Immediately upon these words, the Beautiful Shigne ordered her virgins to row back and join the fleet of Rolf, whither the white hull of her _holker_ darted like an arrow.
CHAPTER IV.
A BERSERKER.
Following with saddened eyes the light _holker_ that carried away the warrior maid, Gaelo remained silent and pensive, while his champions rested upon their oars. The steersman, a man of about thirty years, of a merry face and clad in the coat and wide breeches of the skippers of the Seine, was named Simon Large-Ears. He owed his surname to an enormous pair of ears, that stood out far from his temples, and which were as red as his nose. Simon, once a serf of the fisheries attached to the abbey of St. Paterne, had, jointly with three other companions, who were seated on the oarsmen"s benches, and who wore the Northman pointed casque and cuira.s.s of iron scales, run away to the pirates and offered them their services in the capacity of pilot and oarsmen, the moment that the numerous Northman fleet had appeared at the mouth of the Seine.
Simon and his comrades, as well as many other Gallic serfs, who availed themselves of the opportunity to drop their servitude and revenge upon their masters the ill-treatment that the latter subjected them to, only demanded from their Northman allies a share of the prospective booty.[1]
Leaning on his harpoon, silent and pensive, Gaelo contemplated the _holker_ of the Beautiful Shigne as it rowed back and became indistinct in the light mist that frequently rises at sunset from the surface of the river"s waters. Simon Large-Ears, seated at the p.o.o.p, and, as pilot, holding the rudder in his hand, said to one of his companions surnamed Robin Jaws, by reason of his lower jaw-bones protruding like a Molossian"s:
"Did you hear the conversation between the Beautiful Shigne and Gaelo?
What savage she-devils are these Northman virgins! They must be courted with rough sword whacks, caressed with battle-axe cracks, and their hearts can be reached only by boring through their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and if you don"t, then these furies make you wed death. How do you like such betrothals?"
"I would prefer to court one of those African lionesses of which Ibrahim the Saracen was telling us the other day," and turning towards his bench-mate, a gigantic Northman of a beard so blonde that it seemed almost white, Robin said: "h.e.l.loa, Lodbrog! If all the women of your race receive their lovers in that manner, there must be more dead bodies than new-born ones in your country."
"Yes--but the children of these virgin warriors, whom none possesses until after he has vanquished his chosen one with the sword, become men, everyone of whom are worth ten others in vigor and bravery," answered the giant gravely, and raising his enormous head he proceeded: "All such children are born, like myself, berserkers."
"Aye, aye!" put in the other Northman oarsmen in a low voice and with an accent of deference that bordered on fear. "Lodbrog was born a berserker!"
"I do not deny it, comrades," replied Simon; "but by the devil! Explain to me what "berserker" means."
"A warrior who is always terrible to his enemies," explained one of the Northmans, "and sometimes dangerous to his friends."
The giant Lodbrog nodded his head affirmatively, while Simon and Robin looked at him in astonishment, not having understood the mysterious words of the pirates. At this moment Gaelo approached his men. He had awakened from the profound revery into which the disappearance of the Buckler Maiden plunged him. The Northman chieftain looked determined.
"My champions," said Gaelo in a resonant voice, "we must be ahead of the Beautiful Shigne and seize the abbey of St. Denis ourselves! Yours shall be the booty, mine the glory!"
"Gaelo," observed Simon, "when I heard you mention the feat to your warrior maid, I, who am well acquainted with the abbey of St. Denis, where I have recently been more than once, when I was a serf of the fishery of St. Paterne, may h.e.l.l consume it, I took your words simply as a lover"s jest. Guarded as the abbey is, and fortified with thick walls, the place can resist five or six hundred determined men. How can you think of taking it with only fifteen? Come, Gaelo, you must give up the plan."
"My braves," resumed Gaelo, after a moment"s silence, "if I were to tell you that a serf, a swine-herd, is at this very hour a count, the seigneur and master of a province that Charles the Bald, grandfather of Charles the Simple, who is now king of the Franks, presented him with, you would answer me: "A serf, a swine-herd, become master and seigneur of a province? It is impossible!""
