Swain's Burning

By Arthur D. Howden Smith

Swain's Burning by Arthur D. Howden Smith is about the fierce and proud son of Swain Olaf as he rides the high seas. Excerpt: "Tossing waves and a chill wind from the north. The Pentland Firth was a heaving gray floor; the cliffs of Caithness lowered dark in the south, outlined by the white tempest of the rushing surge, torn by the fangs of the black rock reefs that stretched in an interminable barrier, striving, always unsuccessfully, never dismayed, to ward off ocean's assault upon the land."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 4064066429966

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Arthur D. Howden Smith

Swain's Burning

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4064066429966

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A COMPLETE NOVELETTE

By Arthur D. Howden Smith Author of Swain’s Vengeance, Swain’s Stone, etc.

TOSSING waves and a chill wind from the north. The Pentland Firth was a heaving gray floor; the cliffs of Caithness lowered dark in the south, outlined by the white tempest of the rushing surf, torn by the fangs of the black rock-reefs that stretched in an interminable barrier, striving, always unsuccessfully, never dismayed, to ward off ocean’s assault upon the land. Northeast a blurr

on the horizon was Haey, first of the Orkneys. Westward, behind the unseen masses of the Sudreyar[1] and Ireland, the pallid sun was sinking into a monstrous pile of clouds that bellied and whirled before the pressure of the Iceland gale.

Midway of the Firth, steering a precarious course between the hostile impulses of wind and currents, crawled a great dragonship, her red and gold figurehead dipping and plunging as she climbed the short, choppy waves and dropped precipitously into the hollows. She showed only a shred of her big square sail, but her sixty oars rose and fell, rose and fell, with a monotonous, insistent rhythm, which was undisturbed even when the booming combers topped her shallow waist and rolled along her swaying gangway, sloshing ankle-deep among the rowing-benches and spurting in creamy jets from the oar-holes.

Ha-ha! panted the oarsmen. Ha-ha! Hi-heh! Ha-ha! Hi-heh!

And sometimes a few of them would break into a wild, toneless chant, keeping time to the oar-swing. More than once the singers were choked to silence by a torrent of spray that slapped into their faces, dousing mouths and eyes; but while they might be unable to breathe for the space of a stroke, they never missed the feathering, immersion, pull and recovery in unison with their comrades. They shook their shaggy, bearded heads, until the water flew, and bent their broad backs to the drive of the long, supple, bucking sweeps of toughened ash.

The wind howled overhead; the roar of the surf was a distant menace on their starboard quarter; the waves, tricky at best in those narrow seas, heaped and tumbled from every direction. But from one end of the packed waist to the other there was not a single look of concern, not a mutter of fear or complaint. Tall, thick-thewed, wide-shouldered, their clothing tattered and salt-stained, their armor and weapons rusty, they were men who had dared death in every form too frequently to be affected by the ordinary perils of the storm.

On the poop beside the steersmen, who fought with the steering-sweeps to keep the vessel on her course, stood Swain Olaf’s son, and there was a kind of fierce pride in his bleak gaze as he conned Deathbringer homeward. He knew the dragon as a rider knows his horse. He knew his picked crew of viking-farers, most of them Hebrides. men who had sailed with him for three years on forays the length and breadth of England and Ireland and far to the south, in France and Spain. He knew, too, the dangers which lay in wait for them at that moment, with snow flurries offshore, weeks beyond the period usually considered safe for the undecked longships of the Norse seafarers of the Orkney group. But