The Frost Giant's Daughter

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The clangor of sword and ax had died away; the shout­ing of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The bleak, pale sun that glittered so blindlingly from the ice fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of sflver from rent corselet and broken blade where the dead lay as they had fallen. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads, drawn back in their death throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in a last invocation to Ymir the frost giant, god of a warrior race.

Across the reddened drifts and the mail-clad forms, two figures glared at each other. In all that utter desolation, they alone moved- The frosty sky was over them, the white illimitable plain around them, the dead men at their feet.

Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a dead world. In the brooding silence, they stood face to face. Both were tall men, built as powerfully as tigers. Their shields were gone, their corselets battered and dented. Blood dried on their mail; their swords were stained red. Their horned helmets showed the marks of fierce strokes. One was beardless and black-maned; the locks and beard of the other were as red as the blood on the sunlit snow.

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