“Do you want to freeze?” I was provoked, I admit. “The very sight of you dressed like that gives me the shivers!”
“Neither you nor I will be cold this night,” she laughed. “Isn’t it glorious? And this is a good boat you brought. Please, let me sail it, and ask me no questions.”
She took the tiller, hauled in on the sheet; the sail filled, and she began singing, with a queer, wild strain running through her song. That dory fairly flew—and I swear there was not enough wind to drive us at such speed.
Finally I saw something I didn’t admire. No one does, who dwells on that part of the coast.
“Are you crazy, girl?” I demanded sharply. “That reef is dead ahead! Can’t you see the breakers?”
“Why, so it is—the reef! And am I to be affrighted by a few puny breakers? Nay, it is in the heart of those breakers that I wish to be! But you—have you fear, O Jarl Wulf?”
I suspected from her tone that the witch was laughing at me; so I subsided, but fervently wished that I’d not been so indulgent of her whim for a moonlight sail on a cold winter’s night.
Then we hit those breakers—or rather, we didn’t! For they seemed to part as the racing dory sped into them, making a smooth clear lane of silvery glinting water over which we glided as easily as if on a calm inland mill-pond!
“Drop the sail and unstep the mast,” she called suddenly.
I was beyond argument, and obeyed dumbly, like any boat-carle of the olden days.
“Now, take to the oars,” she directed, “and hold the boat just hereabouts for a while,” and even as I slid the oars into the oarlocks she made that swift movement of hers and stood nude, the loveliest sight that grim, ship-shattering, life-destroying reef had ever beheld.
Suddenly she flung up both shapely white arms with a shrill, piercing cry, thrice repeated. Then without a word she went overside in a long clean dive, with never a splash to show where she’d hit the water.
“Hold the boat about here for a while,” she’d bidden me! All I’d ever loved in this world was somewhere down below, in the hellish cross-currents of that icy water! I’d hold that boat there, if need were, in the teeth of a worse tempest than raged the night she came to me. She’d find me waiting. And if she never came up, I’d hold that boat there till its planks rotted and I joined her in the frigid depths.
It seemed an eternity, and I know that it was an hour ere a glimmer of white appeared beneath the surface. Then her shapely arm emerged and her hand grasped the gunwale, her regal head broke water, she blew like a porpoise; then she laughed in clear ringing triumph.
“You old dearling!” she cried in her archaic Norse. “Did I seem long gone? The boat has not moved a foot from where I dove. Come, bear a hand and lift my burden; it is heavy, and I am near spent. There are handles by which to grasp it.”
The burden proved to be a greenish metal coffer—bronze, I judged—which I estimated to measure some twenty inches long by twelve wide and nine inches deep. And how she rose to the surface weighted with that, passes my understanding. But how she knew it was down there passes my comprehension, too. But then, Heldra Helstrom herself was an enigma.
She re-wrapped herself in her flimsy silken robe of crimson and smiled happily, when she should have been shivering almost to pieces.
“If you’ll ship the mast and spread the sail again, Uncle John,” she said, surprizingly matter-of-fact now that her errand was successfully accomplished, “we’ll go home. I’d like a glass of brandy and a smoke, myself; and I read in your mind that such is your chief desire, at present.”
* * * *
Back at the cottage again, and comfortable once more, Heldra requested me to bear the coffer into her room, which I did. For over an hour she remained in there, then returned to the living-room where I sat, and I stared at the picture she presented. If she had always been beautiful, now she was surpassingly glorious.
Instead of the usual crimson robe, her lovely body was sheathed in a sleeveless, sheer, tightly fitting silken slip, cut at the throat in a long sloping V reaching nearly to her waist. The garment was palest sea-green, so flimsy in texture that it might as well have been compounded of mingled moon-mist and cobwebs. Her rosy-pearl flesh gleamed through the fabric with an alluring shimmer which thrilled anew my jaded old senses at the artistic wonder of her.
