From the folds of strange craftiness that had been drawing over them, Helvin’s eyes looked up dazedly. Then—slowly—the gaze that he met steadied the flickering torch of his reason.
“Why, that is true,” he admitted. “I forgot that he had not yet found the carrion which his vulture-scent warned him of.... Still in the Fates’ hands is that happening.... Only I can see it coming ... slipping through their bony fingers....” In a mutter his voice died away. Stretched at full length he lay in brooding reverie, so sombre a figure that the cup of dregs took on new suggestiveness.
The song-maker began to speak quietly, gazing out through the open door where the rosy snow of blossoming crab-trees was banked against the blue sky, and sun like golden wine steeped all the noonday world.
“It befell me once to see a place far west of here where the earth had shaken and rent a rock in twain, and out of the chasm had leaped a brook of sweet water. So I think this happening with Eric must have shaken me; for like a well of water, a song rose in my mind while I slept,—a song that never had place there before.”
In the black morass of his musing the Jarl turned, lured by the will-o’-the-wisp curiosity.
“Never have I heard of a song coming in that manner,” he said. “Even you have always hammered them out before. Has it risen as far as your lips so that any of it could brim over into words?”
Though he continued to gaze out at the blowing trees, the song-maker bent all his energies upon his story-weaving.
“Little of it has yet got so high as that. But it will be a song about the good which is in a man even though his actions appear to be evil.... Perhaps I shall say that he had Thor’s wrath for turning to the Christ-faith; and the Thunderer cursed him so that he had no other choice than to do three nithing deeds, even though his mind was noble.... He will have a friend—perhaps it will be a maiden—who is brave enough to believe in his honorable mind in spite of the unworthiness of his actions.... I do not know yet what those crimes will be ... except that the first must be that he slays a kinsman—”
“Are—you—mad?” Starkad’s son said slowly.
With a start, Randvar turned. That the Jarl had risen gradually from his place on the straw he had realized, but he had taken it for interest. Now for the first time he looked at him. Looking, he sprang to his feet.