"By the faith of Large-Ears, that would, indeed, be my answer. A swine-herd can never become a count!"
"You think not?" replied Gaelo. "And who is the present Count of Chartres and master of the country if not a pirate who one time was a swine-herd at Trancout, a poor village located near Troyes?"[2]
"Oh! Oh! Chief," put in Robin Jaws, "you have Hastain in mind, the old bandit who fought in the ranks of the Northman pirates! We know the song:
"When he had sacked the Franks, Saw all his ships full rigged, Hastain of Rome heard tell, Vowed he would go there.
Vowed he would take the place, Plunder and pillage it, And make of Rome the King His friend Boern Iron Sides."
"Simon," said Gaelo, interrupting Robin"s song, "listen well with both your large ears to the end of the song! Proceed my champion!"
"The song ends well," answered Robin, resuming the thread of the ballad:
"Down Into Italy, Plundering, the pirates went, Laded their ships with rich Spoils of the Churches.
Then Hastain gave the word, For the return to France, And to the Frankish sh.o.r.es Steered they their way back.
"But the old Frankish King, Dreading the pirates" band, Quoth unto Hastain then: "Strike not the abbeys; Touch not nor plunder them, Nor the seigniorial burgs,-- I shall establish you Count of the Chartres."
"Hastain the pirate Chief, Well with the offer pleased, Answered agreeably, "Lo, I am willing!"
Thus was the bargain struck, Thus he became the Count Of the vast Chartres land, He, once a swine-herd!"
"By the devil and his horns! Long live Hastain! All is possible!" cried Simon Large-Ears, saying which he joined his piercing voice to the deep voices of the pirates, who, striking with their oars upon the row of bucklers that hung from the sides of the _holker_, sang fit to rend the welkin:
"Thus was the bargain struck, Thus he became the Count Of the vast Chartres land, He, once a swine-herd!"
"And now," Gaelo resumed after his champions had finished the martial refrain, "if a swine-herd serf could become the master of a province, do you hold it impossible for fifteen resolute champions to take possession of the abbey of St. Denis, the richest abbey of all Gaul?"
"No! No!" cried the pirates fired with the prospect of pillage, and again smiting with their oars the bucklers that hung from the sides of the _holker_. "To St. Denis! To St. Denis! Death to its tonsured masters! Pillage! Pillage! Fire and blood!"
The thundering voice of Lodbrog the Giant dominated the din that proceeded from the Northmans" throats and the clangor of the smitten shields. Standing on his bench and whirling in one hand his long oar with the ease that he would have handled a reed, he bellowed at the top of his voice: "To St. Denis! To St. Denis!" And intoxicating and lashing himself into a fury with his own clamor, his savage features speedily betokened a degree of exaltation that developed into a kind of delirium.
His eyes rolled rapidly in their orbits; his lips whitened with foam; and finally, emitting a terrible cry, he bent his oar in his hands and broke it in two as if it had been a cane.
At the sight of such a display of superhuman strength, the Northmans, who had for some little while before been observing Lodbrog with anxious looks, now cried out in chorus:
"Beware all! He is berserk! He will kill us all!" And before Gaelo had time to prevent it, all the pirates threw themselves upon the giant, and by their united efforts rolled him overboard into the Seine.
Gaelo had anch.o.r.ed his vessel at a short distance from one of the woody islets, washed by the river. Lodbrog fell heels over head into the water between the _holker_ and the nearby sh.o.r.e. With one bound the giant leaped out of the river, which was deep and rapid at that spot, and gained the sh.o.r.e, where he ran about shouting: "To St. Denis! To St Denis!" The frenzy that possessed the giant increased ten-fold the man"s prodigious strength. He uprooted a twenty-foot poplar, and armed with the tree as with a mace, smote and crushed the other trees within his reach. The largest branches flew into splinters, the trunks broke in two, and still the furious vertigo of the colossus was on the increase.
