“Be bold!  Our gods are still with us in storm.”

“Yes,” I answered, “and soon we shall be with our gods—­in peace.”

After this I heard no more of him, and fell to thinking with such wits as were left to me of how many perils we had passed since we saw the shores of Thames, and that it seemed sad that all should have been for nothing, since it would have been better to die at the beginning than now at the end, after so much misery.  Then the glare of the lightning shone upon the handle of the sword Wave-Flame, which was still strapped about me, and I remembered the rune written upon it which my mother had rendered to me upon the morning of the fight against the Frenchmen.  How did it run?

     He who lifts Wave-Flame on high
     In love shall live and in battle die. 
     Storm-tossed o’er wide seas shall roam
     And in strange lands shall make his home. 
     Conquering, conquered shall he be
     And far away shall sleep with me.

It fitted well, though of the love I had known little and that most unhappy, and the battle in which I must die was one with water.  Also, I had conquered nothing who myself was conquered by Fate.  In short, the thing could be read two ways, like all prophecies, and only one line of it was true beyond a doubt—­namely, that Wave-Flame and I should sleep together.

Awhile later the lightning shone awesomely, like to the swords of a whole army of destroying angels, so that the sky became alive with fire.  In its light for an instant I saw ahead of us great breakers, and beyond them what looked like a dark mass of land.  Now we were in them, for the first of those hungry, curling waves got a hold of the balsa and tossed it up dizzily, then flung it down into a deep valley of water.  Another came and another, till my senses reeled and went.  I cried to St. Hubert, but he was a land saint and could not help me; so I cried to Another greater than he.

My last vision was of myself riding a huge breaker as though it were a horse.  Then there came a crash and darkness.

Lo! it seemed to me as though one were calling me back from the depths of sleep.  With trouble I opened my eyes only to shut them again because of the glare of the light.  Then after a while I sat up, which gave me pain, for I felt as if I had been beaten all over, and looked once more.  Above me shone the sun in a sky of deepest blue; before me was the sea almost calm, while around were rocks and sand, among which crawled great reptiles that I knew for turtles, as I had seen many of them in our wanderings.  Moreover, kneeling at my side, with the sword that he had taken from the body of Deleroy still strapped about him, was Kari, who bled from some wound and was almost white with encrusted salt, but otherwise seemed unharmed.  I stared at him, unable to open my mouth from amazement, so it was he who spoke the first, saying, in a voice that had a note of triumph in it: