"Let it be so," answered Gaëlo.
While Anne the Sweet and her brother walked to the cell where Martha lay, the dean of the Skippers' Guild of Paris, together with Rustic the Gay and his other men, followed Gaëlo to be presented to Rolf, who was feasting in the apartment recently occupied by the gourmandizing and craven Abbot of St. Denis. On their way thither, the young pirate left Eidiol and his men for an instant, and ran to one of the lower apartments of the abbey whither the Beautiful Shigne, whose wound, although serious, was not mortal, had been transported and was being tended. When Lodbrog the berserker, still under the spell of his vertigo of fury dashed into the crypt of the mausoleum of Clovis where the wounded warrior maid lay, the structure would inevitably have been demolished had he not stumbled at the first step of the short stone stairs that led down into the cell, and rolled to the bottom where he fell prostrate, bleeding to death from the wounds that he had received, not a few of which would have even singly proved mortal.
CHAPTER IX.
THE NORTHMAN SEA-KING.
Rolf, the Sea-King and supreme Chief of the Northman pirates, was a man far advanced in years. His beard and hair, naturally of a yellow blonde, were heavily streaked with grey. Numerous scars criss-crossed his face, which was of a brick-red hue, tanned and copper-colored by the sun and the sea air. His physiognomy was rendered hideous by a saber cut that put out his left eye and cut his nose off to the bone. His single eye glistened like a burning coal under its bushy eye-brow; his heavy lips, half-hidden under his bristling moustache and by his shaggy beard, imparted to his mouth a scoffing and sensuous expression. Rolf was of middle size and of athletic frame. His arms were abnormally long. Like his champions, the Northman Chieftain wore an armor of iron scales. But, in order to feast and frolic more at ease, he had doffed his cuirass, and now kept on only a jacket of reindeer-skin, blackened at several places by the friction of his armor, and that fell open from time to time, exposing his shirt and, under his shirt, a chest as hirsute as that of the bears of the northern sea. The pirate chieftain was just finishing his repast. Canons and a few other surviving dignitaries of the abbot served Rolf upon their knees. The friars looked haggard and were pale with fear. He allowed them to move about only on all fours, or upon their knees when they were wanted to reach out dishes and wine cups to him. Every time that the movements of these servitors seemed too slow, either the pirates themselves, or former serfs of the abbey, who now saw their opportunity to avenge the ill-treatments that they had been subjected to, quickened, with kicks and sticks, the motions of the holy men.
Rolf, just finishing his sumptuous feast, seemed to be in great good humor. Half seas over with the old wines of Gaul, he was indulging himself in the well upholstered easy-chair of the abbot. He had just placed a woman on each knee, when, back from his call upon the Beautiful Shigne, and at ease concerning her recovery, Gaëlo entered the banquet-hall, accompanied by Eidiol, Rustic and the other skippers whom he was to present to Rolf.
"So the priests of this place were keeping you prisoners!" remarked Rolf to the skippers while wiping with the back of his hand his thick moustache, still wet with wine. "You should side with us against the church rats and the castle falcons!"
"We river-pikes can escape the rats and the falcons easy enough," answered Eidiol. "Nevertheless, we love to see the falcons transfixed with arrows, and the rats drowned in their traps. We applaud your victory over the monks of St. Denis."
"Are you of the city of Paris?"
"Yes, seigneur; I am the dean of the Skippers' Guild."
"Will the Parisians defend their city?"