Circumspect and reserved
Every man should be,
And wary in trusting friends;
Of the words
That a man says to another
He often pays the penalty.
Hávamál.
Waking to tapestried walls and jewelled lanterns and a strange splendor
of furnishings, Randalin experienced a moment of wild bewilderment.
What had happened to the low-ceiled dormitory with its bare wall-spaces
splotched with dampness? What had become of the row of white beds, with
Dearwyn’s rosy face on the next pillow? And she herself—why was she
lying on the outside of the covers, with all her clothes on, a cramped
aching heap? Rising on her elbow, she gazed wonderingly at the frowzy
woman stretched near her on a pallet. It was not until the woman turned
over, puffing out her fat cheeks in a long breath, that the girl on the
bed recognized her and knew what room this was and remembered what had
happened to separate to-day from all the yesterdays of her life.
Falling down upon the pillows, she lay with her face hidden among them,
living over with the swift sharpness of a renewed brain the scenes of
the previous night.
As she had seen it from the gallery where the King’s soldiers had
hidden her, she saw again the great stone hail, enshrining a
feasting-table around which a throng of nobles in their gorgeous
dresses and their jewels and their diadems made a glittering halo. At
the farther end, the King sat in his shining gilded chair. Just below
her, was Edric of Mercia with Norman Leofwinesson beside him. She could
not see their faces for their backs were toward her, but now and again
the Gainer’s velvet voice rose blandly, and each time she was seized
with shuddering. How was it possible that he did not feel disaster in
the air? To her it seemed that the very torch-flames hissed warnings
above the merriment, while the occasional pauses were so heavy with
doom that their weight was well-nigh unendurable; at each, she was
forced to fight down a mad impulse to scream and scatter the hush.
Then the light from the taper which a page was holding behind Norman of
Baddeby fell upon the gemmed collar that was his principal ornament,
and the sight wrought a subtle change in her mood. The collar had been
her father’s; she could not look at it without seeing again his ruddy
old face with its grim mouth and faded kindly eyes. Beside this vision
rose another,—the vision of this beloved face dead in the moonlight,
with Fridtjof’s near it, his brave smile frozen on his young lips. From
that moment, softness and shrinking died out in her bearing as out of
her heart, and her blood was turned to fire within her,—the liquid fire
of the North. Hour after hour, she sat in rigid waiting while the
endless line of servants ran to and fro with their silver dishes and
the merriment grew and spread and the clinking came faster and louder
and the voices grew thicker and wilder.
When the wave of good-will and fellowship had reached its height, like
one who would ride in upon its crest the Gainer rose to his feet and
began speaking to the King. His manner was less smoothly deferential
than when addressing Edmund, she noticed, affecting more the air of
bluff frankness which one might who wished to disarm any suspicion of
flattering; but she could not hear what he said because of the noise
around him. The first words she heard distinctly were Canute’s, as he
paused with upraised goblet to look at the Mercian. Like an arrow his
voice cleft the uproar, so that here and there men checked the speech
on their lips to look at him, and their neighbors, observing them,
paused also, until the lull extended from corner to corner.
“Strangely do you ask,” he said. “Why should I give you more than
Edmund gave you?”
She had no difficulty in hearing Edric this time. Aggressively honest,
his words rang out with startling sharpness: “Because it was for you
that I went against Edmund, and from faithfulness to you that I
afterwards destroyed him.”
Out of the stillness that followed, a voice cried, “Are you mad?” and
there was the grating of chairs thrust hastily back. But, after a great
wrench, her heart stood still within her as through the madness she
perceived the purpose. As well as Edric of Mercia she knew that the
young Viking’s vulnerable point was his longing for his own
self-esteem, a craving so unreckoning in its fervor that—should he have
the guilty consciousness the traitor counted on—rather than endure his
own reproach for cowardice he would be equal to the wild brazenness of
flinging the avowal in the teeth of his assembled court. Her pulses
began to pound in a furious dance as the same flash of intuition showed
her the rock upon which the Gainer’s audacious steering was going to
wreck him.
For no skulking guilt was in the face of the new King of England as he
met the startled glances, but instead a kind of savage joy that widened
his nostrils and drew his lips away from his teeth in a terrible smile.
“Now much do I thank whatever god has moved you to open speech,” he
said, “for with every fibre of my body have I long wanted to requite
you for that faithfulness. Knowing that you were coming to-night to ask
it, I have the reward ready. Never was recompense given with a better
will.” Leaping to his feet, he hurled the goblet in his hand against
the opposite wall so that it was shattered on the stone behind the
embroidered hangings. At the signal the tapestry was lifted, and in the
light stood Eric of Norway, leaning on a mighty battle-axe. To him the
King cried in a loud voice, all the irony gone from it, leaving it
awful as the voice of Thor at Ragnarok. “Do your work where all can see
you, Eric Jarl, that no man shall accuse me of being afraid to bear my
deeds. And let Norman Leofwinesson die with his lord for the slaying of
Frode of Avalcomb.”
