And thereafter he said
no more, but lay still until there came up suddenly through the thick
air a thunderstorm from the north; and in that he passed, and with his
passing the rain came.
Thereof Withelm said that surely Odin fetched him, and that at once he
had made prayer for us. But the Welsh folk said that not Odin but the
White Christ had taken the man who had been a father to them, and had
staved off the worst of the famine from them.
Then pined and died my mother Leva, for she passed in her sleep on the
day before we made the mound over her husband, and so we laid them in it
together, and that was well for both, as I think, for so they would have
wished.
So we made a great bale fire over my father's mound, where it stood over
the highest sandhill; and no warrior was ever more wept, for English and
Welsh and Danes were at one in this. We set his weapons with him, and
laid him in the boat that was the best--and a Saxon gave that--and
in it oars and mast and sail, and so covered him therein. And so he
waits for the end of all things that are now, and the beginning of those
better ones that shall be.
That thunderstorm was nothing to the land, for it skirted the shores and
died away to the south, and after it came the heat again; but at least
it brought a little hope. There were fish along the shore that night,
too, if not many; and though they were gone again in the morning, there
was a better store in every house, for men were mindful of Grim's teaching.
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