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have been kinder to have done the job cleanly. It took her long to die.
    Meanwhile, Jorunn bided her time. For so long she had submitted herself to her husband—out of love, or duty, who could say? But the savaging of her child changed that.
    All evening Thorvald kept his post by the door, haranguing us in wild, incoherent sentences. Terrified himself, he was terrifying to us. We kept our eyes averted—I especially, for I felt that his were constantly on me. Instead we busied ourselves with changing the compresses of moss every little while, and bathing Gudrun’s cold face and hands.
    Mercifully, she never woke up.
    I must have sunk at last into an exhausted sleep, for I was struggling in a violent dream when I opened my eyes suddenly and sat bolt upright. Hours had passed. The room was silent and dark as pitch except for the flicker of a lamp flame above my head. Behind the flame hovered my mother’s face, pale as a ghastly moon in the black sky, her unbound hair streaming loose over her shoulders.
    Not saying a word, she took my sword down from its peg on the wall and put it in my hands, leaning so close that her damp hair brushed my face. Still half in my dream, I rose and followed her outside. There I found Gunnar standing with two of the thralls, armed with spears, and four horses. A night wind had risen. It whipped his hair against his face.
    â€œI told her to wake you, brother. Even now she wasn’t going to make you disobey him. Did I do right?”
    â€œWhere is he?”
    â€œOut there,” he pointed with his chin, contemptuously, toward the mountain, “wandering and talking to himself. Mother leads us now.”
    I felt sick to my stomach. “May the gods help him, Gunnar.”
    â€œMay the gods fling him down the bloody crater and have done! Are you coming or not?”
    I eased my sword a little from its scabbard and tested its edge with my thumb. Its name was ‘Neck-Biter’. It was an old weapon, heavy and plain-hilted, that had belonged to several men before it came to me. Others, no doubt, had killed with it. I, at the old age of sixteen, had never drawn it in anger. Time to change that.
    I swung into the saddle and kicked my horse hard. Gunnar led us at a dead gallop into the dusk. The rest of that night and all the next day we followed the river, stopping only once along the way to beg some curds and milk from a farmwife for our breakfast. Late in the afternoon, we reached the coast, and turning northwards, rode up along the black sand beach toward the mouth of the Whitewater.
    Before we’d gone half the distance we found them. A big finback whale had beached itself and Hrut’s two sons were there with a couple of their hired men and some packhorses to cut it up for meat.
    Brand, the eldest, who was standing spraddle-legged on the whale’s back, saw us first and shouted a warning to the other three. They spun around to face us. Plainly they hadn’t expected us to come after them or they wouldn’t have been so few and so far from home. How they must despise us, I thought.
    We dismounted and started towards them, Gunnar striding ahead, loose-limbed and balancing his crescent-bladed axe in his hand—easy as could be, although I knew he had never fought a man to the death before.
    When we were close enough to see the ragged scar on Mord’s cheek, Gunnar asked mockingly if he might have another chance at that eye. “‘Second time perfect’ as they say.”
    â€œWhat for?” said Mord, edging sideways. “We’re quits, Hjalti-godi said so.”
    â€œQuits, you dog-shit,
You
say that?”
    â€œGet back to your mountain, you sons-of-trolls, you haven’t any business with proper men.”
    â€œFight me!”
    But fighting wasn’t to Mord’s taste. “Bork!” he shouted. At his command, the broad-shouldered fellow standing beside him ran forward and swung at Gunnar with his billhook. Gunnar