"As good as Thor"s when he caught Snake Midgard with the bullock"s head," said Wulf.
It turned to the east for a hundred days" journey more, all round Arabia and India, among forests full of elephants and dog-headed women.
"Better and better, Smid!" growled Wulf, approvingly.
"Fresh beef cheap there, Prince Wulf, eh?" quoth Smid; "I must look over the arrow-heads."
-To the mountains of the Hyperboreans, where there was eternal night, and the air was full of feathers.... That is, one-third of it came from thence, and another third came from the Southern ocean, over the Moon mountains, where no one had ever been, and the remaining third from the country where the phoenix lived, and n.o.body knew where that was. And then there were the cataracts, and the inundations-and-and-and above the cataracts, nothing but sand-hills and ruins, as full of devils as they could hold.... and as for Asgard, no one had ever heard of it.... till every face grew longer and longer, as Pelagia went on interpreting and misinterpreting; and at last the giant smote his hand upon his knee, and swore a great oath that Asgard might rot till the twilight of the G.o.ds before he went a step farther up the Nile.
"Curse the monk!" growled Wulf. "How should such a poor beast know anything about the matter?"
"Why should not he know as well as that ape of a Roman governor?" asked Smid.
"Oh, the monks know everything," said Pelagia. "They go hundreds and thousands of miles up the river, and cross the deserts among fiends and monsters, where any one else would be eaten up, or go mad at once."
"Ah, the dear holy men! It"s all by the sign of the blessed cross!" exclaimed all the girls together, devoutly crossing themselves, while two or three of the most enthusiastic were half-minded to go forward and kneel to Philammon for his blessing; but hesitated, their Gothic lovers being heathenishly stupid and prudish on such points.
"Why should he not know as well as the prefect? Well said, Smid! I believe that prefect"s quill-driver was humbugging us when he said Asgard was only ten days" sail up."
"Why?" asked Wulf.
"I never give any reasons. What"s the use of being an Amal, and a son of Odin, if one has always to be giving reasons like a rascally Roman lawyer? I say the governor looked like a liar; and I say this monk looks like an honest fellow; and I choose to believe him, and there is an end of it."
"Don"t look so cross at me, Prince Wulf; I"m sure it"s not my fault; I could only say what the monk told me," whispered poor Pelagia.
"Who looks cross at you, my queen?" roared the Amal. "Let me have him out here, and by Thor"s hammer, I"ll-"
"Who spoke to you, you stupid darling?" answered Pelagia, who lived in hourly fear of thunderstorms. "Who is going to be cross with any one, except I with you, for mishearing and misunderstanding, and meddling, as you are always doing? I shall do as I threatened, and run away with Prince Wulf, if you are not good. Don"t you see that the whole crew are expecting you to make them an oration?"
Whereupon the Amal rose.
"See you here, Wulf the son of Ovida, and warriors all! If we want wealth, we shan"t find it among the sand-hills. If we want women, we shall find nothing prettier than these among dragons and devils. Don"t look angry, Wulf. You have no mind to marry one of those dog-headed girls the monk talked of, have you? Well, then, we have money and women; and if we want sport, it"s better sport killing men than killing beasts; so we had better go where we shall find most of that game, which we certainly shall not up this road. As for fame and all that, though I"ve had enough, there"s plenty to be got anywhere along the sh.o.r.es of that Mediterranean. Let"s burn and plunder Alexandria: forty of us Goths might kill down all these donkey-riders in two days, and hang up that lying prefect who sent us hereon this fool"s errand. Don"t answer, Wulf. I knew he was humbugging us all along, but you were so open-mouthed to all he said, that I was bound to let my elders choose for me. Let"s go back; send over for any of the tribes; send to Spain for those Vandals-they have had enough of Adolf by now, curse him!-I"ll warrant them; get together an army, and take Constantinople. I"ll be Augustus, and Pelagia, Augusta; you and Smid here, the two Caesars; and we"ll make the monk the chief of the eunuchs, eh?-anything you like for a quiet life; but up this accursed kennel of hot water I go no farther. Ask your girls, my heroes, and I"ll ask mine. Women are all prophetesses, every one of them."
"When they are not harlots," growled Wulf to himself.
"I will go to the world"s end with you, my king!" sighed Pelagia; "but Alexandria is certainly pleasanter than this."
Old Wulf sprang up fiercely enough.
"Hear me, Amalric the Amal, son of Odin, and heroes all! When my fathers swore to be Odin"s men, and gave up the kingdom to the holy Annals, the sons of the Aesir, what was the bond between your fathers and mine? Was it not that we should move and move, southward and southward ever, till we came back to Asgard, the city where Odin dwells for ever, and gave into his hands the kingdom of all the earth? And did we not keep our oath? Have we not held to the Amals? Did we not leave Adolf, because we would not follow a Balth, while there was an Amal to lead us? Have we not been true men to you, son of the Aesir?"
"No man ever saw Wulf, the son of Ovida, fail friend or foe."
"Then why does his friend fail him? Why does his friend fail himself? If the bison-bull lie down and wallow, what will the herd do for a leader? If the king-wolf lose the scent, how will the pack hold it? If the Yngling forgets the song of Asgard, who will sing it to the heroes?"
"Sing it yourself, if you choose. Pelagia sings quite well enough for me."
