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When he spoke he pushed each word at Bjarni with a bobbing of his head.
    “Your goat-god, your dirty-handed farmer-god, did he save you from the beating last night? Can he save you from death?”
    “Every man comes to die,” Bjarni said. “It is the price of life. There is no choice in it, save to meet it well.”
    “That is the weakness in the old way, do you not see? If there is no choice, a man is worthless, the slave of Fate. Christ has freed us from that.”
    “Free. You have no claim on that word. You Christians are ever telling folk how to act.”
    “A man can sin,” Sigurd said.
    “You leave me unconvinced.”
    “Because you will not bend your mind,” Sigurd said. He tossed the picked bone under the table. “We shall argue again—I enjoy this. In time you will agree. Now take leave of me, I must talk to these other men.”
    He rose from the High Seat and walked off along the table, his hand stretched out to a small troop of newcomers. Bjarni turned slowly away from the table.
    Sigurd’s men were coming in and out of the hall. Some stood idly talking by the door, and some were drinking. Bjarni had seen no one here do any work, except the servants. The belts of the men were stuffed with knives and swords and hatchets. On their arms they wore heavy bracelets of gold, and there were gold rings in their ears and on their fingers. Bjarni was a misfit here, poorer than the servants. His gaze caught on a man sitting on the bench by the fire.
    It was Lyr, the burly man with the feathers in his beard, who had started the fight. Bjarni went around the hearth to him.
    “Get up,” he said.
    The feathered man raised his startled face. He looked to right and left; there was room on the bench.
    “Get up,” Bjarni said again.
    Reluctantly the burly man stood. He watched uncertainly as Bjarni took his place on the bench. After a moment he slunk away down the hall.
     
    * * *
     
    TWO MORE LONGSHIPS rowed into the cove between then and nightfall. In the crowded anchorage, Bjarni took the ship’s small boat again and again around Swan, directing his brothers inside the ship to move the ballast here and there, so that Swan rode better in the water.
    “When shall we sail?” Andres said.
    He sat in the stern of the boat; Bjarni and Jon were rowing back to the beach.
    “Do you have someplace to go?” Bjarni asked.
    “Anywhere but here,” Andres said, intensely. “This is a wicked place.”
    “He’s right,” Jon said, behind Bjarni at the bow oars. “Let’s go back to Iceland. These people are sinners.”
    Bjarni trailed his oars to turn the boat. The little waves lifted her sideways up onto the gravelly beach. “I have been beaten worse in Iceland. Hop out.”
    His half brothers sprang out of the boat, and he waited for another wave to carry him higher on the shore and got out onto the land. They dragged the boat out of the surf. Jon walked on his left, Andres on his right, and they flung arguments at him, none convincing. They were both a head shorter than he was. Their fair faces, broad and stub-nosed, reminded him of Hoskuld. He let them argue and said nothing.
    They went into the little booth where Swan’s crew slept. The men from the two new longships were staying there as well and the place was crowded. Ulf sat on the wooden bench where he slept; he smiled, and in his hands held a piece of fine linen.
    “What is that?” Jon said.
    Ulf held it out to him. “Smell of it.”
    Bjarni took a bucket out the door and filled it from the rainbarrel under the eave. When he came in again, Jon was holding the linen at arm’s length. It was a piece of a woman’s underclothing, the top piece. Jon threw it down.
    “You will get us all in trouble,” Andres hissed, and glanced around them at the other men scattered through the dark room.
    Bjarni set the bucket on the bench, stripped off his shirt, and washed himself. Ulf was grinning. He took the linen in his hands and sniffed it and laid it against his