“Thor will not listen to any but a warrior,” I said.  “Come home, brother, for mother waits us.”

“If not Thor, who is maybe busy at the battle they talk of, then do I think that All Father will listen,” he said stoutly.  “But this was all that I had to make sacrifice withal, and it may not be enough.”

“The jarl will make amends when he comes back,” I said, wishing to get home and away from this place, and yet unwilling to chide the child.  “Now let us go, for mother will grow anxious.”

With that he put his hand in mine, and we both saluted Thor, as was fitting, and then went homeward.  It seemed to me that the glare in the north was fiercer now than when I had first seen it.

Now, after my mother had put Withelm to bed, I told her how I had found him; and thereat she wept a little, as I could see in the firelight.

After a long silence she said, “Strange things and good come into the mind of a child, and one may learn what his fate shall be in the days to come.  I am sure from this that Withelm will be a priest.”

Now as one may buy the place of a godar, with the right to have a temple of the Asir for a district and the authority that goes therewith, if so be that one falls vacant or is to be given up by the holder, this did not seem unlikely, seeing how rich we were fast growing.  And indeed my mother’s saying came to pass hereafter, though not at all in the way of which we both thought.

There was no alarm that night.  The old warriors watched round the town and along the northern tracks, but saw nothing, and in the morning the black smoke hung over the place of the burning, drifting slowly seaward.  The wind had changed, and they said that it would doubtless have taken the foe away with it, as my father had hoped.  So I went down to the ship with Raven, and worked at the few things that were still left to be done to her as she lay in her long shed on the slips, ready to take the water at any tide.  She was only waiting for cargo and stores to be put on board her with the shift of wind that had come at last, and I thought that my father would see to these things as soon as he came back.

Now in the evening we had news from the Jarl, and strange enough it was.  My father came back two days afterwards and told us all, and so I may as well make a short story of it.  The ways of Gunnar Kirkeban had been his end, for a certain Viking chief, a Norseman, had wintered in Wales during the past winter, and there he had heard from the Welsh of the wrongs that they had suffered at his hands.  Also he had heard of the great booty of Welsh gold that Gunnar had taken thence in the last summer; and so, when these Welsh asked that he would bide with them and help fight the next Danes who came, he had offered to do more than that —–­he would lead them to Gunnar’s place if they would find men to man three ships that he had taken, and would be content to share the booty with them.