“Did he yet bear aloft those black wings?” said she.
“Yes,” he answered.
The Queen abode motionless. She said nothing for a minute. Then she spoke again: “Why didst thou not wait to see it out?”
“There was no need,” he answered. “It could end but one way. I am an old man, and it is not to be wondered at if I am tired.”
She looked at him silent a moment with her lips parted. Then, “But one way for him,” she said: “that is true. Yet, I would know.”
Thorgnyr said nothing. The Queen stepped forward and he made way for her. She muffled her cloak about her and walked with swift sure steps across the garth and out into the open field. The light was fading now. All the low sky southwestward was filled with a long bank of grey and shapeless cloud. There was a window of a cold buff-colour far down over the river, and higher up a great streak of a deep dark bloodred that looked strange and ill-boding amid those dull and lifeless hues. There was fallen a dead silence now on those meadows. The dust-fog was gone, but night-mists began to roll up from the river. The Queen waited there in the gathering dusk. Her eyes were bright. As men passed her by, coming by twos and threes back from the field, they saluted her, marking her proud and triumphant bearing. Night closed in, and yet the King came not. She went in now.
Eric stood on Upsala brink. He bade him that could, to make a stave in praise of that victory. Then Thorvald Hialtison, a man of Iceland of great and noble kin that was then of the King’s bodyguard, sang this stave:
“Fare to Fyrisfield, ye wolf-folk, as many as be an-hunger’d!
Nightriders’ stallions, bait at the western garth!
There be the black gems of corpse-dew: true ’tis, ’neath the spear-din,
Meat enough for the wolves’ feast Eric hath cut down there.”
The King gave Thorvald a ring of half a mark of gold for every verse. Men say that Thorvald made no other verses save these either before or since.
It was dark night when King Eric came home. The Queen met him in the door. Very big he seemed in his battered war-gear and his great horned helm. He walked somewhat heavily, but he carried his head high and kingly. And now, as he stepped into the bright light of the doorway, the Queen suddenly had sight of his face, and, with that, the question she was ready to ask him froze in her throat. Seeing her there to meet him, he checked in mid-stride, then passed on his way into the hall, as if the sight of her at that time was more than he could well bear to look upon.
XVI
Valhalla
From beyond those lampless depths where the last dim beam of the last star is dissolved in the eternal dark, immortal eyes looked on Fyrisfield: the eyes of the great Father of All, sitting on an high seat that seemed carved out of coppery-louring thunderclouds, and inlaid with those colours which are on the sea at sundown, and beaded and gemmed with stars of the night. And the appearance of His breast and shoulders and sinewy arms and the great thighs and thews of Him, that were partly shown and partly veiled, was as the appearance of the vast-rearing walls and headlong naked slopes of bare rock mountains, when the grey that goes before the dawn first stirs in those unwinged heights of air, and the coverlets of cloud roll back, and darkness creeps like a garment down, and the cold and prodigious limbs seem to awake out of slumber, and from the remoteness of small and narrow valleys, deep down where men have their little dwellings, a cock crows for the day. Surely to look upon the face of him, which was ruddy like a sea-cliff of red earth where a low-wheeling sun shines fair upon it, seen against the azure of a summer sea, was to find answers to many riddles and the comfort of many fears and sorrows.
At His either shoulder those ravens of his, like two black clouds, shadowed with their wings. There was darkness about the high seat and a music passing all music imagined by the mind of man, speaking those things which no tongue can utter, but men’s hearts know them. And there were shapes about the high seat and above it, titanic, unclear, without stability, mountains, and giant forms of living creatures, and sleet and snows, and bearded stars travelling, and cities depopulate, and wild seas, and dreadful wolds, and forests, and burnings, and shapes and semblances of the enormous dead: all these blown by in a mist on a mighty wind that blew round about Him. And that is the wind of Eternity; and save the All-Father there is none can abide the cold of that wind nor sit in that seat: not even a God, not even those gray-faced Maidens who carve and spin beside the Well which is beneath the tree Yggdrasill; nor endure to comprehend at once all things, past, present, and to come, as, sitting there, the All-Father compre-hendeth them.
Now thronged the Einheriar into Valhalla, smoking from the fight, innumerable as the multitudinous clouds in a mackerel sky at eve, heroes of bliss, of many lands, chosen from many generations of men; and the voice of their talk and deep-echoing laughter was like the sounding of the sea, and they were like unto Gods in stature and seeming, and their weapons and rich apparel like to a sunset glory in a summer garden after rain.
On a sudden our Father Odin lifted up a hand, and there was darkness in heaven all save the light of the Father’s face, and all they stood up and
