Winter's Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  “Still,” the King said thoughtfully, as Sune had finished his tale, “the Lord did not, to my mind, try His hand sufficiently on the conditions of man. Why did he stay only with carpenters and fishermen? Once He was down here, He might have tried the circumstances of a great lord, yes, of a king. He cannot be said to have full knowledge of the earth as long as He has not ridden a horse. Is it possible that He may have, at the time, forgotten, that He had himself created the horse, the deer, iron, sweet music, silk?”

  As they had ridden on, the wood had become lower and sparer round them; the oaks and maples were succeeded by thin, wind-crooked birch trees. Here and there in the glades the heather grew, and in the end the road became but a sandy path. The rain had ceased. They came to the end of the wood and cantered over grassland with a few scattered and gnarled thorn trees. Two ravens, walking sedately on the short grass, flew up in front of the horsemen. Before them lay a row of irregular low downs; they rode up on them, and came in view of the open sea.

  The King reined up his horse and looked out. The full, salt, moist breath of the sea met his face and embraced him. It was saturated with the rank smell of sea-thong; he drew it in deeply, and wondered why he had not come here for such a long time. For a few minutes he thought of nothing but the sea.

  The day was dim, but the world was filled, like a glass bell, with vague, blurred light, and with the incessant, songful murmur of the sea: a powerful, low rushing from the depths far out—strangely unreal in the still day, but a strong wind had been blowing for three or four days before—a sweet prattle near by, where the waves ran up on the stones and the gravel. It was these sounds that the King had heard in his dream. All round the horizon the sea and the sky played together, unsteadily and beguilingly. Towards the west the sea was lead-coloured, darker than the sky; to the east it was lighter than the air itself, nacreous, like a luminous mirror. But to the north the sea and the sky joined without the faintest line of division, and became but the universe, unfathomable space. Far out, the light of the sun stole through the amorphous, blind clouds, and where it caught the sea, the surface of it glimmered like silver, as if innumerable shoals of fish were playing on the water. Half way out to the horizon a flight, a wedge of wild swans drew a white line, like a pearly breaker of the air, across the pale field of view.

  One of the King’s men was to point out the hut of the thrall to him, but the hut was small and similar in colour to the seashore. He only caught sight of it by the thin column of blue smoke rising from its conical roof. Outside it, Granze’s short, broad, dark boat lay, and as they rode down the dunes they saw the owner of it all, Granze himself, in the water to his knees, wading ashore, and dragging a weight, a heavy catch of fish, after him. When he saw the horsemen coming towards him, the old thrall stopped and shaded his eyes with his hand to gaze at them, then again occupied himself with his catch. He had trussed up his goatskin frock to the waist, and the young men could not help laughing at the sight of him, so little human was his crooked, dark nakedness. He waded on land, shaggy and flat-footed, snorted like a water-dog and placed on the sand the big fish he trailed; then he let down his frock to his ankles. He stood dead still and waited for his visitors. As they came close to him, Sune’s horse gamboled and came up in front of the King’s horse. Granze did not look at the King, but laid his hand on Sune’s foot.

  “Is it you who have come here, Sune, kinsman of Absalon?” he said. “I thought that you were dead.” “Nay, not dead yet, by the grace of God,” said Sune smiling, and quieted his horse. Granze looked at him. “You came near to it, though, seven full moons ago,” he said. “Yes, that is so,” said Sune gravely. Granze stood a moment silent; then he chuckled. “A woman cooked a nice dish for you,” he tittered, “and put ratsbane in it. Did she take you for a rat, little Sune? If the rats would go into the holes that God made for them, people would not poison them.” Sune had grown pale. He sat on his horse without a word.

  The King drove his horse on to his old thrall. The gold in his frock, his sword-hilt and saddle-cloth glinted. “Do you not know me, Granze, Gnemer’s son?” he asked the thrall. “Aye, I know you, Prince Erik,” the Wend said solemnly, “although you are paler than you were last time. I knew you already when you were on the top of the down.” He looked the King full in the face a long time. “Hail,” he cried, “you are welcome, my master, when you honour your father’s good, faithful thrall by coming to him. Come, drink with Granze. You will have the same good brew as you had here the other day, or better. And I have caught a big fish early this morning. I shall fry it for you. I am smoking fish in my house, but I will make you a fire out on the stones. You sit down and eat with Granze once more.”

