specting the contrivance slung overhead, told
his men to feign slumber and shift their bodies, saying that it would be
very wholesome for them to change their place.

Now among these were some who despised the orders which the others
obeyed, and lay unmoved, each in the spot where he had chanced to lie
down. Then towards the mirk of night the heavy hanging machine was set
in motion by the doers of the treachery. Loosened from the knots of its
fastening, it fell violently on the ground, and slew those beneath it.
Thereupon those who had the charge of committing the crime brought in
a light, that they might learn clearly what had happened, and saw that
Ebb, on whose especial account they had undertaken the affair, had
wisely been equal to the danger. He straightway set on them and punished
them with death; and also, after losing his men in the mutual slaughter,
he happened to find a vessel, crossed a river full of blocks of ice,
and announced to Gotar the result, not so much of his mission as of his
mishap.

Gotar judged that this affair had been inspired by Siward, and prepared
to avenge his wrongs by arms. Siward, defeated by him in Halland,
retreated into Jutland, the enemy having taken his sister. Here he
conquered the common people of the Sclavs, who ventured to fight without
a leader; and he won as much honour from this victory as he had got
disgrace by his flight. But a little afterwards, the men whom he had
subdued when they were ungeneraled, found a general and defeated Siward
in Funen. Several times he fought them in Jutland, but with ill-success.
The result was that he lost both Skaane and Jutland, and only retained
the middle of his realm without the head, like the fragments of some
body that had been consumed away. His son Jarmerik (Eormunrec), with his
child-sisters, fell into the hands of the enemy; one of these was sold
to the Germans, the other to the Norwegians; for in old time marriages
were matters of purchase. Thus the kingdom of the Danes, which had been
enlarged with such valour, made famous by such ancestral honours, and
enriched by so many conquests, fell, all by the sloth of one man, from
the most illustrious fortune and prosperity into such disgrace that it
paid the tribute which it used to exact. But Siward, too often defeated
and guilty of shameful flights, could not endure, after that glorious
past, to hold the troubled helm of state any longer in this shameful
condition of his land; and, fe