A gold collar, gem-studded, unmistakably of ancient Egyptian workmanship, was resting on her superb shoulders—loot of some viking foray into the far South-lands, doubtless. A broad girdle of gold plates, squared, and also gem-studded, was about her sloping hips, and was clasped in front by a broader plate with a sun-emblem in jeweled sets; from which plate or buckle it fell in two broad bands nearly to her white slender feet.
Broad torques of gold on upper armsand about her wrists, and an intricately wrought golden tiara with disks of engraved gold pendent by chains and hanging over her ears, set off her loveliness as never before. Even her red-gold hair, braided in two thick ropes, falling over her breasts to below her waist, were clasped by gem-set brooches of gold.
“Ragnar Wave-Flame’s gift to me, O Jarl Wulf,” she breathed softly. “Do you like your niece thus arrayed?”
Norse princess out of an elder day, or Norse witch from an even older and wickeder period of the world—whichever this Heldra Hclstrom was, of one thing I was certain, no lovelier woman ever lived than this superb being who styled herself my “niece.”
And so I told her, and was amply rewarded by the radiance of her smile, and the ecstatic kiss she implanted on my cheek.
Despite her splendid array, she perched on the arm of my chair, and began toying with my left hand. Presently she lifted it to the level of my eyes, laughing softly. I’d felt nothing, yet she’d slipped a broad tarnished silver ring of antique design on my third finger.
“It was yours in the ancient days, 0 Jarl Wulf,” she whispered in her favorite tongue—the archaic form of the Norsk language. “Yours again is the ancient ring, now! Ragnar herself carved the mystic runes upon it. Shall I read them, O Jarl, or will you?”
“They are beyond my skill,” I confessed. “The words are in the ‘secret’ language that only the Rime-Kanaars’ understood. Nor was it well for others than witches and warlocks to seek to understand them.”
“Ragnar took that ring from Jarl Wulf’s finger ere she set fire to the dragon-ship,” Heldra murmured. “Had those runes been on the ring when your foes set upon you—they, not you, would have perished in the sword-play, Jarl Red-Sword!
“But the sea-born witch knew that you would weary of Valhalla in a day to come, and would return to this world of strife and slaying, of loss and grief, of hate and the glutting of vengeance—and, knowing, she carved the runes, that in time the charmed ring would return to its proper owner.
“It is her express command that I read them to you, for knowing the runes, never shall water drown or fire burn; nor sword or spear or ax ever wound you, so be it that in time of danger you speak the weird words!
“And for my sake—you who are my ‘Uncle John’ to all the rest of the world, but to me are dearer than old Jarl Wulf was to Ragnar the sea-witch—I implore you to learn the runic charm, and use it if ever danger menaces. Promise me! Promise me, I say!”
Her silvery voice was vibrant with fierce intensity. She caught my right hand and pressed it against her palpitant body, just beneath her proudly swelling left breast.
“Promise!” she reiterated. “I beg your promise! With your right hand on my heart I adjure you to learn the rune.”
“No fool like an old fool,” I grumbled, adding a trifle maliciously, “particularly when in the hands of a lovely woman. But such a fuss you make over a few words of outlandish gibberish! Read me the rune, then, witch-maid! I’d learn words worse than those can be to please you and set your mind at rest.”
With her scarlet lips close to my ear, with bated breath, and in a tone so low I could barely catch her carefully enunciated syllables, she whispered the words. And although he
r whisper was softer than the sighing of gentlest summer breeze, the tones rang on my inner hearing like strokes of a great war-hammersmiting on a shield of bronze. There was no need to repeat them—either on her part or mine. There was no likelihood of my ever forgetting that runic charm. I could not, even if I would.
“Surely,” I muttered, “you are an adept in the ancient magic. Well for me that you love me, else your witcheries might
Most amazingly she laughed, a clear, ringing merriment with no trace of the mystic about it.
“Let me show you something—a game, a play; one that will amuse me and entertain you.”
She fairly danced across the room and into her own room, emerging with an antique mirror of some burnished, silver-like metal. This she held out to me. I grasped it by its handle obediently enough, humoring this new whim.
“Look into it and say if it is a good mirror,” she bade, her sapphire eyes a-dance with elfin mirth.
