Vandrad the Viking Part 20

"Right let it be then," he said, and turned down the right-hand path.

It had been so dark and their flight so hurried that nothing remained in his memory of the night before, to show him whither the way was leading. He only knew that he had wandered for some time, when a prospect of white, open country began to show in peeps through the trees ahead. Presently he came to the edge of the forest, and saw that the cast of his dagger had led him wide of his mark. A long stretch of treeless country opened out before him, getting wider and wider in the distance. Near at hand a narrow lake began, and stretched for a mile or two down the snow- fields, and, like the greater lake they had pa.s.sed, it was frozen and shining white. Less than a hundred yards from him, between the forest and the water, there lay a small village. A number of men stood about among the houses, and from their movements and the presence of two or three sledges he judged that a party must either have lately arrived, or be on the point of departing. As nothing further seemed to happen, he made up his mind that they must be arrivals; and then, seeing little to be gained by waiting further, he was about to retrace his steps when his attention was arrested by the appearance of two women. They came out of a house, and one, the taller of the two, went up to a group of men standing near, while the other, who looked like a peasant's wife, hung behind. The look of the first figure caught Estein's eye at once, and he felt his heart suddenly beat quickly. He could only see her back as she talked with the men, but every gesture she made, slight though they were, brought sharply and clearly before his mind memories of the Holy Isle.

"By the hammer of Thor and the horse of Odin, this country is surely bewitched," he muttered. His fancy, he told himself, was playing him a pleasant trick: he had seen Osla so continually in his mind's eye, that this girl, for girl she seemed, shaped herself after his thoughts. That it could be she he loved, there in the flesh, was almost laughably impossible; yet as she talked, apparently with an air of some authority, to the men beside her, the resemblance became at moments stronger, and then again he would say to himself, "Nay, that is not like her." As the men gesticulated and answered her their voices came to him indistinctly, while hers, strain his hearing as he might, he could not catch. There seemed to be a dispute about something which the whole party were engrossed in, when suddenly one man gave a cry and pointed at Estein. Then he saw that in his curiosity he had stepped outside the shelter of the wood and stood in a s.p.a.ce between the trees.

At the man's cry they all looked round, and he saw the girl's face.

"It is she or her spirit," he exclaimed.

Instinctively he stepped behind a tree, and at this sign of flight there was a shout from the men. One shot an arrow, which pa.s.sed harmlessly to the side, and then they all came at him. He had only time to see that more villagers were coming out of the houses, and that the girl had turned away to join the other woman, when his wits came back to him, and turning into the path he set off as fast as he could put his feet to the ground.

For a time the chase was hot: he could hear the men scattering so as to cover the wood behind him, and once or twice the leaders seemed near. Estein was fleet of foot, however, and the wood so dense that it was hard to follow a man for far, and at last the sound of his pursuers died away, and he felt that, for the time at least, he was safe. But he had long left the path, and there was nothing to guide him save glimpses of the sinking sun, the ice that showed the north side of twigs and stems, and in more open s.p.a.ces the lie of the branches to the prevalent wind. And as he wandered on, his mind hardly grasped the bearing and significance of forest clues. Twenty times, at least, he dismissed the resemblance he had seen as the work of fancy. The girl had been too far off to read her features, her figure was not really like, and, most weighty argument, it was out of all reason that she should be in this land of forests, so distant from her island home. Still each time he dismissed it the resemblance came back fresh and strong, to be sent away again. He had lost all idea of where he was, and the sun had already set, when more by good luck than by good guidance, the trees grew thinner in front, and he found himself once more in the glade of the stream.

CHAPTER XIII.

ARROW AND SHIELD.

It seemed strangely still and fresh in the open glade. The blood- red glamour of a frosty sunset was fading from the sky as the daylight died away; all round the wood was populous with shadows; and over its ragged edge the moon hung pale and faint.

Estein walked down a little way, and then stopped and listened. He could hear the stream rumbling over the stones, but not another sound. Then the far-off howl of a wolf struck dismally on his ear.

Twice it sounded and pa.s.sed away, leaving the silence more intense, while all the time the air grew colder. All at once a dead branch snapped sharply. Estein looked round keenly, but in the dusk of the pine stems his eye could pick out nothing. For a minute everything was still, and then a twig cracked again. This time he could see plainly a man come from behind a tree and stand in the outskirts of the wood. For a minute they stood looking at each other. The man, so far as he could discern in the waning light, wore the native skin coat and cap, and seemed to hold in his hands a bow ready to shoot.

Estein quietly drew an arrow from his quiver and laid it on his bow. Just as he cast his eye down to fit the notch to the string, there was a tw.a.n.g from the wood; an arrow whizzed, and stuck hard in his fur cap, stopping only at the steel of his helmet.

