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"Let your man get water; there is a pool yonder." The housecarl started toward it, but as he passed one of the helpless horses, he turned to that and brought me a horn from the saddlebags. It had wine in it, and that was better. The old thane tried to get some of it into the lips of the lady, and succeeded while I rubbed her hands.

"So you are a real Dane not an English-bred one like myself. That is good. You and I will have many a talk together. Odin, how good it is to meet a housecarl who speaks as man to man and does not cringe to me! Who are you?" "Radbard Grimsson of Grimsby, housecarl just now to this King of Lindsey." "And your comrade?"

Twenty or more of them there were; and two horses rolled on the ground hard by them, and they had been hamstrung, as one glance told me. One man, too, in the dress of a housecarl, lay not far off, wounded sorely. He saw me, and beckoned wildly to me.

After him the thronging people closed up, and though I thought that a housecarl would have been sent to see what he was about, this would have made an open talk, and Alsi forbore. "Let Havelok take your horse, Mord," I whispered to him; "I will tell you why directly." He nodded, and I told Havelok to mount.

Then one of the three singers looked, and his voice stayed, for he was a stranger, and had heard nothing of this newcomer, and then Havelok followed Berthun up the hall in a kind of hush that fell, and he was smiling a little, as if it amused him. He had on the things that the steward had given him, and they were good enough as good as, if more sober than, my housecarl finery.

"If he had been a Mercian, or even a Saxon, I would have had him here, but a fisher has had no training in arms after all." "Some of us have," said I. The captain looked me up and down, and then walked round me, saying nothing until we were face to face again. "That, I take it, is a hint that you might like to be a housecarl of the king's," he said. "Are you a Lindseyman?"

Then the thane of the prizes said, "He is not here, lord; for little trouble would there be in seeing him, if he were, seeing that he is a full head and shoulders over even this housecarl of yours." Now the princess had turned to look at me, and she saw that I was abashed, and so she smiled at me pleasantly, as much as to say that she was a little sorry for me, and turned away.

So Withelm went his way to the old priest with a light heart, and I to the captain. "Well," said Eglaf, "this is about what I expected when your brother came. Good it has been to have you here; and I think that I shall see you as a housecarl for good yet. When do you go?" "The first time that I do not turn up on guard I am gone, not till then." "Come and drink a farewell cup first."

Now I could not see Havelok as yet, and so I went into the stone-arched Roman guardroom, and Eglaf the captain fetched out a pot of wine and some meat, and made me very welcome while we talked. And presently I thought that I might do worse than be a housecarl for a time, if Eglaf would have me.

I told him as we went on of the pit we had seen, and how Werbode thought it was a trap. Whereon the housecarl laughed a little, and said that it was but an ancient flint working. The men who had fallen on the party were the descendants of those who had made it. The flints had been worked here from time untold even till now, and those who worked them today had all the craft of their forebears.