They hid in ambush at the mouth of a river and took some fishing-boats, but they found little of worth in them and could elicit no reply from the men in the boats when they asked where the rich villages were around there. When they had killed a couple of them and still could get no intelligible answer from the others, they let them go alive, since they were of miserable appearance and would be of no use as rowers and would fetch no price as slaves. More than once they slipped ashore under the cover of night, but they won little, for the people lived in large and well-guarded villages, and several times they had to make haste back to their ships to avoid being surrounded and outnumbered. They hoped that they would soon come to the end of the region where the Northmen held sway.
One evening they met four long ships rowing from the south; they looked to be heavily laden, and Krok let his ships move near to them so that he might see how strongly they were manned. It was a calm evening, and they rowed slowly toward each other; the strangers set a long shield upon their mast-top, with its point turned upwards, as a sign that they came as friends, and Krok’s men conversed with them at the distance of a spear’s throw, while each chieftain tried to calculate the other’s strength. The strangers said that they were from Jutland and that they were on their way home after a long voyage. They had plundered in Brittany with seven ships during the previous summer, and had then ventured far to the south; afterwards they had wintered on an island off the mouth of the Loire and had ventured up the river, but then a cruel plague had broken out among them, and now they were making their way home with such ships as they had strength to man. When asked what they had won, they replied that a wise seaman never counts his wealth until he has brought it safely home; but this they could tell him (since at this meeting they reckoned themselves strong enough to hold what they had won), that they had no complaint to make about the amount of their catch. There was always the possibility of a bad season, compared with the way things had been in the old days, and that held true however far southwards one might travel; but anyone who happened on a part of Brittany that had hitherto escaped plunder would be able to find good reward for his pains.
Krok asked whether they had any wine or good ale that they would be willing to exchange for pork or dried fish; meanwhile he tried to come nearer their ships, for he was sorely tempted to hazard an attack on them and by this means get a fine return for his whole voyage at one swoop. But the Jutish captain at once brought his ship round to bar their path, with his prow facing them, and replied that he preferred to keep his wine and ale for his own use.
“But by all means come nearer,” he said to Krok, “if there is anything else you care to sample.”
Krok weighed a spear in his hand and seemed uncertain which course to take; but at that moment a commotion broke out on one of the Jutish ships. Two men could be seen struggling with each other by the gunwale; then they fell into the water, still locked in each other’s arms. Both of them sank, and one was seen no more; but the other rose to the surface at a distance from the ship, only to dive again when a spear was thrown at him by one of the men he had left. There was much shouting on the Jutish ship, but when Krok’s men asked them what was the matter, they received no reply. Dusk was now beginning to descend, and after a brief exchange of words the strangers began to row forward again before Krok could decide whether or not to join battle. Then Toke, who sat at his larboard oar just behind Orm on Krok’s own ship, cried to Krok:
“Come and look at this! My fishing-luck gets better all the time!”
One hand was gripping Toke’s oar, and one Orm’s, and a face lay in the water between the hands, staring up at the ship. It was big-eyed and very pale, black-haired and black-bearded.
“This is a bold fellow and a good swimmer,” said one of the men. “He has dived under our ship to get away from the Jutes.”
“And a wise man, too,” said another, “for he sees that we are better men than they.”
A third said: “He is black like a troll, and yellow like a corpse, and does not look the sort of man who brings good luck with him. It is dangerous to take such a man aboard.”
They discussed the advantages and disadvantages of doing so, and some of them shouted questions at the man in the water; but he lay there without moving, clinging tightly to the oars and blinking his eyes and swaying with the sea. At last Krok ordered him to be brought aboard; he could always be killed later, he explained to those who opposed the idea, if the course of things showed that it would be best to do so.
So Toke and Orm drew in their oars and hauled the man aboard; he was yellow-skinned and strongly built, and naked to his waist, with only a few rags to cover him. He tottered on his feet and could hardly stand, but he clenched his fist and shook it at the Jutish ships as they merged into the distance, spitting after them and grinding his teeth. Then he cried something and fell head-long as the ship rolled, but was quickly on his feet again, and beat his breast and stretched his arms toward the sky and cried in a different voice, but in words that none of them could understand. When Orm was old, and told of all the things that had befallen him, he used to say that he had never heard so terrible a grinding of teeth, or so pitiful and ringing a voice, as when this stranger cried out to the sky.
They all wondered at him and questioned him profusely as to who he was and what had happened to him. He understood some of what they said and was able to reply brokenly in the Nordic tongue, and they thought he said that he was a Jute and that he disliked rowing on Saturdays and that it was for this reason that he hated the men he had now escaped from; but this made no sense to them, and some of them were of the opinion that he was crazy. They gave him food and drink, and he ate greedily of beans and fish; but when they offered him salt pork, he rejected it with disgust. Krok said that he would do to man an oar, and that when the voyage was over they could sell him for a good sum; meanwhile Berse, out of his wisdom, could try to make something of what the stranger said and discover whether he had any useful information to give them about the lands from which he had come.
So during the next few days Berse sat and talked a good deal with the stranger, and they conversed as well as they could. Berse was a calm and patient man, a great eater and a skillful bard, who had gone to sea to get away from a shrewish wife; he was wise and full of cunning, and bit by bit he succeeded in piecing together most of what the stranger had to say. This he told to Krok and the others.
“He is not crazy,” said Berse, “though he seems so; nor is he a Jute, though we thought him to be one. He says that he is a Jew. They are a people from the East who killed the man whom the Christians regard as their God. This killing took place long ago, but the Christians still cherish a great hatred against the Jews because of it, and like to kill them, and will not accept any ransom for them or show them any clemency. For this reason most of the Jews live in the lands ruled by the Caliph of Córdoba, since in his kingdom the man they killed is not regarded as a god.”