“Ho! ho!” roared Tostig Lodbrog, as the old man and I and the wolfskin were mauled and worried by the dogs.

But Lingaard gained his feet, saving me but losing the wolfskin to the hounds.

Tostig Lodbrog finished the mead and regarded me, while Lingaard knew better than to beg for mercy where was no mercy.

“Hop o’ my thumb,” quoth Tostig.  “By Odin, the women of the North Danes are a scurvy breed.  They birth dwarfs, not men.  Of what use is this thing?  He will never make a man.  Listen you, Lingaard, grow him to be a drink-boy at Brunanbuhr.  And have an eye on the dogs lest they slobber him down by mistake as a meat-crumb from the table.”

I knew no woman.  Old Lingaard was midwife and nurse, and for nursery were reeling decks and the stamp and trample of men in battle or storm.  How I survived puling infancy, God knows.  I must have been born iron in a day of iron, for survive I did, to give the lie to Tostig’s promise of dwarf-hood.  I outgrew all beakers and tankards, and not for long could he half-drown me in his mead pot.  This last was a favourite feat of his.  It was his raw humour, a sally esteemed by him delicious wit.

My first memories are of Tostig Lodbrog’s beaked ships and fighting men, and of the feast hall at Brunanbuhr when our boats lay beached beside the frozen fjord.  For I was made drink-boy, and amongst my earliest recollections are toddling with the wine-filled skull of Guthlaf to the head of the table where Tostig bellowed to the rafters.  They were madmen, all of madness, but it seemed the common way of life to me who knew naught else.  They were men of quick rages and quick battling.  Their thoughts were ferocious; so was their eating ferocious, and their drinking.  And I grew like them.  How else could I grow, when I served the drink to the bellowings of drunkards and to the skalds singing of Hialli, and the bold Hogni, and of the Niflung’s gold, and of Gudrun’s revenge on Atli when she gave him the hearts of his children and hers to eat while battle swept the benches, tore down the hangings raped from southern coasts, and, littered the feasting board with swift corpses.

Oh, I, too, had a rage, well tutored in such school.  I was but eight when I showed my teeth at a drinking between the men of Brunanbuhr and the Juts who came as friends with the jarl Agard in his three long ships.  I stood at Tostig Lodbrog’s shoulder, holding the skull of Guthlaf that steamed and stank with the hot, spiced wine.  And I waited while Tostig should complete his ravings against the North Dane men.  But still he raved and still I waited, till he caught breath of fury to assail the North Dane woman.  Whereat I remembered my North Dane mother, and saw my rage red in my eyes, and smote him with the skull of Guthlaf, so that he was wine-drenched, and wine-blinded, and fire-burnt.  And as he reeled unseeing, smashing his great groping clutches through the air at me, I was in and short-dirked him thrice in belly, thigh and buttock, than which I could reach no higher up the mighty frame of him.