I looked. All I could see was my same old face, tanned and wrinkled, which I daily saw whenever I shaved or combed my hair, and I told her so. She perched again on the arm of my chair, laid her cheek against mine, and curved her cool arm about my neck.
“Now look again!”
Again the mirror told truth. I saw my face the same as ever, and hers as well, “Like a rose beside a granite boulder,” as I assured her.
“You do but see yourself as you think of yourself,” she murmured softly, “and me you behold as you believe me to be.”
SHE brought her lips close to the mirror and breathed upon its surface with her warm breath. It clouded over, then cleared. Her voice came, more murmurous than before, but with a definite note of sadness:
“Once more, look! Behold yourself as I see you always; and behold me as I know myself to be! And when I am gone beyond your ken, remember the witch-maid, Heldra, as one woman who loved you so truly that she showed you herself as she actually was!”
The man’s face was still my own, but mine as it was in the days of early manhood, ere life’s thunders had graven their scars on brow and cheeks and lips, and before the snows of many winters had whitened my hair.
Her features were no less beautiful, but in her reflected eyes I saw ages and ages of life, and bitter experience, and terrible wisdom that was far more wicked than holy; and it came to me with conviction irrefutable that beside this young-appearing girl, maid, or woman, all my years were but as the span of a puling babe compared to the ageless age of an immortal.
“That, at least, is no glamyr,” her voice sighed drearily, heavy with the burden of her own knowledge of herself.
I laid my thick, heavy old arm across her smooth satiny white shoulders, and I turned her head until her sapphire eyes met mine fairly. Very gently I kissed her on her brow.
“Heldra Helstrom,” I said, and my voice sounded husky with emotion, “you may be all you have just shown me, or worse! You may be Ragnar Wave-Flame herself, the sea-witch who never dies. You may be even what I sometimes suspect, the empress of Hell, come amongst mortals for no good purpose! But be you what you may, old or young, maid or woman, good or evil, witch, spirit, angel or she-devil, such as you are, you are you and I am I, and for some weird reason we seem to love each other in our own way; so let there be an end to what you are or have been, or who I was in other lives, and content ourselves with what is!”
Were those bright glitters in her sapphire eyes tear-drops ready to fall? If so, I was not sure, for with a cry like that of a lost soul who has found sanctuary, she buried her face on my shoulder.…
After a long silence, she slipped from the arm of my chair, and wordlessly, her face averted, she passed into her room. After an hour or so, I went to my own room—but I could not sleep.…
* * * *
Time passed, and I dwelt in a “fool’s paradise,” dreaming that it would last for ever.
The summer colony began to arrive. There were cottages all along the shore, but there were likewise big estates, whose owners were rated as “somebodies,” to put it mildly.
A governor of a great and sovereign state; an ex-president of our nation; several foreign diplomats and some of their legation attaches—but why enumerate, when one man only concerns this narrative?
Michael Commnenus, tall, slight, dapper, inclined to swarthiness, with black eyes under crescent-curved black eyebrows; with supercilious smiling lips, a trifle too red for a man; with suave Old World manners, and a most amazingly conceited opinion of himself as a “Lady-charmer.”
It was not his first summer in our midst; and although when he was in Washington at his legation I never gave him a thought, when I saw his too handsome face on the beach, I felt a trifle sick! I knew, positively, that the minute he set eyes on Heldra.… Of course I knew, too, that my witch-niece could take care of herself; but just the same, I sensed annoyance, and perhaps, tragedy.
Well, I was in nowise mistaken.
Heldra and I were just about to shove off in my dory for a sail. It was her chief delight, and mine too, for that matter.
Casually, along strolled Michael Commnenus, twirling a slender stick, caressing a slender black thread he styled a mustache, smiling his approbation of himself. I’d seen that variety of casual approach before. As our flippant young moderns say: It was “old stuff.”
Out of the corner of my eye I watched. The Don Juan smirk faded when his calculating, appraising eyes met her sapphire orbs, now shining like the never-melting polar ice. An expression of bewilderment spread over his features. His swarthy skin went a sickly greenish-bronze. Involuntarily he crossed himself and passed on. The man was afraid, actually fear-struck!
