Chapter 2

_Still again Blödoxe laughed his deep-chested laughter. And there was
pride in his glance as his eye wandered over the stout-timbered galley
with the salt-crusted dragon of gold at its prow._

_“They travel fast who overtake Blödoxe,” he proclaimed. “And having
overtaken him, they are lucky indeed when they live to tell just how
they caught the sea-lion by its tail.”_

_But the laughter, the next moment, went out of his eyes._

_“I want this woman,” he said as he tightened the heavy-buckled belt
about his waist. “Twice, now, my eyes have rested on her, and I
understand well enough why her beauty is a byword up and down this coast
of herring-slitting wenches with little more charm than a she-cod on a
smoking-rack. She may be the daughter of the Jarl of Hordoland and she
may be duly promised to the lily-skinned Haakon. But that does not
figure in the stars as I read them. If I have the wit to take her, and
the power to hold her, she by the rights of our breed belongs to me.”_

_“She herself being willing,” amended the frowning Gunhild._

_That, for a moment, seemed to hold the other._

_“Reason may come in at the door,” he finally retorted, “when freedom
has flown out of the window. And that is not the first of my troubles.
Our duty at the moment is to pluck the fruit while the branch swings
low. So we shall divide into two groups, one to clamber quietly up over
the cliffs and steal down on the cove from the rear, the other to take
the ‘Dragon’ as silently up into the gut, so that we may close in on
this white-skinned band of Thera’s from two sides. And all must be
seemly. In this attack, bear in mind, there must be no raping and
killing. There must be no violence. That man who violates a woman will
be put to the sword.”_

_“And you yourself?” questioned Graafeld with his sober enough
half-smile._

_“I will take Thera,” announced Blödoxe._

_“But any man who violates woman——” began the other with his huge
hands outspread._

_“I will take her,” averred the Viking with the ruminative eyes, “but in
taking her she will be accorded the honor of a queen and the daughter of
a queen.”_

_It was Gunhild who muttered aloud as he clambered down the worn footway
between the rowers’ benches._

_“He abducts his towering queen of beauty,” that swart sea-rover rumbled
in his chest, “but he abducts her, mark you, with all the gentleness of
a sucking lamb!”_

_II_

_It was the wolf-hound stretched at Thera’s feet that lifted an ear,
stirred and then growled deep in his throat. Thera, however, gave
neither thought nor speech to that movement. Her sea-blue eyes, as she
sat indolently combing her hair of gold with a comb of gold more pallid
than the tresses through which it so slowly passed, were abstracted and
unfocused. Yet there was queenliness in her lassitude and an aura of
dignity even in her languor._

_“Down, Fleotan!” she called as the hound rose to his feet, his back
a-bristle._

_She was about to repeat that command when the unformed words died on
her lips. For through the mother-of-pearl mist along the gut-water she
detected, or thought she detected, a movement that was both uncertain
and ambiguous. Her languidly roving eye seemed to make out a gilded
skuta-prow creeping shadow-like about the shadowy promontory at the
cove-mouth. She could not be sure, for a moment, whether the
wide-breasted dragon of gold was indeed an actual sea-boat drifting into
those sheltered waters, or merely a mirage, a foolish image born of her
own foolish brain._

_But that question was all too promptly answered for her. It was not, in
truth, the idle mirage of an idle afternoon. For at the same instant
that Fleotan’s bay echoed deep-noted between the fiord-walls a chorus of
higher-pitched screams burst from the young tire-women bathing and
wading along the sandy beach. There was a sudden flurry of white bodies
from the shallows._

_“Sea-robbers!” cried the youngest of that flying band as they ran,
huddling low, for the shelter of the cliff-rocks. Yet they recoiled
again, even as sharply as they had advanced. For down on them from the
crags above came circling and sliding a dozen swart men, men unknown to
them, evil-eyed men from another country and another coast. And as the
women ran screaming back into the sea-water the gilded skuta grounded on
the cove-sand, within a boat-length of where Thera’s handmaidens stood
with something more than horror in their eyes. And from a garth, high
overhead, geese trumpeted._

_Thera herself did not join in that commotion. She was not a daughter of
swineherds. Her only movement, in fact, was to rise frowningly to her
feet and throw a tunic of woven Finnish wool about her white shoulders.
It was a heavy tunic, colored like a rowan-leaf first touched with
frost, regally lined with swan’s-down and bordered with miniver. And
about it fell her hair of living and liquid gold, gold luminous as a
cat’s eye by night, gold indiscernibly vivid yet soft, with a muffled
radiance all its own, like that of a rose-leaf behind which a candle
burns._

_And thus cloaked, a new dignity came to her queenly figure. But her
face remained clouded as the bronzed and thick-shouldered Blödoxe leaped
waist-deep into the cove-water and with the arrogance of the fearless
began to wade ashore. Under her breath, indeed, she must have spoken
some word to the wolf-hound. For Fleotan, as the Viking came toward her,
sprang straight for the throat of the intruder._

_Blödoxe, in the face of that assault, merely laughed aloud. For the
bronzed and hairy hands that could be so quick in movement met in some
way about the longer-haired neck of the animal. There was a moment’s
struggle as the great fingers clamped closer about the writhing throat
and as the snarling head was thrust and held under the sea-water. Then,
tossing the quieted body disdainfully aside, Blödoxe strode up the
beach-sand to where Thera stood with one hand pressed flat against her
white shoulder-flesh._

_Whatever her secret impulses, she still remained motionless. A
berserk-gang was a berserk-gang, but she was no swineherd’s daughter.
She knew what that advance, what that attack, meant. She knew also the
sun-darkened square face with the tawny hair under the battered rim of
the helmet. Jarl Olaf, her father, had only a year before denied that
lawless scourge of the northern seas both the banquet-hall of his home
and the hand of his daughter who was not for pirates and
coast-plunderers steeped in blood. And now——_

_But Sigurd Blödoxe gave her scant time for thought, just as he wasted
no moment on speech. He merely stooped low and caught her about the
knees, the knees that showed ivory white through the miniver-bordered
tunic. He merely caught her up, swinging her from her feet and flinging
her over his broad shoulder, even as he turned in his tracks and started
back toward the galley._