In an instant the cunning beauty caught at the hint, and poured forth a soft, low, sleepy song:-
"Loose the sail, rest the oar, float away down, Fleeting and gliding by tower and town; Life is so short at best! s.n.a.t.c.h, while thou canst, thy rest, Sleeping by me!"
"Can you answer that, Wulf?" shouted a dozen voices.
"Hear the song of Asgard, warriors of the Goths! Did not Alaric the king love it well? Did I not sing it before him in the palace of the Caesars, till he swore, for all the Christian that he was, to go southward in search of the holy city? And when he went to Valhalla, and the ships were wrecked off Sicily, and Adolf the Balth turned back like a lazy hound, and married the daughter of the Romans, whom Odin hates, and went northward again to Gaul, did not I sing you all the song of Asgard in Messina there, till you swore to follow the Amal through fire and water until we found the hall of Odin, and received the mead-cup from his own hand? Hear it again, warriors of the Goths!"
"Not that song!" roared the Amal, stopping his ears with both his hands. "Will you drive us blood-mad again, just as we are settling down into our sober senses, and finding out what our lives were given us for?"
"Hear the song of Asgard! On to Asgard, wolves of the Goths!" shouted another; and a babel of voices arose.
"Haven"t we been fighting and marching these seven years?"
"Haven"t we drunk blood enough to satisfy Odin ten times over? If he wants us lot him come himself and lead us!"
"Let us get our winds again before we start afresh!"
"Wulf the Prince is like his name, and never tires; he has a winter-wolf"s legs under him; that is no reason why we should have."
"Haven"t you heard what the monk says?-we can never get ever those cataracts."
"We"ll stop his old wives" tales for him, and then settle for ourselves," said Smid; and springing from the thwart where he had been sitting, he caught up a bill with one hand, and seized Philammon"s throat with the other.... in a moment more, it would have been all over with him....
For the first time in his life Philammon felt a hostile gripe upon him, and a new sensation rushed through every nerve, as he grappled with the warrior, clutched with his left hand the up-lifted wrist, and with his right the girdle, and commenced, without any definite aim, a fierce struggle, which, strange to say, as it went on, grew absolutely pleasant.
The women shrieked to their lovers to part the combatants, but in vain.
"Not for worlds! A very fair match and a very fair fight! Take your long legs back, Itho, or they will be over you! That"s right, my Smid, don"t use the knife! They will be overboard in a moment! By all the Valkyrs, they are down, and Smid undermost!"
There was no doubt of it; and in another moment Philammon would have wrenched the bill out of his opponent"s hand, when, to the utter astonishment of the onlookers, he suddenly loosed his hold, shook himself free by one powerful wrench, and quietly retreated to his seat, conscience-stricken at the fearful thirst for blood which had suddenly boiled up within him as he felt his enemy under him.
The onlookers were struck dumb with astonishment; they had taken for granted that he would, as a matter of course, have used his right of splitting his vanquished opponent"s skull-an event which they would of course have deeply deplored, but with which, as men of honour, they could not on any account interfere, but merely console themselves for the loss of their comrade by flaying his conqueror alive, "carving him into the blood-eagle," or any other delicate ceremony which might serve as a vent for their sorrow and a comfort to the soul of the deceased.
Smid rose, with a bill in his hand, and looked round him-perhaps to see what was expected of him. He half lifted his weapon to strike .... Philammon, seated, looked him calmly in the face.... The old warrior"s eye caught the bank, which was now receding rapidly past them; and when he saw that they were really floating downwards again, without an effort to stem the stream, he put away his bill, and sat himself down deliberately in his place, astonishing the onlookers quite as much as Philammon had done.
"Five minutes" good fighting, and no one killed! This is a shame!" quoth another. "Blood we must see, and it had better be yours, master monk, than your betters","-and therewith he rushed on poor Philammon.
He spoke the heart of the crew; the sleeping wolf in them had been awakened by the struggle, and blood they would have; and not frantically, like Celts or Egyptians, but with the cool humorous cruelty of the Teuton, they rose altogether, and turning Philammon over on his back, deliberated by what death he should die.
Philammon quietly submitted-if submission have anything to do with that state of mind in which sheer astonishment and novelty have broken up all the custom of man"s nature, till the strangest deeds and sufferings are taken as matters of course. His sudden escape from the Laura, the new world of thought and action into which he had been plunged, the new companions with whom he had fallen in, had driven him utterly from his moorings, and now anything and everything might happen to him. He who had promised never to look upon woman found himself, by circ.u.mstances over which he had no control, amid a boatful of the most objectionable species of that most objectionable genus-and the utterly worst having happened, everything else which happened must be better than the worst. For the rest, he had gone forth to see the world-and this was one of the ways of it. So he made up his mind to see it, and be filled with the fruit of his own devices.
And he would have been certainly filled with the same in five minutes more, in some shape too ugly to be mentioned: but, as even sinful women have hearts in them, Pelagia shrieked out-
"Amalric! Amalric! do not let them! I cannot bear it!"
"The warriors are free men, my darling, and know what is proper. And what can the life of such a brute be to you?"
Before he could stop her, Pelagia had sprung from her cushions, and thrown herself into the midst of the laughing ring of wild beasts.
"Spare him! spare him for my sake!" shrieked she.