Ronia, The Robber's Daughter

by Astrid Lindgren

  Then she heard something. There was someone coming on the other side. She could hear footsteps. Who could it be but a Borka robber? She held her breath and stood stock-still, not daring to move, listening and wishing she were far away before whoever was on the other side of the pile of stones discovered she was there.

  Then the Borka robber began to whistle, a simple little tune she had heard before. Yes, indeed she had heard it before! Birk had been whistling it when he was struggling to free her from the rumphobs’ hole. Could it be Birk in there, so close to her, or did all the Borka robbers whistle that particular tune?

  She was burning to find out, but she could not very well ask; that would be dangerous. All the same, she must find out somehow who the whistler was, so she decided to whistle too, the same tune, very softly.

  There was silence on the other side. For a long time it was horribly quiet, and she was making ready to rush off if an unknown Borka robber suddenly came scrambling over the rubble to get his hands on her.

  But then she heard Birk’s voice, low and hesitant, as if he did not know what to expect. “Ronia?”

  “Birk!” she shouted, so tremendously happy that she almost lost her breath. “Birk, oh, Birk!”

  Then she stopped. After a moment she said, “Is it true that you want to be my brother?”

  She heard him laughing on the other side of the rubble. “My sister,” he said, “I like hearing your voice, but I would like to see you too. Are you as black-eyed as you used to be?”

  “Come and see,” said Ronia.

  She got no further, because now she had heard something else, something that took her breath away and silenced her. She had heard the heavy cellar door, far away behind her, opening and closing again with a bang, and now someone was coming down the steps. Yes, someone was coming, and if she could not work out what to do very quickly she was lost—and so was Birk! She heard footsteps coming closer and closer. Someone was coming softly and inexorably down the long corridor. She heard and knew what it meant, yet she stood there like an idiot, motionless with terror. It was almost too late when she suddenly came back to life and whispered quickly to Birk, “Tomorrow!”

  Then she ran to meet whoever was coming. Whoever he was, he must be prevented from seeing what she had been doing with the tumbled stones.

  It was Noddle-Pete, and his face brightened when he saw her.

  “How I’ve searched!” he said. “What in the name of all the wild harpies have you been doing?”

  She took him briskly by the arm and turned him around before it was too late.

  “You can’t shovel snow all the time,” she said. “Come on, I want to get out of here.”

  Indeed she did! It was only now that she realized what she had done. She had opened up a way into Borka’s Keep—if Matt only knew! He might not have the cunning of a fox, but at least he would understand that here at last was a way of getting at Borka.

  He could have worked it out for himself long ago, thought Ronia, but she was glad he had not done so. It was strange, but she no longer wanted to have the Borka robbers thrown out of Matt’s Fort. They must be allowed to stay here, for Birk’s sake. Birk must not be thrown out, and if she could prevent it, no one was going to get into Borka’s Keep by the way she had opened up. So she must make sure now that Noddle-Pete did not start thinking any unnecessary thoughts. There he was, walking beside her, looking very knowing— though that was his usual expression. It was easy to imagine that he knew all your secrets, but however artful he was, this time Ronia was more artful still. He had not discovered her secret—not yet, at least

  “No, no, you can’t shovel snow all the time,” Noddle-Pete agreed. “But you can play dice night and day, don’t you think, Ronia?”

  “You can play dice night and day. And especially now,” said Ronia, dragging him enthusiastically up the steep cellar steps.

  She played dice with Noddle-Pete until it was time for the Wolf Song, but Birk was always in her thoughts.

  Tomorrow! That was the last thing she thought before she fell asleep that night. Tomorrow!

  Seven

  And then it was morning and she was going to birk. she must go quickly, watching out for the brief moment when she was alone in the stone hall while all the others were about their various morning jobs. At any moment Noddle-Pete might pop up, and she wanted to avoid his questions.

  I can eat just as well underground, she thought. There’s no eating one’s meal in peace here, anyway.

  She stuffed bread hastily into her leather bag and poured milk into her wooden jar. And without being seen by anyone she made her way down to the cellar vaults. Soon she had reached the pile of stone.

