Maija was by the edge of the marsh. Ducks flitted in and out of the reeds. Uncle Teppo had said their part of the swamp was the part furthest east, the one that clung onto the mountain. But the sedge was not ready to harvest; the green shoots barely broke water. Seven rack wagons of sedge equaled one cow and one sheep surviving winter, that’s what Uncle Teppo had said. They hadn’t harvested sedge before. Paavo believed that once they took the barley, the grass from their field ought to be enough to feed Mirkka and the goats through winter. “If we can avoid the wet …” he’d said.
A crane stepped broad-legged in between tufts, head pecking in a large arc. Beyond the bird the water was black. Apparently Eriksson had said he’d like to see if they could harvest further out in the wet areas. She wondered how far out they reaped sedge now.
She leaned down and scratched her leg. An insect bite that she couldn’t stop itching. A branch snapped behind her. Gustav’s face tightened as he saw her. He sat down not far from her and unlaced his shoes. His lips were moving as if he were talking with no sound.
His feet. Red stumps, scarred and torn.
Maija looked away. When she looked back, Gustav was already on his way out into the marsh, stepping like the crane, legs lifting high. He headed for some planks of wood. He pulled at them and put them in between tufts, making what could have been a path.
So Gustav had been a soldier. So many of them had lost limbs to the frost in similar ways. There had been winters so cold, birds fell dead to the ground, frozen in midflight.
A brisk voice said, “This marsh used to be a lake.”
She swirled around.
The newcomer was clean shaven and his gray hair short. There were deep wrinkles on his forehead and by the sides of his mouth. What might have been a smile turned his face into a different kind of frown. He was tall and straight. His eyes were streaked red. He’s been drinking, she thought. Although sun on water could burn eyes like that too.
“Nils Lagerhielm,” he said.
“Maija,” she said, and curtsied before she could stop herself.
The skin on his hand was soft, not used to hard work. But then, he’d told her as much already. He had a nobleman’s last name.
“The peasants called her Little Lake,” the nobleman continued. “She wasn’t strong enough. The forest seized her and she became swamp. A part of her turned bottomless. The moss keeps growing upward, feeding off itself. It is impossible to say from the surface where there is firm ground and where there isn’t. The planks are put out so nobody goes past them and drowns.”
Nils was watching Gustav, upper lip curled. “Sometimes the spring floods move them. I came to inspect them before people came to harvest, but it seems Gustav has already tasked himself with correcting the matter.”
“There isn’t much to harvest,” Maija said. She was still annoyed with herself for having curtsied.
He turned toward her. “It’s been a cold summer. Where is your husband?”
“He’s at the homestead.”
“I will go and introduce myself to him. I understand it was your daughters who found Eriksson.”
She lifted her head.
“I need to talk to your husband about that,” he said.
Paavo sat on a wooden bench by the barn and sharpened the scythes. He wielded the stone against the edge with long, slow strokes, and the blade sang. Through the laundry on the clothesline Maija glimpsed Frederika trying to shift a boulder with an iron rod.
Paavo rose.
Nils nodded to him. “My name is Nils Lagerhielm,” he said.
Her husband stroked his shirted chest with his hand and mumbled something, impossible to tell what. Nils looked at Maija as if to tell her she could leave now. When she didn’t, his lips narrowed, but he turned back to Paavo.
“I heard your daughters found the body of Eriksson,” he said.
Her husband nodded.
“I came to see they are well.”
“They’re doing better,” Paavo said.
Maija looked for Frederika. Are you, she thought, doing better? The stone was large, and her daughter leaned her weight on the rod. Careful, Maija thought. You put that kind of pressure on, and something will have to give. As if she had heard her, her daughter released the rod and inserted it from another angle.
Nils cleared his throat. “I was wondering if there was … was there anything strange about it?”
“He was dead,” Maija said. “That was rather strange.”
Both men frowned.
“There wasn’t anything that appeared … mystic?” Nils asked.
“Mystic?” Paavo repeated.
“It’s not the first time there has been trouble on the mountain.”
Trouble again. But for some reason Maija was certain that Nils would tell them what had happened.
“What do you mean?” Paavo asked.
When Nils spoke again, he’d lowered his voice. “Two children have gone missing on the mountain,” he said. “One, ten years ago. She was going to pick lingonberries and didn’t return. The second, five or six years ago, during the harvest. It’s not strange in itself. We are in the wilderness. But the siblings of both children raved of having seen things in the forest. And then last year a whole family disappeared overnight, the Janssons. One day they were here, the next day they weren’t.”
“People don’t just disappear,” Maija said.
“Precisely,” Nils replied.
Paavo blinked.
“Before they were Christianized, Lapps from far away used to travel to this mountain to see the shaman here. It was said he had uncommon powers. I am an educated man, but out there, on this mountain is … something. And that something isn’t good.”
Sunlight twinkled in the crowns of the spruce trees. A fly landed on Maija’s arm, and she brushed it away.
“Back home we had the village,” her husband said, and she knew he was looking at her.
“A village,” the nobleman said.
He said it slowly.
“We were safe,” Paavo said.
