bid you to be brave, for who of our Northern race is not? That's our one heritage: the courage of a bull. Yet it seems to me that there are other sorts of courage which we lack: to tread the dark ways of death with eyes fixed on things gentler and better than we know. Pray to our gods, Steinar, since they are the best we have to pray to, though dark and bloody in their ways; pray that we may meet again, where priests and swords are not and women work no ruin, where we may love as we once loved in childhood and there is no more sin. Fare you well, my brother Steinar, yet not for ever, for sure I am that here we did not begin and here we shall not end. Oh! Steinar, Steinar, who could have dreamed that this would be the last of all our happy fellowship?"
When I had spoken such words as these to him, I flung my arms about him, and we embraced each other. Then that picture fades.
It was the hour of sacrifice. The victim lay bound upon the stone in the presence of the statue of the god, but outside of the doors of the little temple, that all who were gathered there might see the offering.
The ceremonies were ended. Leif, the head priest, in his robe of office, had prayed and drunk the cup before the god, dedicating to him the blood that was about to fall, and narrating in a chant the crimes for which it was offered up and all the tale of woe that these had brought about. Then, in the midst of an utter silence, he drew the sacrificial sword and held it to the lips of Odin that the god might breathe upon it and make it holy.
It would seem that the god did breathe; at least,
