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.”
XII
The Cowing of the Dane-King
The lords of Jomsburg came in now from their summer viking. Styrbiorn would speak to no man of those things which had come about in Upsala at summer’s end; but they remained not hidden, for they that had fared with him into Sweden told it to their messmates, and it was in most men’s minds that he was not likely to sit quiet under that shaming.
All that winter Styrbiorn abode in Jomsburg. He was moody and ill to do with. Biorn was with him winter-long, but the rest of them went every one to his own place: Sigvaldi and his brethren to Skaney, Bui and Sigurd to the old man Veseti their father in Borgundholm, and the rest accordingly. Palnatoki, ere that he went home into Fion, took Styrbiorn apart and said, “Few be they that can stand alone. I would have thee remember this: whatsoever thou art minded to do or whithersoever to fare next summer, we will lend thee aid as thumb serves finger.” Styrbiorn gripped him by the hand.
Styrbiorn grew blacker of mood as winter deepened. He would be oftenest alone; out of doors all day long in the wildest weather, walking hours together on the seawalls; rowing out to sea sometimes in a boat alone; once or twice, in weather when no boat could live long, swamped and swimming ashore out of seas which no man, save by luck, could look to win out of alive. Other whiles he would go alone upon the mainland, ranging among the hills and sea-cliffs. Now the thrall Erland, at Styrbiorn’s riding from Upsala, had bethought him to bring Moldi and ship him aboard and carry him south to Jomsburg. For it seemed to him that his lord was now leaving behind him in the Swede-realm many a thing should grieve his heart to lose it, and that here was one thing might be saved for him and that he should be glad of, albeit he had no mind as for that while neither for that nor for naught else beside. And so it was that when Styrbiorn fared alone upon the mainland, Moldi would ever follow some way behind him. But Styrbiorn seemed neither to see him nor to know he was there, taking, if he saw him indeed, no more note of him than he
