‘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 headlong as the ship rolled, but was quickly on his feet again, and beat his breast and stretched his arms towards the sky and cried in a different voice, but in words which 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 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 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 could, out of his wisdom, 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 skilful 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 Cordova, 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 rumours 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 Cordova’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 towards 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.
On each of the three ships, the men now began hotly to discuss all this, and it put them in the best of spirits. They said that the stranger might not bring much luck to himself, to judge by what happened to him, but that he might bring all the more to them; and Toke thought that he had never hooked a better fish. They treated the Jew as a friend, and collected a few clothes for him to wear, and gave him ale to drink, though they had not much left. The country to which he wished to guide them was called Leon, and they knew roughly where it lay; on their right hand between the land of the Franks and that of the Cordovan Caliph; perhaps five days good sailing southwards from the Breton cape, which they could now see. They sacrificed again to the sea-people, were rewarded with a good wind, and sailed on into the open sea.
How Krok’s men came to Ramiro’s kingdom, and how they paid a rewarding visit
When Orm was old, and spoke of the adventures that had befallen him, he used to say that he had had little to complain of during the time that he was in Krok’s