Ulric the Jarl

by William Stoddard

  “Harken!” said Oswald, the harper, as he sat by the now smoldering fire in the hall of Ulric’s house.

  “I hear,” said Hilda from her place on the other side of the ash heap. “It is the last time that I shall listen to the song of the outing ice, but I shall feel the wind from the sun land and I shall see the grass green in the valley before I go. There will be buds on the trees when I pass down into the earth to meet my kindred. O what a realm is that! The land of shadows. The under world which has the sod for a roof. But the old runes on the rocks tell of wide places. One may travel far in that land, and where I may go I know not.”

  The gnarled fingers of Oswald were searching among the strings of his harp, but only discords answered his touches.

  “I have heard,” he said, “that they hang their shields on the roots of the trees, and they see as we see in a twilight. I think I have heard them harping in the summer nights, when the moon was full and the wind was in the pines. I would that my own harp might be buried with me.”

  “No need,” said Hilda. “They have better harps than thine. They will give thee one. It is well that the weapons of a warrior should be placed beside him in his tomb, but they must be marred in token that he useth them no more. He hath left others for his kinsmen. There are many good swords in the old tombs. One day they will all be opened and the blades will be found.”

  “And also much treasure,” grumbled Oswald; but his harp twanged angrily as he said it, for he had ever been a man to hold fast anything in the shape of coined money or of precious metal. Many were said to be the outland coins in his leather bag in his room at the southerly end of the house. He had sometimes shown them to inquiring folk, but grudgingly, and he had always tied them up again tightly, as if he feared that there might be a thief even among the vikings.

  Hilda arose and walked slowly across the room to the open door. She looked toward the sea, but the mist and the rain were a curtain.

  “Hammers!” she said. “I can hear them. Ulric and his men are at work upon the ship. She will be ready to launch when the ice goeth out. She will sail to the Middle Sea, but when I look for her I cannot see her come again.”

  Once more she turned, and this time her slow and stately march carried her to the farther end of the hall, on the dais, where many suits of armor were hanging. She went straight to one of these and she touched it, piece by piece, while Oswald leaned upon his harp and watched her.

  “When the hour was upon me,” she said, “I saw the son of Brander in battle, and the men upon whom his ax was falling bore shields like this. There were dark men with them, wearing turbans. It is well. I think that at the end of this cruise he will come to me where I am. It were no shame to his father’s son that the valkyrias, when they come to call the hero to Valhalla, should find him circled with slain Romans. Brander the Sea King took these arms for his trophies in the great fight off the coast of Britain. He drove the Roman galley ashore. He burned it with fire. Not one Roman escaped.”

  “I have seen Britain,” muttered Oswald.

  “Brander the Brave liked Britain well,” continued Hilda. “It is a fair land, he said. If he could take more men with him, he would drive out of it the Romans and the Britons and keep it. But he said they have no good winters there, and the summers are all too long. It would be no land for me. What would I do in an island where the fiords do not shut up at the right season? I should perish!”

  Very thoughtful was the face of the tall daughter of the Northland as she passed along, inspecting the armor and talking to herself about its varied history. Some of it had been won in fights with far-away peoples before she was born, but more of it had been brought into that hall before her eyes, and she had heard the bringers tell the tales which belonged to its pieces and to the swords and spears. Now, therefore, hanging there on the wall, the war treasures of the house of Brander were page-marks for her memory, and she also was a book of the old history of the Northmen from the days of the gods to this hour of her own closing.

  Swiftly went by the day of rain and thaw, but their work was tenfold in the night which followed it. The rain fell on the roof in increasing abundance, and the wind threw it with force against the sides of the house. The torrents on the mountains grew into small swift rivers, and they made a continual loud sound of rushing water; but that was not the tumult which so filled the air and smote upon the ear. All other sounds were overborne by the booming and groaning of the ice and by the roar with which its loosened edges ground against the granite cliffs in the fiords.

  The day of Saturn had been a day of frost and snow and storm until near its close. The day of the sun had brought the sun’s breath from his own land and his smile into the sky, and he had slain the winter at a blow. The morrow would be the day of the moon, and before its arrival came now this night of such uproar that Oswald did not care to touch his harp, and the vikings mended their armor and sharpened their swords in silence. Hilda also was long silent, nor had Ulric the Jarl spoken aught that could be heard by all. When at last his voice arose, and men put by their work to hear, he gave answer to a question of Tostig the Red.

  “Aye!” he said loudly, “the ship is ready from stem to stern. We will launch her behind the ice as it leaveth the shore. We will follow the floes as the tides bear them southward; ever do they melt as they go. So shall no other ship sail before us, and we shall be the first of all keels from the Northland, this year, among the islands of the Middle Sea.”

  Fiercely twanged the harp of Oswald and loud rang the shouts of the men who heard the young jarl speak his purpose, but before the harp could sound again Hilda arose in her place.

  “Son of Brander,” she said, “thou wilt go. Thou wilt see many things. All day have I been watching thy path, and the clouds are over it. In this thing that I now tell thee, do thou as did thy father: crush the keels of Rome in the seas of Britain and smite the men of Rome on the British island. And in the end of all thou wilt die, as did thy father, at the hand of a spearman of Cæsar.”

