Читать книгу The Woman Who Couldn't Die - Stringer Arthur - Страница 5

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It was the wolf-hound stretched at Thera’s feet that lifted an ear, stirred and then growled deep in his throat. Thera, however, gave neither thought nor speech to that movement. Her sea-blue eyes, as she sat indolently combing her hair of gold with a comb of gold more pallid than the tresses through which it so slowly passed, were abstracted and unfocused. Yet there was queenliness in her lassitude and an aura of dignity even in her languor.

“Down, Fleotan!” she called as the hound rose to his feet, his back a-bristle.

She was about to repeat that command when the unformed words died on her lips. For through the mother-of-pearl mist along the gut-water she detected, or thought she detected, a movement that was both uncertain and ambiguous. Her languidly roving eye seemed to make out a gilded skuta-prow creeping shadow-like about the shadowy promontory at the cove-mouth. She could not be sure, for a moment, whether the wide-breasted dragon of gold was indeed an actual sea-boat drifting into those sheltered waters, or merely a mirage, a foolish image born of her own foolish brain.

But that question was all too promptly answered for her. It was not, in truth, the idle mirage of an idle afternoon. For at the same instant that Fleotan’s bay echoed deep-noted between the fiord-walls a chorus of higher-pitched screams burst from the young tire-women bathing and wading along the sandy beach. There was a sudden flurry of white bodies from the shallows.

“Sea-robbers!” cried the youngest of that flying band as they ran, huddling low, for the shelter of the cliff-rocks. Yet they recoiled again, even as sharply as they had advanced. For down on them from the crags above came circling and sliding a dozen swart men, men unknown to them, evil-eyed men from another country and another coast. And as the women ran screaming back into the sea-water the gilded skuta grounded on the cove-sand, within a boat-length of where Thera’s handmaidens stood with something more than horror in their eyes. And from a garth, high overhead, geese trumpeted.

Thera herself did not join in that commotion. She was not a daughter of swineherds. Her only movement, in fact, was to rise frowningly to her feet and throw a tunic of woven Finnish wool about her white shoulders. It was a heavy tunic, colored like a rowan-leaf first touched with frost, regally lined with swan’s-down and bordered with miniver. And about it fell her hair of living and liquid gold, gold luminous as a cat’s eye by night, gold indiscernibly vivid yet soft, with a muffled radiance all its own, like that of a rose-leaf behind which a candle burns.

And thus cloaked, a new dignity came to her queenly figure. But her face remained clouded as the bronzed and thick-shouldered Blödoxe leaped waist-deep into the cove-water and with the arrogance of the fearless began to wade ashore. Under her breath, indeed, she must have spoken some word to the wolf-hound. For Fleotan, as the Viking came toward her, sprang straight for the throat of the intruder.

Blödoxe, in the face of that assault, merely laughed aloud. For the bronzed and hairy hands that could be so quick in movement met in some way about the longer-haired neck of the animal. There was a moment’s struggle as the great fingers clamped closer about the writhing throat and as the snarling head was thrust and held under the sea-water. Then, tossing the quieted body disdainfully aside, Blödoxe strode up the beach-sand to where Thera stood with one hand pressed flat against her white shoulder-flesh.

Whatever her secret impulses, she still remained motionless. A berserk-gang was a berserk-gang, but she was no swineherd’s daughter. She knew what that advance, what that attack, meant. She knew also the sun-darkened square face with the tawny hair under the battered rim of the helmet. Jarl Olaf, her father, had only a year before denied that lawless scourge of the northern seas both the banquet-hall of his home and the hand of his daughter who was not for pirates and coast-plunderers steeped in blood. And now——

But Sigurd Blödoxe gave her scant time for thought, just as he wasted no moment on speech. He merely stooped low and caught her about the knees, the knees that showed ivory white through the miniver-bordered tunic. He merely caught her up, swinging her from her feet and flinging her over his broad shoulder, even as he turned in his tracks and started back toward the galley.

And that, plainly, held little of the respect due to one of royal blood. For it was then that Thera began to fight. It was then, raging against the ignominy of her oat-sack position, that she began to twist and writhe and struggle in the great-thewed arm of her captor. Where she saw flesh, she clawed at it with her nails. Where she could find a loose tress of tawny hair, she clutched at it and did her utmost to tear it from the helmeted skull. Where she could sink her teeth into an unarmored forearm, she bit at the corded muscles, bit with the ferocity of a wild animal, forgetting at last that she was the daughter of a jarl.

Blödoxe, hip-deep in the cove-water, stopped short at that and swung her about, shaking her as a terrier shakes a rat. He shook her so that the woolen tunic fell aside and her white body was half undraped as he held her at arm’s length, partly in and partly out of the water. Yet he viewed her indifferently, with a grimness born of many harryings.

“Kill me,” gasped Thera, her scorn of him overcoming even her fear. “Kill me as you killed my dog!”

“That I will not,” retorted Blödoxe, still studying her face. “We kill only whom we hate.”

“Your hate is all I ask,” cried Thera, storming again against his strength. Froth even came from her mouth, as from the bitted mouth of a horse, hard-driven.

“That you will never get,” contended her captor. And quietly yet firmly he held her as she still again struggled to free herself from his clasp. She was both taller of body and more flower-like of face, he decided, than he had pictured her in his memory.

“Haakon will kill you for this,” she panted. “And all Hordoland will keep at your heels, will keep after you until the six seas can no longer hide you.”

“Even so,” averred the grim-eyed Blödoxe, “you are mine, and you are coming with me.”

And with that he caught her closer and resumed his approach to the galley-side.

“I will kill myself,” murmured the woman in his arms, speaking so quietly that the half-smile went again from his lips.

“You are much too fair for an end so foul,” he said with a heavy effort at mockery. His face clouded, however, when a moment later he saw her so passive in his arms. She lay there, unresisting and relaxed, with her eyes closed and a wistful puckering of the deep-cut lips that made him think of the mouth of a child, sorely hurt.

Yet his face was once more hard and his manner was pirate-rough as he flung her bodily over the weathered gunwale and clambered up after her. For already, from the cliffs high overhead, came the alarm of many horns and the echo of angry shouts. The plunderer of untold coasts merely stopped long enough to wrap the woman in her fallen wet tunic, lift her to the fore-cabin under the carved prow, and put his own ship’s horn to his lips to recall his scattered men.

“They will be after us,” said Graafeld with a curt glance along the cliff-tops, “before another dog can be drowned.”

“Then head for the open sea,” commanded Blödoxe as he signaled for Gunhild to take the heavy tiller.

“And once there?” questioned the phlegmatic Graafeld as the rowers came clambering aboard.

“Then we will lay her head due west,” said Blödoxe, “and if need be, go on to Jöklarland. And beyond that, the Danes tell me, there be other lands, lands of green ice and many islands and strange people who live at peace with their neighbors.”

“And?” prompted Graafeld.

“It may so fall out that we shall go to that farther land,” said the quiet-lipped Blödoxe.

“In flight?” asked the saturnine Gunhild.

“Jarl Olaf has many ships,” observed Blödoxe. “And men have gone far in the search of a lost woman.”