The Sentimental Vikings

by R. V. Risley

Father Peter hesitated a moment, then throwing back his head:

“No,” he said; “they were words militant, for the Church is born militant; and she shall ride you as a plough-horse. Let me pass on from my devotions.”

“No, Father Peter,” said my lord in a quiet voice, reaching one arm out of the shadow. “You go where you have taught us that there is more devotion than there is upon this earth. For three years you and your crew have eaten, slept, and builded on my lands, until now my house is but very little my own.”

Father Peter took a step forward, but the long white arm barred him across his thick throat. He strode one step farther forward, pushing the arm aside, and, turning in the direction of my lord’s voice, snarled like a dog, calling him long names from books I never read. Whether my lord was mad, or whether the humiliation of the past three years had hurt his heart, I do not know, but he reached both arms around the priest, and lifting him in the air, flung him face-downward against the window, where it ran to the floor. I went to my lord and caught his hands behind him. Then drawing long breaths, we walked silently toward the black form at the window foot. Stooping, I put my hand over its mouth and over its fat chest. There was a drawing up of legs and something like a laugh, deep in the throat. Then Father Peter died.

The snow chunked under our weary feet and our staffs were useless in the thaw, and ever behind, when the wind was still, and when there were no pines near us to whisper as of safety, we could hear the sound of the horses, and we would look at each other and step higher, and take longer strides for a few yards. My lord was very weary, for he was a man who loved warmth, and he could not bear the cold of the indifferent sky above him and the unfeeling purity of the snow that lay about us.

Far away was the glimmer of sea. There was no dawn, but a streak of yellow in the east, that grew and lengthened and widened, and then became flame-coloured and then disappeared, and a little sun came from the sea, but it had no light and the snow had glimmered more under the moon. There were but two of us left. We had been seven at first, but of the others three had turned back and two lay in the snow on our way. It was the ninth day that we had left the hall; and ever the men of the Bishop of Lund, three hundred and fifty of them, came after us on their light horses, and ever we doubled and crouched over the snow, like hares hungered or hunted. At night we would make fires of the pine-cones, and in our helmets melt the snow into water, lowering our helmets into the snow again to cool them afterwards. We had eaten all our bread, but of fish we had plenty, though I was sorry for my lord. So all that day we hastened, and when the night came we lay back to back in a hollow of the snow on a little hill that looked over a bay. The bay was frozen, and I remember the winter moonlight kept me awake as it shed itself upward from the ice into my face; and whenever I looked out over the snow-sweep, its long white track seemed to point to where we lay. Deep into the night, when the sighing wind had ceased to scud the drift-snow into our hiding-place, my lord turned over and shook me feebly. “Man!” he said; “he was right when he said the Church was born militant, and that only a greater power like itself shall cast a shadow on men. We broken clans, that call ourselves nations, are little things. What shall I do? Tell me, what shall I do?” I looked at him in the surprise of one just waking, as he knelt above me, one hand on each shoulder. “Man!” he said, again, shaking me, “what shall I do? They are coming; I can hear them under the snow. I can hear the ice of the bay cracking to their boats, and I can hear the whispered warnings of the pine trees when they bend to the stirred air of their innumerable breaths. Man! what shall I do?” Awake now, I saw that my lord was full of terror, like a child, and bringing him close to me, I rolled him in his clothes and put him deep in the snow again, piling some of my own things over him, and he slept complainingly and fitfully like a child who has been punished.

It was just before the dawn when we heard the far-away shouting of the Bishop’s noisy troop, and crawling to our feet we left our hole in the snow and crept down the side of the hill toward the water. Here my lord thought it was easier walking on the ice, but soon we heard the sound of horses on the strand, and as it was a road to them not like the snow above, we climbed again to where the deeper drifts were and passed unseen. So half that day we travelled, and twice they went ahead of us going by the strand, but both times a few horsemen only; so we dared not turn back, for we knew the others were spread out on the uplands. Late in the afternoon we came to the long point of rock that stretches from our island towards the mainland, and here my lord stopped. “If we had a boat,” he said, trembling I think with eagerness; then, pulling his grey beard, he whispered to himself only, “Who can fight against the Church,—who will not fight?” Then turned he again and went on along the shore; and thus late in the evening we came to a solitary beech which rose from out a hollow in the hills. Great formless mounds of white lay near, the fallen ones who had left this old tree lonely; and leaning against this solitary trunk we passed our night, until the coming of a glorious dawning fell on our faces as they lay against the smooth beech-bark, and awakened us early—I think earlier than any of the Bishop’s men awakened that morning, for though we waited to eat we heard no sound of their pursuing until nearly the noon-time; then from far off came the familiar thud of horses’ hoofs and the crisp jingle of the bridle-reins, in the far-carrying, cold, morning air.

It was the next day after this, when my Lord Rolf seemed to hesitate, walking by himself, telling even me nothing, and when it came to the sunset and a cold yellow edged the dark sky over the sea, and the snow-drifts looked ghostly at any distance, he spoke to me after many trials with himself.

“Do you know where we are?”

“No,” I said.