Wordsworth puts it. Not in entire
forgetfulness had I, little
Darrell Standing, come into the world. But those memories of other
times and places that glimmered up to the surface of my child
consciousness soon failed and faded. In truth, as is the way with
all children, the shades of the prison-house closed about me, and I
remembered my
mighty past no more. Every man born of woman has a
past
mighty as mine. Very few men born of women have been fortunate
enough to suffer years of
solitary and strait-jacketing. That was
my good fortune. I was enabled to remember once again, and to
remember, among other things, the time when I sat astride a horse
and
beheld the lepers healed.
My name was Ragnar Lodbrog. I was in truth a large man. I stood
half a head above the Romans of my
legion. But that was later,
after the time of my journey from Alexandria to Jerusalem, that I
came to command a
legion. It was a
crowded life, that. Books and
books, and years of
writing could not record it all. So I shall
briefen and no more than hint at the
beginnings of it.
Now all is clear and sharp save the very
beginning. I never knew my
mother. I was told that I was
tempest-born, on a beaked ship in the
Northern Sea, of a captured woman, after a sea fight and a sack of a
coastal
stronghold. I never heard the name of my mother. She died
at the
height of the
tempest. She was of the North Danes, so old
Lingaard told me. He told me much that I was too young to remember,
yet little could he tell. A sea fight and a sack, battle and
plunder and torch, a
flightseaward in the long ships to escape
destruction upon the rocks, and a killing
strain and struggle
against the
frosty, foundering seas--who, then, should know aught or
mark a stranger woman in her hour with her feet fast set on the way
of death? Many died. Men marked the living women, not the dead.
Sharp-bitten into my child
imagination are the incidents immediately
after my birth, as told me by old Lingaard. Lingaard, too old to
labour at the sweeps, had been
surgeon, undertaker, and midwife of
the huddled captives in the open midships. So I was delivered in
storm, with the spume of the cresting seas salt upon me.
Not many hours old was I when Tostig Lodbrog first laid eyes on me.
His was the lean ship, and his the seven other lean ships that had
made the foray, fled the rapine, and won through the storm. Tostig
Lodbrog was also called Muspell, meaning "The Burning"; for he was
ever aflame with wrath. Brave he was, and cruel he was, with no
heart of mercy in that great chest of his. Ere the sweat of battle
had dried on him, leaning on his axe, he ate the heart of Ngrun
after the fight at Hasfarth. Because of mad anger he sold his son,
Garulf, into
slavery to the Juts. I remember, under the smoky
rafters of Brunanbuhr, how he used to call for the skull of Guthlaf
for a drinking beaker. Spiced wine he would have from no other cup
than the skull of Guthlaf.
And to him, on the reeling deck after the storm was past, old
Lingaard brought me. I was only hours old, wrapped naked in a salt-
crusted wolfskin. Now it happens, being prematurely born, that I
was very small.
"Ho! ho!--a dwarf!" cried Tostig, lowering a pot of mead half-
drained from his lips to stare at me.
The day was bitter, but they say he swept me naked from the
wolfskin, and by my foot, between thumb and
forefinger, dangled me
to the bite of the wind.
"A roach!" he ho-ho'd. "A shrimp! A sea-louse!" And he made to
squash me between huge
forefinger and thumb, either of which,
Lingaard avers, was thicker than my leg or thigh.
But another whim was upon him.
"The youngling is a-thirst. Let him drink."
And
therewith, head-downward, into the half-pot of mead he thrust
me. And might well have drowned in this drink of men--I who had
never known a mother's breast in the briefness of time I had lived--
had it not been for Lingaard. But when he plucked me forth from the
brew, Tostig Lodbrog struck him down in a rage. We rolled on the
deck, and the great bear hounds, captured in the fight with the
North Danes just past,
sprang upon us.
"Ho! ho!" roared Tostig Lodbrog, as the old man and I and the
wolfskin were mauled and worried by the dogs.
But Lingaard gained his feet, saving me but losing the wolfskin to
the hounds.
Tostig Lodbrog finished the mead and regarded me, while Lingaard
knew better than to beg for mercy where was no mercy.
"Hop o' my thumb," quoth Tostig. "By Odin, the women of the North
Danes are a scurvy breed. They birth dwarfs, not men. Of what use
is this thing? He will never make a man. Listen you, Lingaard,
grow him to be a drink-boy at Brunanbuhr. And have an eye on the
dogs lest they slobber him down by mistake as a meat-crumb from the
table."
I knew no woman. Old Lingaard was midwife and nurse, and for
nursery were reeling decks and the stamp and
trample of men in
battle or storm. How I
survived puling
infancy, God knows. I must
have been born iron in a day of iron, for
survive I did, to give the
lie to Tostig's promise of dwarf-hood. I outgrew all beakers and
tankards, and not for long could he half-drown me in his mead pot.
This last was a favourite feat of his. It was his raw
humour, a
sally esteemed by him
delicious wit.
My first memories are of Tostig Lodbrog's beaked ships and fighting
men, and of the feast hall at Brunanbuhr when our boats lay beached
beside the
frozen fjord. For I was made drink-boy, and
amongst my
earliest recollections are toddling with the wine-filled skull of
Guthlaf to the head of the table where Tostig bellowed to the
rafters. They were madmen, all of
madness, but it seemed the common
way of life to me who knew
naught else. They were men of quick
rages and quick battling. Their thoughts were
ferocious; so was
their eating
ferocious, and their drinking. And I grew like them.
How else could I grow, when I served the drink to the bellowings of
drunkards and to the skalds singing of Hialli, and the bold Hogni,
and of the Niflung's gold, and of Gudrun's
revenge on Atli when she
gave him the hearts of his children and hers to eat while battle
swept the benches, tore down the hangings raped from southern
coasts, and, littered the feasting board with swift corpses.
