XI
Jomsburg Seawalls
Styrbiorn stood on the outer seawall at Jomsburg while they brought his fleet in through the sea-gates: a tricky work, seeing there was a heavy sea running, and the last part worst of all, for it was now long past sunset, and their only light torchlight and the moon shining fitfully through flying racks of vapour. But it was by his command; and there was that in his eye since they sailed out of the Low three days gone that made his folk count it safer to risk the smashing may be of one ship or two sooner than meddle with him. Styrbiorn stood there in his war-gear, wearing under his gold-edged byrny that Greek kirtle of cramoisy silk and gold which the princess of Holmgarth had given him in days gone by, and about his middle that mighty silver girdle with horse-headed serpents intertwined at every link, the same which he had taken from about Jomala’s middle in the temple amid the wolds of Kirialaland, and the barbarous people had watched in vain to see earth gape for him that wrought so impiously; and from that girdle hung the heavy two-edged sword, Eric’s gift, wherewith he had made so many famous conquests: the same wherewith he had fought and prevailed against Palnatoki’s self when first he came to Jomsburg. He was bareheaded and, according to his common wont in these days, without cloak or mantle, so that the glory of his arms was naked to the eye, and the breadth of his shoulders, that cast about him, in their proud shapely poise, a mantle of more kingliness than royal and costly stuffs might ever shed about a king.
Fierce and sullen was the countenance of Styrbiorn, yet quiet, as of a fierce beast charmed with music, as he watched that dance of the rolling surges sweeping and pausing and falling and rising again: Ran’s eternal children leading their round as if in sad ceremonial observance of some divinity hidden apart, removed from all knowledge or communion of human kind; and listened to the swelling roar of the breaker as it rode on, the thud and thunder of its fall, and the grinding hiss of the shingle in the backwash, as if wrath, which is older than the world and older than the Gods, drew in its breath once again, pondering some greater mischief.
Stepping back to avoid a wave that flung itself with more than ordinary violence against the seawall and tossed high above it a wild white man of spray, Styrbiorn found himself in the arms of Biorn Asbrandson that was come up behind him unheard.
“What fiend bewitched thee?” said Biorn. “Could’st thou not have beached ’em in the firth where calm water is and a sheltered shore? There’s one stove in but now by the gate, and men drowned, like enough: we cannot tell i’ this windy dark.”
“Let them drown, then,” said Styrbiorn; “and thou too, unless thou mend thy talk.” He swung round away from Biorn, and the great sword at his side, Eric’s gift, clanked against his thigh. He took it in his two hands, peered at it for a moment in the glimpsing moonbeams as if at some strange thing, then unfastened it sheath and all from his girdle and sent it hurtling into the sea. “And that, afore all,” he said.
Biorn, being a man of sense, held his peace.
The last ship was in. After a while Styrbiorn, still in his former posture watching the endless procession of surges, said in hard toneless accents, “Shall I tell thee what I did in Sweden?”
“Am not I thy brother?” said Biorn.
Styrbiorn said, “I dallied with a whore, and I lost a kingdom.”
Biorn, who knew when silence is best, said nothing.
Styrbiorn lifted his eyes to the moon, high over Wendland to the east, that showed like a dead queen’s face, white and forlorn, behind a drifting waterish veil of broken cloud that turned all the sky to tarnished silver. Nearer at hand, through a lower level of air, woolly clouds black as coal were charioted by the tearing wind one by one across the face of the moon. Each as it passed seemed to catch and retain some tincture of her brightness, and fled down the wind eastward mantled with a darkness less pitchy than before. Here and there for an instant a star beamed down.
Styrbiorn said, “I lied to thee. Thus it was: I have foully belied a Queen, and lost that which all the world and the kingdoms of the world might not avail to purchase again for me.”
Biorn, thinking in himself that such speeches are but as so many catches and scrabblings of a man over head and ears in water, said nothing, but gripped him by the hand. Styrbiorn kept the hand in his, tightening his iron grasp upon it whenever it offered to move away, and standing in all other respects motionless for a long time with feet firm planted wide apart, like some colossus brooding above the flood. Biorn, his hand in his, felt the throb of his veins, not less thunderous nor less deep-drawn from the ultimate springs of life and fate than that thunder of waters about Jomsburg seawall, the pulse of the elemental sea.
Stybiorn said at last, “Men of lore will tell thee that adulterers when they come to die must wander in streams of venom, at the strand of corpses remote from the sun, in that castle which is woven of the spines of snakes. Is that true, foster-brother, thinkest thou?”
Biorn answered, “I do not know.”
“Thou art mine elder by ten year, and shouldst know more than I,” said Styrbiorn.
For a great while Styrbiorn was silent, following with his eye the mighty rhythm of the waves, where one after another stormed up the wall, clutched, and fell, and swept back to sea; and every wave as it plunged back seaward from the wall met another wave coming on, and like young living things in their boisterous sport the two waves meeting clasped and tumbled one another, clashed together with a shout and reared high in the air, a single sudden pillar of flashing foam. Then he said, “Snorri the Priest drove thee out of Iceland because of a woman.”
“Not drove me,” said Biorn. “I went, though.”
Styrbiorn turned sharp upon him, set a hand on either shoulder of him, drew him close, and looked him close in the eye. He said, “Follow me, and I shall show thee wonders. There is no good thing under sun or moon, Biorn. He that will follow me shall get no good by it. There is no good for me to give him, in all the world. But dominion he shall get, and power, and this withal: that when my foot is on the neck of the King of Danes, and of King Burisleif, and the great King in Micklegarth, and—No more; but his foot that will follow me shall be there beside my foot, ’stead of his neck beside theirs.”
“Thou art a blasphemer,” said Biorn. “And I think thou art fey.”
“Is that all thou hast to tell me?” said Styrbiorn.
Biorn answered and said, “There is this, too: that I will not leave thee nor forsake thee so long as both thou and I be alive.”