Martin Lightfoot heard this news with joy.
“I have no more to do here,” said he. “I have searched and asked far and wide for the man I want, and he is not on the Irish shores. Some say he is gone to the Orkneys, some to Denmark. Never mind; I shall find him before I die.”
“To put this through his brain.” And he showed his axe.
“Look you, lord. A man owes his father naught, and his mother all. At least so hold I. ‘Man that is of woman born,’ say all the world; and they say right. Now, if any man hang up that mother by hands and feet, and flog her to death, is not he that is of that mother born bound to revenge her upon any man, and all the more if that man had first his wicked will of that poor mother? Considering that last, lord, I do not know but what I am bound to avenge my mother’s shame upon the man, even if he had never killed her. No, lord, you need not try to talk this out of my head. It has been there nigh twenty years; and I say it over to myself every night before I sleep, lest I should forget the one thing which I must do before I die. Find him I will, and find him I shall, if there be justice in heaven above.”
So Hereward asked Ranald for ships, and got at once two good vessels as payment for his doughty deeds.
One he christened the _Garpike_, from her narrow build and long beak, and the other the _Otter_, because, he said, whatever she grappled she would never let go till she heard the bones crack. They were excellent, new “snekrs,” nearly eighty feet long each; with double banks for twelve oars a side in the waist, which was open, save a fighting gangway along the sides; with high poop and forecastle decks; and with one large sail apiece, embroidered by Sigtryg’s Princess and the other ladies with a huge white bear, which Hereward had chosen as his ensign.
As for men, there were fifty fellows as desperate as Hereward himself, to take service with him for that or any other quest. So they ballasted their ships with great pebbles, stowed under the thwarts, to be used as ammunition in case of boarding; and over them the barrels of ale and pork and meal, well covered with tarpaulins. They stowed in the cabins, fore and aft, their weapons,--swords, spears, axes, bows, chests of arrow-heads, leather bags of bowstrings, mail-shirts, and helmets, and fine clothes for holidays and fighting days. They hung their shields, after the old fashion, out-board along the gunwale, and a right gay show they made; and so rowed out of Waterford harbor amid the tears of the ladies and the cheers of the men.