With that cometh out the carle again, bearing a little
keg and a mazer roughly wrought; and he came to Birdalone,
and sat down, and bade her sit by him, and said to
her: Maybe I shall hear more of thy sweet voice
when thy sweet lips have been in the cup. Therewith
he poured forth into the mazer, and handed it to Birdalone,
and lo! it was clear and good mead. She sipped
thereof daintily, and, to say sooth, was well-pleased
therewith, and it stirred the heart in her. But
then she gave back the cup to the elder, and would
no more of it. As for him, he drank what was
left in the cup, looking over the rim thereof meanwhile;
and then filled himself another, and another, and
yet more. But whereas it might have been looked
for that his tongue should be loosened by the good
mead into foolishness and gibbering, he became rather
few-spoken, and more courteous and stately even than
he had been at the first. But in the end, forsooth,
he was forgetting Birdalone, what she was, and he
fell a-talking, always with much pomp and state, as
if to barons and earls, and great ladies; till suddenly
his head fell back, he turned over on his face, and
all wit was gone from him.
At first, then, Birdalone was afraid that he was dead,
or nigh unto death, and she knelt down and raised
his head, and fetched water and cast it over his face.
But when she saw that he was breathing not so ill,
and that the colour was little changed in his lips
and cheeks, she knew that it was but the might of
the mead that had overcome him. Wherefore she
laid him so that he was easy, and then stood up and
looked about her, and saw the children playing together
a little way off; and nought else anigh her, save
the birds in the brake, or flying on their errands
eagerly from place to place. Then, as it were,
without her will being told them, her limbs and her
feet turned her about to the shore where lay the Sending
Boat, and she went speedily but quietly thitherward,
her heart beating quick, for fear lest something should
yet stay her, and her eyes glancing from brake to
bush, as if she looked to see some enemy, old or new,
come out thence.
So now her will was clear enough to her feet, and
they brought her down to the water-side and the long
strand, past which the wide water lay windless and
gleaming in the hot afternoon. Then lightly she
stepped aboard, and awoke the Sending Boat with blood-offering,
and it obeyed her, and sped swiftly on the way to
the southward.
CHAPTER X. BIRDALONE COMES TO THE ISLE OF THE QUEENS
Birdalone awoke the next morning while the boat was
yet speeding over the water, and the sun was up:
but she was hard on the land, which sat low and green,
like a meadow exceeding fair, on the bosom of the
water, and many goodly trees were sprinkled about the
greenland. But from amidst the trees, no great
way from the water’s edge, rose a great house,
white and fair, as if it were new-builded, and all
glorious with pinnacles, and tabernacles set with imagery.
