Time Knot

by M. C. Morison

  The pathway we followed climbed gently with some occasional downhill runs, when the skis swished along and the wind blew the honk of our clothes well behind us. The sun shone brightly and the snow-clad trees looked just right for a picture postcard. We knew we were coming close to another village. We were near the very edge of Signy’s map. She’d marked this village with a little dot that meant it looked on Lutherans in a friendly way. Eira, who’d been taking long swishing strides in the lead, came to a stop and pointed. We were climbing the track towards a crossroads, where a great fir tree dominated the view. A shape, man-like and not man-like, hovered below a great branch. In a few strides Signy overtook her daughter.

  “We have to pass this way. Don’t look children. Such a view never leaves your mind. The poor man is beyond helping now.”

  Signy’s words proved right. I glanced up as we went by and wished I hadn’t. In the cold the man looked chilly but normal, apart from the fact he hung from a branch, with his feet a horse’s height above the ground – and he had no eyes.

  I felt gorge rise in my throat and thought I might be sick. We took the track to the right at the crossroads. Signy had seen that on her map. Anyway we could see smoke curling up quite close by. Minutes later we were in the village. Every door remained closed. This had been where we hoped to find lodging for the night. Sometimes we paid and sometimes we all did some work to cover the cost of our warm hay and salt-fish stew. But to find a place to stay we needed to talk with people and here no one wanted to show their faces to us. We took off our skis and carried them across the rutted frozen mud of the main street. A wooden church stood a little way apart at the edge of the village. The door stood ajar.

  “Maybe we can sleep in there, Mother,” said Håkan.

  Signy went to the door and looked in.

  “What do you want?” said a voice behind us.

  “Shelter for the night, mistress,” said Signy. “That and a little food. We can pay.”

  The woman looked at her for a long time without saying anything. She stood at the door of a small cottage on the other side of the road to the church. A cat came out and rubbed itself against her legs. She had a white bonnet on her head and a heavy shawl around her shoulders. She could have been any age, but I guessed she was older than my mum.

  “I know you,” said the woman at last.

  Signy waited without saying anything. We three cold youngsters looked back and forth from one to the other.

  “You, best come in,” said the woman. “I’m Kristina Ralfsdatter.”

  “Yes,” said Signy, introducing herself, and us. “I remember you.”

  The woman didn’t say much after that but bustled around preparing a stew. She even had meat and the smells were beyond mouth-watering. A fire roared in the stove and the room, whilst a bit smoky, had enough warmth so we could take off our outer layers. The cat had found its way to my lap. Outside, the steady clack, clack came from where Håkan chopped wood. He had a real gift for that and an accurate eye.

  Once darkness had fallen, lamps had been lit and we were eating, the woman turned to Signy.

  “We met once, you know.”

  “I do,” said Signy.

  “When things were safer.”

  “Yes,” said Signy.

  “Your husband?”

  Signy looked up from her trencher of bread, brimming with meat and root vegetables.

  “Doing the Lord’s work.”

  The woman nodded. She passed the beer jug around once more before saying, “As is mine. As is mine. May the good Lord keep them safe in their travails.”

  “Amen,” said Signy and Håkan together.

  Eira’s eyes had grown as big as two king-sized marbles, as she looked from her mother to this lady. She said nothing.

  “The man?” said Signy.

  “By the crossroads?” said the woman.

  “Yes.”

  Listening to them was like listening to my mum and dad talk sometimes. A code you just cannot quite get because not all the information is divulged at the right time.

  The woman leaned back in her chair.

  “He unwisely spoke too much.”

  We waited to see what more she would say. She’d closed her eyes.

  “He was our pastor.”

  Signy leant across and placed her hand on the woman’s arm. The woman covered it with her own.

  “Soldiers came here looking for a woman on the run with three children in tow. The pastor spoke for us all when he said none of us had seen any woman on the run. He added, ‘What woman in her right mind would run with the snow so thick and the winter still holding everything in its grasp?’ The soldier in charge, a cruel man, struck him for those words, with the flat of his sword. But Gustav stood up once more and told the man he wasn’t fit to be an officer. If you could have seen him smile then, your blood would have turned to ice.”

