![]() He was talking of this, now, as he guided his brother, Gunni, and Osbiorn Grim’s son, the chief of his housecarls, who manned the jerking steering-sweeps, larboard and starboard. But that made the feat of returning safe to his stead at Gairsey all the more worth while and he was not less satisfied because it compensated in some part for the ill-luck of their voyage. He knew, too, the dangers which lay in wait for them at that moment, with snow flurries offshore, weeks beyond the period usually considered safe for the undecked longships of the Norse seafarers of the Orkney group. men who had sailed with him for three years on forays the length and breadth of England and Ireland and far to the south, in France and Spain. ![]() He knew his picked crew of viking-farers, most of them Hebrides. ![]() He knew the dragon as a rider knows his horse. On the poop beside the steersmen, who fought with the steering-sweeps to keep the vessel on her course, stood Swain Olaf’s son, and there was a kind of fierce pride in his bleak gaze as he conned Deathbringer homeward. Tall, thick-thewed, wide-shouldered, their clothing tattered and salt-stained, their armor and weapons rusty, they were men who had dared death in every form too frequently to be affected by the ordinary perils of the storm. But from one end of the packed waist to the other there was not a single look of concern, not a mutter of fear or complaint. The wind howled overhead the roar of the surf was a distant menace on their starboard quarter the waves, tricky at best in those narrow seas, heaped and tumbled from every direction. They shook their shaggy, bearded heads, until the water flew, and bent their broad backs to the drive of the long, supple, bucking sweeps of toughened ash. More than once the singers were choked to silence by a torrent of spray that slapped into their faces, dousing mouths and eyes but while they might be unable to breathe for the space of a stroke, they never missed the feathering, immersion, pull and recovery in unison with their comrades. “Ha-ha! Hi-heh! Ha-ha! Hi-heh!”Īnd sometimes a few of them would break into a wild, toneless chant, keeping time to the oar-swing. She showed only a shred of her big square sail, but her sixty oars rose and fell, rose and fell, with a monotonous, insistent rhythm, which was undisturbed even when the booming combers topped her shallow waist and rolled along her swaying gangway, sloshing ankle-deep among the rowing-benches and spurting in creamy jets from the oar-holes. Midway of the Firth, steering a precarious course between the hostile impulses of wind and currents, crawled a great dragonship, her red and gold figurehead dipping and plunging as she climbed the short, choppy waves and dropped precipitously into the hollows. Westward, behind the unseen masses of the Sudreyar and Ireland, the pallid sun was sinking into a monstrous pile of clouds that bellied and whirled before the pressure of the Iceland gale. Northeast a blurr on the horizon was Haey, first of the Orkneys. The Pentland Firth was a heaving gray floor the cliffs of Caithness lowered dark in the south, outlined by the white tempest of the rushing surf, torn by the fangs of the black rock-reefs that stretched in an interminable barrier, striving, always unsuccessfully, never dismayed, to ward off ocean’s assault upon the land. TOSSING waves and a chill wind from the north. Howden Smith Author of “ Swain’s Vengeance,” “ Swain’s Stone,” etc. ![]()
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