Not far from the sh.o.r.e stood the ruins of a house still partly covered by its roof; its walls arrested for a moment the demented course of the berserker. But the obstacle redoubled his rage. The trunk of the poplar served him for a ram. Its repeated blows broke through a portion of the lower wall, which thereupon came tumbling down with a great crash. Held up by the iron work in the opposite wall, a portion of the roof still remained in place. The giant clambered over the debris, grasped the beams of the roof with both hands and shook them furiously, ever bellowing: "To St. Denis! To St. Denis!" At last the beams yielded, and the worm-eaten roof, still partly covered with tiles, sank down upon Lodbrog with a deafening crash. For an instant the raging maniac disappeared under a cloud of dust, but presently reappeared unscathed from the falling timber and tiles. His casque and iron armor had protected him. He mounted the heap of ruins, looked around, and seeing nothing more to destroy, descended, pulled up the joists and beams, lifted up enormous stones and hurled them about with the irresistible force of those engines of war that are called catapults. Suddenly the berserker was heard to emit a roar like that of a lion; he raised his powerful arms heavenward, his body became rigid; for a moment he remained motionless like a gigantic iron statue, and then, like a colossus about to tumble from its base, swayed for an instant in air, dropped to the ground and rolled like a solid block from the top of the heap of ruins down to its foot, where he lay p.r.o.ne, seemingly as inanimate as a corpse.
Gaelo and the Northman pirates were not amazed at the frenzy of Lodbrog.
They knew well that many a Northman mariner was subject to these frightful fits, frightful like the fury of the insane, a sort of epilepsy peculiar to the berserkers, with whom the antic.i.p.ation or the ardor of battle, anger or drunkenness brought on the spell. Simon Large-Ears and Robin Jaws, however, now witnessed the spectacle for the first time; they gazed at it with surprise and affright. Finally, seeing from the distance that Lodbrog lay unconscious and rigid amidst the wreck that he had wrought, Simon cried:
"He is now fortunately dead! We have nothing more to fear!"
"The Northmans are right," put in Robin; "such frantic folks are as dangerous to their friends as to their enemies. If that berserker had remained among us in the _holker_, he would have strangled or drowned us all!"
"After which he would have flung the vessel over his head like a wooden shoe. He could have done it. I saw him flinging around beams and rocks that must have surely weighed three times as much as any man," added Large-Ears. "What an amount of strength all wasted! How he would have scattered about death and desolation in the abbey of St. Denis, where he thought he was fighting. After all, it is a pity that he is dead and gone."
"He is not dead--weigh anchor, my champions! With two strokes of the oars we can reach the isle, and presently you will see Lodbrog return to himself as if awakening from a dream."
"By the horns of the devil!" exclaimed Simon. "Out of fear that he may take to dreaming again and harpoon me, I prefer to stay on the vessel with my friend Robin;" and Large-Ears never once took his eyes off the berserker who continued motionless only a hundred feet from the sh.o.r.e and in plain sight of his companions.
"The Northmans may go alone to the a.s.sistance of the maniac, if they so desire," observed Robin as the _holker_ approached the sh.o.r.e. "It will be a sweet sensation for Lodbrog to recognize the faces of folks from his native land, when he regains consciousness, will it not?"
"It sometimes happens that fires, thought to be extinct, suddenly flame up," Large-Ears rejoined sagely.
The vessel touched land, and Gaelo and the Northmans approached the colossus, not, however, without caution. One of the pirates took off his casque, filled it half-full with water, threw into it a handful of sand that he picked up from the sh.o.r.e and shook up the mixture, while his companions vainly sought to raise Lodbrog into a sitting posture. The body was rigid like a bar of iron. They found it impossible to extract from his clenched fist a stone that he still held as firmly as in a vise between his fingers. His face, surrounded by the borders of his casque, was livid and motionless, his jaws were set, his lips were covered with froth, his eyes fixed, dilated, gla.s.sy. The Northman, dipping out of his casque the sand moistened with cold water, threw it by handfuls upon the prostrate giant"s face.
"Be careful!" called out Gaelo. "You will blind him with the moist sand."
"No, no!" confidently answered the pirate, redoubling his sandy douches.
"It is especially when the fine gravel enters the eye that the good effect is produced."