The Northern nations were drunken with victory and conquest. Rome had fallen; Frank, Goth, Vandal and Saxon had looted the fairest possessions of the world. And now these races found themselves hard put to hold their prizes from the wilder, fiercer peoples who swept down on them from the blue mists of the North. The Franks, already settled in Gaul and beginning to show signs of Latinization, found the long, lean galleys of the Norsemen bringing the sword up their rivers; the Goth further south felt the weight of their kinsmen's fury and the Saxons, forcing the Britons westward, found themselves assailed by a more furious foe from the rear. East, west and south to the ends of the world ranged the dragon-beaked long ships of the Vikings.
The Norse had already begun to settle in the Hebrides and the Orkneys, though as yet it was more a rendezvous of pirates than the later colonization. And the lair of Rognor the Red was this isle, called by the Scots Ladbhan, the Picts Golmara and the Norse Valgaard. His word was law, the only law this wild horde recognized; his hand was heavy, his soul ruthless, his range the open world.
The sea-king's eyes ranged about the board, while he nodded slightly in satisfaction. No pirate that sailed the seas could boast a fiercer assortment of fighting men than he; a mixed horde they were, Norsemen and Jutes-big, yellow-bearded men with wild, light eyes. Even now as they feasted they were fully armed and girt in mail, though they had laid aside their horned helmets. A ferocious, wayward race they were, with a latent madness burning in their brains, ready to leap into terrible flame at an instant.
Rognor's gaze turned from them, with their great bare arms heavy with golden armlets, to rest on one who seemed strangely different from the rest. This was a tall, rangily built man, deep-chested and strong, whose square-cut black hair and dark, smooth face contrasted with the yellow manes and beards about him. This man's eyes were narrow slits and of a cold-steel grey, and they, with a number of scars that marred his face, lent him a peculiarly sinister aspect. He wore no gold ornaments of any kind and his mail was of chain mesh instead of the scale type worn by the men about him.
Rognor frowned abstractedly as he eyed this man, but just as he was about to speak, another man entered the huge hall and approached the head of the board. This newcomer was a tall, splendidly made young Viking, beardless but wearing a yellow mustache. Rognor greeted him.
"Hail, Hakon! I have not seen you since yesterday."
"I was hunting wolves in the hills," answered the young Viking, glancing curiously at the dark stranger. Rognor followed his gaze.
"That is one Cormac Mac Art, chief of a band of reivers. His galley was wrecked in the gale last night and he alone won through the breakers to shore. He came to the skalli doors early in the dawn, dripping wet, and argued the carles into bringing him in to me instead of slaying him as they had intended. He offered to prove his right to follow me on the Viking path, and fought my best swordsmen, one after the other, weary as he was. Rane, Tostig. and Halfgar he played with as they were children and disarmed each without giving scathe or taking a wound himself."
Hakon turned to the stranger and spoke a courtly greeting, and the Gael answered in kind, with a stately inclination of his head.
"You speak our language well," said the young Viking.
"I have many friends among your people," answered Cormac. Hakon's eyes rested on him strangely for a moment, but the inscrutable eyes of the Gael gave back the gaze, with no hint of what was going on in his mind.
Hakon turned back to the sea-king. Irish pirates were common enough in the Narrow Seas, and their forays carried them sometimes as far as Spain and Egypt, though their ships were far less seaworthy than the long ships of the Vikings. But there was little friendship between the races. When a reiver met a Viking, generally a ferocious battle ensued. They were rivals of the Western seas.
"You have come at a good time, Cormac," Rognor was rumbling. "You will see me take a wife tomorrow. By the hammer of Thor! I have taken many women in my time-from the people of Rome and Spain and Egypt, from the Franks, from the Saxons, and from the Danes, the curse of Loki on them!. But never have I married one before. Always I tired of them and gave them to my men for sport. But it is time I thought of sons and so I have found a woman, worthy even of the favors of Rognor the Red. Ho-Osric, Eadwig, bring in the British wench! You shall judge for yourself, Cormac."
Cormac's eyes roved to where Hakon sat. To the casual watcher the young Viking seemed disinterested, almost bored. But the Gael's stare centered on the angle of his firm jaw as he caught the sudden, slight ripple of muscle that betrays controlled tenseness. The Gael's cold eyes flickered momentarily.
Three women entered the feasting-hall, closely followed by the two carles Rognor had sent for them. Two of the women led the third before Rognor, then fell back, leaving her facing him alone.
"See, Cormac," rumbled the Viking: "is she not fit to bear the sons of a king?"
Cormac's eyes traveled impersonally up and down the girl who stood panting with anger before him. A fine, robust figure of young womanhood she was, quite evidently not yet twenty years old. Her proud bosom heaved with angry defiance, and her bearing was that of a young queen rather than a captive. She was clad in the rather scanty finery of a Norse woman, but she was quite apparently not of their race. With her blond hair and blazing blue eyes, coupled with her snowy skin, she was evidently a Celt; but Cormac knew that she was not one of the softened and Latinized people of southern Britain. Her carriage and manner were as free and barbaric as that of her captors.
"She is the daughter of a chief of the western Britons," said Rognor; "one of a tribe that never bowed the neck to Rome and now, hemmed between the Saxons on one side and the Picts of the other, holds both at bay. A fighting race! I took her from a Saxon galley, whose chief had in turn taken her captive during an inland raid. The moment I laid eyes on her, I knew she was the girl who should bear my sons. I have held her now for some months, having her taught our ways and language. She was a wildcat when we first caught her! I gave her in charge of old Eadna, a very she-bear of a woman-and by the hammer of Thor, the old valkyrie nearly met her match! It took a dozen birchings across old Eadna's knee to tame the spit-fire-"
"Are you done with me, pirate?" flamed the girl suddenly, defiantly, yet with a tearful catch, barely discernible, in her voice. "If so, let me go back to my chamber-for the hag-face of Eadna, ugly as it is, is more pleasant to my sight than your red-bearded swine-face!"
A roar of mirth went up, and Cormac grinned thinly.
"It seems that her spirit is not utterly broken," he commented dryly.
"I would not count her worth a broken twig if it were," answered the sea-king, unabashed. "A woman without mettle is like a scabbard without a sword. You may return to your chamber, my pretty one, and prepare for your nuptials on the morrow. Mayhap you will look on me with more favor after you have borne me three or four stout sons!"
The girl's eyes snapped blue fire, but without a word she turned her back squarely on her master and prepared to leave the hall-when a voice suddenly cut through the din:
"Hold!"
Cormac's eyes narrowed as a grotesque and abhorrent figure came shambling and lurching across the hall. It was a creature with the face of a mature man, but it was no taller than a young boy, and its body was strangely deformed with twisted legs, huge malformed feet and one shoulder much higher than the other. Yet the fellow's breadth and girth were surprising; a stunted, malformed giant he seemed. From a dark, evil face gleamed two great, yellow eyes.
"What is this?" asked the Gael. "I knew you Vikings sailed far, but I never heard that you sailed to the gates of Hell. Yet surely this thing had its birth nowhere else."