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dried vegetables, all the supplies and equipment needed for a long voyage were
laid in. As of late the tone at the keep had become more somber as the reality
of leaving took the last feelings of childhood from many of the teen-aged
Norsemen.
In their homes, the night before the sailing, wass sail was sung and farewells
made and gifts given. The parents knew that some of those sailing would never
return, but like all parents they hoped and prayed to their gods that their
own sons would be among those who sailed back to the fjord with the stories
and spoils of the voyage.
The time had come.
In the morning they would sail.
That night Casca. made his farewell to the auburn-haired girl and gave her a
large enough dowry to wed a baron if she wished, or to make her independent,
if that was what she wanted.
Glam, though, was something else.
The old warrior sat in his cups, despondent because he was being left behind.
Casca took him by the arm and ran the others out of the hall with the words
that they would need their sleep. Alone with Glam, he said:
"Glam, old friend, listen to me. We have gone on a long road together, but the
time is here for us to part, not because I wish it, but because that is the
way of it. I need you here to keep things safe for me until I return. It may
be years or even decades before I come back, so it is for you to see that I am
not forgotten. Sometime in the future I may need the Hold again, and it is for
you to see that my coming back will be welcome. You are my Keeper of the Hold,
and when you go to Valhalla, before you go, you must be careful to select one
who will honor your charge and keep faith with me. Though I be gone a century
or more, he, and each Keeper of the Hold in his turn, must swear to honor my
claim and wait for me to return, as I will one day."
Glam raised his red-rimmed eyes to his lord and friend. Snuffling, he said, "I
know that what you say is true. I know that I am too old for the sailing you
are going on. But my heart goes with you. You have never told me why you are
what you are, and I am not even sure of exactly what that is, but you have
been friend and brother to me for over forty years, and now with my age I feel
more to you as a father would even though you are much older than I. So, my
son of the ages, I will keep your Hold in your name and will see that all who
follow me do likewise. Someday you may need this place, and it will be here
for you. The only request I have is that you take my son Olaf with you."
Raising a horn of honeyed mead, the old barbarian cried out with a voice that
rang through the hold:
"Wassail! And farewell, my friend!"
There was one final moment for Casca.
In the early hours before the sailing he sat alone beside the fire he and Lida
had shared so often. ..... . without her the Hold was an empty shell.
Thirty-one years he had lived here with her.
Casca drank deep from a flagon of honeyed mead, his thoughts flowing through
his mind. The fire crackled and sparks leaped forth to die untended on the
stones.
The road has been long and will, I fear, be much longer yet. But I could not
stay here. Everywhere are things that remind me of Lida. Perhaps some-where
out there on the sea I will be released either from my life or my memories.
Memories.
They crowd In on me at times. He stared into the flickering fire, made drowsy
by the flames, and just before sleep overtook him he set the flagon of mead
down on the warm stones. The face of the yellow sage, Shiu Lao Tze, was
appearing in the red coals just before his eyes closed. Casca slept.
In his sleep dreams and niemories rushed into his brain one after another,
appearing and then quickly vanishing to make way for others. At the beginning
there was the Jew on the Cross whom he, Casca Rufio Longinus, had struck with
the spear.. . and the Jew had condemned him to live until they met again. That
life flickered through his brain like the flames in the fire he had just
watched. . the slave years in Greece where he had lived in the mines like a
blind mole for over fifty years. . . the Roman arena and the giant Nubian
Jubala. . . the detailed scene came back to him of how he had killed the black
with his bare hands using the art taught him by the yellow sage from the land
of Khitai beyond the Indus River. Casca's own thoughts appeared in his dream:
Shiu Lao Tze always tried to teach me more than I could understand of his
beliefs and philosophy. He always said that life is a circle that goes on and
on, endlessly repeating itself All that was will be. Perhaps so. It makes as
much sense as anything else I have heard.... When he had killed Jubala he had
won the wooden sword from the hands of Gaius Nero himself. It had made him a
freeman, for a short time. Then a slave again, ship after ship as a galley
slave. . . . Then more years. And Neta, the first woman he had loved. How he
had to leave her when he saw the worry in her eyes as her hair turned gray and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]