"This archer will deem my fur is of singular proof," he said to himself, with the flicker of a smile, as he let a shaft fly in return. He could see his foe move to one side, and heard his arrow strike a branch. Instantly the man fired again, and this time struck him on the breast, and the arrow, checked by the ring-mail beneath, hung from his wolf-skin coat.

He smiled to himself again, and thought, "Never, surely, has that bowman shot at so stout a garment. Yet he shoots hard and straight. I wish not to meet with a stronger archer, and could do well with a worse one now." And with that he took his shield from his back.

His situation was indeed far from safe, and he had to come to some instant decision. Standing in the open against the snow, he offered a fair mark, while his opponent among the trees was hard to see and harder to hit. To try to rush so good an archer, though risky, would certainly have been his scheme, had he not strongly suspected that this one man was set as a decoy to tempt him into an ambush. His blood was up, and he vowed that run he would not at any cost; and, in fact, flight was far from easy, for behind him lay the stream, and in crossing he must expose himself.

It took him but a moment to turn the alternatives over in his mind, and then he suddenly hit upon a plan. His shield was one of the long, heart-shaped kind, coming to a point at the lower end, and covering him down to the knee as he stood upright. He raised it high, and driving the point hard into the ground, dropped on one knee behind it. As he stooped a third arrow sang close above his head and sped into the gloaming. Leaning to one side he fired again, and an instant later a fourth shaft rang on his shield.

Then came a brief pause in the hostilities, and, looking round the edge of his fort, Estein could see his foe standing motionless close under a tree. He soon tired of waiting, however, and presently an arrow, aimed evidently at what he could see of Estein's legs, pa.s.sed within six inches of one knee and buried itself in the snow beside him.

"He shoots too well," muttered Estein. "If this goes on I must try a desperate ruse. I shall have one other shot."

He rose almost to his full height, fired his arrow, and quickly stooped again. His enemy was evidently on the watch for such an opening, for the two bowstrings tw.a.n.ged together, and while Estein's shaft struck something with a soft thud, the other hit the Viking hard on the headpiece.

Throwing up his arms, he reeled and fell flat upon his back. Yet, as he lay for all the world like a man struck dead, a smile stole over his face, and he quietly and gently drew his sword.

"Can my shaft have gone home?" he wondered. Apparently not, for his foeman left the shelter of the wood, and he could see him walk slowly across the open. He was clad in a loose and almost grotesquely ill-fitting garment, seemingly of sheep-skin, and held an arrow on his bow ready to shoot on a sign of movement. When he had come within ten or fifteen yards, he suddenly dropped his bow, drew his sword, and stepped quickly forward. At the same instant Estein jumped to his feet, and with a shout sprang at him. The blades were on the point of crossing, when his enemy stopped short, dropped his point, and then burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

"Estein, by the beard of Thor!" he gasped.

"Helgi!" cried his quondam foe.

They looked each other in the face for an instant, and then simultaneously broke out into another fit of mirth.

"By my faith, Estein, that was a plan worthy of yourself!" cried Helgi. "But 'tis lucky I fired not at you on the ground, as I had some thoughts of doing, knowing the trickery of these Jemtlanders."

"Two things I feared," replied Estein. "One that you might do that; the other, that a troop of as villainous-looking knaves as you now are yourself might hive out of the wood behind you. But how did you escape last night, and how came you here?"

"Those are the questions I would ask of you," said Helgi; "but one story at a time, and shortly this is mine--a tale, Estein, that for credit to its teller, yoked with truthfulness, I will freely back against yours or ever I hear it."

"I doubt it not," replied his friend, with a smile; "you have the look of one who is high in favour with himself."

"As I ought!" cried Helgi. "But hear me, and gibe not before the end. I left that hall, accursed of the G.o.ds, and over full, I fear, of drunken men, in the manner you witnessed. My counterfeit of drunkenness was so exceedingly lifelike, that even when I got outside I felt my head buzz round in the fresh air and my legs sway more than is their wont. 'Friend Helgi,' I said to myself, 'you have drunk not one horn too few if you value your life at its proper worth.' Upon that I applied a handful of snow to my face, and thereupon, on counting my fingers, was able to get within one of the customary number--erring, if I remember rightly, upon the generous side, as befitted my disposition. But to get on to the moving part of my adventures--Where do you take me now?"

"'Tis all right," replied Estein, "I take you to supper and a fire. They come in my story."

