mber
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
flight seaward 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