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Updated: May 9, 2025
If Guthrum chooses to make peace, that is not Halfden's business, or Hubba's, or that of any chief who likes it not. One is as free as the other." "What mean you? I say that Guthrum and his chiefs swore by the greatest oath they knew to return to Mercia." "If they swore by the holy ring, there is no doubt that they who swore would keep the oath.
"That will Thormod tell you, therefore," I answered. "As for me, I came at Halfden's bidding, which Thormod told me." "What did Halfden bid you come here for?" "To take Osritha his sister into safety and peace again. Suffer me to do so," I said, boldly enough, but yet quietly. Now Ingvar looked fixedly at me from under his brows, and I gave back his look.
And in Ingvar's house the thralls wrought to prepare a great feast in honour of Jarl Halfden's homecoming. Soon I stood with the jarls and Osritha at the landing place, and behind us were the courtmen in their best array. And as we came to the place where we would wait, Halfden's ship came past the bar into the haven's mouth.
Now it was Halfden's ship which had done that, and the fires we saw before the fog came had been the beacons lit because of his landing. Then he made a great outcry until he had many folk to listen, and they paid him well before he would sing. Whereon, forsooth, my ears tingled, for he sang of the burning of Bosham.
Now I saw that the tide was on the turn, and that Halfden's ship my own ship, as I have ever thought her had hauled out, and her boats waited for the last of the crew at the wharf side. But Rorik's ship was there still, and her men were busy rigging a crane of spars as though they would lower some heavy thing on board her. Nor could I guess what that might be.
"Let Odin have him," said Hubba; and I knew that he meant that the man should be hanged, for so, as Halfden's vikings told me, should he be Odin's thrall, unhonoured. Then the maiden fled from the hall, glad to have gained even that for the man, instead of the terrible death that the Danes keep for traitors and cowards.
And in ten days' time Cyneward came to me saying that there were two longships coming in from the open sea. "Let the pilots go out to them," I said; for it was of no use withholding this help from the Danish ships, little as we liked to see them come. So I forgot the matter. Then again Cyneward ran to me in haste, and with his eyes shining. "Master, here is Halfden's ship. Come and see!"
And at that remembrance the maiden shivered, and Halfden's face showed that he knew what the man's fate was like to have been at the great jarl's hands. "So, brother," he said, when I left off speaking, "had I gone to Reedham there would have been burnt houses in East Anglia." "In Reedham?" said I.
Gladly I rode hack with my news to find Ingvar in the ship garth, and there I told him who came. "A ship, maybe. How know you she is Halfden's?" he said carelessly. "Why, how does any sailor know his own ship?" I asked in surprise. Then he turned at once, and smiled at me fairly for the first time. "I had forgotten," he said. "Come, let us look at her again."
We were far down channel when morning broke, and on either bow were white cliffs, plain to be seen in the clear light that came after the short fury of the gale was spent. Never had I thought that a ship could sail so wondrously as this of Halfden's, and yet I took no pleasure therein, because of all that I had lost.
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