  “Birk,” she called, afraid that he might not be there. No one answered from beyond the heaps of stone, and she felt disappointed enough to cry—what if he did not come! Perhaps he had completely forgotten, or—still worse—perhaps he had regretted their meeting. After all, she was one of Matt’s robbers and an enemy of Borka; perhaps in the end he did not want to have anything to do with someone like that.

  Then someone behind her gave her hair a tug. She screamed with fright. Did he have to come sneaking in again, that Noddle-Pete, and ruin everything?

  But it was not Noddle-Pete. It was Birk. There he stood, laughing, and his teeth were white in the darkness. She could not see much more of him in the glow from the horn lamp.

  “I’ve been waiting a long time,” he said.

  Ronia felt a little spurt of joy inside her—just think, she had a brother who would wait a long time for her sake!

  “And so have I,” she said. “I’ve been waiting ever since I got away from the rumphobs.”

  Then for a time they could think of nothing more to say. They just stood there, silent but very pleased to be together again.

  Birk raised his tallow candle and held it up to her face.

  “You’ve still got the black eyes,” he said. “You look like you, only a little paler.”

  It was only then that Ronia noticed that Birk did not look like himself as she remembered him. He had grown thin; his face was haggard and his eyes very large.

  “What have you been doing with yourself?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” said Birk, “but I haven’t been eating much. Even so, I’ve had more than anyone else in Borka’s Keep.”

  It was a little time before Ronia understood what he had said.

  “Do you mean that you haven’t any food? That you haven’t enough to eat?”

  “None of us has had enough to eat for a long time. All our food is running out, and if spring doesn’t come soon, we’ll all be done for. Just as you wanted, remember?” he said, laughing.

  “That was then,” said Ronia. “I didn’t have a brother then. Now I have.”

  She opened the leather bag and gave him the bread. “Eat, if you’re hungry,” she said.

  There was an extraordinary sound, almost like a little scream, from Birk. And he took the coarse chunks of bread, one in each hand, and ate. It was as if Ronia were not there. He was alone with his bread, gulping it down to the very last crumb. Then Ronia handed him the jar of milk, and he put it greedily to his mouth and drank until it was empty.

  Afterward he looked shamefacedly at Ronia. “Shouldn’t you have had this for yourself?”

  “There’s more at home,” she said. “I’m not starving.”

  And in her mind’s eye she saw Lovis’s rich stores in the great larder: the wonderful bread, the goat cheese and soft whey cheese, and the eggs, the barrels of salted food, the smoked joints of mutton hanging from the roof, the bins full of flour and grain and dried peas, the crocks of honey, the baskets of hazelnuts and bags of herbs and leafy plants that Lovis had gathered and dried to put into the chicken soup she sometimes prepared. That chicken soup—Ronia began to feel hungry as she remembered how good it tasted after all the salted and smoked food they had to eat throughout the winter.

  But where Birk lived they were starving. She could not think why. />
  He explained it to her. “We’re poor robbers for the time being, you see. We had goats and sheep too, before we came here to Matt’s Fort. Now we have nothing but our horses, and we stabled them for the winter with a farmer down beyond Borka’s Forest. Thank goodness we did—otherwise we would have eaten them, as things are now. We did have a bit of flour and some turnips and peas and salt fish, but they are running out now. Oof, what a winter we’ve been having!”

  Ronia felt as if it were her fault and the fault of Matt’s Fort that Birk had had such troubles and was now so thin and hungry. But he could still laugh in spite of it all.

  “Poor robbers, yes, that’s what we are! Can’t you smell the dirt and poverty on me?” he said with a grin. ““We’ve scarcely any water either. We’ve had to melt snow, because sometimes it’s been impossible to go down to the woods and dig out the stream under all the snow. And then, hauling a bucket of water up a rope ladder in a snowstorm—have you ever tried it? No, because if you had you’d know why I smell like a dirty robber!”

  “Our robbers smell the same,” Ronia assured him, to comfort him a little. She herself smelled quite all right, because Lovis scrubbed her in the big wooden tub in front of the fire every Saturday night and deloused her and Matt with the louse comb every Sunday morning, although Matt complained that she pulled his hair out at the same time. He did not want to be combed, but he had to put up with it.

  ““Twelve matted, lousy robbers are enough,” Lovis had said. “I intend to comb the chief, dead or alive, as long as I can manage to lift a louse comb.”

