A Sea Queen's Sailing

by Charles W. Whistler

Then the victors leapt out of the ship and went ashore as swiftly as they had come, and the forest hid them. The ship was hard and fast aground now, and we pulled up abreast of her slowly, having no mind to share her fate. Whether the Irish took any of her crew with them as captives I do not know, but I saw her decks, and it seemed hardly possible. So terrible a sight were they, that I feared lest Gerda should in any way see it. But the doors of the cabin had been shut, doubtless lest the fighting should fray the ladies.

"Will you venture farther, King Hakon?" asked the pilot.

"We will take one ship farther," he said. "The other shall bide here, and see that this ship is not burnt by these wild folk. Mayhap we shall want her."

Thoralf laughed at that. "We have no men to man her withal," he said.

"We have men to sail her to Norway, and there wait the men to fight for us," Hakon answered gaily. "We shall meet no foes on the high seas, and we have met a queen whose men will hail us as their best friends."

Thoralf shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "None can say that you fare forward sadly, Hakon."

"This is the worse of the two ships," Bertric said. "The other is Heidrek's own. He is not here. Asbiorn yonder commanded this."

"Asbiorn is in luck today," Earl Osric said, nodding toward those terrible decks.

But Asbiorn stood on the foredeck with his back to that which he had looked on, biting the ends of his long moustache, and pale with rage. I did not wonder thereat.

Now Osric hailed the other ship and bade her anchor in the stream while we went on. The pilot said that we could safely do so, and that the next reach was the one of which he had spoken as a trap. Then his comrade went into the bows with a long pole, sounding, and so we crept past the stranded vessel, and into the most lovely reach of river I had ever seen. It was well nigh a lake, long and broad, between the soft hills and forest-clad shores, and the water was bright and clear as glass beneath our keel, so that I saw a great silver salmon flash like an arrow past the ship as we held on. There was a village at the head of the reach, and men swarmed in it like angry bees round a hive's mouth. Only the long black ship, which still pulled slowly away from us, and the fiercely-burning fires on every hilltop spoilt the quiet of the place.