"Lead on then," said Helgi. "To continue my tale: I walked with much a.s.surance up to the gateway, singing, I remember, the song of Odin and the Jotun to prove the clearness of my head. There I found a sentinel who, it seemed, had lately been sharing in the hospitality of King Bue. Certain it is that he was more than half drunk, and so fast asleep that he woke not even at my singing, and I had to prod him with the hilt of my sword to arouse the sluggard."

"Then you woke him!" exclaimed Estein, between amus.e.m.e.nt and surprise.

"How else could I pa.s.s? The man leaned so heavily upon the gate, that wake him I must, for I liked not to slay a sleeping man, even though he stood upon his feet. He looked upon me like a startled cow, and said, 'You are a cursed Norseman.' 'It would seem so, indeed,' I replied, and thereupon ran him through with my blade and opened the gate. Then a plan both humorous and ingenious came upon my mind, for my wits were strangely sharp. I laid the man out under the shadow of the fence, where he could not well be seen save by such as had more clearness of vision than becomes the guests of so hospitable a monarch as King Bue, and having stripped him of his coat and put it round mine own shoulders, I took his place and awaited your coming."

"Singing all the while?" said Estein.

"Softly and to myself," replied Helgi; "for what is becoming enough in a guest is not always so well suited to a sentinel.

There I stood, stamping my feet and beating my arms upon my breast to keep the cold away, till I began to think that something was amiss."

"Then while I was scaling the wall at one end of the court, you were guarding the gate at the other!" exclaimed Estein.

"So it would appear now, though I pledge you my word I had no thought of such a thing as I watched that gate last night. In truth, what I had done began to seem to me so plainly the best thing to do, that I thought you would surely follow my movements in your mind--so far as drink allowed you, and come straightway to the gate in full confidence of finding me on duty. I see now that your plan had its merits, though I still maintain that mine was the better."

"Saving only in so far as it left me at the trysting-place alone,"

said Estein.

"And me to shiver at the gate," answered Helgi, with a laugh.

"Well, after a time, which seemed long enough, though doubtless a shorter s.p.a.ce than I thought, the hall door opened, and men rushed out with much needless uproar. Then, I must confess, I e'en left my post with all the haste I could, and concealed me in the outbuildings of a small house close without the gate. The door was open, but it was so pitch black inside that I knew they could not see me, though them I saw plainly enough as they stopped at the gate."

"Who were they?" asked Estein.

"The black traitor Thorar, and with him some ten or twelve others, doubtless all the sober men at the feast. It took them but a short s.p.a.ce to find the dead sentinel; and thereupon Thorar, who seemed almost beside himself with anger, sent the others off in haste to intercept our road to Ketill, while he himself ran to collect a force from the village. Then I bethought me it was well to have company on the road, so I even joined myself to my pursuers.

Luckily they went not by the open glade, but kept a path well shaded and very dark, and for the best part of an hour we must have run together through the wood.

"At last we reached a solitary woodman's house, and there for a brief s.p.a.ce we paused to inquire of the good man whether he had seen us pa.s.s that way. It was a wise inquiry, and the answer was such as an entirely sober man might have reasonably expected. The woodman was in the village at the feast, and his wife, good woman, had been in bed for the last two hours, and strangely enough had not seen us. So our brisk lads started off at the run again. But there we parted company, for I was tired of chasing myself, and the woman had a pleasant voice, and, so far as I could see, a comely countenance."

Estein laughed aloud. "My story will seem a tame narrative after this," he exclaimed.

"Did not I say so," said Helgi. "Well, I fell behind, and presently was knocking up the good woman again, for I said to myself, 'These dogs will not surely come to this house a second time, and a night in the cold woods is not to my liking.' So to make a long story short, I wrought so upon the tender heart of the woodman's wife that, Norseman as I was, she gave me shelter and bed, and promised to send me off in the morning before her husband returned."

"As most wives would," interposed Estein.

Helgi laughed. "Fate had decided otherwise," he continued. "Even as I was eating my morning meal, the goodwife waiting on me most courteously, the door opened and the husband entered. I saw from the man's ugly look that all his wife's wiles were lost upon him; but the dog was a cowardly dog, and feared the game he thirsted to fix his treacherous teeth in. He had nothing for it but to equip me with this great sheep-skin coat and cap, and a stout bow and sheaf of arrows; and then, after a most kindly parting with his goodwife, I made him set me on my way to Ketill. He liked not the job over much, yet he dared not refuse, and so we started. I shrewdly suspected, from my memory of the way I had come overnight, that he was leading me back to King Bue's hall, and meant on our parting to put a horde of his rascally fellows in my way. I cared little, however, for I had mine own ending for our walk. When we had gone a little way I stopped and said to him,--