A roar of hideous sound—a confusion of overturned lights, of screeching
servants, of writhing struggling bodies—above it all, the vision of
that glittering axe poised in the air—then flashing
downward,—Randalin’s recollections blurred, ran together, and faded out
in broken snatches.
She recalled a brief space of something like sleep-walking as the
soldiers led her through branching corridors to this room, and fetched
for her attendant the only woman available, a wench they had taken from
trencher-washing in the royal kitchen. She remembered irritably
rejecting the woman’s clumsy services and sending her to sleep on her
pallet, while she herself walked to and fro with her surging thoughts
until sheer physical exhaustion forced her to throw herself upon the
bed. After that she remembered—nothing.
“I am glad that I did not disgrace my kin by screaming or fainting,”
she reflected now, as she raised herself stiffly. “I am glad I did that
much credit to my name.” She flushed as her hand, touching the pillow,
found it wet, and for an instant the bearing of her head was less
erect. “I do not remember what I dreamed,” she murmured, “but full well
I know that it was not because Norman Leofwinesson is slain that I shed
tears in my sleep.” For a while she drooped there, her eyes on the open
window, outside of which a robin was singing blithely among the
cherries. But all at once she seized the pillow with a kind of
fierceness, and turned it over and piled the others on top of it,
crying under her breath, “How dared he! How dared he! I will shed no
tears for him while I am awake. I will remember only that I am my
father’s daughter and the Lady of Avalcomb.”
Proudly as became an odal-woman, she followed the page when he came at
last to call her to the royal presence. The great stone hall in which
the King awaited the arrival of his Norman bride was the same room in
which he had feasted the night before, but tables and dishes now were
gone, gold-weighted tapestries hung once more over the door by which
Eric of Norway had made his entrance, and a rich-hued rug from an
Eastern loom lay over the spot where she had seen the axe rise and
fall. Crossing the threshold, the commonplaceness of it all clashed so
discordantly with the scene in her memory that for an instant she grew
faint and clung to the curtains between which she was passing. That
death should leave so little trace, that the spot which one night was
occupied by a headsman, the next, should hold a bride, made her fancy
reel with horror even while she pulled herself together sternly.
“This is life as in truth it is,” she said. “It is well that I
understand at last how terrible everything really is, and how little
anything matters.” Forcing herself to tread the rug with steady step,
she came where the King stood by an open window. He was as changed as
the room, though in honor of his bride he wore again state robes of
silk and cloth-of-gold, for the fire of the Northern lights was gone
out of his face, leaving it dull and lustreless. In the garden below, a
minstrel was making hay in the sun of the royal glance by a rapid
improvising of flattering verses which he was shouting lustily to his
twanging harp, but now the King’s hand rose curtly.
“Your imagination has no small power, friend, yet save some virtues in
case you should want to sing to me again,” he advised as he tossed down
a coin and turned away.
His ward courtesied deeply before him. “For your justice, King Canute,
I give you thanks drawn from the bottom of my heart,” she said.
“I welcome you to your own, Lady of Avalcomb,” he answered as he
returned her salutation. Leaning against the window frame he stood a
long while looking at her in silence,—so long that she was startled
when at last he spoke. “Yet for the good of the realm, I must lay on
your odal one burden, Frode’s daughter.”
“What is that, King?”
“It is that before the year is out you take a husband who shall be able
to defend your land in time of need.”
Her white cheeks went very red before him and then grew very pale
again, while her breast rose and fell convulsively. But she clasped her
hands over it as though to still its protest and, suddenly, she flung
up her head in a kind of trembling defiance. “What does it matter?
King, I know what a Danish woman owes her race. Choose you the man and
this shall, like other things, be as you wish.”
It was evident that her answer took him by surprise, for he bent from
the wall to observe her. “I choose!” he repeated. “Have you then no
choice?”
She tried to say “No”; she tried desperately to say it; but already her
courage was crumbling under her. All at once she took her hands from
her breast to hold them out pleadingly, and her voice was broken:
“Lord, let me go back to Avalcomb—now—to-day!”
“Wherefore to-day?” he asked. “I had thought you would remain here for
a while and get honor from Queen Emma.” A moment he looked away from
her, out of the window at the drifting clouds. “I can tell you, Frode’s
daughter, that while she is noble in her birth, she is still nobler in
her mind,” he said gravely. “Little would there be in her service for
you to take ill. I think it possible that she might be highly helpful
to you. There is that about her which makes the good in one come out
and bask like a snake in the sun, while the evil slinks away
shadow-like—”
She interrupted him with a cry that was half a sob. “Lord King, I
cannot bear it to see more people that are strange to me! Since I left
my father’s house I have felt the starkness of strangers, and now—now I
can endure it no longer. My heart within me is as though it were
bruised black and blue. Let me go back where all know me,—where none
will hold me off at arm’s length to challenge me with his eyes, but all
love me and place faith in me because they know me. Lord, give me leave
to go home,—I pray it of you! Beseech it of you!” Entreating, she would
have fallen at his feet if he had not caught her hands and stayed her.
