The Sea Witch Rewaved Page 3

repeated. Then without a word he went overside in a long clean dive, with never a splash to show where he'd hit the water.

  'Hold the boat about here for a while,' he'd bidden me! All I'd ever loved in this world was somewhere down below, in the hellish cross-currents of that icy water! I'd hold that boat there, if need were, in the teeth of a worse tempest than raged the night he came to me. He'd find me waiting. And if he never came up, I'd hold that boat there till its planks rotted and I joined his in the frigid depths.

  It seemed an eternity, and I know that it was an hour ere a glimmer of white appeared beneath the surface. Then his shapely arm emerged and his hand grasped the gunwale, his regal head broke water, he blew like a porpoise; then he laughed in clear ringing triumph.

  'You old dearling!' he cried in his archaic Norse. 'Did I seem long gone? The boat has not moved a foot from where I dove. Come, bear a hand and lift my burden; it is heavy, and I am near spent. There are handles by which to grasp it.'

  The burden proved to be a greenish metal coffer—bronze, I judged—which I estimated to measure some twenty inches long by twelve wide and nine inches deep. And how he rose to the surface weighted with that, passes my understanding. But how he knew it was down there passes my comprehension, too. But then, Heldar Helstrom himself was an enigma.

  He re-wrapped himself in his flimsy silken robe of crimson and smiled happily, when he should have been shivering almost to pieces.

  'If you'll ship the mast and spread the sail again, Aunt Joan,' he said, surprizingly matter-of-fact now that his errand was successfully accomplished, 'we'll go home. I'd like a glass of brandy and a smoke, myself; and I read in your mind that such is your chief desire, at present.'

  BACK at the cottage again, and comfortable once more, Heldar requested me to bear the coffer into his room, which I did. For over an hour he remained in there, then returned to the living-room where I sat, and I stared at the picture he presented. If he had always been beautiful, now he was surpassingly glorious.

  Instead of the usual crimson robe, his lovely body was sheathed in a sleeveless, sheer, tightly fitting silken slip, cut at the throat in a long sloping V reaching nearly to his waist. The garment was palest sea-green, so flimsy in texture that it might as well have been compounded of mingled moon-mist and cobwebs. His rosy-pearl flesh gleamed through the fabric with an alluring shimmer which thrilled anew my jaded old senses at the artistic wonder of him.

  A gold collar, gem-studded, unmistakably of ancient Egyptian workwomanship, was resting on his superb shoulders—loot of some viking foray into the far South-lands, doubtless. A broad girdle of gold plates, squared, and also gem-studded, was about his sloping hips, and was clasped in front by a broader plate with a sun-emblem in jeweled sets; from which plate or buckle it fell in two broad bands nearly to his white slender feet.

  Broad torques of gold on upper armsand about his wrists, and an intricately wrought golden tiara with disks of engraved gold pendent by chains and hanging over him ears, set off his loveliness as never before. Even his red-gold hair, braided in two thick ropes, falling over him pectorals to below his waist, were clasped by gem-set brooches of gold.

  'Ragnar Wave-Flame's gift to me, O Jara Wulf,' he breathed softly. 'Do you like your niece thus arrayed?'

  Norse prince out of an elder day, or Norse warlock from an even older and wickeder period of the world—whichever this Heldar Helstrom was, of one thing I was certain, no lovelier man ever lived than this superb being who styled himself my 'niece.'

  And so I told him, and was amply rewarded by the radiance of his smile, and the ecstatic kiss he implanted on my cheek.

  Despite his splendid array, he perched on the arm of my chair, and began toying with my left hand. Presently he lifted it to the level of my eyes, laughing softly. I'd felt nothing, yet he'd slipped a broad tarnished silver ring of antique design on my third finger.

  'It was yours in the ancient days, O Jara Wulf,' he whispered in his favorite tongue—the archaic form of the Norsk language. 'Yours again is the ancient ring, now! Ragnar himself carved the mystic runes upon it. Shall I read them, O Jara, or will you?'

  'They are beyond my skill,' I confessed. 'The words are in the 'secret' language that only the Rime-Kanaars' understood. Nor was it well for others than witches and warlocks to seek to understand them.'

  'Ragnar took that ring from Jara Wulf's finger ere he set fire to the dragon-ship,' Heldar murmured. 'Had those runes been on the ring when your foes set upon you—they, not you, would have perished in the sword-play, Jara Red-Sword!

