"What the mischief had you to do with that?" said Glum. "And how the mischief did it concern you, if he had no concern about it himself? Do you think all men are such rats as you are? Don't you know that I would have seen the pair of you dead with gladness if I knew that you had died like men? Vex me no more, but let me be rid of you."
Then Ogmund began to plead in earnest, but Glum would hardly listen to him. He cut him short by saying, "It comes to this, Ogmund. Either you are a man of long-mindedness and caution—and why you took such a high hand with Halward at first if you are not, that beats me—or you are a bag of silly vapour, a bladder of dry peasen. I believe myself, that you are a cur, and am forced to remind you that you come of base blood. A thrall deals like a thrall, they say—and so I say. But you shall not stay here any longer." And Ogmund must needs go. He went away to his father in the North, and there he was for two years or more.
OF KING OLAF TRYGVASSON; AND OF SIGURD HELMING AND GUNNAR, HIS BROTHER
CHAPTER III OF KING OLAF TRYGVASSON; AND OF SIGURD HELMING AND GUNNAR, HIS BROTHER
During those years, while Ogmund was faring prosperously with his father and was thinking of marrying a girl of those parts, misfortune overtook Earl Haakon, who fell out with some of his sworn friends, became suspicious of others, and at last took to his bed with a troublesome complaint, and died in it, but not of the complaint. He had a servant called Kark, whom he trusted inordinately, and used to have him to sleep in his chamber at the foot of his bed. He had bad dreams and used to throw himself about and cry out against his enemies. One night he had a very bad dream, and sat up in bed, staring at the wall and screaming, "They are coming, they are coming, they are here!" Kark sprang up in a fright and with a sword in his hand slashed about him. He slashed the Earl in the neck; and that was his death-blow. The deed was done, and by misadventure, but being done, Kark thought he might as well make profit off it. So he cut off Earl Haakon's head and put it in a bag. Then he carried it with all speed over the mountains to King Olaf Trygvasson, who he knew would be chosen King of Norway, as his right was. That was the end of the Earl, who was a great man. But his death made way for a greater.
King Olaf was still a youngish man when the Thing chose him. He may have been thirty years old, and the wife he had was his second, if not third. He was a great-grandson of King Harold Fairhair, and had been bred up in Russia, then in Vendland, which is the country round about the Vistula; then he went viking and did great things in Orkney, in Iceland and in England also. He sailed to Scilly at one time, and there he was baptized and became a Christian. The way of it was this: He heard tell of a prophet in those islands who knew everything that was going to happen, and determined to see what he could do. So he sent a fine man of his out to visit him, dressed in the best clothes that he had, rings, chains and I don't know what else. "Now," he said, "go to the prophet, and say you are a king. Ask him what he has to tell you, and report it all to me." The man went as he was bid, found the prophet and said, "Here is a king come to visit you and hear what you have to say." The prophet, who was old, and white, and had a loose, wrinkled skin and remarkable finger-nails, like a bird's claws, plucked at the roots of his beard. "You are not a king," he said, "but I advise you to be faithful to the man who is one, and sent you here. I have nothing to tell you, and if I had I should not tell it. Go away."