Here the Sound opened out into the Kattegat. Scania was no more than a darkness in the east. Otherwise the eye found only sea. It murmured to the land, moonlight shattered where small waves broke, but beyond went the long, easy breathing of the deeps, as mighty in their sleep as ever in their wrath, and the light ran over them like a fire as &old as the air.
Hadding dismounted. He tethered his horse to a bush. It whuffed and drooped its head. Hadding rumpled the rough mane. “You’ve done your work,” he said. “Take your ease.”
Untying the bundle behind the saddle, he spread it on the ground. The moonlight showed bread, cheese, smoked meat; other gear for the road; and a rope, which no one had seen him put in. He uncoiled an end of it, ran fingers over the noose there, and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I have my skill yet.”
Hanging it over his shoulder, he walked to the brink of the bluff. For a while he watched the sea that was his. Stars came out of it eastward and sank into it westward, as do ships faring by.
Then, “Here I make my last offering,” he said aloud, “for my honor, my blood, and my folk. Wherever I am bound, know, know well, you yonder, he who comes was a king.”
He turned and strode to the oak tree. There he unslung his sword, drew it, dropped sheath and belt, and drove the blade upright into the earth. Moonlight sheened On iron.
He tossed off his cloak and bared his feet. Reaching, he caught hold of the lowest branch and began to climb.
Aloft and aloft he went. So had he climbed when he was a boy, laughterful, afar in wilderness and all unaware of any strangeness in his life. As he rose, he saw ever more widely across the waters he had sailed, toward lands where he had warred, won, lost, and gone back to win anew. Scania became a moon-misty ridge. Beyond it, northwesterly, lay Ragnhild’s Norway. Ever had she yearned for its mountains. South and west reached Denmark, low in the arms of the sea. Overhead were the stars.
The tree was not big. Too long had the sea winds grieved it. The topmost limbs would not bear his weight. But he had risen far enough. With a boy’s nimbleness, he walked out until his footing bent beneath him. With a sailor’s deftness he hitched his rope to the branch above. The noose he laid around his neck. A while more he stood looking at the moonlit sea.
He sprang.
Eyjolf and the housecarles found him in the morning. A wind had awakened. Whitecaps chopped. The rope creaked as Hadding swung to and fro. On each of his shoulders perched a raven. They had not taken his eyes. As the men drew near, they spread black wings and flew off eastward.
XXXV
Leaves rustled, alive with sunlight. He stood beside an lash tree whose trunk was mightier than a mountain and whose crown reached higher than heaven. Those boughs spread as wide as all the worlds, and he knew that three roots ran down to three of them, the worlds of the gods, the giants, and the dead.
Wind tossed his hair. He glimpsed a lock. Its hue was golden. His clothes were the blue, green, and white of summer seas. When he walked forward over ground hidden by low-eddying mists, the lameness was gone from his step.
One stood awaiting him, tall, gray beard falling over bluegray cloak. Only the right eye shone below a shadowing hat. Its look struck as keenly as would the spear he held.
His voice rolled thunder-deep. “Greeting and welcome.”
The newcomer halted before him. “So we meet again,” he said slowly. “You told me we never would.”
“Never on earth, while you were what you then were. But that is now ended.”
The newcomer passed a hind across his brow. “I do not understand.”
“No. You have made the longest trek of all and are still bewildered. But you shall soon remember that which you laid aside for a span. Come.”
They set forth across the clouds. “It was needful,” said the Wanderer. “Great was the wrong you suffered, and great was your wrath. When you foreswore our friendship, you were wholly within your rights. Yet the sundering would have led to another war among the gods, a war that would have brought them down in untimely wreck. How could we cleanse ourselves of what had happened and make whole again your honor?
“The word of the Norns cannot be gainsaid. That which is done is done forever. But seeking through time, with the knowledge I won on the far side of death, I found that deeds may be done over again in the morrow, and thus may a wrong be set right. They must be true deeds, however, done without foresight of their meaning, a life lived in and for itself.”
“I begin to see,” whispered he who had returned.
Also he saw with his eyes. Somehow he and the other had already walked down from above the sky. It reached half-clear, half-cloudy over the high hillside on which they now were. Rain had lately fallen. The wet grass flashed with its drops. Nonetheless sight swept far and far, across woodlands, meadows, homes of men, and the sea roaring along a broad strand. A rainbow glimmered.
“But this is earth!” he cried.
The Wanderer nodded. “You ken it again—better, I think, than ever aforetime.”
They strode onward with the same unwearying swiftness. “I was Hadding,” knew he who had returned.
“Thus were you born to the house of the Skjoldungs,” said the Wanderer. “Thus did you live, a man of flesh, bone, and blood, hero, father of kings, but still a man. You shared the gladness and grief, wounds and weal, victory and vanquishment, love and loss that are the lot of humans, and at last you died as they do.
“Yet the soul in Hadding was yours. He had the freedom to choose that
