Читать книгу The Woman Who Couldn't Die - Stringer Arthur - Страница 6

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The eyes of Thera, once the fairest woman of all Hordoland, remained clouded and inscrutable as the fleeing “Dragon” traversed her lonely northern seas. Seldom did the captive of Sigurd Blödoxe speak, as she sat high and lonely in the galley’s castle, and never once was she seen to weep. Hour by silent hour she watched the men at the oars; she watched the bellying square-sail; she watched the plunging green seas on which the tarnished gilded prow rose and fell and rose and fell until all life seemed merely a dream of endless rocking on an endless watery trail that led always toward a slowly setting sun.

Even when they saw land, at last, misted glens and coves and precipitous walls of basalt surmounted by straggling snow-fields, to the north of their course, the queenly woman with the brooding blue eyes betrayed little interest in that distant country to which they were taking her.

But she had her own thoughts on the matter, plainly enough, for, having studied the wake that lay behind their rudder, the wake that lay between her and her lost Hordoland, and having gazed at the desolate and rocky table-land that loomed ever higher on their quarter, she stood for many moments with her eyes closed and her hand pressed on her heart. Then, gathering her tunic about her, she crossed slowly to the rail of the ship, looked up at the sky arching so pallidly above her and flung herself headlong into the sea.

Blödoxe, braced at the tiller, saw that unexpected movement and felt his blood run cold. But he lost little enough time in hesitation. Flinging off helmet and sword-belt, he plunged in after her. He dove from the dipping poop-rail and for a moment was lost in a mountain of green. Over tumbling wave by wave he fought his way to the white body enmeshed in its floating gold. He came up with her, stroke by powerful stroke. He caught her and held her head above water, lifting, as he did so, the strangling wet hair from her face. Then, swimming more easily, he supported her there in the tumbling green seas until the dusky-lidded blue eyes opened again.

“Let me die,” she said with a moan of weariness. “Please let me die!”

“Not while I live,” proclaimed the man at her side.

“Oh, be merciful and let me die,” she repeated, making an effort as though to push his great sinewed body away from her.

“Have I wronged you that deep?” he asked, a note of wonder in his voice. For, as never before, he was conscious of something pitiful in the pallid face so close to his own.

“You have wronged me beyond forgiveness,” she told him, turning away as the galley, doubling about, came bearing down on them.

“Then it is I who should die,” said Blödoxe, with wonder on that face scarred by many blades. And at those unlooked-for words she let her gaze lock with his. So, as they floated there in the heaving waters, side by side, they looked each into the eyes of the other. And if, from that strange and silent study, they gleaned anything of moment, they kept that discovery to themselves. For they were oddly quiet as they were lifted aboard the galley. And Thera, when her tall body was once more dry and warm, sat apart, deep in thought. Those watching her, in fact, observed for the first time that she was weeping, weeping openly and abandonedly. And when Blödoxe, sorely troubled in heart, finally went to comfort her as well as a man rough of speech could comfort a woman thus desolated, she surprised him by not turning silently away but by clinging to his shoulders and weeping more abandonedly than ever, by resting in his great arms and pillowing what seemed a hopelessly tired head on his shoulder.

So astonished was Blödoxe, in truth, that when Gunhild called out that three Norse sails were following after them, the master of the galley showed scant concern in that discovery.

“Would you be overhauled by your enemies?” demanded Graafeld, squinting back at the heavy-timbered skutas so doggedly bearing down on them.

But Blödoxe, after one glance at the plunging galleys with the bronze-studded shields along the freeboards, let his eyes rest again on the face of the woman so forlornly clinging to his shoulders.

“That,” he told her, “is Haakon and Olaf of Hordoland. And now, of a truth, I would know your will. Shall I take you back to them?”

Thera, for a moment, did not speak.

“They will kill you,” she finally said.

“What odds?” cried Blödoxe with his ever-careless and deep-chested Viking laugh.

“They would kill you,” repeated the woman with the strangely troubled eyes.

“And is that a matter of any great moment?” asked the man with the wind-bronzed face.

Thera did not answer him. By word of mouth, at least, she made no answer to that question. But in her eyes of immemorial blue must have been some semblance of a reply. For Blödoxe, after looking deep into those azure pools, turned about and called a sudden order to his helmsman.

“Lay her head due west,” was that abrupt command. “And every man to the oars.”

“Due west?” questioned the somber-faced Graafeld, with a wistful look at the basalt cliffs they were leaving behind them.

“Due west,” repeated Blödoxe. “For we now follow Eric the Red to that new country of his known as Greenland. And we can prove there is still speed in the ‘Dragon.’ ”

“But damned little fight,” Graafeld muttered in his throat as, staring over the rail and studying the three Norse skutas, he solemnly licked his lips.

Blödoxe, overhearing that mutter where he stood with an arm about Thera, called back over his shoulders: “Something better than fighting, Old Gray-Coat!”

Graafeld busied himself tightening a rope about a salt-encrusted deck-block.

“And after Greenland?” he asked with a shrug of paraded unconcern.

“Still farther west, if need be,” said Blödoxe as he lifted a lappet of wolf-skin about Thera’s shoulders, to the end that the freshening wind might not chill her white body.