aid; "here are the arms in which you
fought well in your first fight, and axe and sword beside. Now you
shall stand with our crew, and so none of them will heed you, for
they love you, and know your ways are not as ours. So will all be
well."

Then I thanked him, for I surely thought it would be so; and I
armed myself, and that man who had been my own shield man when I
led the midship gang helped me. One thing only I wished, and that
was that I had the axe which Lodbrok made for me, for then, I told
the man, I should feel as a Viking again, and that pleased him.

"However," he said, "I think I have found an axe that is as near
like your own as may be."

And he had done so, having had that kindly thought for me. Then we
went out, for the horns were blowing outside the town in the ash
grove where the Ve, as they call the temple of Odin and Thor and
the other gods, was. And overhead, high and unseen in the air,
croaked the ravens, Odin's birds, scared from their resting places
by the tramp of men, yet knowing that their share in the feast was
to come.

I shivered, but the sound of the war horns, and the weight and
clank of the well-known arms, stirred my blood at last, and when we
fell in for our short march, Halfden and Thormod, Rorik and myself
leading our crew, I was ready for all that might come, if need for
a brave heart should be.

Silently we filed through the bare trunks of the ashes, the trees
of Thor, where many a twisted branch and dead trunk showed that the
lightning had been at work, until we came to the place of the Ve in
its clearing.

There stood the sanctuary, a little hut--hardly more--built of
ash-tree logs set endwise on a stone footing, and roofed with logs
of ash, and closed with heavy doors made of iron-bolted ash timber
also. This temple stood under the mightiest ash tree of all, and
there was a clear circle of grass, tree bordered, for a hundred
yards all round it, and all that circle was lined with men, armed
and silent.

Before the temple was a fire-reddened stone, the altar. And on it
were graven runes, and symbols so strange that neither I nor any
man could read them, so old were they, for some men said that stone
and runes alike were older than the worship of Odin himself, having
been an altar to gods that were before him. And a pile of wood was
ready on the altar.

Beside it stood Ingvar, clad in golden shining scale armour, and
with a gilded horned helm and scarlet cloak that hu