It is Absalon,
then, who finds the way and, as one would expect, he forces it. The
captains wail over the trap and abuse him for getting them into it.
Absalon, disdaining to answer them, leads his ships in single file
straight for the gap where the Wendish fleet lies waiting, and gets
the King to attack with his horsemen on shore. Between them the
enemy is routed, and the cowards are shamed. But when they come to
make amends, he is as unmoved as ever and will have none of it.
Again, when he is leading his men to the attack on a walled town, a
bridge upon which they crowd breaks, and it is the bishop who saves
his comrades from drowning, swimming ashore with them in full armor.
Resting in his castle at Haffn, the present Copenhagen, which he
built as a defence against the sea-rovers, he hears, while in his
bath, his men talking of strange ships that are sailing into the
Sound, and, hastily throwing on his clothes, gives chase and kills
their crews, for they were pirates whose business was murder, and
they merely got their deserts. In the pursuit his archers "pinned
the hands of the rowers to the oars with their arrows" and crippled
them, so skilful had much practice made them. Turn the leaf of
Saxo's chronicle, and we find him under Ruegen with his fleet,
protecting the now peaceful Wendish fishermen in their autumn
herring-catch, on which their livelihood depended.
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