  “So be it,” shouted Ulric, with a laugh on his lips and a flash of fire in his bold, bright eyes; “I ask no better!”

  He said no more, but seated himself and began to sharpen his seax on a smooth, hard stone.

  * * *

  CHAPTER III. The Launching of “The Sword.”

  THE DAY OF THE moon, the second day of the week, dawned brightly over the village of the vikings. The faces of the cliffs along the shores of the Northland boomed back continuous echoes of the thunderous reports of the splitting ice. The frost had been strong, and the winter mail of the sea was thick and hard, but the sun and the lifting tides and all the torrents from the mountains made a league, and they were more powerful than was the ice. The south wind also helped them.

  All the hours since Wulf the Skater brought the news of the coming thaw had been spent by Ulric and his men in getting the good ship The Sword ready for the water. No room in her was to be wasted, and her hollow, to her very keel, was now closely packed with provisions, taking the place of other ballasting. There were tightly stowed barrels of pork and beef, and there were bags and boxes of hard bread, and casks of ale and casks of water. Over the greater part of these were planks fastened down like a deck, for the voyage to be undertaken promised to be long, and all except provisions for immediate use must be sealed until a day of need.

  The seats of the rowers were all in, and the short oars, and also the long oars, which a man would stand erect to pull with. The small boats were fastened upon the half decks, fore and aft. The mast was now stayed and rigged and the spars and the sail had been swung in their places. Not of woven stuff was the sail, but of many well-dressed skins of leather, that it might toughly withstand any gale.

  There were twenty oars on a side, and the crew who were to do the rowing, taking their turns, had been carefully selected during the winter. Their war shields were hung along the bulwarks, and they placed them there with great pride. The chosen men who lived further inland were now arriving, and they
were as eager as were the men who dwelt on the shore. Stalwart and high-hearted were all the vikings who were to sail in The Sword. Among them were veterans who had fought under Brander the Brave, the father of Ulric, and others were youths who were now going out for their first venture in distant seas. Great store of weapons went on board, for there had been much making of bows and arrows and swords and spears and shields all winter. So the gray-headed and caretaking warriors declared that the ship was exceedingly well provided.

  At the dawn of the day of the moon Ulric the Jarl stood at high-water mark looking seaward.

  “As the tide turneth I shall know,” he said to those who were with him. “The flood hath lifted the ice, but the ebb must lower it. The Sword will be launched at the next high tide if the outing is good.”

  That might be toward the evening, and word went out so that all might be ready.

  The ship as yet bore no flag, but on the forward half deck stood a great anvil, carved finely of oak and blackened, and upon the anvil was fastened a massive hammer, made in like manner, that Thor the Great, the god of war, the smith god, might go with The Sword into any battle. Now could more fully be seen the carvings and the gildings and the many rich ornamentations which had been lavished upon the ship, and men who now saw her for the first time marveled at her beauty and at the strength of her timbers.

  “Larger ships have been,” they said, “but not many, nor was there ever one that gave better promise of bearing well the shock of another ship or the stroke of an ice floe.”

  All day the sound of harping could be heard in the house, for other harpers besides Oswald were now there, and they played and sang in a rivalry with each other. Hilda was not to be seen. It was said that she had shut herself up in her own room and would have none speak with her. Although the house was thronged, there were none who thought well to disturb her. Not many, indeed, were curious enough to pass near the closed door behind which she was believed to be looking into the twilight where the gods live, and out of which come those whose shadows darken the woods at times and whose voices are heard in the night as they talk to one another across the fiords.

  The noon came and at low tide the ice edge was out twenty fathoms from the shore, leaving clear water behind it. If it should shove in again, there would be no launching, but as the ebb ceased there came an unexpected help. A mighty drift of snow and ice had formed, in early winter, hundreds of feet above the level, and yet in a hollow of the high mountain at the head of the fiord. Hard and strong was the grasp of this glacier upon the rocks and trees at its sides, but under it was a stream which had been covered, though not entirely closed. Above and beyond was now a lake of melted snow, and the water from it was forcing its way under the glacier by that rivulet channel, mining, mining, mining, until its work was done.

  There was a great sound of breaking, a sound that was sharp, rasping, shrieking, as if the mountain uttered a great cry to see the glacier tear itself free and spring forward. The screams of a gier-eagle, startled from the withered pine tree on the summit, answered the scream of the mountain. Down, down, faster and faster, to the sheer precipice at the face of the fiord, and then the glacier itself uttered an awful roar as it leaped headlong from the cliff. A thunderous boom responded from the smitten face of the ice, and through the clefts that were made in all directions the freed salt water bounded high into the sunshine, which it had not seen since it was imprisoned in the dark by the winter. The entire mass went over, and with it went the bowlders, earth, and trees which it had rent off and brought away. The blow which it struck was as a blow from the hammer of Thor, and a vast wave rolled out of the fiord, breaking the nearer ice as it went and splitting square miles of the sea face beyond into floes of a right size for drifting. Out slipped the ice edge at the cove, a hundred fathoms further. In it came again angrily, but only to retreat once more and leave a wider, surer harbor for The Sword to dip her keel into when her launching hour should come.

