III
All day the Blind Harper steered the galley of the dead. There was a faint wind moving out of the west. The boat went before it, slow, and with a low, sighing wash.
Torcall saw the red gaping wounds of the dead, and the glassy eyes of the nine men.
“It is better not to be blind and to see the dead,” he muttered, “than to be blind and to see the dead.”
The man who had been steersman leaned against him. He took him in his shuddering grip and thrust him into the sea.
But when, an hour later, he put his hand to the coolness of the water, he drew it back with a cry, for it was on the cold, stiff face of the dead man that it had fallen. The long hair had caught in a cleft in the leather where the withes had given.
For another hour Torcall sat with his chin in his right hand, and his unseeing eyes staring upon the dead. He heard no sound at all, save the lap of wave upon wave, and the suss of spray against spray, and a bubbling beneath the boat, and the low, steady swish of the body that trailed alongside the steering oar.
At the second hour before sundown he lifted his head. The sound he heard was the sound of waves beating upon rocks.
At the hour before sundown he moved the oar rapidly to and fro, and cut away the body that trailed behind the boat. The noise of the waves upon the rocks was now a loud song.