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One May morning, more than a thousand years ago, so the story runs, an old man came slowly along a woodland track that uncoiled itself from the mountain passes and snow-crowned inlands of Norway. Presently the trees grew thinner, and grass and wild flowers spread on either hand, and at last, just where the path dipped down to the water-side at Hernersfiord, the traveller stopped.
Out at sea, beyond the high headlands that guarded Hernersfiord, a fresh breeze was blowing briskly from the north-east, and past the rocky islets of the coast white caps gleamed in the sunshine. As the ships drew clear of the fiord, and the boom of the outer sea breaking on the skerries rose louder and nearer, sails were spread and oars shipped.
Long after King Estein had joined his fathers on the little holm beyond Hernersfiord, and Helgi, Earl of Askland, had become but a warlike memory, the skalds of Sogn still sang this tale of Vandrad the Viking.
For a minute he watched them crackle and spit sparks, bending his brows as he deliberated how he should begin. Then he turned to Estein and said, "When I saw thee by the shore at Hernersfiord, now some two years gone, didst thou think then that Atli was a stranger?" "I thought so indeed," replied Estein, "though some words you let fall pointed otherwise."
Without heeding the other's gruffness, the old man asked, "Does King Hakon sail from Hernersfiord to-day?" "King Hakon has not sailed for many a day. His son leads this force." "Ay, I had forgotten, we are both old men now. Then Estein sails to-day?" "Ay, and I sail with him. My ship awaits me, so make way, old man," replied Ketill. "Whither do ye sail?" "To the west seas.
Saw you ever so many trees and so few true men before?" "Yet was it not quite bare of good things," replied his friend. "What, mean you the woodman's wife?" "What else?" said Helgi, and then he fell silent again. They reached Hernersfiord towards nightfall, and as they crept up the still, narrow waters darkness gathered fast.
On the slope above Hernersfiord stood the royal hall of Hakonstad, the seat of the kings of Sogn; and all about the house, and right down to the water's edge, there was a great bustle and movement of men. From the upland valley at the fiord head, warriors trooped down to the ships that lay by the long stone pier.
Ever since the first wild Northmen, pushing westwards to the sea, had settled in the land of Sogn, its kings had been interred on a certain barren islet hard by the mouth of Hernersfiord, and on the morning of the fifth day after King Hakon's death they bore him out to his last resting-place by the surge of the northern ocean.
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