Then he took up an enormous stone and threw it down into the boat.  It fell into the heap of clothes.  Thorbjorn had not thought that any man could throw so far.  A loud scream was heard, for the stone had struck her thigh and broken it.

Illugi said:  “I wish you had not done that.”

“Do not blame me for it,” said Grettir.  “I fear it has been just too little.  One old woman would not have been too great a price for us two.”

“How will she pay for us?  That will be a small sum for the pair of us.”

Thorbjorn then returned home; no greeting passed between them when he left.  He spoke to the old woman and said:  “It has happened as I expected.  Little credit has the journey to the island brought you.  You have been injured for the rest of your life, and we have no more honour than we had before; we have to endure unatoned one insult after another.”

She answered:  “This is the beginning of their destruction; I say that from this time onwards they will go downwards.  I care not whether I live or not, if I do not have vengeance for the injury they have done me.”

“You seem to be in high spirits, foster-mother,” he said.  Then they arrived home.  The woman lay in bed for nearly a month before her leg was set and she was able to walk again.  Men laughed much over the journey of Thorbjorn and the old woman.  Little luck had come from the meetings with Grettir, first at the peace declaration at the Thing, next when Haering was killed, and now the third time when the woman’s thigh was broken, while nothing had been done on their side.  Thorbjorn Angle suffered much from their talk.

CHAPTER LXXIX

THE SPELL TAKES EFFECT

The autumn passed and but three weeks remained till the winter.  The old woman asked to be driven to the sea-shore.  Thorbjorn asked what she was going to do.

“A small thing only,” she said, “yet maybe the signal of greater things to come.”

They did as she asked them.  When they reached the shore she hobbled on by the sea as if directed to a spot where lay a great stump of a tree as large as a man could bear on his shoulder.  She looked at it and bade them turn it over before her; the other side looked as if it had been burned and smoothed.  She had a small flat surface cut on its smooth side; then she took a knife, cut runes upon it, reddened them with her blood and muttered some spells over it.  After that she walked backwards against the sun round it, and spoke many potent words.  Then she made them push the tree into the sea, and said it should go to Drangey and that Grettir should suffer hurt from it.  Then she went back to Vidvik.  Thorbjorn said he did not know what would come of it.  The woman said he would know more clearly some day.  The wind was towards the land up the fjord, but the woman’s stump drifted against the wind, and not more slowly than would have been expected.