  He dived into his hut, and came out with a full black goatskin on his shoulder. “Call off your dog, my master,” he cried, as the bitch followed him and sniffed at his legs, and he changed feet quickly, as if he was treading water. “She is fine, very strong. Surely she helps you well to catch the deer. But the dogs of great people never like the thralls.” He lifted the black, greasy skin to the King’s mouth, where he sat on his horse. “Drink,” he said. The King had forgotten the brew, which he had long ago tasted in the Wend’s hut. Now the flavour at once brought back many pictures of Granze jabbering and dancing under its effect. It burnt his tongue and sent a sweet satisfaction through his veins. Granze held the jar up to Sune, then set the spout to his own mouth, lay back his head and emptied the skin. “Now we are friends,” he said. “Now what we dream and scheme may differ, but the water that we make will be the same.”

  Now the King had meant to question Granze on the future, but he no longer found that it was needed. It seemed to him that he and Granze were akin, more than any other two men in the land—the thrall, who had been taken away from his home and had never seen any of his own people, and the King, who found no equal anywhere around him. Lonelier than the others they were, but wiser as well; the secret powers of the world recognized them and yielded obedience to them.

  “You are a mighty man here, Granze,” he said, “and have the world to yourself as far out as you can see. You are as good a saint in a way as the old hermits who withdrew to the desert, as the man who stood on the column to worship God. Only it is not the Lord God whom you serve, but your own old, black, wooden pictures inside your hut, which I remember well.”

  “No, no,” said Granze quickly, and looked to Sune for support. “Granze has been watered, Granze has been instructed and has forgotten nothing. I know of her who gave birth, and still kept her maidenhead, like your glass windows that the sun goes through and does not break. Also of the man who was swallowed and again vomited up by the fish. Look!” he cried and solemnly crossed himself. Sune said in Latin: “Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar amongst wheat, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.”

  Sune leaped from his horse, and held the stirrup to the King. The King’s men also dismounted, and led the horses off. The King’s valet spread a cloak over a stone for him to sit on.

  Granze brought out fire in a basin, charcoal and a long spit. He sat on his heels upon the sand and made the fire with care and skill, the while, on and off, watching his guests through the smoke. He held up a suck of black, hard and sticky peat, and said: “This was a tree growing in the soil before there was a hen in the land to lay an egg.” “It is a long time ago,” said the King, “and I do not remember the tree.” “Nay, I should not remember it either, if I were you,” said Granze. “But with us Wends it is a different thing. What has happened to our father’s father, and to those old men, who were mould when he was suckled by his mother, we still keep in our mind; we recall it whenever we want. You, too, have the lusts and the fears of your fathers in your blood, but their knowledge you have not; they did not understand how to put that in when they were begetting a child. That is why each of you has to begin anew, from the beginning, like a new-born mouse fumbling in the dark.

  “In those old days,” he recounted, “many things had life which ar
e now lifeless. The mossy, rotten old logs in the forest and the swamps could talk. I myself have not heard it, but I have heard one of them snore in its sleep as I passed it on the narrow path at night. The big stones at the bottom of the sea came on land upon full-moon nights, shining wet, hung with sea-thong and mussels; they ran a race, and copulated, on the shore.

  “Men had to fell the trees of big woods to make themselves ploughland. Hey, that was sour work. My two hands here did not do the work, and still they are knotted with it; should not my mind keep the knots as well? The tree-fellers made themselves a low cover to sleep in by the root of a tall fir tree, and they were very tired; they grew as small as wood-mice by their little fire by night. Then the storm came, seated itself in the top of the fir and sang: ‘Snow-fields, stone-fields, wasteland, grey walking waves. Very wide is the world, without end is it!’ The song ran down the fir stem and wailed: ‘Full-fed am I with flight, sated with distance, weary, weary am I with wandering. When will my course be ended?’ And all of a sudden the storm itself came sliding down, pushed its head into the hut, and roared: ‘Ho ho! You little men! You rats, you lice, I might blow you out over the big cold ocean. Where would you be then?’—and whiffed smoke and ashes into their faces, and was gone.”

