He showed the way to the farthest of the sheds by the quay. Olav hardly ever used this one—there was not so much trade at Hestviken now. Only in spring, when Olav was preparing to visit the Holy Cross fair at Oslo, did he store some of his winter goods here. Now the shed was empty and unlocked. Eirik drew his father into it.
The sea splashed and gurgled about the piles under the floor of the shed. This was leaky and the walls were gaping, so that reflections of the sunlight from the water rose and fell in bright streaks on walls and roof. Eirik sniffed in the salt smell of the shed, and his face sparkled with excitement. He looked up into his father’s eyes with a smile of expectation and, stealing on tiptoe, led him to an old barrel standing bottom-upwards, which Olav used to pack skins in.
“Here,” he whispered, squatting down. “In here they dwell. Can you see them—now the cracks have grown so big again, else we could see better, but they are sitting there eating—can you see them?”
Olav turned the barrel on its side and gave it a kick so that it rolled away. There was nothing underneath but some litter.
Eirik looked up smiling and was about to say something—when he noticed the expression of his father’s face and stopped in terror, open-mouthed. With a scream he put up his arms to ward off the blow, bursting into a heart-rending fit of weeping.
Olav let his hand drop—felt it was unworthy of him to strike the boy. So puny and miserable Eirik looked as he stood there in tears that his father was almost ashamed of himself. He just took the child’s arms, drew him away, and sat down on a pile of wreckage, holding Eirik before him.
“So you have lied, I see—’twas a lie every word you said of these friends of yours—answer me now.”
But Eirik answered nothing; he stood staring up at the man’s face, clean dazed—it seemed he could not make it out at all.
The end of it was that Olav had to take Eirik on his knee to stop his bitter weeping. He said again and again that Eirik must never say what was untrue or he would get a beating—but he spoke much more gently now, and between whiles he stroked the boy’s head. Eirik nestled close to his father’s chest and put his arms tightly about his neck.
But he did not understand—Olav was sure of that, and it affected him almost uncannily. This boy that he held in his arms seemed to him so strange and odd—what in God’s name had come over him that he could invent all these lies? To Olav it was so utterly aimless that he began to wonder: was Eirik altogether in his right senses?
Ingunn stayed indoors for nearly nine weeks after her lying-in. She was not notably sick or weak; it was rather that she had grown too fond of her life in the narrow chamber, where all was done for the comfort of herself and the infant, and all was shut out that might disturb her. She let herself sink deep into this new happiness—the infant she had at the breast, and Eirik, who ran in and out of her room all day long. Toward the end Olav began to grow impatient—they had passed so many bad years together, and in all that time she had clung to him. Now she was happy and well, ay, she had recovered some of her youthful beauty, and she barred herself in from him with the children. But Olav allowed nothing of this to appear.
At last, on the Sunday after St. Laurence’s Mass, she kept her churching. Eirik was asleep when the company left home in the early morning, but he was out in the yard when the church folk came back.
A new custom had grown up—although many liked it not, nay, said it was tempting God with overweening pride: young wives at their first churching, especially if the child was a son, wore again on that day their golden circlet, the bridal crown of noble maids, outside their wedded women’s coif.
Ingunn had fastened her white silken kerchief with the golden garland; she wore a red kirtle and her blue mantle with the great gold brooch in it.
Olav lifted his wife from her horse; Eirik stood rapt, gazing at his mother’s loveliness. She seemed much taller in this splendid dress, with the silver belt around her slender waist; her movements were lithe and supple, light as a bird’s.
“Mother!” Eirik exclaimed, beaming; “you are Leman after all!”
In an instant his father seized him by the shoulder; the blow of a clenched fist fell on his cheek-bone, making his head swim. Blow followed blow, leaving the child no breath to cry out—only a hoarse whistling came from his throat—till Una Arnesdatter came running up and caught the man by the arm.
