Omer, and repeated the demand to surrender.
"There is no need for it," said Hereward. "We are already that young
prince's guests. He has said that we shall be his friends and brothers. He
has said that he will answer to his grandfather, the great Marquis, whom I
and mine shall be proud to serve. I claim the word of a descendant of
Charlemagne."
"And you shall have it!" cried the boy. "Chatelain! Abbot! these men are
mine. They shall come with me, and lodge in St. Bertin."
"Heaven forefend!" murmured the Abbot.
"They will be safe, at least, within your ramparts," whispered the
Chatelain.
"And they shall tell me about the sea. Have I not told you how I long for
Vikings; how I will have Vikings of my own, and sail the seas with them,
like my Uncle Robert, and go to Spain and fight the Moors, and to
Constantinople and marry the Kaiser's daughter? Come," he cried to
Hereward, "come on shore, and he that touches you or your ship, touches
me!"
"Sir Chatelain and my Lord Abbot," said Hereward, "you see that, Viking
though I be, I am no barbarous heathen, but a French-speaking gentleman,
like yourselves. It had been easy for me, had I not been a man of honor,
to have cast a rope, as my sailors would have had me do, over that young
boy's fair head, and haled him on board, to answer for my life with his
own.
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