“Perhaps we do need to come together,” the nobleman said. “If we lived in a village, we’d have each other to rely on. Just as long as we didn’t bring the trouble with us in our midst.”
The nobleman creased his forehead and nodded to himself. He’s thinking of someone in particular, Maija thought. Someone he doesn’t want to live close to.
“Let’s think about this,” Nils said. “I’ll talk to the others about it too.”
He nodded curtly and left.
Frederika was by her side. Maija didn’t know how long she had been there. Her daughter waited one breath to see if she would be told anything more, then sauntered off.
Paavo juggled the sharpening stone in his hand a couple of times.
“Don’t tell me,” Maija said.
“We shouldn’t have come here,” he said.
“Paavo …”
“Things in the forest? I don’t like it.”
Oh Paavo, she thought. She put her hand on his sleeve. “The other day she—the widow—asked me to look at Eriksson’s body …”
The muscles in his arm tensed. He stared at her, his nose wrinkled, mouth open.
“Together with the priest,” she added.
“You looked at the body?”
“Yes.”
“But why would you do such a thing, Maija? Why?”
“It wasn’t bear or wolf that killed Eriksson.”
“That’s not what he suggested either.” He indicated with his head the direction of Nils’s leaving.
“I can assure you that Eriksson was not killed by sorcery or by evil either,” Maija continued. “He was killed by a man, by flesh and blood.”
Her husband shook his head. “Leave this,” he warned. It sounded like a growl.
“Paavo, listen to me. People like Nils don’t care about people like us. For some reason he wanted to tell us about Blackåsen’s past. And he said that some people oughtn’t to be welcome in any villag
e, if it was to be built. Could you hear that? Don’t you see what that ought to remind us of?”
“I know exactly what this reminds me of. Leave it. Think of your children.”
Maija laughed, but it didn’t come out like one.
“As if that were the reason,” she said, before she could stop herself.
There was a pause, then, “What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
“No, say it. For once, say it out loud.” Her husband’s voice rose. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re thinking?”
“Paavo.”
But she spoke too late. He was walking away.
The ground in the glade was yellow. Autumn had begun to blanket the top of Blackåsen Mountain without letting anybody else know. The sun was out, small and white, like one in winter. Maija stood over the brown patches left by Eriksson’s body. Death worn down and forgotten. Nature not impressed. She squatted and pulled her fingers through the grass, felt the spongy ground beneath.
The watching eyes of a village. Villages were good things, but not if built on the wrong grounds. Those eyes could fast turn from watching what was outside to inside, and then there was no saying where they might take things.
We must find out what happened before this gets out of hand, she thought. Never again will our family stand by while fear spreads.
She glanced at Jutta. They were done talking about it. Many people had something like that in their past. A grief, a time when they had fallen short. But Jutta didn’t meet her gaze.
Maija got down on her knees. Inch by inch she crawled the glade, studied the ground, fingers prodding. Nothing out of the ordinary. No trace of the strange herbs either. The sun leaned on her shoulders. Her knees ached. She sat back on her heels. Who brings a rapier to the forest? Someone who always carries it or someone who, this time, has brought it with a purpose.
She looked around. The glade wasn’t close to anything in particular; it was on the way. On the way from the valley to the river or the other way around. Passing from one side of the mountain to the other.
She got to her feet. So: Eriksson had been lying with his head south and his feet north. He hadn’t defended himself. The man who killed him—for the length of that wound would have had to be done by a man—must have been standing … she took two long steps. Somewhere here, she thought. In the middle of the glade—same blue above him, same sun. Her eyes followed the tree trunks all the way to the sky. They waved and waved as if it didn’t concern them.
She turned around. Whoever killed Eriksson might have come from this direction. She walked into the forest and in a loop around the glade: passed the trail down to the river, then the one leading to the valley through the pass. There was a whirl of birdsong coming from the glade, bells and trills. Bluethroat. Maija stretched her neck to see. She stilled. Right here there was a scarcity of branches on the low larch beside her. One step forward and she had a view over the whole glade. Underneath the lowest branches something gleamed blue. She bent down. A piece of blue glass, with color, like the windows in church, its edges round. Now they told her. The larch said, yes, there had been an infringement. The crowns of the pine trees whispered that the view from there was almost as good as their own. Yes, someone had stood here.
Someone might have stood here just before, during, or after the kill.
Henrik’s derelict yard lay empty. A damp cough came from inside the house. Leaning against the porch railing, beside a shovel and an old meat grinder, its rusty crank pointing straight up to the sky, there was a broken fishing rod. Maija followed the trail in the grass toward the river.
A blond head moved among the reeds. As she came closer, she saw Henrik and the knife in his hand. He shot forward, stabbed into the water, scooped the knife up, and swung it.
The pike slapped to the ground in front of her, flailing, soil sullying its green fins, its large mouth with the underbite snapping. Maija grabbed a rock and struck the fish on its head. It shook and stilled. She rose, threw the rock away.
He waded toward her, his hand raised: “Sorry.”
He squatted by the fish, laid it on its back on the grass, and gutted it with one slit of his knife. He threw the guts into the water. Then he leaned back on his heels, one hand covering his eyes against the sun. “What brings you here?”
