by Henry Treece
‘The Shield-maiden has come with her swans,’ he said. ‘Do you not hear them?’
Grummoch bent over him and clasped his cold hand. Then all the braves bowed down their feathered heads as they passed the rock on which the Viking lay, in their last homage.
And at last, when it seemed that the world had stopped in its courses through the sky, Gichita lifted up his head and wiped his eyes.
‘The three of them shall go together,’ he said. ‘At last Heome shall be with warriors.’
And so Long Snake was brought to shore by the braves, and her deck piled high with the resinous wood of the fir tree; and Harald was laid with his sword, Peacegiver, in his right hand, and with Wawasha on the one side of him and Heome on the other.
In Wawasha’s hand the red men placed a war-axe; but Heome’s hands were still stiff and useless, even now, and they were forced to lay his axe upon his chest, beside the broken war-drum.
As the sun was sinking below the far hills, the red men flung tarry torches among the dried wood, and then set Long Snake off on her voyage, with the wind of evening in her parched sail.
She was twenty bowshots away when the red flames leaped the length of her mast and ate up the wood and the hide of the sail; she was thirty bowshots away when the flames ravened down to her waterline.
And then, still flaring like a great furnace, Long Snake slipped below the surface of the lake, just as the distant sun fell from sight behind the hills.
Thorgeif said softly to Grummoch, ‘I have sailed with Harald Sigurdson since he was a lad – by North Sea, White Sea and Middle Sea. But I never thought to see him sail away and leave me in a strange land, among foreign men.’
Grummoch turned from the lake and put his great arm about Thorgeif’s shoulders.
‘We shall have each other to speak Norse to in the evening time,’ he said slowly. ‘A man must be thankful even for small mercies in this world.’
Then, to cover their grief, they walked together, chanting an old feast-hall ditty from Jomsburg, about a man who put his arm round a bear in the darkness, thinking it was his sweetheart.
But before they reached the bright fires of the Beothuk encampment, they were silent again. For a while there would be nothing worth saying. They knew that well enough.
