Chapter 3

_And that, plainly, held little of the respect due to one of royal
blood. For it was then that Thera began to fight. It was then, raging
against the ignominy of her oat-sack position, that she began to twist
and writhe and struggle in the great-thewed arm of her captor. Where she
saw flesh, she clawed at it with her nails. Where she could find a loose
tress of tawny hair, she clutched at it and did her utmost to tear it
from the helmeted skull. Where she could sink her teeth into an
unarmored forearm, she bit at the corded muscles, bit with the ferocity
of a wild animal, forgetting at last that she was the daughter of a
jarl._

_Blödoxe, hip-deep in the cove-water, stopped short at that and swung
her about, shaking her as a terrier shakes a rat. He shook her so that
the woolen tunic fell aside and her white body was half undraped as he
held her at arm’s length, partly in and partly out of the water. Yet he
viewed her indifferently, with a grimness born of many harryings._

_“Kill me,” gasped Thera, her scorn of him overcoming even her fear.
“Kill me as you killed my dog!”_

_“That I will not,” retorted Blödoxe, still studying her face. “We kill
only whom we hate.”_

_“Your hate is all I ask,” cried Thera, storming again against his
strength. Froth even came from her mouth, as from the bitted mouth of a
horse, hard-driven._

_“That you will never get,” contended her captor. And quietly yet firmly
he held her as she still again struggled to free herself from his clasp.
She was both taller of body and more flower-like of face, he decided,
than he had pictured her in his memory._

_“Haakon will kill you for this,” she panted. “And all Hordoland will
keep at your heels, will keep after you until the six seas can no longer
hide you.”_

_“Even so,” averred the grim-eyed Blödoxe, “you are mine, and you are
coming with me.”_

_And with that he caught her closer and resumed his approach to the
galley-side._

_“I will kill myself,” murmured the woman in his arms, speaking so
quietly that the half-smile went again from his lips._

_“You are much too fair for an end so foul,” he said with a heavy effort
at mockery. His face clouded, however, when a moment later he saw her so
passive in his arms. She lay there, unresisting and relaxed, with her
eyes closed and a wistful puckering of the deep-cut lips that made him
think of the mouth of a child, sorely hurt._

_Yet his face was once more hard and his manner was pirate-rough as he
flung her bodily over the weathered gunwale and clambered up after her.
For already, from the cliffs high overhead, came the alarm of many horns
and the echo of angry shouts. The plunderer of untold coasts merely
stopped long enough to wrap the woman in her fallen wet tunic, lift her
to the fore-cabin under the carved prow, and put his own ship’s horn to
his lips to recall his scattered men._

_“They will be after us,” said Graafeld with a curt glance along the
cliff-tops, “before another dog can be drowned.”_

_“Then head for the open sea,” commanded Blödoxe as he signaled for
Gunhild to take the heavy tiller._

_“And once there?” questioned the phlegmatic Graafeld as the rowers came
clambering aboard._

_“Then we will lay her head due west,” said Blödoxe, “and if need be, go
on to Jöklarland. And beyond that, the Danes tell me, there be other
lands, lands of green ice and many islands and strange people who live
at peace with their neighbors.”_

_“And?” prompted Graafeld._

_“It may so fall out that we shall go to that farther land,” said the
quiet-lipped Blödoxe._

_“In flight?” asked the saturnine Gunhild._

_“Jarl Olaf has many ships,” observed Blödoxe. “And men have gone far in
the search of a lost woman.”_

_III_

_The eyes of Thera, once the fairest woman of all Hordoland, remained
clouded and inscrutable as the fleeing “Dragon” traversed her lonely
northern seas. Seldom did the captive of Sigurd Blödoxe speak, as she
sat high and lonely in the galley’s castle, and never once was she seen
to weep. Hour by silent hour she watched the men at the oars; she
watched the bellying square-sail; she watched the plunging green seas on
which the tarnished gilded prow rose and fell and rose and fell until
all life seemed merely a dream of endless rocking on an endless watery
trail that led always toward a slowly setting sun._

_Even when they saw land, at last, misted glens and coves and
precipitous walls of basalt surmounted by straggling snow-fields, to the
north of their course, the queenly woman with the brooding blue eyes
betrayed little interest in that distant country to which they were
taking her._

_But she had her own thoughts on the matter, plainly enough, for, having
studied the wake that lay behind their rudder, the wake that lay between
her and her lost Hordoland, and having gazed at the desolate and rocky
table-land that loomed ever higher on their quarter, she stood for many
moments with her eyes closed and her hand pressed on her heart. Then,
gathering her tunic about her, she crossed slowly to the rail of the
ship, looked up at the sky arching so pallidly above her and flung
herself headlong into the sea._

_Blödoxe, braced at the tiller, saw that unexpected movement and felt
his blood run cold. But he lost little enough time in hesitation.
Flinging off helmet and sword-belt, he plunged in after her. He dove
from the dipping poop-rail and for a moment was lost in a mountain of
green. Over tumbling wave by wave he fought his way to the white body
enmeshed in its floating gold. He came up with her, stroke by powerful
stroke. He caught her and held her head above water, lifting, as he did
so, the strangling wet hair from her face. Then, swimming more easily,
he supported her there in the tumbling green seas until the dusky-lidded
blue eyes opened again._

_“Let me die,” she said with a moan of weariness. “Please let me die!”_

_“Not while I live,” proclaimed the man at her side._

_“Oh, be merciful and let me die,” she repeated, making an effort as
though to push his great sinewed body away from her._

_“Have I wronged you that deep?” he asked, a note of wonder in his
voice. For, as never before, he was conscious of something pitiful in
the pallid face so close to his own._

_“You have wronged me beyond forgiveness,” she told him, turning away as
the galley, doubling about, came bearing down on them._