Читать книгу The Ward of King Canute - Ottilie A. Liljencrantz - Страница 6

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Openly I now speak

Because I both sexes know:

Unstable are men’s minds toward women;

‘T is when we speak most fair,

When we most falsely think:

That deceives even the cautious.

Ha’vama’l.

This morning there were few travellers upon the Street. South of the highway the land was held by English farmers, who would naturally remain under cover while a Danish host was in the neighborhood; while north of the great dividing line lay Danish freeholds whose masters might be equally likely to see the prudence of being in their watch-towers when the English allies were passing. Barred across by the shadows of its mighty trees, the great road stretched away mile after mile in cool emptiness. At rare intervals, a mounted messenger clattered over the stones, his hand upon his weapon, his eyes rolling sharply in a keen watch of the thicket on either side. Still more rarely, foraging parties swept through the morning stillness, lowing cows pricked to a sharp trot before them, and squawking fowls slung over their broad shoulders. Captured pigs gave back squeal for squawk, and the voices of the riders rose in uproarious laughter until the very echoes revolted and cast back the hideous din.

The approach of the first of these bands caused Randalin’s heart to leap and sink under her brave green tunic. For all that she could tell from their dress, they might as well be English as Danish. If her disguise should fail! As they bore down upon her, she drew her horse to the extreme edge of the road and turned upon them a pale defiant face.

On they came. When they caught sight of a sprig of a boy drawn up beside the way with his hand resting sternly on his knife, they sent up a shout of boisterous merriment. The blood roared so loudly in Randalin’s ears that she could not understand what they said. She jerked her horse’s head toward the trees and drove her spur deep into his side. Only as he leaped forward and they swept past her, shouting, did the words reach home.

“Look at the warrior, comrades!” “Hail, Berserker!” “Scamper, cub, or your nurse will catch you!” “Tie some of your hair on your chin, little one!”

As the sound of hoof-beats died away, and the nag settled back to his steady jog-trot, the girl unclenched her hands and drew a long breath.

“Though it seems a strange wonder that they should not know me for a woman, I think I need give myself no further uneasiness. It must be that I am very like Fridtjof in looks. It may be that it would not be unadvisable now for me to ask advice of the next person how I can come to the camp.”

The asking had become a matter of necessity by the time she found anyone capable of answering the question. Three foreign merchants whom she overtook near noon could give her no information, and she covered the next five miles without seeing a living creature; then it was only a beggar, who crawled out of the bushes to offer to sell the child beside him for a crust of bread. The petition brought back to Randalin her own famished condition so sharply that her answer was unnecessarily petulant, and the man disappeared before the question could even be put to him. Two miles more, and nothing was in front of her but a flock of ragged blackbirds circling over a trampled wheat-field. Already the sun’s round chin rested on the crest of the farthest hill. In desperation, she turned aside and galloped after a mailed horseman who was trotting down a clover-sweet lane with a rattle and clank that frightened the robins from the hedges. He reined in with a guffaw when he saw what mettle of blade it was that had accosted him.

“Is it your intention to join the army?” he inquired. “Canute will consider himself in great luck.”

“I am desirous to—to tell him something,” Red Cloak faltered.

His grin vanishing, the man leaned forward alertly. “Is it war news? Of Edric Jarl’s men?”

Before her tongue could move, Randalin’s surprised face had answered. The warrior smote his thigh resoundingly.

“You will be able to tell us tidings we wish to know. Since the fight this morning we have been allowed to do no more than growl at the English dogs across the plain, because it was held unadvisable to make an onset until the Jarl’s men should increase our strength. It is to be hoped they are not far behind?”

“You make a mistake,” Randalin began hesitatingly. “My news does not concern the doings of Edric Jarl, but the actions of his man Norman—”

A blow across her lips silenced her.

“Hold your tongue until you come in to the Chief,” the man admonished her, with good-humored severity. “Have you not learned that babbling turns to ill, you sprouting twig? And waste no more time upon the road, either. Yonder is your shortest way, up that lane between the barley. When you come to a burned barn, do you turn to the left and ride straight toward the woods; it should happen that an old beech stock stands where you come out. Take then the path that winds up-hill, and it will bring you to the war booths before you can open your foolish mouth thrice. Trolls! what a cub to send a message by! But get along, now; you will suffer from their temper if they think it likely that you have kept them waiting.” He gave the horse a stinging slap upon the flank, that sent him forward like a shaft from a bow.

Snatching up her slackened rein with one hand, his rider managed to secure her leaping cap with the other; and after the first bounce, she caught the jerky gait instinctively and swayed her body into its uneven swing. But her heart was all at once a-throb in a wild panic. Was this what a boy must expect? This challenging brutal downrightness, which made one seem to have become a dog that must prove his usefulness or be kicked aside? Her spirit felt as bruised as a fledgeling fallen upon stony ground. She shivered as the old beech stock loomed up before her.