“Olav, Olav, curb yourself—’tis a little boy—are you out of your senses, to strike so hard?”
Olav let go. Eirik let himself fall backward flat on the ground; there he lay, panting and whining, black and blue in the face. It was no swoon—half on purpose, the boy behaved as if he were dying. Una stooped down to him and lifted him to her lap; then his tears began to flow.
Olav turned toward his wife—he was still trembling. Ingunn stood bending forward; eyes, nostrils, the open mouth were like the holes in a death’s-head. Olav laughed, a harsh and angry laugh—then he took her by the upper arm and drew her into the hall, where the maids were now bringing in the banquet.
None of the company had heard what the child said. But all thought the same—no matter what he had done, it had been an ugly sight to see the father correct the little boy so roughly. They sat about on the benches, waiting to be bidden to table, and all were ill at ease.
At last Una Arnesdatter came in, carrying Eirik in her arms. She set him down beside his father’s knee. “Eirik will not disobey you again, Olav—you must tell your son you are angry no longer.”
“Has he told you why I chastised him?” asked Olav without looking up.
Una shook her head. “Poor little fellow—he has cried so he had no power to speak.”
“Never more shall you dare to say that word, Eirik,” said Olav hotly in an undertone. “Never more—you understand?”
Eirik was still hiccuping spasmodically. He said nothing, but stared at his father, frightened and bewildered.
“Never again are you to speak that word,” his father repeated, laying a heavy hand on the boy’s shoulder. Till the child nodded. But then Eirik’s eyes wandered longingly to the dinner-table, which was groaning with good things.
And so the company seated themselves.
Eirik was to sleep in Torhild’s house that night, for there were so many guests at the manor. In the evening, when he was going across, his father came after him into the yard. Eirik stopped short, trembling violently—he looked up at the other in such mortal fear.
“Who taught you to say that ugly word—of your mother?”
Eirik looked up, frightened; the tears began to rise. Olav could get no answer to his question.
“Never say it again—do you hear, never again!” Olav stroked the boy’s head—saw with something like a sense of shame that one side of Eirik’s face was all red and swollen.
The boy was on the point of falling asleep when he felt that someone was bending over him—his mother; her face was burning hot and wet.
“Eirik mine—who has told you this—that your mother was a leman?”
The boy was wide awake in a moment:
“But are you not Leman?”
“Yes,” whispered his mother.
Eirik threw his arms about her neck, nestled up to her, and kissed her.
10
AUTUMN came early that year. Bad weather set in about Michaelmas, and then it rained and blew, day in, day out, except when the gale was so high that the clouds could not let go their rain. This weather lasted for seven weeks.
At Hestviken the water rose above the quays. One night the sea carried away the piles under the farthest shed: when the men came down in the grey dawn, they saw the old house lying with its back wall, which faced the rock, leaning forward, and the front wall, toward the fiord, sunk half under water. It rocked in the heavy seas like a moored boat, and every time the wreck was lifted by a wave and sank again, the water poured out between the timbers, but most of all through a hatch under the gable. It looked like a drunken man hanging round-shouldered over the sid
e of a boat and spewing, thought Anki.
With axes, boathooks, and ropes the men now had to try to cut the wrecked shed adrift and warp it out of the way; otherwise it was likely to be flung in against the quay and the shed in which Olav stored all the salt he had dried during the summer, and his fish—of this there was not much, for the autumn fishing had failed. In the course of this work Olav bruised his right arm badly.
He paid little heed to it while he was toiling in the spray and the storm, which was so violent that at times the men had to lie flat and crawl along the rocks. But at dusk, as they walked up to the manor, he felt his arm aching and it hurt when he touched it. As he was shutting the house door a gust of wind blew it inr carrying Olav off his feet; his bad arm was given a violent wrench as the man stumbled over the threshold and fell at full length on the floor of the anteroom. He had to call for help to be rid of his soaking sea-clothes, and Torhild bound up his arm in a sling.