He did not release them immediately but tightened his grasp as his
eyes, grown suddenly keen, searched her face. His voice dropped low.
“Randalin, it is very unlikely that Elfgiva’s scratches have brought
you to this. Do you stand in need of reminding that any man who has
angered you has angered me? That my sword lies under your hand?”
Her face seemed to have become glass before him, through which he
looked into the innermost chambers of her mind. Terror-stricken, she
snatched her hands away to cover it. “No, no!” she cried wildly. “I am
angry with no one. I have found fault with no one. Draw no sword for
me—only let me go!”
Again he turned from her and stood looking out at the clouds; but when
at last he spoke, his voice was the gentlest she had ever heard it.
“You are wise in this, as in other things, Frode’s daughter,” he said,
“and you shall certainly have your way. I take it that I am your
guardian to protect you from harm, not to force you into things you do
not want. Soldiers I can trust shall go with you, in case there be
danger from Norman’s people, and for women—”
She spoke up eagerly, “There is an old nun at Saint Mildred’s, King,
who loves me. I think she would come to me until others could be
found.”
“Go then,” he granted. “Thorkel shall see to it that men and horses are
ready when you are.” He held out his hand, but when she took it in both
of hers and would have saluted it reverently, he would not let her but
instead raised her fingers to his lips. An odd note was in his voice.
“Heavy is it for my tongue to say farewell to you, Frode’s daughter,”
he said, “for your friendship has surpassed most other things in
pleasantness to me.”
Frank liking mingled with gratitude and reverence as she looked up at
him. “I have got great kindness and favor from you, King Canute; I pray
that you will be very happy with your Queen.”
A moment he pressed his lips to her hand; then gently set it free. “I
give you thanks,” he returned, “but happiness is for me to wish you.
The best you can ask for me is that sometime I shall become what you
believed me to be the day you came to me at Scoerstan.”
She tried to tell him that she believed him that now,—but something in
her forbade the untruth. She could do no more than leave him, with a
mute gesture of farewell.
Perhaps her gaze was not quite clear as she crossed the room, for she
did not see that the door-curtains were moving until she was close upon
them, when they were thrust apart to admit the form of Rothgar
Lodbroksson. Stifling a gasp, she shrank behind a tall chair.
He did not see her, however, for his eyes were fastened upon the King,
who had turned back to the window. He had cast aside the splendor of
the royal guards, wearing over his steel shirt a kirtle of blue that
made his florid face seem redder and gave to his fiery hair a hotter
glow. Two sentinels carrying shining pikes had followed him in,
uncertainly, and now one plucked at his arm. But the Jotun shook him
off to stride forward, clanking his heels with intentional noisiness
upon the stone floor.
At the clatter the King looked around, and the tone in which he spoke
his friend’s name had in it more of passion than all the lover’s
phrases he had ever paid Elfgiva’s ears. At the same time, he made a
sharp sign to the two sentinels. “Get back to your posts,” he said.
Hesitating they saluted and unwilling they wheeled, while one spoke
bluntly over his shoulder. “It would be better to let us stay, King, if
you please. You are weaponless.”
“Go,” Canute repeated. In a moment the doors beyond the curtain had
closed behind them, and the two men were alone save for the girl hiding
forgotten in the shadow of the chair.
Rothgar laughed jarringly. “Whatever has been told about you, you have
not yet been accounted a coward. But I do not see how you know I shall
not kill you. I have dreamed of it not a few times.”
Something like a veil seemed to fall over the King’s face; from behind
it he spoke slowly as he moved away to the dais upon which his
throne-chair stood, and mounted the steps. “The same dream has come to
me, but never has it occurred to me to seek you out to tell you of it.”
“No such purpose had I,” the Jotun said with a touch of surliness.
Pulling a bag from under his belt, he shook out of it upon the floor a
mane of matted yellow hair. “If you want to know my errand, it is to
bring you this. Yesterday it came to my ears that one of my men was
suspected of having tried to give you poison through your wife’s
British thrall. I got them before me and questioned them, and the
Scar-Cheek boasted of having done it. This is his hair. If you remember
anything about the fellow, you understand that he was not alive when I
took it from him.”