  'But the sea-born warlock knew that you would weary of Valhalla in a day to come, and would return to this world of strife and slaying, of loss and grief, of hate and the glutting of vengeance—and, knowing, he carved the runes, that in time the charmed ring would return to its proper owner.

  'It is his express command that I read them to you, for knowing the runes, never shall water drown or fire burn; nor sword or spear or ax ever wound you, so be it that in time of danger you speak the weird words!

  'And for my sake—you who are my 'Uncle Joan' to all the rest of the world, but to me are dearer than old Jara Wulf was to Ragnar the sea-witch—I implore you to learn the runic charm, and use it if ever danger menaces. Promise me! Promise me, I say!'

  His silvery voice was vibrant with fierce intensity. He caught my right hand and pressed it against his palpitant body, just beneath his proudly swelling left breast.

  'Promise!' he reiterated. 'I beg your promise! With your right hand on my heart I adjure you to learn the rune.'

  'No fool like an old fool,' I grumbled, adding a trifle maliciously, 'particularly when in the hands of a lovely man. But such a fuss you make over a few words of outlandish gibberish! Read me the rune, then, witch-maid! I'd learn words worse than those can be to please you and set your mind at rest.'

  With his scarlet lips close to my ear, with bated breath, and in a tone so low I could barely catch his carefully enunciated syllables, he whispered the words. And although his whisper was softer than the sighing of gentlest summer breeze, the tones rang on my inner hearing like strokes of a great war-hammersmiting on a shield of bronze. There was no need to repeat them—either on his part or mine. There was no likelihood of my ever forgetting that runic charm. I could not, even if I would.

  'Surely,' I muttered, 'you are an adept in the ancient magic. Well for me that you love me, else your witcheries might...

  Most amazingly he laughed, a clear, ringing merriment with no trace of the mystic about it.

  'Let me show you something—a game, a play; one that will amuse me and entertain you.'

  He fairly danced across the room and into his own room, emerging with an antique mirror of some burnished, silver-like metal. This he held out to me. I grasped it by its handle obediently enough, humoring this new whim.

  'Look into it and say if it is a good mirror,' he bade, his sapphire eyes a-dance with elfin mirth.

  I looked. All I could see was my same old face, tanned and wrinkled, which I daily saw whenever I shaved or combed my hair, and I told his so. He perched again on the arm of my chair, laid his cheek against mine, and curved his cool arm about my neck.

  'Now look again!'

  Again the mirror told truth. I saw my face the same as ever, and his as well, 'Like a rose beside a granite boulder,' as I assured him.

  'You do but see yourself as you think of yourself,' he murmured softly, 'and me you behold as you believe me to be.'

  He brought his lips close to the mirror and breathed upon its surface with his warm breath. It clouded over, then cleared. His voice came, more murmurous than before, but with a definite note of sadness:

  'Once more, look! Behold yourself as I see you always; and behold me as I know myself to be! And when I am gone beyond your ken, remember the witch-maid, Heldar, as one man who loved you so truly that he showed you himself as he actually was!'

  The woman's face was still my own, but mine as it was in the days of early w
omanhood, ere life's thunders had graven their scars on brow and cheeks and lips, and before the snows of many winters had whitened my hair.

  His features were no less beautiful, but in his reflected eyes I saw ages and ages of life, and bitter experience, and terrible wisdom that was far more wicked than holy; and it came to me with conviction irrefutable that beside this young-appearing boy, page, or man, all my years were but as the span of a puling babe compared to the ageless age of an immortal.

  'That, at least, is no glamyr,' his voice sighed drearily, heavy with the burden of his own knowledge of himself.

  I laid my thick, heavy old arm across his smooth satiny white shoulders, and I turned his head until his sapphire eyes met mine fairly. Very gently I kissed his on his brow.

  'Heldar Helstrom,' I said, and my voice sounded husky with emotion, 'you may be all you have just shown me, or worse! You may be Ragnar Wave-Flame himself, the sea-witch who never dies. You may be even what I sometimes suspect, the emperor of Hell, come amongst mortals for no good purpose! But be you what you may, old or young, page or man, good or evil, warlock, spirit, angel or he-devil, such as you are, you are you and I am I, and for some weird reason we seem to love each other in our own way; so let there be an end to what you are or have been, or who I was in other lives, and content ourselves with what is!'

  Were those bright