Ingvar turned his eyes gloomily on him for a moment, and then answered:
"What know you of pity? Slay him if you will."
Then when he heard that, Eadmund looked at Raud, smiling on him with a wondrous smile and saying:
"Thanks, good friend."
So Raud slew him in pity, and that was now the best deed that might be done.
Thereat I cried out once, and my senses left me, and I knew no more.
[CHAPTER XIII. HOW BISHOP HUMBERT JOINED THE KING.]
When I began to come to myself it was late afternoon. At first into my mind came the fancy that I sat on the side of King Eadmund's bed in the king's chambers at Reedham, and that he told me a wondrous dream; how that--and then all of a sudden I knew that it was no shadowy dream, but that I had seen all come to pass, and that through the arrow storm Eadmund had passed to rest.
All round me the trees dripped with the damp November mist that creeps from the river, and the smell of dead leaves was in my nostrils, and for a while I lay still, hardly yet knowing true from false, dream from deed. So quiet was I that a robin came and perched close to me on a bramble, whose last leaves were the colour of the bird's red breast, and there it sang a little, so that I roused to life with the sound. Then swooped down a merlin with flash of gray wings on the robin and took it, and that angered me so that I rose on my elbow to fray it away; and with that the last cloud left my mind and I knew where I was. Then, too, from where he waited my waking came Vig, my great Danish dog, who had been tied at the thane's house, and must have left the flying party to seek me. And he bounded in gladness about me.