Nils had been for three years a clerk in Syvert Thorolfsson’s warehouse.  While not tall he was neither stunted nor crippled, and easily kept pace with Thorolf.  As he set out the silver-bound horn cups to drink skal[1] with his friend in his own lodging, the croak and sputter of German talk sounded in the street below.

“Behold a new Bergen,” observed Nils whimsically.  “Let us drink to the founding of a new Iceland.  Did you go to Greenland?”

“We touched at Kakortok with letters for the Bishop.  The people are sick and savage with fighting against the Skroelings.”

“Now,” said Nils, rubbing his long nose, “it is odd that you say that, for I was just going to tell you some news.  The King has given Paul Knutson leave to raise a company to fight against the Skroelings in Greenland—­and parts beyond.  He sails in a month.”

“I wish I had known of it.”

“I thought you would say that.  This is between us two and the candle, but Anders Amundson is going, and I am going, and you may go if you will.”

Thorolf’s gray eyes flamed.  “What is Knutson like?”

“Well, they may call him Chevalier, but he has the old Viking way with him.  I said that I had a friend who had long wished to lay his bones in a strange land, and he answered, ’If your friend sails with me I would prefer to have him bring his bones home again.’  He kept a place for you.”

Three weeks later Thorolf, looking backward as the Rotge, (little auk or sea-king) stood out to sea, saw the familiar outline of Snaehatten against the sunrise and wondered when he should see it again.  Like a questing raven his mind returned to the summer spent at the saeter, and recalled that dark saying of the Wind-wife,—­

“In the land of Klooskap shall you be Klooskap’s guest.”

The galley[2] rode the waves with the bold freedom of her kind.  Her keel was carved out of a single great tree.  Her seasoned oaken timbers, overlapping, were riveted together by iron bolts, with the round heads outside.  Where a timber touched a rib, a strip was cut out on each side, forming a block through which a hole was bored.  Another hole was bored in the rib to match and a rope twisted of the inner bark of the linden was put through both holes and knotted.  In surf or heavy sea, this construction gave the craft a supple strength.  Calking was done with woolen cloth steeped in pitch.  The mast, of a chosen trunk of fir, was set upright in a log with ends shaped like a fishtail.  The long oarlike rudder was on the board or side of the ship to the right of the stern, called the starboard or steerboard.  The lading was done on the opposite side, the larboard or ladderboard.  There were ten oars to a side, and a single large triangular sail.

Long and narrow, hardly ten feet above the water-line at her lowest, her curved prow glancing over the waves like the head of a swimming snake, she was no more like the tumbling cargo-ships than a shark is like a porpoise.  When they were two days out, Nils said to Thorolf,