Vandrad the Viking; Or, The Feud and the Spell

by J. Storer Clouston

It was nearly noon when he awoke, and the sun was streaming through the attic window. He found Atli in the room below.

"I have turned sluggard, it seems," he said.

"Young heads need sleep," replied the old man. "There was no need to rise before, or I should have roused thee. Jomar has been gone since daybreak, and till he returns thou canst do naught."

"Naught?" said Estein. "Have I not got my foster-brother to seek for? Give me but a meal to carry me till nightfall and I will away."

At first the old man endeavoured to dissuade him, but finding he was obdurate, he finally gave him a cap and coat of wolf-skin to be worn over his mail lest he should be seen by any natives, a good bow and arrows, and copious but perplexing directions regarding the forest paths. As he sallied forth, and followed the track by which he had come the night before, his plans were vague enough. To make for King Bue's hall, and, taking advantage of the woods that covered all the country, spy out what might be seen, was the hazardous scheme he proposed. Perhaps, he thought, Helgi might be wandering the country too, and if fate was kind they might meet. In any case he could not rest in his state of uncertainty, and he pushed boldly on. He smiled as he glanced at his garb: the long wolf-skin coat reached almost to his knees, over his legs he had drawn thick-knitted hose to keep out the cold, his helmet was hidden by the furry cap, and the only part of his original equipment to be seen were the sword girt round his waist and the long shield that hung upon his back. He had been in two minds about taking this last, but ere the day was done he had reason to congratulate himself that it was with him.

Before long he struck the open glade they had gone down by moonlight, and following it to the end, he found, after a little search, the opening of another path. This at last divided into two divergent tracks, and he had to confess himself completely puzzled.

"I seem to be the plaything of fate," he exclaimed, after he had tried in vain to recall Atli's directions; "let fate decide, life is but made up of the castings of a die," and with that he threw his dagger into the air, crying, "Point right, haft left!" It landed on its point and sunk almost out of sight in the snow. "Right let it be then," he said, and turned down the right-hand path.

It had been so dark and their flight so hurried that nothing remained in his memory of the night before, to show him whither the way was leading. He only knew that he had wandered for some time, when a prospect of white, open country began to show in peeps through the trees ahead. Presently he came to the edge of the forest, and saw that the cast of his dagger had led him wide of his mark. A long stretch of treeless country opened out before him, getting wider and wider in the distance. Near at hand a narrow lake began, and stretched for a mile or two down the snow-fields, and, like the greater lake they had passed, it was frozen and shining white. Less than a hundred yards from him, between the forest and the water, there lay a small village. A number of men stood about among the houses, and from their movements and the presence of two or three sledges he judged that a party must either have lately arrived, or be on the point of departing. As nothing further seemed to happen, he made up his mind that they must be arrivals; and then, seeing little to be gained by waiting further, he was about to retrace his steps when his attention was arrested by the appearance of two women. They came out of a house, and one, the taller of the two, went up to a group of men standing near, while the other, who looked like a peasant's wife, hung behind. The look of the first figure caught Estein's eye at once, and he felt his heart suddenly beat quickly. He could only see her back as she talked with the men, but every gesture she made, slight though they were, brought sharply and clearly before his mind memories of the Holy Isle.

"By the hammer of Thor and the horse of Odin, this country is surely bewitched," he muttered. His fancy, he told himself, was playing him a pleasant trick: he had seen Osla so continually in his mind's eye, that this girl, for girl she seemed, shaped herself after his thoughts. That it could be she he loved, there in the flesh, was almost laughably impossible; yet as she talked, apparently with an air of some authority, to the men beside her, the resemblance became at moments stronger, and then again he would say to himself, "Nay, that is not like her." As the men gesticulated and answered her their voices came to him indistinctly, while hers, strain his hearing as he might, he could not catch. There seemed to be a dispute about something which the whole party were engrossed in, when suddenly one man gave a cry and pointed at Estein. Then he saw that in his curiosity he had stepped outside the shelter of the wood and stood in a space between the trees.

At the man's cry they all looked round, and he saw the girl's face.