“Someone called Nils came to see us.”
Henrik stroked the sides of his knife against the grass. He stood up, walked to the water, and washed the inside of the fish with his fingers. A glimpse of sallow red.
“He’s a nobleman?” she asked.
Henrik nodded. He rose, the fish hanging from one hand, his fingers in its gills.
“They are settlers?”
Henrik nodded again.
“I am surprised,” she said. “Nobles are no settlers.”
Henrik chuckled. “That family can fend for themselves,” he said. “I’ll tell you a story. When Kristina and Nils first arrived here, one of the merchants saw his chance. He sold them rat meat, called it pheasant. Someone told on him, and it’s said that when this same merchant arrived back to the coast after a long journey and unpacked, he found his cases full of the vermin. Under the cover of night someone had replaced all his furs with dead rats.”
That would have done it, she thought. Nils was certain never to have been bothered again.
“I went back to see where Eriksson was killed,” she said. “I found this.”
She took out the piece of glass from her dress pocket. In her hand it looked dull.
He took the piece from her. “In the glade?”
“At its edge.”
“Where?”
“Underneath some bushes. South, toward the pass.”
He turned it around in his hand, then handed it back to her and shook his head. He began to walk and she followed him.
“It wasn’t wolf that killed Eriksson,” she said to his back.
“No,” he agreed.
“Then why did Gustav say it was?” she asked, meaning, Why did you?
“Henrik?” A woman’s voice, calling from the yard. “Henrik?”
Henrik lengthened his steps.
There was a thin woman in a long white dress on the porch. “I told you not to go far. The children are out, and I am all alone.” She began to cough and supported herself with her hand against the doorframe. Then she noticed Maija.
“And who are you?”
The air in the cottage smelled of wood fire and fever.
“We don’t get many visitors.” The woman had introduced herself as Lisbet. She had long dark hair and blue eyes framed by bowed eyebrows. Her skin was pale and fine over her bones. Maija removed her own arms from the table where she had crossed them, freckled and rough-skinned.
“I forget my manners.” Lisbet put her hands on the table to rise.
“Don’t,” Maija said, as Henrik stepped forward to wrap his arm around the waist of the woman. Lisbet coughed and coughed until her thin frame hung as a coating on Henrik’s. When he lowered her, the skin around her mouth looked green.
“Have you been sick for long?” Maija asked.
“A long time. Poor Henrik. He takes such good care of me.”
Henrik took the pike and put it in a bucket of water. He didn’t look at his wife.
It was hard to see the two of them together. There was nothing unexpected about finding a man like Henrik on Blackåsen, but Maija could imagine Lisbet younger, dancing in a frilly dress, chatting. She must have been beautiful, and at some point Henrik must have doubted his luck. Now his wife was marked. Not by one of the obvious diseases, Maija thought. Crayfish, perhaps. Crayfish was like hatred. It ate away at a person from the inside, and nothing was seen until they crumbled.
“I am sorry,” Maija said.
Lisbet shook her head.
“Where are you from?” Maija asked.
“We’ve been here so long now,” Henrik said. “This is home.”
“Twenty years,” Lisbet said. “We were among the
first to arrive.”
She sounded proud. Maija thought about the cluttered yard. To think that people could live somewhere for such a long time without getting better organized. But Lisbet was sick. Not so easy to manage, then.
“What about the others?” Maija asked.
Henrik raised his brows to her.
“It’s just interesting,” Maija said. “All of you from such different backgrounds.”
Lisbet counted on her fingers. “Daniel and Eriksson were born here,” she said. “Nils and Kristina arrived some years ago from Stockholm.” She smiled and small dimples appeared by her nose, a reminder of the beauty she’d once had. “They had so much luggage, you wouldn’t have believed it.”
“Why would they come here?”
Lisbet shrugged. She didn’t seem to find it strange.
“And Gustav? He was in the army?” Maija asked.
“Gustav doesn’t get involved with the rest of us,” Henrik said. “He keeps to himself.”
“Oh, I heard Eriksson saying he was a soldier—he would have known,” Lisbet said.
“What was he like—Eriksson?” Maija asked.
Lisbet giggled. “Unafraid. He knew Blackåsen inside out, and he made living here seem so easy. He was gallant, pleasant …” She interrupted herself and looked to her husband. “I don’t want to be left alone,” she said, remembering her earlier grievance. “People disappear here.”
“Nils told us,” Maija said.
Lisbet was still looking at her husband. “And now she’s killed Eriksson too.”
“She?” Maija shook her head.
Lisbet’s eyes fixed on Maija. “Elin,” she said.
“His wife … why?”
“She’s a sorceress.”
“She was under investigation for sorcery a long time ago, but she was declared innocent,” Henrik said, correcting his wife.
But the trials had all stopped. Oh what was wrong with people? Maija was glad she hadn’t told anyone about the seeds she had found on Eriksson’s clothes. Everyone used herbs for medical purposes, but some people were quick to point out that sages had faculties beyond the simple restoration of health.
Wolf Winter Page 6