“He needs none. Let us fight fairly or not at all. The earl takes the axe.—What say you, Radbard? Griffin takes what he likes.”
“You keep to the axe after all, and yet say that it gives an advantage.”
“Axe against axe it does, but if your man chooses to take a twenty-foot spear and keep out of its way, we do not object. We give him his own choice.”
Then the other second said frankly, “This is generous, Cadwal. No more need be said. But this young thane has not yet asked his earl whether it will suit him.”
“Faith, no,” said Havelok, laughing; “I was thinking what I should like myself, and nothing at all of the earl.”
So I went across to Ragnar, who was waiting patiently at one end of the clearing, while Griffin was pacing with uneven steps backward and forward at the other, and I told him what the question was.
“I thought it would be a matter of swords,” he said, “but I am Dane enough to like the axe best. Settle it as you will. Of course he knows naught of axe play, so that you are right in not pressing it on him. He is a light man, and active, and maybe will be glad not even to try sword to sword; for look at the sort of bodkin he is wearing.”
The earl and we had the northern long sword, of course; but when I looked I saw that the Welsh had short, straight, and heavy weapons of about half the length of ours, and so even sword to sword seemed hard on the lighter man; wherein I was wrong, as I had yet to learn.
I went back, therefore, and told the others.
“The earl takes the axe, and the thane has his choice, as we have said.”