Читать книгу The Woman Who Couldn't Die - Stringer Arthur - Страница 4

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The fiord air was windless and humid. So heavy was it, in fact, that the sweat stood out on the bronzed bodies of the rowers as, at a sign from Sigurd Blödoxe, they sat with suspended oars. They sat motionless, making a picture that drifted swan-like in the mirroring quiet of the pearl-misted afternoon.

“Yonder comes Gunhild,” announced the tawny-haired Sigurd.

Graafeld, who stood beside him on the gilded skuta-poop, grunted aloud as he detected the bobbing blond head of a swimmer slowly bearing down on them. This swimmer, whose strokes grew more labored as he came closer, was plainly exhausted by the tides which he had been opposing.

“Give him a hand aboard there,” commanded the captain of the high-prowed craft. And a dozen hairy arms reached over the low freeboard to help the tired adventurer back to his ship.

Gunhild, lying on the sun-bleached deck-boards, let the warmth of life once more soak into his bones. Blödoxe, with a half-smile about his untroubled blue eye, watched the heaving chest until its movements became less spasmodic.

“What found you in the gut?” he asked. His head-nod toward the inner fiord-end was a curt one.

“Women,” replied Gunhild, turning on the wet boards. “Nothing but women.”

“Doing what?” demanded Blödoxe, his mailed shoulders stiffening into a sterner line.

“Bathing,” retorted the other. “Bathing along the sands of the inner cove, a full dozen of them, like seal-pups along a Lofoden rock-ledge!”

“And Thera?”

Gunhild, sitting up, slowly buckled on the bronze-studded sword-belt of ox-hide that had been silently tossed to his side, and then through the belt thrust the leaf-shaped sword of tempered bronze.

“Thera is there,” he explained as he continued to dress. “She is there with a fathom or two of yellow hair down about her white body, sunning herself on the cove-sand.”

A harder light came into the blue-green eye of the Viking chief from the Baltic mouth. Hunger, like a shadow, passed over the bronzed square face under the winged helmet crested with its raven of gold.

“This, then,” he proclaimed as he glanced along the freeboard ringed with its barrier shields of bronze and leather, “is the day that I take her.”

A frown crept over the face of Graafeld, the oldest and the dourest of the trio on the after-deck.

“Thera is to be given as wife to Haakon, the son of Hlaford,” he reminded his younger chief. “And there would be scant room on these seas for the ravisher of a woman loved as Thera is loved.”

Blödoxe’s laugh was deep and indifferent.

“Then, by the hammer of Thor, we shall seek us out other seas where we may find peace with the lady!”

“That means you must travel far,” protested the heavy-jowled Graafeld.

“And why must I travel far?”

“Because Olaf of Hordoland is both hot of blood and proud of heart. And a jarl of that breed will not see a daughter thus dishonorably taken without embarking after the taker. And Haakon, equally dishonored, would harry and hunt you until the end of time.”

Still again Blödoxe laughed his deep-chested laughter. And there was pride in his glance as his eye wandered over the stout-timbered galley with the salt-crusted dragon of gold at its prow.

“They travel fast who overtake Blödoxe,” he proclaimed. “And having overtaken him, they are lucky indeed when they live to tell just how they caught the sea-lion by its tail.”

But the laughter, the next moment, went out of his eyes.

“I want this woman,” he said as he tightened the heavy-buckled belt about his waist. “Twice, now, my eyes have rested on her, and I understand well enough why her beauty is a byword up and down this coast of herring-slitting wenches with little more charm than a she-cod on a smoking-rack. She may be the daughter of the Jarl of Hordoland and she may be duly promised to the lily-skinned Haakon. But that does not figure in the stars as I read them. If I have the wit to take her, and the power to hold her, she by the rights of our breed belongs to me.”

“She herself being willing,” amended the frowning Gunhild.

That, for a moment, seemed to hold the other.

“Reason may come in at the door,” he finally retorted, “when freedom has flown out of the window. And that is not the first of my troubles. Our duty at the moment is to pluck the fruit while the branch swings low. So we shall divide into two groups, one to clamber quietly up over the cliffs and steal down on the cove from the rear, the other to take the ‘Dragon’ as silently up into the gut, so that we may close in on this white-skinned band of Thera’s from two sides. And all must be seemly. In this attack, bear in mind, there must be no raping and killing. There must be no violence. That man who violates a woman will be put to the sword.”

“And you yourself?” questioned Graafeld with his sober enough half-smile.

“I will take Thera,” announced Blödoxe.

“But any man who violates woman——” began the other with his huge hands outspread.

“I will take her,” averred the Viking with the ruminative eyes, “but in taking her she will be accorded the honor of a queen and the daughter of a queen.”

It was Gunhild who muttered aloud as he clambered down the worn footway between the rowers’ benches.

“He abducts his towering queen of beauty,” that swart sea-rover rumbled in his chest, “but he abducts her, mark you, with all the gentleness of a sucking lamb!”