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Updated: June 22, 2025
Now Heidrek stood before me and looked at me, glowering, for a moment. "Well," he said curtly, "do you join me? Mind you, I would not give every man the chance, but you and yours are men." Before I could say aught, and it was on my mind to tell the pirate what I thought of him, if I spent my last breath in doing it, the courtman who had spoken with me just now answered for himself.
He was staring toward the westward mouth of the strait, half a mile away. There was a long black boat there, and the sun sparkled on the arms of the men in her. They were rowing slowly against the tide, toward us. "Too late," said Bertric between his teeth. "That is Heidrek treasure hunting, and we shall not get back to the mainland." I looked over my shoulder at Gerda.
"As for me, it is no new thing that I should be a winter abroad, and my folk have long ceased to trouble much about me. I am twenty-five, and took to the sea when I was seventeen. Well, if Heidrek has spoilt this voyage, we can afford it. Luck has been with me so far. If I win home again it is but to start fresh with a new ship, or settle down on the old manors in the way of my forebears."
Now they were rounding that headland whence they had come, and were altering their course. Asbiorn said that they were making for the river mouth, and half an hour thereafter we opened it out and saw that Heidrek was far within it, heading landward. The beacon fires blazed up afresh as the watchers knew that he had returned, and presently each fire had a second alongside it.
With a few strokes the swimmer neared us, and I saw that he was a young man, brown-haired and freckled, with a worn, anxious face, that had desperation written on it. I had never set eyes on him before. "I would fain make a third in this escape," he said, speaking fair Danish, but slowly, as if unused to it. "I have been a captive with Heidrek like yourselves, and I saw you go."
Heidrek's ships were swift when before the wind, and these great vessels might not overhaul them until they had reached some shallow waters in the river mouth which Heidrek had already entered. But there waited Dalfin and the Irish levies, who would be gathered by this time in force. Mayhap Heidrek would not chance being pent between two foes.
"Dalfin," I said, with a great chill on me, "ask if they know the name of the leader of these men." He changed colour, for I think that the knowledge of what I feared came to him in a flash. He asked, and the man at his feet muttered what was meant for the name of Heidrek. He said it once or twice, stammering, but I knew it, and Bertric caught it also.
The falling tide was setting westward through the strait, and we had to row more or less against it now as we crossed to where Gerda's white dress shone on the farther shore. "Heidrek will not risk a landing," Bertric said. "The sooner we are back here with Gerda the better. He has heard of that wreck." I told him the words of the fishers, and he was the more sure of it.
I owned my own ship, and was thane by right therefore, according to the old laws. Last year I fared to Flanders, where I had done well before, in the summer. In September I was homeward bound, and met this Heidrek outside the Scheldt mouth. He took my goods, and burned my ship, and kept me, because I was likely to be able to pilot him, knowing all that coast.
Our ship, which Heidrek had left here, was ready for sailing, as it seemed, and if we had come a day or two later we should have lost Arnkel, and maybe had trouble to follow. Now, these two men were the pilots of the fjord, as we had guessed from their coming off to us.
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