It was unbearable in the hall that evening; the room was chock-full of smoke, for it was impossible to open door or louver in this wind. Eyes smarted and chests were racked; and when the men’s wet clothes began to steam on the crossbeams, the air was soon so thick that it could be cut with a knife.
Ingunn lay in the little closet with both the children—there was less smoke, but it was so cold that they had to creep under the bedclothes. The men went out as soon as they had supped. Olav threw some skins and cushions on the floor by the hearth and lay down there, to be below the smoke.
His arm was now swollen. His face was burning from the weather and his head and body were hot and cold by turns. Feverish and light-headed, he heard the storm as a multiplicity of voices—it howled about the corners of the house, slamming a loose shutter somewhere—now and then he could distinguish its roaring in the trees on the crag above the manor. The deepest note was that of the raging fiord; where he lay he thought he could hear the thunder of the waves breaking on the rock on which the houses stood as though the booming came from beneath him, up through the rock.
In a doze he saw the huge white-crested seas coming, their water brown with mud; and he crawled again up the wet rock on hands and knees, with the boathook gripped under him, and the rope he had to fasten in a cleft of the rock. The spray, thick as rain, lashed him even up here. The black welter of clouds was split at that moment with a brassy yellow rift, and far beneath him, where the black and foaming fiord seemed hollow as a cup, a single shaft of sunlight fell glittering upon the racing waves.
Then another vision appeared under his closed eyelids—a great bog, pale with rime, grass and heather frosted and white. But a kind of light glimmered within the morning mist, and he could tell that as the day wore on, the sun would break through. Never is there such a day for riding out with hawk and hound: bog-holes and tarns scattered over the moor are held fast in dark, smooth ice with little white air-bubbles that crack. The wooded hillsides are clear and carry sound, for trees and bushes are bare, and the fallen leaves are bright over the ground, but the fir forest stands dark and fresh after the rime has thawed—and then there is the suspense, whether the bird will make for impassable ground or will take to the bogs and the frozen water.
The only hawk he owned now was in the loft of the men-servants’ house, sick and reddish about the feet, nor did it breathe as it should either. It would be as well to make an end of it now—it would never be fit for hunting again. And he had lost his falcon last autumn.
Now Audun was fretting again. Ingunn hushed him and lulled him to sleep in there.
Torhild Björnsdatter came up and spread some blankets over her master. Olav opened his eyes—from where he lay he could see the girl’s strong figure moving in the red glare from the embers on the hearth. Torhild was putting things straight—moving the clothes on the crossbeams.
“Are you not asleep, Olav—are you thirsty?”
“Oh, ay. Nay, I will rather have water—”
Olav raised himself on his elbow. His bandaged arm hurt him when he tried to stretch it out and take the cup of water. Torhild sat on her haunches and held it to his mouth. When he lay down again, she drew the coverlet over his shoulder. Then he heard her asking in the closet whether the mistress wanted anything.
“Hush, hush,” Ingunn whispered impatiently in reply; “you will wake Audun for me—he was almost asleep.”
Torhild covered the embers and went out. Olav lay on the floor all night.
The severe autumn weather was not good for Audun. He got sore eyes from being always in the pungent smoke, and he coughed a great deal.
On the approach of Yule the weather fell calm; the sun glowed red behind the frost fog every morning. Early in the new year the fiord froze over, but the cold increased. In the farms round about, folk had to move all into one house and keep the fire burning on the hearth night and day.
It had been a good spring the year before, so the farmers had as much live stock as they could in any way find room for. But in spite of their byres and stables being overfilled, the beasts suffered so much from the cold that folk had to wrap in sacks and cloths those it was most important to save, and they had to spread the floor with spruce boughs, lest the animals should freeze fast in the clay. The dung was frozen stiff every morning, so it was almost impossible to clear it away.
