When Queen Sigrid knew that this rede of hers was taken by the King she was glad at heart. She let send for Helgi and charged him saying, “I will have thee do this, Helgi: thou shalt seek out that little hairy ox that Styrbiorn set so much store by, and so bring it about that he shall be arrayed in the midst and front of all the baggage-beasts. That will be good sport, that they should meet the last time in battle indeed, ’stead of as heretofore in make-believe.”
Helgi promised this, to do as the Queen bade him. But it came not about, for Moldi was now in Jomsburg.
Now was it the third evening since tidings were first brought to King Eric in Upsala of Styrbiorn’s coming aland at Mirkwood. And now was all ready to the King’s hand and his army weaponed and marshalled and the beasts furnished and their drivers held in readiness. And on this had he determined, to give Styrbiorn battle in the ings and meadows on the left bank of Fyriswater a few miles below Upsala. Nor did the King lack aught save only men; but that was a sore lack, and might, if it so fell out, danger his whole state and kingdom. But there were fresh forces that should swell the King’s army, some coming in hourly and others due on the morrow or the morrow’s morrow.
All that day had the King busied himself with the army, looking to every point, even to the weapons and gear of the meanest man of the host and the cooking gear and meat and drink, that every man might be well fed and in frame for the fight; and he spake with men and heartened them and bade them quit themselves well when it should come to the proof. And now, when all was to his mind, he with his bodyguard rode at evening with Thorgnyr down to the head of the firth at River-oyce, mainly to ease his mind with riding after the long day’s toil, but with this intent also, to see for sure that Styrbiorn’s fleet had not sailed up into the firth despite the sticking of the channel at Sigtun. For if that should befall, then might they come upon the King’s forces and Upsala from all another side than that whence they were looked for.
Day was fading as the King and Thorgnyr rode down to the desolate shore at the firth-head. The wind blew a gale from the west. The first was empty: not a ship nor a boat: only iron clouds, murky and unbroken, that tore out of the western airt and passed overhead and away endlessly down the dark eastern sky behind the windswept pinewoods. Eric the King sat silent on his horse there, looking through half-shut eyelids upwind as if into the heart or quickening womb of that turmoil. Thorgnyr sat silent beside him: neither he nor any man that was there durst speak word to the King, for he seemed fallen in a mood that brooks not speech. After a time the King, troubled perhaps by his horse’s fidgetting, dismounted, tossed his reins to a house-carle of his, and walked down a few paces to the edge of the low cliff that overhung the stony beach where the waves broke and thundered. There he stood alone. Night shut down. There was no moon, and sea and sky were now mingled and blurred together; and, to a man so striving to gaze up that baffling and hurtling wind, there was naught to be seen save row after row of breakers bodied in unending succession out of the womb of night, and livid white in the windy darkness. One after another broke into foam, first along but a short strip of wave, then spreading quickly its foaming crest left and right. And in that blackness, where landmark and sea-mark were swallowed up, that spreading gave the appearance of white things first seen afar then rushing shoreward with a speed that seemed terrible and beyond nature, broadside on the flood.
A full hour the King stood watching them rush out of the remote dark to their ruin on the shore, by tens and by hundreds, and naught left but the black backwash at his feet. Then, without a word, he turned about, took horse again, and rode with his company back through the night to Upsala.
XV
Fyrisfield
Styrbiorn lay with his host two days’ march north of Mirkwood that night that Earl Wolf his foster-father came back from the north. The sentinels knew the Earl and brought him in through the camp. It was the deep and dead time of the night. The waning moon, scarce three hours risen, shone bright in a serene heaven that was without cloud save for a slanting band of mackerel sky down in the southwest, and the bigger stars that were not put out by the strong moonshine blinked and sparkled. There was rime on the grass, so that it crunched under their tread. As they came past the horse-lines, there was here and there the sound of a horse kicking or stamping: a long way off at the far end of the lines a torch showed red, where a man was changing the tethers to make his horse comfortable: the tap of his mallet sounded dead on the stillness. On every side, as far as the eye might reach, the low skin tents lay mushroom-like in the stark white and black of the moonlight.
The Earl looked now and then at the faces of the men that guided him, and their faces seemed white and wooden, so that hard it was to know them for men of right flesh and blood; and like to them seemed the faces of all other waking men they encountered, of other sentinels as they came through that sleeping camp. Everywhere the Earl
