Day after day Zora held on at coursing speed, never faltering, her steel limbs seemingly tireless. But now the roads were rougher, and more than one bridge was missing. Twice horse and rider were carried down from treacherous fords, and once Zora sank in a bog. Neither master nor mare, however, met with injury; and, despite all hindrance, the long miles melted swiftly away before the mare's easy swinging stride.
And so the king's messenger sped through Austrasia, where corners of ancient forest yet stood unhewn, and few men tilled the fields who could not show visible proof of Germanic blood. From Rheims to Treves, Treves to Mayence, thence across the Rhine, and along the Thuringian trade-route which led up the Main and on into the primeval forest,--these were the last stages of the great race.
But the king's messenger was spared at least one day of his expected journeying. At Mayence he learned that Count Rudulf had lately been staying at the Monastery of Fulda, and that it was possible the old hero had not yet returned to his mark.
When, midmorning of the next day, Olvir came at last to Fulda, he found that great centre of civilization in the heart of the beech-wood vastly different from the gilded abbey of Tours, with its slaves and precious hoard. The rude mass of log structures was a very beehive of skilled workers,--sturdy brothers of Northern blood, who found it more to their liking to toil at husbandry and the handicrafts, or to practise with the pen and study the seven liberal arts, than to chant the dirge-like hymns of Holy Church.
Above all was Olvir drawn to Abbot Sturm, whose manly and dignified welcome of the king's messenger all but conquered the young man's aversion to Christian priests. Not all the bluff old abbot's urgings, however, could hold Olvir over the day, when he learned that Rudulf and his Wend wife had gone to the count's homestede in the adjoining shire.
Again Zora stretched out her lean neck, and raced away down the forest road. By midday she had reached the journey's end. On a rocky knoll, close by the Fulda's bank, stood Rudulf's burg,--a walled enclosure in which were grouped the hall and bower and outbuildings familiar to the Norse eye, and, beside all these, the rude stone keep of the Franks and Southern Saxons, adopted centuries since in imitation of the Roman tower.
CHAPTER XIV
When a wolf thou wert
Out in the wildwood.
LAY OF HELGI.