Authors: Frans G. Bengtsson
Toke said that, for his part, he did not know whether he had great good luck, except that his luck in fishing had always been good. He had always done well enough against men whom he had quarreled with; but that might be the result of his strength and skill rather than of his luck.
“But what worries me,” he said, “is whether on this expedition we shall have gold-luck and woman-luck; for I have heard great tales of all the fine things that are to be found here in the west, and it is beginning to seem a long time since I felt a gold ring or a woman. Even if we only find silver instead of gold, and no princesses, such as Berse has spoken of, but simple Frankish house-wives, I shall not complain; for I am not a fussy man.”
Krok said that Toke would have to be patient for a little longer, however strong his desire for either commodity; and Toke agreed that it certainly seemed likely that he would have to wait for a while; for it did not look as though either gold or women grew on trees in these parts.
They sailed along flat coasts, where nothing was to be seen except sand and marshlands and an occasional fishing-hut. Then they passed promontories on which tall crosses stood, and knew that they had come to the Christians' land, and to the Frankish coasts. For the wise men among them knew that these crosses had first been set up by the great Emperor Charles, the father of all emperors, to keep Nordic seafarers away from his land; but the gods of the north had proved stronger than his. They put into creeks to take refuge from threatening squalls and to rest overnight, and saw waters more salt and green than any they had seen before, rising and falling with the ebb and the flood tides. There were no ships to be seen, and no people; only here and there the traces of some old building. Many villages had flourished in these parts before the first Northmen came, but everything had long since been plundered and laid waste, so that nowadays men had to travel far to the south before they could find any prizes worth the taking.
They came down to where the sea narrowed between England and the mainland; and there was talk among them of turning toward the English coast. For they knew that King Edgar had recently died and that he had been succeeded by sons who were not yet of age, which had made the land much sought after by the Vikings. But Krok and Berse and others among the wisest of them held that the country of the Franks was still the best, if one went far enough south; for the King of Frankland and the Emperor of Germany were at war with each other on a point of dispute concerning their frontiers, and the coastal regions of countries at war always provided good hunting-grounds for Northmen.
So they continued down the Frankish coast; but here they lay farther out to sea and kept a sharp lookout on every quarter, for they had now come to that region which certain Northmen had won from the King of the Franks. Here ancient crosses were constantly to be seen on promontories and at river mouths, but even more frequent were pikes with bearded heads set on them, to signify that the rulers of that land had no desire to welcome seamen from their own northern climes upon their coasts. Krok and his men thought that this showed scant hospitality on the part of the men who were now enjoying the fruits of the land; but, they said, it was only what was to be expected of men from Skania and Sjælland; and they asked Orm whether he had any kinsmen in these parts. Orm replied that he had none, as far as he knew, since his kinsmen always sailed to Ireland; but that he would bear in mind, when he got home, this idea of putting heads on poles, for they would make fine scarecrows to protect his sheep. They all laughed at this and thought that he was well able to speak up for himself.
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.”
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.