Berse added that he had heard some talk of this before, and many others said that they, too, had heard rumors relating to it. Orm said that he had heard that the dead man had been nailed to a tree, as the sons of Ragnar Hairy-Breeks had done in the old days with the chief priest of England. But how they could continue to regard him as a god after the Jews had killed him, none of them could understand; for obviously no true God could be killed by men. Then Berse went on to tell them more of what he had managed to grasp of the Jew’s story:
“He has been a slave of the Jutes for a year, and there he underwent much suffering, because he would not row on Saturdays; for the God of the Jews gets very angry with a Jew who does anything on that day. But the Jutes could not understand this, though he often tried to explain it to them, and they beat him and starved him when he refused to row. It was while he was in their hands that he learned the little he knows of our tongue; but when he speaks of them, he curses them in his own language, because he does not know sufficient words to do so in ours. He says that he wept much when he was among them and cried to his God for help; then, when he saw our ship approaching, he knew that his cry had been heard. When he jumped overboard, he dragged with him a man who had often beaten him. He asked his God to be a shield to him and not to let the other man escape; that, he says, is why no spear hit him, and how he found the strength to dive under our ship; and so powerful is the name of his God that he will not name him to me, however much I try to persuade him to do so. That is what he says of the Jutes and his escape from them; and he has more to tell us about something else, which he thinks we shall find useful. But much of what he says about this I cannot clearly understand.”
They were all curious to know what else the Jew had to say which might be useful to them, and at last Berse managed to discover the gist of it.
“He says,” Berse told them, “that he is a wealthy man in his own country, which lies within the Caliph of Córdoba’s kingdom. His name is Solomon, and he is a silversmith, besides apparently being a great poet. He was captured by a Christian chieftain who came from the north and plundered the region where he lives. This chieftain made him send for a large sum of money to ransom himself, and then sold him to a slave-trader, for the Christians do not like to keep their word to Jews, because they killed their God. The slave-trader sold him at sea to merchants, from whom he was captured by the Jutes; and it was his bad fortune to be set at once to pull an oar on a Saturday. Now he hates these Jutes with a bitter hatred; but even that is mild compared with the hatred he feels toward the Christian chieftain who betrayed him. This chieftain is very rich and lives only a day’s march from the sea; and he says that he will gladly show us how to get there, so that we may plunder the chieftain of all he possesses and burn down his house and take out his eyes and loose him naked among the stones and trees. He says that there is wealth for us all there.”
They all agreed that this was the best news they had heard for many a day; and Solomon, who had been sitting beside Berse while he was recounting all this and had been following him as well as he could, leaped to his feet with a great cry and a joyful countenance and cast himself full length on the deck before Krok and put a tuft of his beard into his mouth and chewed it; then he seized one of Krok’s feet and placed it upon his neck, all the while babbling like a drunken man in words that no one could understand. When he had calmed himself a little, he began to search among the words of their language that he knew; he said that he wished to serve Krok and his men faithfully until they had won these riches and he had gained his revenge; but he asked for a definite promise that he himself should be allowed to pluck out the eyes of the Christian chieftain. Both Krok and Berse agreed that this was a reasonable request.
On each of the three ships the men now began hotly to discuss all this, and it put them in the best of spirits. They said that the stranger might not bring much luck to himself, to judge by what had happened to him, but that he might bring all the more to them; and Toke thought that he had never hooked a better fish. They treated the Jew as a friend, and collected a few clothes for him to wear, and gave him ale to drink, though they had not much left. The country to which he wished to guide them was called León, and they knew roughly where it lay: on their right hand between the land of the Franks and that of the Cordoban Caliph; perhaps five days' good sailing southwards from the Breton cape, which they could now see. They sacrificed again to the sea people, were rewarded with a good wind, and sailed on into the open sea.
CHAPTER FOUR
HOW KROK’S MEN CAME TO RAMIRO’S KINGDOM, AND HOW THEY PAID A REWARDING VISIT
WHEN Orm was old and spoke of the adventures that had befallen him, he used to say that he had had little to complain of during the time that he was in Krok’s service, though he had joined his company so unwillingly. The blow he had received on his skull troubled him only for a few days; and he got on well with the men, so that before long they ceased to regard him as their prisoner. They remembered gratefully the good sheep that they had obtained from him, and he had other qualities that made him a good shipmate. He knew as many ballads as Berse, and had learned from his mother to speak them with the intonation of the bards; besides which, he could tell lie-stories so cunningly that you had to believe in them, though he admitted that in this particular craft he was Toke’s inferior. So they prized him as a good comrade, and a clever one, well able to while away the dreary hours agreeably for them during the long days when they had a good wind in their sail and were resting from their oars.
Some of the sailors were disgruntled because Krok had left Brittany without having first tried to get new supplies of fresh meat; for the food they had aboard was now beginning to smell old. The pork was rancid, the stockfish mildewed, the meal stale, the bread maggoty, and the water sour; but Krok and those of his followers who had sailed on expeditions of this sort before asserted that this was as good fare as any sailor could wish for. Orm ate his rations with a good appetite, though while he did so, he used often to tell the others of the delicacies to which he was accustomed at home. Berse remarked that it seemed to him to be a wise dispensation of the gods that a man when at sea could eat and enjoy food that at home he would not offer to his slaves or his dogs, but only to pigs; for, were it not so arranged, long sea voyages would be exceedingly nauseating.
Toke said that the thing that troubled him most was the fact that the ale was now finished. He was, he assured them, not a fussy man, and he reckoned that he could stomach most things when necessity demanded it, not excluding his sealskin shoes, but only if he had good ale to wash them down. It would be a fearful prospect, he said, to envisage a life without ale, either on sea or ashore; and he questioned the Jew much concerning the quality of the ale in the country to which they were journeying, without, however, being able to extract any very clear information from him on the subject. He told the others stories of great feasts and drinking-bouts that he had been present at, and mourned that on those occasions he had not drunk even more than he had.
Their second night at sea a strong wind arose, driving high breakers, and they were glad that the sky remained clear, for they were steering by the stars. Krok began to wonder whether it would be wise to come out into the limitless sea; but the wisest sailors among them said that, however far you might sail to the south, you would always have land on your left, save only in the Njörva Sound,1 where the waters led in to Rome, which stood at the center of the world. Men who sailed from Norway to Iceland, said Berse, had a more difficult task, for they had no land in whose lee to shelter, but only the open sea, stretching away for ever on either bow.