So it was, for the Danes fought well.  The sides of the ship were high above the wading men, and the spears flashed out between the war boards, and the axe and sword were at work across the gunwales.  Yet the Irish never fell back from their swarming attack, and their cries never ceased.  One or two wounded men floated, paddling with their hands, down past us, and hurled curses and defiance at us also.  Phelim and Fergus cried to them to forbear, for we were friends, but they did not heed them, and passed, to reach the shore below us as they might.  We did not watch them.

For now the Irish had borne down the defence amidships, where the run of the gunwales was lowest.  The sheer weight of them as they clambered, one over the other, on board, listed the ship over, and made the boarding easier for those who followed.  The wild Danish war shout rose once or twice, and then it was drowned by the Irish yell.  After that there was a sudden silence, for the fighting was over.

Then the victors leapt out of the ship and went ashore as swiftly as they had come, and the forest hid them.  The ship was hard and fast aground now, and we pulled up abreast of her slowly, having no mind to share her fate.  Whether the Irish took any of her crew with them as captives I do not know, but I saw her decks, and it seemed hardly possible.  So terrible a sight were they, that I feared lest Gerda should in any way see it.  But the doors of the cabin had been shut, doubtless lest the fighting should fray the ladies.

“Will you venture farther, King Hakon?” asked the pilot.

“We will take one ship farther,” he said.  “The other shall bide here, and see that this ship is not burnt by these wild folk.  Mayhap we shall want her.”

Thoralf laughed at that.  “We have no men to man her withal,” he said.

“We have men to sail her to Norway, and there wait the men to fight for us,” Hakon answered gaily.  “We shall meet no foes on the high seas, and we have met a queen whose men will hail us as their best friends.”

Thoralf shrugged his shoulders and laughed.  “None can say that you fare forward sadly, Hakon.”

“This is the worse of the two ships,” Bertric said.  “The other is Heidrek’s own.  He is not here.  Asbiorn yonder commanded this.”

“Asbiorn is in luck today,” Earl Osric said, nodding toward those terrible decks.

But Asbiorn stood on the foredeck with his back to that which he had looked on, biting the ends of his long moustache, and pale with rage.  I did not wonder thereat.

Now Osric hailed the other ship and bade her anchor in the stream while we went on.  The pilot said that we could safely do so, and that the next reach was the one of which he had spoken as a trap.  Then his comrade went into the bows with a long pole, sounding, and so we crept past the stranded vessel, and into the most lovely reach of river I had ever seen.  It was well nigh a lake, long and broad,