About the time of St. Agatha’s Mass9 it was said in the countryside that now men could drive on the ice right down to Denmark. But now no man had business in that land; peace had been concluded between the Kings the year before.
About this time Olav was called upon to show cause why he had stayed at home in the summer, when the Duke proceeded to Denmark to negotiate the peace of Hegnsgavl. The matter was thus: that Olav, who had been out for three summers in succession with the war fleet as one of the lesser captains, had been given a half-promise of furlough by Baron Tore Haakonsson for the fourth summer; but Tore ordered him to provide two fully armed men and their victuals for the Baron’s service instead. Olav had not been able to do this, but in spite of that he had not presented himself at the muster of the army in the spring—the levy this year was much smaller, since the Duke only went south to negotiate. Now Olav found himself in trouble over this, and in the bitter cold about mid-Lent he had to ride once to Tunsberg and then several times to Oslo, first to account for his absence and then to raise ready money. He lost much cattle that winter, and the white horse died that he had bought of Stein.
The two little children filled the crowded house with commotion.
Eirik had a bad fault: Olav found out by degrees that this boy was greatly given to lying. If his father asked whether he had seen this or that member of the household, Eirik was always quick to answer yes, he had just spoken with the other in the house or out in the yard, and gave an account of what had been said or done. Usually there was not a word of truth in it. Some of the serving-folk, and his mother too, hinted that perhaps the child had second sight—Eirik was not like other boys. Olav had not much to say to this, but he kept an eye on him—he could see no sign that it was anything but mendacity.
Another bad habit of Eirik’s was that he would sit humming or singing some rigmarole that he made up himself, interminably, till Olav’s head ached and he felt inclined to beat the boy. But he had grown wary of laying a hand on the child since he had thrashed him so pitilessly the day Ingunn came home from her churching.
Eirik knelt before the bench in the evening, arranging these snail-shells and animals’ teeth of his in rows and chanting:
“Four and five of the fifth dozen,
Four and five of the fifth dozen,
Fifteen mares and four foals
I got in the daytime and got in the nighttime.
Four and five of the fifth dozen
Were the horses I owned upon the morrow.”
He repeated this about cows and calves, sheep and lambs, sows and pigs.
“Be still,” his father checked him sharply; “have I not told you I will have no more of these gowling cantraps of yours?”
Olav asked him: “How many horses would you choose to have, Eirik—four and five of the fifth dozen or a hundred horses?”
“Oh, I would have many more,” replied Eirik. “I would have—seven and twenty!”
So little did he understand of his own crooning.
Audun was fretful and ailing. Ingunn boasted of her son and said there was no fairer child, and indeed he had been better of late; but Olav saw the smouldering anxiety in her eyes when she spoke thus. Eirik repeated what he heard his mother say, hung over the cradle, rocking and wheedling his silken brother, as he always called Audun.
Olav felt a strange distress when he saw it. Audun seemed to him a most miserable little creature—always scurfy about the scalp, sore about the mouth, lean and raw about the body, which was backward in its growth. Never had this son made him feel anythink like paternal joy; but that he was father to this poor sick, fretting child gave him a feeling of bitter pain when Eirik was bending over the cradle: the other was so fair and full of life, with his glistening nut-brown locks falling about Audun’s wrinkled face.
One day Olav asked Torhild what she thought of Audun.
“He will surely mend, when the spring comes,” said Torhild; but Olav felt in himself that the girl did not believe her own words.
They had turned loose the cattle at Hestviken and drove them up to the old moss-grown pastures in Kverndal in the daytime, when Audun fell very sick. He had coughed the whole winter and had had many fits of colic, but this time it was worse than ever before.
Olav saw that Ingunn was ready to drop with fatigue and anxiety, but she kept wonderfully calm and collected. Untiringly she watched over the child night and day, while every remedy was tried to help Audun—first those familiar to the people of the house, and then all those known to the neighbours’ wives for whom Ingunn sent.
The Snake Pit Page 15