“No such purpose had I,” the Jotun said with a touch of surliness. Pulling a bag from under his belt, he shook out of it upon the floor a mane of matted yellow hair. “If you want to know my errand, it is to bring you this. Yesterday it came to my ears that one of my men was suspected of having tried to give you poison through your wife’s British thrall. I got them before me and questioned them, and the Scar-Cheek boasted of having done it. This is his hair. If you remember anything about the fellow, you understand that he was not alive when I took it from him.”
The King looked immovably at the yellow mass. “You have behaved in a chieftain-like way and I thank you for it,” he said. “But I would have liked it better if you had come to me about the judgment that raised this wall between us—”
Rothgar’s throat gave out a savage sound. “Tempt me not! I am no sluggish wolf.”
But Canute spoke on: “What I expected that day was that you would come to me, as friend comes to friend, and with my loose property I would redeem from you every stick and stone which my kingship had forced me to hold back. Not more than they have called me coward, have men ever called me stingy—”
“And when have men called me greedy?” the Jotun bellowed. “Your thoughts have got a bad habit of lying about me if they say that it was greed for land which made me take your judgment angrily. Except for the honor of my stock, what want I with land while I have a ship to bear me? I tell you, now as heretofore, that it was your treachery which unsheathed a sword between us.”
“Rothgar my brother,—” the veil was rent from the King’s face and he had stepped from the dais and seized the other by the shoulders as though he would wrestle bodily with him,—“by the Holy Ring, I swear that I have never betrayed you! If you grudge not the land to the Englishman, you have no cause to grudge him anything under Ymer’s skull. Can a man change his blood?—for so much a part of me is my friendship for you. Time never was when it was not there, and it would be as possible to fill my veins with Thames water as to put an Englishman into your place. Can you not understand—”
But Rothgar’s hand had fallen upon the other’s breast and pushed him backward so that he was forced to catch at the chair-arm to save himself from falling. “Never get afraid about that,” he sneered. “Since we slept in one cradle, I have been a thick-headed Thrym and your Loke’s wit has fooled me into doing your bidding and fighting your battles and giving you my toil and my limbs and my faith, but wisdom has grown in me at last. You undertake too steep a climb when you try to make me believe in your love while before my eyes you give to the man I hate my lands and the woman you had promised me and my place above your men—” His rage choked him so that he was obliged to break off and stand drawing his sword from his sheath and slamming it back with a sharp sound. His voice came back in a hoarse roar. “When I reckon up the debt against you, I know that the only thing to wipe it out would be your life. Not taken by poison nor underhandedly, but torn out of your deceitful body as we stand face to face. If I could do that, it might be that my anger would be quenched.” Again he drew his blade half out,—and this time he did not shove it back. His huge body seemed to draw itself together, crouching, as he leaned forward. “Why do you stand there looking as though you thought you were Odin? Do you think to blunt my weapon with your eyes? Why do you tempt me?”