  She clenched her fists and placed them on either side of the trencher of bread in front of her.

  “He turned to two of his soldiers and said, ‘He is defying an officer of the King. That is treason. Hang him. He is not to be cut down. The birds need to feed. Not much food with all this snow.’ And within the hour it’d been done. We were all forced to watch.”

  She paused for a long time. The wood in the stove crackled and the firelight played on her face.

  “Not a man or woman in this village who would not spit on the picture of that papist king now. We’re done with Denmark, that’s for sure. Before, some were loyal. Said it was our duty to obey. God’s will and all that nonsense. Now? Now we are all for Martin Luther.” She drank down her beer, her face fierce.

  The next day Kristina Ralfsdatter would take no money from us.

  “Travel through the woods. Keep going steadily north. Watch the roads. That captain, he’s an evil man. Canny. Cunning. Somehow he knew you’d pass this way. Only he got his timing wrong.”

  She gave Signy a long hug and then held each of us by the shoulders.

  “No one here saw you. I didn’t see you. Even the cat didn’t see you.” She smiled at Håkan and me. “Your mother explained something of the task ahead for the two of you. God speed. Those whom the Good Lord looks over…” She stopped, shrugged and turned back into the cottage. Turning once again she pointed at us, using both hands.

  “Fight, you boys, fight. We are done with all this evil. Fight.”

  Lucian’s Twin Brother

  Signy had been given good directions and we made steady progress. For the second day the sun shone brightly. The snow often tumbled from high branches, falling with a soft humph nearby. Long icicles dripped and sparkled in the light. A buzzard circled slowly, high above us. The food had done us all good and Eira, who skied next to me when she could, whistled her tuneless whistle once more. She’d her bow handy in the hope something small and tasty might come in range.

  We’d worked our way on a small track around the edge of a hill. Stones formed a shelter that might have been man-made or might not.

  Eira said, “I have to stop here a moment. I’ll catch you up.”

  We nodded, we had all had to make stops like that once in a while.

  “There’s a wider track down there,” said Håkan, “we will wait just inside the trees.”

  We skied down slowly. In the summer what lay below our feet must be pasture. Some tufts of frozen grass peeked through. Just before we reached the roadway, Håkan pointed off to our left. Something flashed in the sunlight.

  “Soldiers,” he whispered.

  “Have they seen us?” said Signy.

  “I don’t know. The sun is more in their eyes, but they may have seen movement. The meadow is pretty open.”

  “We should’ve stayed by the tree-line over there,” said Signy.

  “The snow is deep on that side of the hill,” said Håkan pointing across the road. “No horse could follow us there.”

  “Are they on horseback or skis?”

  “Danes on skis? Never. No, some are walking, I think, and
most are riding.”

  We heard a shout.

  “We’ll cross the road and ski down there,” said Håkan.

  A sound like a thin jet of steam escaping made us all turn. There on the road sat the young officer drawing his sword. His face showed clearly now; he could have been Lucian’s twin brother. He could have been Lucian, except his eyes had an almost purple tint and emanated cruelty. The thinnest of thin smiles had crept over his face.

  “You might as well come out,” he said, in Swedish with a slight accent. “I can see you all and my soldiers are behind you.”

  I looked back to see our retreat had indeed been cut off. His horse now blocked the route across the road, and his sharp sword, flashing as he turned it this way and that in the sun, didn’t look ceremonial. He had a small crossbow hanging from his saddle. Something moved just at the edge of my field of vision. I didn’t look towards it because the captain, or whatever he was, had pointed his sword at me.

  “Come here, boy. This is a meeting I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. Now, let me see you properly.”

  He didn’t, because at that point his horse reared and plunged forward along the road, and he nearly lost his balance. An arrow stuck out of the horse’s rump.