  The King sat with his chin in his hand and looked out over the water. He had laid by his cap, his long chestnut hair fell over his gold neck-chain. The seashore stretched out to both sides of him, bone-white, strewn with shells. Here nothing grew; here the earth had given up living or breeding; everything was nobly barren and waste. It was the end, and the beginning, of the world. He thought of the ships which, through centuries, had sailed from the coasts of Denmark. They had hoisted strong sails, and spears and swords had glinted aboard. From there King Canute had sailed to England, and Valdemar to Estonia; Bishop Absalon had launched his boats to chastise the Wendish pirates. These fairways led to great battles and conquests. The triumphs over men and nations were high pursuits. Still they were over and done with. The Kings, his fathers, were dead and even forgotten, and there was more than a war-song in the whispering of the waves: an endless course, infinity itself. Paradise, which Sune had spoken of, perhaps began where the sea and the sky met in front of him.

  Granze’s face blushed brick-red from the drink. He said to the King: “Now I shall tell you why I was afraid to speak to you when I first saw you. As you came over the downs you had a shining ring round your head, such as your holy pictures have. Where did you get that?”

  The fire was now burning bright. Granze rose from it, and dragged along the big fish. He stuck his thick fingers through the gill-openings, and lifted it up before him. It was almost the length of his own stumpy body. “A fish for a great lord,” he said, “for those who wear a shining ring round their heads. It has swum a long way to meet you.” He took up a knife and wiped it on his frock. Laying the fish on the sand, he cut it up and plunged his hands into it to draw out the entrails.

  Sune said to the King: “Look, my lord. The Wend has indeed not forgotten the ways of his fathers. Just like that, I believe, did the priests of Swantewit go through their human sacrifices. He is happy now. It is a strange thing,” he added, “about happy human beings, and the matters which make them so. Food may do it, and blood, the sight of their children. Dancing, in women, may do it, too.”

  On this open seashore Sune’s voice was not as gently modulated as it had been in the King’s room. It had in it a quivering, eager note, like the breaking voice of a boy. Granze, made bold by his own brew, grinned back at him.

  Suddenly the thrall stopped in his activity and stood still; his face grew dull and blank. He drew out his red right hand, held it up and stared at it. He spat on it, wiped it on his frock, and again stared.

  “Ho!” he cried, his voice as deep as a bull’s with surprise. “The fish carries a gift in his belly. He has brought a ring for you through the deep sea. Has not Granze, then, caught you the right fish?” He again spat on his fingers and rubbed them carefully on his goatskin frock.

  Sune ran and took the ring from the thrall; he bent one knee to the King and handed it to him. “All hail, King of Denmark,” he cried. “The elements themselves swear allegiance to you. They bring forth their treasures, as they did to King Polycrates.”

  The King drew off his embroidered glove, and let Sune set the ring on his finger. “I have unlearned the wisdom of our school days,” he said. “How goes the story of King Polycrates?”

  “Polycrates,” Sune said, “was King of Samos, and was known for his good fortune. When he proposed an alliance to King Amadis of Egypt, this King, alarmed by his prosperity, made it a condition that Polycrates should checker it by relinquishing some treasure. So Polycrates threw into the sea a seal, the finest of his jewels. But the next day he received in a present a large fish, and in its belly the ring was found. When Amadis had news of this, he declined all alliance with King Polycrates.”

  “And what happened to King Polycrates?” the King asked.

  “Some time after,” Sune continued, “Polycrates visited Orontes, the Governor of Magnesia. His daughter, warned by a dream, begged him not to go, but he did not listen to her.” “And what then?” asked the King. Sune said: “At Magnesia King Polycrates was put to death.”

