“There you lie, monk,” said the priest. “I have heard that tale too; only they were not priests, but beggar-monks, who came from the rear of the devil like wasps out of a wasp-nest.”
Old Jon laughed louder than all the serving-folk, and roared:
“There were both sorts, I’ll be bound—”
“Then the devil must have a fine broad tail,” said Björn Gunnarsön, and Lady Aashild smiled and said:
“Aye, have you not heard that all evil drags a long tail behind it?”
“Be still, Lady Aashild,” cried Sira Sigurd, “do not you talk of the long tail evil drags after it. You sit here as though you were mistress in the house, and not Ragnfrid. But ’tis strange you could not help her child—have you no more of that strong water you dealt in once, which could make whole the sheep already boiling in the pot, and turn women to maids in the bridal bed? Think you I know not of the wedding in this very parish where you made a bath for the bride that was no maid—”
Sira Eirik sprang up, gripped the other priest by the shoulder and thigh, and flung him right over the table, so that the jugs and tankards were overturned and food and drink ran upon the cloths and floor, while Sira Sigurd lay his length upon the ground with torn garments. Eirik leaped over the board, and would have struck him again, roaring above the tumult:
“Hold your filthy mouth, priest of Hell that you are—” Lavrans strove to part them, but Ragnfrid stood, white as death, by the board, and wrung her hands. Then Lady Aashild ran and helped Sira Sigurd to his feet, and wiped the blood from his face. She poured a beaker of mead down his throat, saying:
“You must not be so strict, Sira Eirik, that you cannot bear to listen to jesting so far on in a drinking bout. Seat yourselves now and you shall hear of that wedding. ’Twas not here in the Dale at all, nor had I the good fortune to be the one that knew of that water—could I have brewed it I trow we would not be sitting now on a hill-croft in the wilds. I might have been a rich woman and had lands in the great, rich parishes—nigh to town and cloisters and bishop and chapter,” and she smiled at the three churchmen. “But ’tis said sure enough, that the art was known in the olden days.”
And the Lady told a merry tale of a misadventure that befell in King Inga’s time when the magic wash was used by mistake by the wrong woman and of what followed thereon.