  “Come on,” shouted Eira, as she skied straight across the road behind the horse, as it reared once more.

  We dug in our ski poles, clattered across the frozen ruts in the road, and gathered speed on the steep slope the other side. The snow-covered meadow had few rocks to avoid and I made a little prayer to the god of green runs that I wouldn’t fall on a slope this easy. Eira, leading, leaned this way and that. Håkan did the same. I just kept my head down and thought we would surely already be out of arrow range. One shot cracked out, echoing around the valley. A gun? We were now speeding so fast the wind brought tears to my eyes. The slope continued on and on, deep, virgin, wind-banked snow, impossible for any horse to cross.

  Eira still held the lead. She screamed, jumped and sailed for some moments in the air before dropping from view. We were all going too fast to stop. Well, falling off a mountainside might be preferable to drowning in a frozen lake. The snow stopped. I leaned back, losing balance. I sprang. I’m good at simple ski acrobatics, and made an enforced backward somersault, an easy manoeuvre. I saw a flash of dark rock, green frozen water and then snow. Straightening out from a crouch my skis hit the snow on the far side of the gulf, much lower than the hillside I’d just left. I leaned into the slope to bring myself to a gliding halt, in a shower of snow and ice. Eira had made it; so had I. Moments later both Håkan and Signy leapt to safety, although he ended up doing a bum’s rush for a bit.

  Håkan and I climbed back up the slope to the gully we had just jumped. The gorge fell at least ten metres and we’d crossed about the same distance with our jump. Only the fact that the other side stood much higher than this bank had saved us. The difference in height entirely hid us from the Danish captain and his murderous thugs. The narrow gorge ran as far as the eye could see in each direction. If no bridge existed nearby then we were safe; at least for a while. No horse or even foot soldier could safely descend and ascend those sharp rocks. Signy said we would keep the gorge to our left, and continue to head more or less north.

  We skied slowly that afternoon. All of us were exhausted and no one spoke much. We’d hugged Eira for her presence of mind and coolness with the arrow in the captain’s horse. Sadly, she’d dropped her bow when she came to the gorge; we hoped it wouldn’t be needed again. We trudged rather than skied, as the ground rose steadily once more. Signy hardly answered when we asked if we were going the right way. The horrid death of the pastor, a man we’d never known, had shocked us all. And the near-death experience with the Danish bully hadn’t helped.

  The path climbed through trees. Sometimes we had to take off our skis to get past a fallen branch or an uprooted tree. This held us up, and the light began to fail. For the first time since crossing the lake, it looked like we might spend the night in the snow. We all knew that with the temperature plunging at night, we mightn’t survive that.

  The trees thinned and then cleared. Ahead of us lay a valley. The track descended to a little hamlet next to a frozen river, fed by the gorge far to our left. We could see a bridge there. Behind the hamlet the hill rose sharply, with its snow and trees looking impassable. The top of the hill stood shrouded in the mist of a low cloud, even though we were bathed in sunshine.

  “It would have helped if Mistress Ralfsdatter had told us of the gorge. She did describe this hamlet. Maybe if we’d followed the road we would’ve reached here eventually. She thought we would be here by tomorrow night, so I think we took a short cut.”

  When we entered the small cluster of houses, Signy counted with care. We knocked at the door of the fifth house on the right. A man asked our business.

  “We are friends of Mistress Ralfsdatter.”

  After a pause, bolts were drawn back and we entered the smoky comfort of the cottage. Jurgan, a man in his forties with a pockmarked face, didn’t smile much. His room had half-made barrels dotted about. He said he made his living as a cooper. The cottage had walls constructed from huge stones, heavier than two men could lift. I’d never seen anything built like this in Sweden or Norway. Signy told a little of our story and how we’d escaped from a troop of Danish soldiers seeking to capture us. The man nodded but didn’t say anything. He put some cheese and bread on the table, with the inevitable pitcher of weak beer. We ate through all he placed before us.

