But the wine-drenched earls were awaking, and the sleep-dazed warriors stirred,
And the light of their dawning was dreadful; wild voice of the day they heard,
And they knew not where they were gotten, and their hearts were smitten with dread,
And they deemed that their house was fallen to the innermost place of the dead,
The hall for the traitors builded, the house of the changeless plain;
They cried, and their tongues were confounded, and none gave answer again:
They rushed, and came nowhither; each man beheld his foe,
And smote as the hopeless and dying, nor brother brother might know,
The sons of one mother's sorrow in the fire-blast strove and smote,
And the sword of the first-begotten was thrust in the father's throat,
And the father hewed at his stripling; the thrall at the war-king cried,
And mocked the face of the mighty in that house of Atli's pride.
There Gudrun stood o'er the turmoil; there stood the Niblung child;
As the battle-horn is dreadful, as the winter wind is wild,
So dread and shrill was her crying and the cry none heeded or heard,
As she shook the sword in the Eastland, and spake the hidden word:
"The brand for the flesh of the people, and the sword for the King of the world!"
Then adown the hall and the smoke-cloud the half-slaked torch she hurled
And strode to the chamber of Atli, white-fluttering mid the smoke;
But their eyen met in the doorway and he knew the hand and the stroke,
And shrank aback before her; and no hand might he upraise,
There was nought in his heart but anguish in that end of Atli's days.
But she towered aloft before him, and cried in Atli's home:
"Lo, lo, the day-light, Atli, and the last foe overcome!"
And with all the might of the Niblungs she thrust him through and fled,
And the flame was fleet behind her and hung o'er the face of the dead.
There was none to hinder Gudrun, and the fire-blast scathed her nought,
For the ways of the Norns she wended, and her feet from the wrack they brought
Till free from the bane of the East-folk, the swift pursuing flame,
To the uttermost wall of Atli and the side of the sea she came:
She stood on the edge of the steep, and no child of man was there:
A light wind blew from the sea-flood and its waves were little and fair,
And gave back no sign of the burning, as in twinkling haste they ran,
White-topped in the merry morning, to the walls and the havens of man.
Then Gudrun girded her raiment, on the edge of the steep she stood,
She looked o'er the shoreless water, and cried out o'er the measureless flood:
"O Sea, I stand before thee; and I who was Sigurd's wife!
By his brightness unforgotten I bid thee deliver my life
From the deeds and the longing of days, and the lack I have won of the earth,
And the wrong amended by wrong, and the bitter wrong of my birth!"
She hath spread out her arms as she spake it, and away from the earth she leapt,
And cut off her tide of returning; for the sea-waves over her swept,
And their will is her will henceforward; and who knoweth the deeps of the sea,
And the wealth of the bed of Gudrun, and the days that yet shall be?
Ye have heard of Sigurd aforetime, how the foes of God he slew;
How forth from the darksome desert the Gold of the Waters he drew;
How he wakened Love on the Mountain, and wakened Brynhild the Bright,
And dwelt upon Earth for a season, and shone in all men's sight.
Ye have heard of the Cloudy People, and the dimming of the day,
And the latter world's confusion, and Sigurd gone away;
Now ye know of the Need of the Niblungs and the end of broken troth,
All the death of kings and of kindreds and the sorrow of Odin the Goth.
THE END.