The Wanderers Necklace | Page 4

there are sometimes gaps between them. To take
one example among several-- the journey of Olaf (in those days my
name was Olaf, or Michael after I was baptised) from the North to
Constantinople is not recorded. The curtain drops at Aar in Jutland and
rises again in Byzantium. Only those events which were of the most
importance seem to have burned themselves into my subconscious
memory; many minor details have vanished, or, at least, I cannot find
them. This, however, does not appear to me to be a matter for regret. If
every episode of a full and eventful life were painted in, the canvas
would be overloaded and the eye that studied it bewildered.
I do not think that I have anything more to say. My tale must speak for
itself. So I will but add that I hold it unnecessary to set out the exact

method by which I have been able to dig it and others from the quarry
of my past. It is a gift which, although small at first, I have been able
gradually to develop. Therefore, as I wish to hide my present identity, I
will only sign myself
The Editor.

THE WANDERER'S NECKLACE

BOOK I
AAR
CHAPTER I
THE BETROTHAL OF OLAF
Of my childhood in this Olaf life I can regain but little. There come to
me, however, recollections of a house, surrounded by a moat, situated
in a great plain near to seas or inland lakes, on which plain stood
mounds that I connected with the dead. What the dead were I did not
quite understand, but I gathered that they were people who, having
once walked about and been awake, now laid themselves down in a bed
of earth and slept. I remember looking at a big mound which was said
to cover a chief known as "The Wanderer," whom Freydisa, the wise
woman, my nurse, told me had lived hundreds or thousands of years
before, and thinking that so much earth over him must make him very
hot at nights.
I remember also that the hall called Aar was a long house roofed with
sods, on which grew grass and sometimes little white flowers, and that
inside of it cows were tied up. We lived in a place beyond, that was
separated off from the cows by balks of rough timber. I used to watch
them being milked through a crack between two of the balks where a
knot had fallen out, leaving a convenient eyehole about the height of a

walking-stick from the floor.
One day my elder and only brother, Ragnar, who had very red hair,
came and pulled me away from this eyehole because he wanted to look
through it himself at a cow that always kicked the girl who milked it. I
howled, and Steinar, my foster-brother, who had light-coloured hair
and blue eyes, and was much bigger and stronger than I, came to my
help, because we always loved each other. He fought Ragnar and made
his nose bleed, after which my mother, the Lady Thora, who was very
beautiful, boxed his ears. Then we all cried, and my father, Thorvald, a
tall man, rather loosely made, who had come in from hunting, for he
carried the skin of some animal of which the blood had run down on to
his leggings, scolded us and told my mother to keep us quiet as he was
tired and wanted to eat.
That is the only scene which returns to me of my infancy.
The next of which a vision has come to me is one of a somewhat
similar house to our own in Aar, upon an island called Lesso, where we
were all visiting a chief of the name of Athalbrand. He was a fierce-
looking man with a great forked beard, from which he was called
Athalbrand Fork-beard. One of his nostrils was larger than the other,
and he had a droop in his left eye, both of which peculiarities came to
him from some wound or wounds that he had received in war. In those
days everybody was at war with everybody else, and it was quite
uncommon for anyone to live until his hair turned grey.
The reason of our visit to this chief Athalbrand was that my elder
brother, Ragnar, might be betrothed to his only surviving child, Iduna,
all of whose brothers had been killed in some battle. I can see Iduna
now as she was when she first appeared before us. We were sitting at
table, and she entered through a door at the top of the hall. She was
clothed in a blue robe, her long fair hair, whereof she had an abundance,
was arranged in two plaits which hung almost to her knees, and about