  “We leave tomorrow before dawn,” Jurgan announced, as he wiped down the table. “I also breed mules. We’ll use those. You cannot ski to where we are going.” I wondered how he bred mules when they are sterile, but kept my basic biology to myself.

  None of us slept well that night. We all shared the thought of fists pounding on the door. Jurgan had courage, certainly. He knew all about the dead pastor. He spat when we told of the Danes.

  We gathered by the mules as silently as we could. Nothing stirred in the village. The last dregs of moonlight meant we didn’t need torches. Jurgan brought us through his kitchen at the back, past the stench of the privy and midden heap, to the rich aromas of a mule pen. One had already been prepared as a pack animal, carrying our skis. It also had a satchel of food for our journey. The other three beasts carried Jurgan and us, two by two. I again had the joy of sharing a ride with Håkan. I didn’t think he liked me very much. He hardly spoke and I think blamed me for holding up the escape so long we were now likely to be caught and … well, who knew, but the eyeless man provided a clue. Signy rode with Eira, who even managed to fall asleep as we climbed a narrow path that started near the cooper’s home.

  When we were well away from the village Jurgan told us that only locals knew of this route. The proper roadway, difficult to negotiate in winter, would take at least two days even on horseback. He doubted the soldiers would think we would head this way, to his small town.

  I wondered about that. The Lucian spooky guy had appeared in my dark Ouija vision. He seemed to be getting intelligence from the nastier places in the universe.

  Mule Paces

  We rode all morning without stopping, going at mule pace. At one point we nearly emerged from the trees and could see down to the little hamlet, laid out like a toy farm in the distant valley below. A couple of people ran down the main street. Eira pointed. We could all see the file of blue-coated soldiers making their way towards the bridge that led to the village. Håkan muttered something.

  “Don’t talk filth,” said his mother.

  “Sorry, Mother,” he responded, and then winked at me. Perhaps he likes me after all. I grinned back, determined to add the word to my Swedish vocab.

  “Don’t worry. No one in the village will help them now. They all know you’ve passed through. They all know where you’re going. But they will all say you headed east. We haven’t time for the Danes.” Jurgan added the same word as Håkan had used. Signy frowned. Eira looked at a spot on her boo
ts. Håkan stared at a mule. I giggled. Then we all laughed, full throated and hearty. The first good laugh since I last took a bath – in the lake.

  “Sshhh…” said Signy.

  “Don’t worry, mistress,” said Jurgan, still chortling, “the wind makes so much noise, the soldiers won’t be able to hear themselves think. But we best move back into the trees. A sharp-eyed soldier might see what he cannot hear.”

  We continued climbing. A good hour later we came to a little plateau. Trees grew at the edges, and near some great stones a frozen pond clasped stiff bulrushes in its icy grip. The flat area, close to what might once have been a building, extended for about half the size of Scrivener’s cricket pitch. Jurgan led the mules past the pond and through a gap in the overgrown stones. Moments later we were in a substantial cave, and he had a fire going, with melted snow approaching the boil.

  “I do this journey frequent,” he said. “This is my stopping-off point.”

  “Was this a building once?” asked Signy pointing outside the cave.

  “Indeed, mistress. This was a small but thriving monastery. The monks had taken a vow of silence or some such thing and chose to live isolated like. Our little village down there served them, as did the town up above.” He pointed to the roof of the cave. “Where we’re headed.”

  “What happened to them?” asked Signy.

  “Before my granddaddy’s day, they died out. Perhaps the plague. Perhaps through lack of talk.” He spat.

  “Don’t like monks. Never have. They live off the poor. I’ve never seen a thin one in my life.”

  Jurgan added some dried meat from the panniers and a few chopped vegetables. Soon we were dipping in chunks of bread and slurping up hot food.

  “Mind you…” Jurgan said as though we’d not all been more or less silent for twenty minutes. “Up there –” and again he pointed to the roof – “I’m as good a Catholic as ever rang a silver bell. When we get there –” he jabbed his finger upwards – “best forget the name of Luther, however much we like him and his reforms.”