“Ever see him before, Heldra?” I queried. “He looked at you as if the devil would be a pleasanter sight. That’s one man who failed to fall for your vivid beauty, you sea-witch!”
“Who is he?” she asked in a peculiar tone. “I liked his looks even less than he liked mine.”
“Michael Commnenus,” I informed her, and was about to give her his pedigree as we local people knew him, but was interrupted by her violently explosive:
“Who?”
“Michael Commnenus,” I stated again, a trifle testily. “And you needn’t shout! What’s he done but again she interrupted, speaking her archaic Norsk:
“Ho! Varang Chiefs of the Guard Imperial! Thorfinn! Arvid! Sven! And ye who followed them—Gudrun! Randvar! Haakon! Smid! And all ye Varangs in Valhalla, give ear! And ye, 0 fiends, witches, warlocks, trolls, vampyrs, and all the dark gods who dwell in Hel’s halls where the eternal frozen fires blaze without heat, give ear to my voice, and cherish my words, for I give ye all joyous tidings.
“He lives! After all these long centuries Michael Commnenus dwells again on the bosom of fair Earth! In a body of flesh and blood and bone, of nerve and tissue and muscle he lives! He lives, I say! And I have found him!
“Oh, now I know why the Norns who rule all fate sent me to this place. And I shall not fail ye, heroes! Content ye, one and all, I shall not fail!”
Was this the gorgeous beauty I’d learned to love for her gentleness? Hers was the face of a furious female demon for a moment; but then her normal expression returned and she sighed heavily.
“Heed me not, Uncle John,” she said drearily. “I did but recall an ancient talc of foul treachery perpetrated on sundry Norsemen in the Varangian Guard of a Byzantine emperor ages agone.
“The niddering—worse than ‘coward’—who wrought the bane of some thirty-odd vikings, was a Commnenus, nephew to the Emperor Alexander Commnenus.… I live too much in memories of the past, I fear, and for the moment somewhat forgot myself in the hate all good Norse maids should hold toward any who bear the accursed name of the Commneni.
“Still, even as I know you to be old Jarl Wulf Red-Brand returned to this world through the gateway of birth—it would be nothing surprising if this spawn of the Commneni were in truth that same Michael Commnenus of whom the tale is told.”
“The belief in reincarnation is age-old,” I said ref
lectively. “And in several parts of the world it is a fundamental tenet of religion. If there be truth in the idea, there is, as you say, nothing surprising if anybody now living should have been anybody else in some former life.… And that sample of the Commneni appears quite capable of any treachery that might serve a purpose at the moment! But, Heldra,” I implored her, struck by a sudden intuition, “I beg of you not to indulge in any of your devilries, witcheries, or Norse magic. If this Michael is that other Michael, yet that was long ago; and if he has not already atoned for his sin, you may be very sure that somewhere, sometime, somehow he will atone; so do not worry your regal head about him.”
“Spoken like a right Saga-man,” she smiled as I finished my brief homily. “I thank you for your words of wisdom. And now, Jarl Wulf Red-Brand, I know you to be fey as well as I am. ‘Surely he will atone for his sin’…oh! a most comforting thought! So let us think no more about the matter.”
I glanced sharply at her. Her too instant acquiescence was suspicious. But her sapphire eyes met mine fairly, smilingly, sending as always a warm glow of contentment through me. So I accepted her assurance as it sounded, and gave myself up to the enjoyment of the sail and the sound of her silvery voice as she sang an old English love ballad I’d known as a young man. And under the spell of her magnetic personality gradually the episode of Michael Commnenus faded into nothingness—for a while.
* * * *
A couple of days later, just about dark, Heldra came down the stairs from the attic, where she’d been rummaging. In her hand she carried an old violin-case. I looked and grinned ruefully.
“You are a bad old Uncle John,” she scolded. “Why did you not tell me you played the ‘fidel,’ even as Jarl Wulf played one in his time? Think of all the sweet music you might have made in the past winter nights, and think of the dances I might have danced for your delight while you played—even as Ragnar danced for her old Jarl.”
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™, Vol. 4: Nictzin Dyalhis Page 3