The King looked immovably at the yellow mass. “You have behaved in a
chieftain-like way and I thank you for it,” he said. “But I would have
liked it better if you had come to me about the judgment that raised
this wall between us—”
Rothgar’s throat gave out a savage sound. “Tempt me not! I am no
sluggish wolf.”
But Canute spoke on: “What I expected that day was that you would come
to me, as friend comes to friend, and with my loose property I would
redeem from you every stick and stone which my kingship had forced me
to hold back. Not more than they have called me coward, have men ever
called me stingy—”
“And when have men called me greedy?” the Jotun bellowed. “Your
thoughts have got a bad habit of lying about me if they say that it was
greed for land which made me take your judgment angrily. Except for the
honor of my stock, what want I with land while I have a ship to bear
me? I tell you, now as heretofore, that it was your treachery which
unsheathed a sword between us.”
“Rothgar my brother,—” the veil was rent from the King’s face and he
had stepped from the dais and seized the other by the shoulders as
though he would wrestle bodily with him,—“by the Holy Ring, I swear
that I have never betrayed you! If you grudge not the land to the
Englishman, you have no cause to grudge him anything under Ymer’s
skull. Can a man change his blood?—for so much a part of me is my
friendship for you. Time never was when it was not there, and it would
be as possible to fill my veins with Thames water as to put an
Englishman into your place. Can you not understand—”
But Rothgar’s hand had fallen upon the other’s breast and pushed him
backward so that he was forced to catch at the chair-arm to save
himself from falling. “Never get afraid about that,” he sneered. “Since
we slept in one cradle, I have been a thick-headed Thrym and your
Loke’s wit has fooled me into doing your bidding and fighting your
battles and giving you my toil and my limbs and my faith, but wisdom
has grown in me at last. You undertake too steep a climb when you try
to make me believe in your love while before my eyes you give to the
man I hate my lands and the woman you had promised me and my place
above your men—” His rage choked him so that he was obliged to break
off and stand drawing his sword from his sheath and slamming it back
with a sharp sound. His voice came back in a hoarse roar. “When I
reckon up the debt against you, I know that the only thing to wipe it
out would be your life. Not taken by poison nor underhandedly, but torn
out of your deceitful body as we stand face to face. If I could do
that, it might be that my anger would be quenched.” Again he drew his
blade half out,—and this time he did not shove it back. His huge body
seemed to draw itself together, crouching, as he leaned forward. “Why
do you stand there looking as though you thought you were Odin? Do you
think to blunt my weapon with your eyes? Why do you tempt me?”
The King had not moved away from the chair against which he had
staggered, and the prints of his nails were on its arm. He was as
though he had hardened to stone. “To show you that I am stronger than
you, though I face you with bare hands,” he said. “To show you that you
dare not kill me.”
“Dare not!” Rothgar’s laughter was a hideous thing as he cleared at a
bound the space between them. His sword was full-drawn now. “Shout for
your guards! It may be that they will get here in time.”
But the King neither gave back nor raised his voice. “I will not,” he
said, “nor will I lift hand against you. Never shall you have it to say
that I forgot you had endangered your life for mine. On your head it
shall be to break the blood-oath.”
Now they were breast to breast. In her mind, the girl in the shadow
flung open the doors and shrieked to the sentinels and roused the
Palace; in her body, she stood spellbound, voiceless, breathless.
Still Rothgar did not strike. It was the King who spoke this time also.
“Among the sayings of men in Norway,” he said coldly, “there is one
they tell of a traitor who carried a sword of death against his King,
but lacked the boldness to use it before the King’s face. So he begged
his lord to wrap a cloak around his head that he might get the courage
to ask a boon. When that had been done, he stabbed. Do you want me to
cover my eyes?”
With a hoarse cry, Rothgar flung his sword back to his sheath,
recoiling,—there was even a kind of fear in his manner: “A fool would I
be, to set your ghost free to follow me with that look on its face!
Keep your life—and instead I will torture every Angle I can get under
my grip, for it is they who have turned a great hero into a nithing—may
they despise you as you have despised your people for their sakes!”
Invoking the curse with a sweep of his handless arm, he strode from the
room.
Randalin did not see when he passed her, for her eyes were on the King
as he stood looking after his foster-brother.
“Ah, God, what a terrible world hast Thou made!” she murmured, as she
put up her hands to ease the swelling agony in her throat. “No longer
will I try to live in it. I will go to the Sisters and remain with them
always.”
Through the doors opening before the Jotun there came in a sudden buzz
of laughing voices, while a breeze brought through the window a ringing
of bells and a clarioning of approaching horns. Upon the girl in the
shadow and the King on the dais, the sounds fell like the dissolving of
a spell. She ran swiftly to the little door behind the tapestry and let
herself out unseen, unheard. The King mounted the throne he had won and
sat there in regal state, facing the throng of splendid courtiers
trooping in to give him their wedding greetings.