“If these other men behave so, it is in my mind to tell them that I am a woman,” she decided. “Since they are my own people, no evil can come of their knowing; and I dislike the other feeling.”

The recollection that she had always this escape open gave her a new lease of boldness. Her courage rose as fast as her body when they began to climb the hillside toward the ruddy light that slanted down between the tree-trunks. When a sentinel stopped her near the top, she faced him with a fairly firm front.

“I have war news for King Canute,” she told him haughtily; and he let her pass with no more than a grin.

The camp appeared to be strung through the whole beech grove that covered the crest of the hill. The first sign of it began less than ten yards beyond the sentry, where a couple of squatting thralls were skinning a slain deer; and as far as eye could swim in the flood of sunset light, the green aisles were dotted with scattered groups. Every flat rock had a ring of dice-throwers bending over it; every fallen trunk its row of idlers. Wherever a cluster of boulders made a passable smithy, crowds of sweating giants plied hammer and sharpening-stone. The edges of the little stream that trickled down to the valley were thronged with men bathing gaping wounds and tearing up the cool moss to staunch their flowing blood. Never had the girl dreamed of such chaos. It gave her the feeling of having plunged into a whirlpool. She threaded her way among the groups as silently as the leaf-padded ground would permit.

She had come in by the back door, but now she began to reach the better quarters. Her nose reported sooner than her eyes that a meal was in making; and a glow of anticipation braced her famished body. Here, in this green alcove, preparations were just beginning; a white-robed slave knelt by the curling thread of smoke and nursed the flickering flame with his breath, while his circle of hungry masters pelted him with woolly beech-nuts and cursed his slowness. There, a dozen yards to the left, the meal was nearly over; between the gnarled trunks the fire shone like a red eye; and bursts of merriment and snatches of boisterous song marked the beginning of the drinking.

Sometimes a woman’s lighter laughter would mingle with the peal. Sometimes, through the sway-ing branches, Randalin caught sight of the flower-fair face of an English girl, bending between the shaggy yellow heads of the captors. Once she came upon a brawny Viking employing his huge fingers to twine a golden chain around a white throat. The girl’s face was dimpling bewitchingly as she held aside her shining hair. Randalin had an impulse of triumph.

“I wish that Sister Wynfreda could see that, now, since it is her belief that Danes are always overbearing toward their captives,” she told herself. “This one has no appearance of having felt blows or known hard labor. She could not have been entertained with greater liberality in her father’s house—”

She broke off suddenly, as the words suggested a new train of thought. This girl must have been driven from her father’s house by Danes, even as she herself had been driven forth by the English. Yet here was she eating with her foes, taking gold from their hands! Could she have honor who would thus make friends with the slayers of her kin? Randalin watched her wonderingly until leaves shut out the picture.

Another sentinel hailed her, and she gave him absently her customary answer. He pointed to a great striped tent of red and white linen, adorned with fluttering streamers and guarded by more sentries in shining mail; and she rode toward it in a daze.

More revellers sprawled under these trees, and she looked at them curiously. The women here did not seem to be amusing themselves so well. One was weeping; and one—a slip of a girl with a face like a rose—was trying vainly to rise from her place beside a drunken warrior, who held her hands and strove to pull her lips down to his wine-stained mouth. In imagination Randalin felt again Norman’s arm around her waist, and a wild pity was quickened in her. This was worse than drudgery, worse than blows! For the credit of Danish warriors, it was well that Sister Wynfreda could not see this.

Again her own words raised a startling apparition. What had been the Sister’s last cry of warning? “It is not their cruelty I fear for you. Child, listen! It is not their blows—” Could it be possible that this was what—

Like a merciless answer came a scream from the girl,—a short piercing cry of horror and loathing and agonized appeal as she was drawn down upon the leering face. At that cry, childhood’s blind trust died forever in Randalin. As she rode past the pair, with clenched hands and flashing eyes, she knew without reasoning that tortures would not tear from her the secret of her disguise.

When the sentinel before the tent challenged her roughly, it was her tongue, not her brain, that answered him.

“I have war news for the King.”

In a twinkling he had dropped his spear, plucked her from her saddle, and was marching her toward the entrance by her collar.

“In the Troll’s name, get in to the Chief, and let nothing hinder you!” he growled. “From your snail’s pace I got the idea that you had come a-begging. Get in, and set your tongue wagging as speedily as you can! Why do you draw back? I tell you to make haste!”

Before she could so much as catch her breath, he had raised the tent-flap, pushed her bodily through the entrance, and dropped the linen door behind her.