness, which
made one seem to have become a dog that must prove his usefulness or be
kicked aside? Her spirit felt as bruised as a fledgeling fallen upon
stony ground. She shivered as the old beech stock loomed up before her.
“If these other men behave so, it is in my mind to tell them that I am
a woman,” she decided. “Since they are my own people, no evil can come
of their knowing; and I dislike the other feeling.”
The recollection that she had always this escape open gave her a new
lease of boldness. Her courage rose as fast as her body when they began
to climb the hillside toward the ruddy light that slanted down between
the tree-trunks. When a sentinel stopped her near the top, she faced
him with a fairly firm front.
“I have war news for King Canute,” she told him haughtily; and he let
her pass with no more than a grin.
The camp appeared to be strung through the whole beech grove that
covered the crest of the hill. The first sign of it began less than ten
yards beyond the sentry, where a couple of squatting thralls were
skinning a slain deer; and as far as eye could swim in the flood of
sunset light, the green aisles were dotted with scattered groups. Every
flat rock had a ring of dice-throwers bending over it; every fallen
trunk its row of idlers. Wherever a cluster of boulders made a passable
smithy, crowds of sweating giants plied hammer and sharpening-stone.
The edges of the little stream that trickled down to the valley were
thronged with men bathing gaping wounds and tearing up the cool moss to
staunch their flowing blood. Never had the girl dreamed of such chaos.
It gave her the feeling of having plunged into a whirlpool. She
threaded her way among the groups as silently as the leaf-padded ground
would permit.
She had come in by the back door, but now she began to reach the better
quarters. Her nose reported sooner than her eyes that a meal was in
making; and a glow of anticipation braced her famished body. Here, in
this green alcove, preparations were just beginning; a white-robed
slave knelt by the curling thread of smoke and nursed the flickering
flame with his breath, while his circle of hungry masters pelted him
with woolly beech-nuts and cursed his slowness. There, a dozen yards to
the left, the meal was nearly over; between the gnarled trunks the fire
shone like a red eye; and bursts of merriment and snatches of
boisterous song marked the beginning of the drinking.
Sometimes a woman’s lighter laughter would mingle with the peal.
Sometimes, through the sway-ing branches, Randalin caught sight of the
flower-fair face of an English girl, bending between the shaggy yellow
heads of the captors. Once she came upon a brawny Viking employing his
huge fingers to twine a golden chain around a white throat. The girl’s
face was dimpling bewitchingly as she held aside her shining hair.
Randalin had an impulse of triumph.
“I wish that Sister Wynfreda could see that, now, since it is her
belief that Danes are always overbearing toward their captives,” she
told herself. “This one has no appearance of having felt blows or known
hard labor. She could not have been entertained with greater liberality
in her father’s house—”
She broke off suddenly, as the words suggested a new train of thought.
This girl must have been driven from her father’s house by Danes, even
as she herself had been driven forth by the English. Yet here was she
eating with her foes, taking gold from their hands! Could she have
honor who would thus make friends with the slayers of her kin? Randalin
watched her wonderingly until leaves shut out the picture.
Another sentinel hailed her, and she gave him absently her customary
answer. He pointed to a great striped tent of red and white linen,
adorned with fluttering streamers and guarded by more sentries in
shining mail; and she rode toward it in a daze.
More revellers sprawled under these trees, and she looked at them
curiously. The women here did not seem to be amusing themselves so
well. One was weeping; and one—a slip of a girl with a face like a
rose—was trying vainly to rise from her place beside a drunken warrior,
who held her hands and strove to pull her lips down to his wine-stained
mouth. In imagination Randalin felt again Norman’s arm around her
waist, and a wild pity was quickened in her. This was worse than
drudgery, worse than blows! For the credit of Danish warriors, it was
well that Sister Wynfreda could not see this.
Again her own words raised a startling apparition. What had been the
Sister’s last cry of warning? “It is not their cruelty I fear for you.
Child, listen! It is not their blows—” Could it be possible that this
was what—
Like a merciless answer came a scream from the girl,—a short piercing
cry of horror and loathing and agonized appeal as she was drawn down
upon the leering face. At that cry, childhood’s blind trust died
forever in Randalin. As she rode past the pair, with clenched hands and
flashing eyes, she knew without reasoning that tortures would not tear
from her the secret of her disguise.
When the sentinel before the tent challenged her roughly, it was her
tongue, not her brain, that answered him.
“I have war news for the King.”
In a twinkling he had dropped his spear, plucked her from her saddle,
and was marching her toward the entrance by her collar.
“In the Troll’s name, get in to the Chief, and let nothing hinder you!”
he growled. “From your snail’s pace I got the idea that you had come
a-begging. Get in, and set your tongue wagging as speedily as you can!
Why do you draw back? I tell you to make haste!”
Before she could so much as catch her breath, he had raised the
tent-flap, pushed her bodily through the entrance, and dropped the
linen door behind her.