  “But I,” said the King, after a moment, “have not complied to sacrifice to the fates, to checker my luck.” “No,” said Sune, smiling, “your ring is a free gift from the fates; they pay obedience to you on their own accord. Yours will be a different tale to write down in books.” “Then tell me,” said the King, “by the comradeship of your childhood, what significance do you give to it?” “My Lord,” said Sune, now grave, “I know this: that events attain significance from the state of mind of the men to whom they happen, and no outward event is the same to two men. You are my King and my Sovereign, but you are not my penitent. And I do not know your mind.”

  The King sat for a little while in silence. “When Granze found the ring, and cried out to me,” he said, “I had my thoughts with King Canute of Denmark. You never forget a tale, Sune. You will remember how the sea did not obey King Canute, when he ordained her.” “Yes, I know the tale, my lord,” said Sune. “King Canute himself called forth the incident, to put his flatterers and eye servants to shame, and he was never a greater King than at that hour.” “Nay,” said the King. “But if the sea had obeyed him? If it had obeyed him, Sune?”

  There was a long silence.

  He held up his hand. “The stone in the ring,” he said, “is blue, like the sea.” He stretched out his hand to Sune to see.

  Sune lifted up the King’s fingers respectfully, but stood for such a long time dead still, gazing at them, that the King asked him: “What are you looking at?” Sune released the King’s hand, and let his own hand fall. “As God lives, my lord,” he said in a low, clear voice, “this is such a strange thing that I hardly dare speak to you of it. When last I saw a ring like this, it sat on the hand of my kinswoman, the wife of your Lord High Constable Stig Andersen.” “Upon her hand?” the King said. “Yes,” said Sune, “in very truth, upon her right hand.” “What is her name?” the King asked him. “Ingeborg,” answered Sune.

  “How can that be?” the King asked. “No, my lord, I know not,” said Sune. “I was staying with her husband at Møllerup, in the country of Mols, just lately, a week ago, as I came from France. We sailed together in a boat out to a small island, Hielm, not far from the coast, which belongs to her husband. It was a clear, sunny day, the sea was blue, and the Lady Ingeborg let her hand trail in the water. Her fingers were slim and smooth; the ring was too large for them, and I told her to be careful, lest she should lose it in the sea, for, I said, she would not get another like it.” The King looked at the ring and smiled. “So Granze’s fish,” he said, “has come across the sea from our country of Mols.”

  After a while he said: “I have heard much of the beauty of your kinswoman, but I have never seen her for myself. Is she indeed so fair?” “Yes, she is i
ndeed very fair,” said Sune.

  Before the eyes of the King’s mind rose the picture of the boat in blue water and a gay breeze, with the young black priest in it, and the fair lady, in silk and gold, her white fingers playing in the ripples, and underneath them the big fish swimming in the dark-blue shadow of the keel. “Why did you tell your kinswoman that she would not get another ring like this one?” he asked Sune. Sune laughed. “My lord,” he said, “I have known my kinswoman since she was a child. I have taught her to play chess, and the lute, and we have jested together many times. I said to her, in jest, that she must take good care of her ring, for she would not get another blue stone which was so like her own eyes.” The King said: “It is gracious and courteous in the Lady Ingeborg to send me her ring by the fish. I shall wear it until I can give it back to her.”

  “It is a curious thing,” he added after a moment, “when fair women wear jewels, these mate themselves with some part of their face or body. Pearls seem to be only another expression of the fairness of their neck and breasts, rubies and garnets of their lips, finger-tips and nipples. And this blue stone, you tell me, is like the lady’s eyes.”

  Granze had gone back to his fire, but from there he had watched the talk, and kept his eyes on the one face or the other. He cried out to the King: “Now the fish has swum, and has been caught, now it is fried and ready to serve. It remains but for you to eat it; your meal is here for you.”

  King Erik of Denmark, surnamed dipping, was murdered in the barn of Finnerup, in the year of 1286, by a party of rebellious vassals. According to the tradition and the old ballads, the murderers were headed by the King’s Lord High Constable, Stig Andersen Hvide, who killed King Erik in revenge, because he had seduced his wife, Ingeborg.

  PETER AND

  ROSA