  All things were ready, both at the house and on the shore, when Oswald left his harp to go and speak to one of the maidens, of whom were many come to see the warriors depart.

  “Go thou to Hilda,” he said. “Say to her that shortly she will be needed at the ship.”

  “Come,” said the maiden to other women who were near her, for she cared not to go alone.

  Truly it was not far to go and come, stepped they never so slowly, and they soon brought back word that her door was open, but Hilda they did not find, nor did any know whither she had gone.

  “So?” said Oswald, thoughtfully. “Pass thou on, then, and tell this to Ulric, the son of Brander, for he will understand. Bid Wulf the Skater and Tostig the Red that they come now to me.”

  Hastily went the maiden, for of this errand she had no fear.

  On the summit of a low hill not more than half a mile from the house was a great heap of stones. Around it, in an oval, standing like watchful sentries, were many great stones, tall and upright. Upon the faces of these uprights were chiseled words in the old runes. A path that led to this hill had been kept open during the winter, and when Hilda left the house, with none to mark her going, she had walked along this path. The snow in it was soft, taking footprints, and Hilda stooped, looking closely at some which were already there. She followed them until they ceased at the heap of stones. She smiled and bowed her head approvingly.

  “Ulric hath been here,” she said. “He hath spoken to his father at the tomb. The son of the hero will himself be a hero. There is no other like him among the young branches of the tree of Odin.”

  Strong affection sounded in her words concerning the youthful head of the ancient house of Brander the Brave. A flush came for a moment into her withered face, and she stood in silence gazing at the tomb. Slowly her arms arose, waving, and her lips opened in a recitative that sounded like a song, wherein she was speaking to the father of Ulric and to other names than his, calling them her kindred. Louder, more weird, mournful, thrilling, grew the tomb song of the old saga woman. But it suddenly ceased, for to her came a response from one that stood upon the crest of the central heap of stones.

  Not in any human voice of the dead or of the living was her answer, but from the gaunt and grisly shape of a large gray she-wolf, famished-looking, that stood there, snapping fiercely her bloody jaws and gazing at Hilda. Then lifted the wolf her head to send forth a long-drawn, wailing howl.

  The long, late winter had been a hard one for all wolves and for other wild beasts, for against them the sheepfolds had been well guarded. And now this hunger-driven monster from the mountains had taken her opportunity to venture in almost to the village, finding this day a flock without a shepherd. She had ravaged unfought, and now she was here upon the tomb of Brander. Her presence there was as if she had been a written message to Hilda.

  “Art thou here?” she exclaimed. “Aye! Thou art as I saw thee at the house. Thou art the name of Rome, O bloody mouth! Scourge of the world! Curse of all nations! Hungry one! The swords of the Northmen shall yet smite the cubs of the she-wolf in their own den.”

  A sharp, harsh bark, another howl, and a snapping of jaws replied to her and then the she-wolf sprang away, disappearing beyond the tomb, but Hilda turned and walked houseward along the path, muttering low as she went.

  When Tostig the Red and Wulf the Skater came to Oswald, the harper, he gave them an errand, for they at once went away together to one of the best made of the stables in the rear of the house. They had not yet returned when Hilda walked past the house and on down to the beach. All men knew that the right hour for the launching of The Sword had come when Hilda came and stood at the prow of the vessel, laying her hand upon it.

  She spoke then but few words, pointing at the heaps of driftwood and loose pieces of timber which were there and giving her commands. Those who heard her began to gather all this wood into a great heap. It was more like two heaps, for there was left a bare spot in the middle large enough for a yawlboat to have been lodged therein.

  Ulric, the so
n of Brander, came and stood by Hilda, and as she looked at him the color arose again into her face and a kindly light kindled in her eyes. He also smiled at her very lovingly. She spoke a word that none else heard, and he blew three long, powerful blasts upon his war horn. From all directions came in haste the vikings and the other shore people and the upland people, both the old and the young, men and women. From the house came all who were in it. Oswald and the other harpers marched to the beach together, bringing their harps.

  Now from the stables beyond the house came Tostig the Red and Wulf the Skater leading between them, whether he would or not, the snow-white colt which at two years seemed large for a four-year-old, but which as yet had neither been bridled nor mounted. That was partly because of the spirit that was in him; for none but Ulric or Hilda would he willingly let lay a hand upon him, and his eyes now grew red as if he were fretted overmuch. As he was led along he reared and plunged and snorted furiously, but Tostig and Wulf were strong men and they brought him to the heap of wood and in front of the hollow in its middle.

  Hilda had brought with her a long polished staff of ash wood, which had something of woven cloth stuff wrapped closely around it. Now she made a sign to Oswald and he struck his harp. So did the other harpers, following him, and the sound of their music stirred the blood of all who heard, so that the men shouted and clashed their spears upon their shields. Then ceased all the harps but that of Oswald, and he sang a song of war which called upon Odin and all the gods to sail with their ship, The Sword, and give her a successful cruise, with many battles and much blood and great plundering and many burnings of the ships and of the strongholds of foemen.