Oh, I, too, had a rage, well tutored in such school. I was but
eight when I showed my teeth at a drinking between the men of
Brunanbuhr and the Juts who came as friends with the jarl Agard in
his three long ships. I stood at Tostig Lodbrog's shoulder, holding
the skull of Guthlaf that steamed and stank with the hot, spiced
wine. And I waited while Tostig should complete his ravings against
the North Dane men. But still he raved and still I waited, till he
caught
breath of fury to
assail the North Dane woman. Whereat I
remembered my North Dane mother, and saw my rage red in my eyes, and
smote him with the skull of Guthlaf, so that he was wine-drenched,
and wine-blinded, and fire-burnt. And as he reeled unseeing,
smashing his great groping clutches through the air at me, I was in
and short-dirked him
thrice in belly, thigh and buttock, than which
I could reach no higher up the
mighty frame of him.
And the jarl Agard's steel was out, and his Juts joining him as he
shouted:
"A bear cub! A bear cub! By Odin, let the cub fight!"
And there, under that roaring roof of Brunanbuhr, the babbling
drink-boy of the North Danes fought with
mighty Lodbrog. And when,
with one stroke, I was flung, dazed and
breathless, half the length
of that great board, my flying body
mowing down pots and tankards,
Lodbrog cried out command:
"Out with him! Fling him to the hounds!"
But the jarl would have it no, and clapped Lodbrog on the shoulder,
and asked me as a gift of friendship.
And south I went, when the ice passed out of the fjord, in Jarl
Agard's ships. I was made drink-boy and sword-bearer to him, and in
lieu of other name was called Ragnar Lodbrog. Agard's country was
neighbour to the Frisians, and a sad, flat country of fog and fen it
was. I was with him for three years, to his death, always at his
back, whether
hunting swamp wolves or drinking in the great hall
where Elgiva, his young wife, often sat among her women. I was with
Agard in south foray with his ships along what would be now the
coast of France, and there I
learned that still south were warmer
seasons and softer climes and women.
But we brought back Agard wounded to death and slow-dying. And we
burned his body on a great pyre, with Elgiva, in her golden
corselet, beside him singing. And there were household slaves in
golden
collars that burned of a plenty there with her, and nine
female thralls, and eight male slaves of the Angles that were of
gentle birth and battle-captured. And there were live hawks so
burned, and the two hawk-boys with their birds.
But I, the drink-boy, Ragnar Lodbrog, did not burn. I was eleven,
and unafraid, and had never worn woven cloth on my body. And as the
flames
sprang up, and Elgiva sang her death-song, and the thralls
and slaves screeched their unwillingness to die, I tore away my
fastenings, leaped, and gained the fens, the gold
collar of my
slavehood still on my neck,
footing it with the hounds loosed to
tear me down.
In the fens were wild men, masterless men, fled slaves, and outlaws,
who were hunted in sport as the wolves were hunted.
For three years I knew never roof nor fire, and I grew hard as the
frost, and would have
stolen a woman from the Juts but that the
Frisians by mischance, in a two days' hunt, ran me down. By them I
was looted of my gold
collar and traded for two wolf-hounds to Edwy,
of the Saxons, who put an iron
collar on me, and later made of me
and five other slaves a present to Athel of the East Angles. I was
thrall and fighting man, until, lost in an
unlucky raid far to the
east beyond our marches, I was sold among the Huns, and was a
swineherd until I escaped south into the great forests and was taken
in as a
freeman by the Teutons, who were many, but who lived in
small tribes and drifted
southward before the Hun advance.
And up from the south into the great forests came the Romans,
fighting men all, who pressed us back upon the Huns. It was a
crushage of the peoples for lack of room; and we taught the Romans
what fighting was, although in truth we were no less well taught by
them.
But always I remembered the sun of the south-land that I had
glimpsed in the ships of Agard, and it was my fate, caught in this
south drift of the Teutons, to be captured by the Romans and be
brought back to the sea which I had not seen since I was lost away
from the East Angles. I was made a sweep-slave in the galleys, and
it was as a sweep-slave that at last I came to Rome.
All the story is too long of how I became a free-man, a citizen, and
a soldier, and of how, when I was thirty, I journeyed to Alexandria,
and from Alexandria to Jerusalem. Yet what I have told from the
time when I was baptized in the mead-pot of Tostig Lodbrog I have
been compelled to tell in order that you may understand what manner
of man rode in through the Jaffa Gate and drew all eyes upon him.
Well might they look. They were small breeds, lighter-boned and
lighter-thewed, these Romans and Jews, and a blonde like me they had
never gazed upon. All along the narrow streets they gave before me
but stood to stare wide-eyed at this yellow man from the north, or
from God knew where so far as they knew aught of the matter.
Practically all Pilate's troops were auxiliaries, save for a handful
of Romans about the palace and the twenty Romans who rode with me.
Often enough have I found the auxiliaries good soldiers, but never
so
steadily dependable as the Romans. In truth they were better
fighting men the year round than were we men of the North, who
fought in great moods and sulked in great moods. The Roman was
invariably steady and dependable.
There was a woman from the court of Antipas, who was a friend of
Pilate's wife and whom I met at Pilate's the night of my
arrival. I
shall call her Miriam, for Miriam was the name I loved her by. If
it were merely difficult to describe the charm of women, I would
describe Miriam. But how describe
emotion in words? The charm of
woman is wordless. It is different from
perception that culminates
in reason, for it arises in
sensation and culminates in
emotion,
which, be it admitted, is nothing else than super-
sensation.