"Here cometh the wind!" shouted Knud the Bear, exultingly. "The foam flyeth!"
First came a sheeted flash of the blinding lightning, and after that closely followed a deep-throated reverberant peal of thunder.
"The voice of Jah!" muttered Ben Ezra. "He hath spoken from his high place."
"Jupiter the Thunderer!" exclaimed Lysias, still standing by the hammer of Thor as if for protection. "I fear him only at such hours as this; but he is a god of the Romans and I am a Greek. Evil are all gods or I should not have lost my Sapphira. Evil are they and wicked, and they hate men, for they destroy us. There is no man but must die, and if the gods were good, we might live. But these Saxons are brave seamen!"
Little cared they for storms, these sons of the sea kings. They shouted and they sang as if they were in a battle, while the waves grew mad and boiled frothing around the high wooden walls of The Sword. Her head was kept toward the wind and she rode the billows like a vast waterfowl, for the Roman shipbuilders were well skilled.
Less easy must have been the course of a keel that strove to cross the surges with her side to the wind, and it now could be seen that the large stranger was laboring and that now and then waves broke over her.
"She bringeth small peril to us," said the jarl. "We will row with but one bank of oars. Let their rowers weary themselves with three. The trumpeter on her fore deck soundeth a signal."
"Of what good," laughed Wulf the Skater, "is the blowing of a horn in such a gale as this?"
"He sendeth us a signal to heave to and wait for them," said Sigurd. "What sayest thou concerning this fellow, O Jew?"
"I think her one of the cruisers sent out by the proconsul of Spain," replied Ben Ezra. "They are all weaker vessels than this, but they are swift. They protect merchantmen from the African pirates to rob all for the proconsul."