But she shook her head, smiling.

“No, Malcolm, it is foolishness.  What need to put on the gear which seems to make me what I am not?”

“Nothing will make you less than a sea queen, my Gerda,” I said.  “Maybe I might say more than that, but you would think me only flattering.  I would have you wear the arms as surety to your folk at first sight that you are indeed here again.  It may save words, and time.”

So I persuaded her, and she left me to don the war gear for the last time, as she told me.  She would dress herself even as she had been clad for the funeral and as we had found her.

Then the tide turned, and slowly the current from the sea found its way up the fjord and reached us, and we warped out of the narrow berth between the rocks, and manned the oars and set out on the last stage of our voyage.  The mast was lowered and housed by this time, and the ship ready for aught.  Only we did not hang the war boards along the gunwales, and we had no dragon head on the stem, for that Heidrek had not carried at any time.  We had no mind to set all men against the ship at first sight as an enemy who came prepared for battle.

We entered the northern branch of the fjord, and at once the high cliffs rose above us again, for the waterway narrowed until we were in a deep cleft of the mountains.  The water was still as glass in the evening quiet, and as the stars came out overhead, we seemed to be sailing under one deep sky and on another.  But the oar blades broke the water into brighter stars than those which were reflected, and after us stretched a wake of white light between the black cliffs, for the strange sea fires burnt in the broken waters brightly, coming and going as the waves swirled around the ship’s path.

So we went steadily for a long way, and then we came to a place where the rocky walls of the channel nearly met, so that one could have thrown a stone from the deck on either as we passed.  High up on the left cliffside a little light glimmered, for a cottage hung as it were on a shelf of the mountain above us.  The measured beat of the oars sounded hollow here as the sheer cliffs doubled their sounds.  Some man heard it, and a door opened by the little light, like a square patch of brightness on the shadow of the hillside.

Then he hailed us in a great voice which echoed back to us, and one of the pilots answered him cheerily with some homely password, and we saw his form stand black against his door for a moment before he closed it, and he waved his hand to the friend whose voice he knew.  The pilot told me that it was his duty to listen for passing ships thus and hail them.  Beside his hut was piled a beacon ready to light if all was not well, and in the hut hung a great, wooden cattle lure wherewith to alarm the town.  We were close to it now.