  Ronia looked earnestly at Birk, standing there in the lamplight. Even if he had not been deloused, his hair still lay like a copper helmet around his head, and his head sat so handsomely on his slender neck and straight shoulders. He was a handsome brother, Ronia thought.

  “It doesn’t matter if you are poor and lousy and dirty,” she said. “But I don’t want you to be hungry.”

  Birk laughed. “How did you know that I was lousy—I certainly am! But I’d rather be lousy than hungry, that’s for sure.”

  Now he was serious again. “Forget being hungry! But I could have saved a bit of bread for Undis, at all events!”

  “I can get some more,” Ronia said thoughtfully, but Birk shook his head.

  “No, I can’t take bread home to Undis without telling her where I got it. And Borka would be beside himself with fury if he found out that I was taking bread from you and had become your brother into the bargain.”

  Ronia sighed. She could well understand that Borka must loathe Matt’s robbers as much as Matt loathed the Borka robbers, but oh, how it messed things up for her and Birk!

  “We can never meet except in secret,” she said sadly, and Birk

  “That’s true! And I hate doing things in secret.”

  “Me too,” said Ronia. “There’s nothing I hate more than old salt fish and long winters, but keeping things secret when it’s just silly is even worse.”

  “But you’ll do it all the same? For my sake? And it will be easier in spring,” said Birk. “We can meet in the woods then instead of in this ice-cold hole of a cellar.”

  They were both so cold that their teeth chattered, and at last Ronia said, “I think I have to go now, before I freeze to death.”

  “But you will come back tomorrow? To your lousy brother?” “I’ll come with the louse comb and this and that,” said Ronia.

  And she kept her promise. Early every morning, as long as the winter lasted, she met Birk down in the cellar vaults and kept him alive with food from Lovis’s larder.

  Birk was sometimes ashamed of taking her gifts. “I feel as if I were stealing from you,” he said.

  But that made Ronia laugh. “Aren’t I a robber’s daughter? So why shouldn’t I steal?”

  In any case she knew that much of what Lovis kept in her stores had already been stolen from rich merchants traveling through the woods.

  “A robber takes without asking or getting permission—that little I have finally learned,” said Ronia. “And now I’m doing what I’ve learned. So just you eat!”

  Every day she also gave him a bag of flour and a bag of peas for him to add secretly to Undis’s store.

  So it’s come to this, she thought, I want to keep Borka robbers alive. Woe betide me if Matt ever finds out!

  Birk thanked her for her generosity.

  “Undis is amazed every day because there are still a few peas and a little flour left in her bins. She thinks there must be some kind of sorcery at work,” Birk said, laughing in his usual way. He was a little more himself now and no longer had that famished look, which pleased Ronia greatly.

  “Who knows? ” said Birk. “Perhaps my mother is right about the sorcery. You do look a bit like a little harpy, Ronia. “

  “But nice and with no claws, ” said Ronia.

  “Yes, as nice as nice can be! How many times do you plan to save my life, sister mine? “

  “As many times as you’ve saved mine, ” she said. “The fact is, we can’t manage without each other. I realize that now. “

  “Yes, that’s true, ” said Birk. “So Matt and Borka can think what they like. “

  But Matt and Borka were not thinking about it at all, because they did not know anything about the meetings between brother and sister under the cellar vaults.

  “Have you eaten enough? ” Ronia asked. “I’m going to start on the louse comb now. “

  She lifted the comb like a weapon and advanced on him. Poor Borka robbers, they did not have even a louse comb left! But she liked feeling Birk’s soft hair under her hands and combed him more often than was strictly necessary.

  “I’m already so extremely deloused, ” said Birk, “that I think you’re combing in vain. “

  “We shall see, ” said Ronia, running the comb vigorously through his hair.

  Gradually the harsh winter began to turn milder. The snow melted little by little, and on a day when the midday thaw was at its height, Lovis drove the robbers out into the snow to wash themselves and get rid of the worst of the dirt. They resisted and would not go. Such things were harmful to the health, Fooloks insisted. But Lovis stood her ground. The smell of winter must go now, she said, even if every robber perished in the process. She drove them out into the snow without mercy, and soon naked, hooting robbers were rolling all over the snowy slopes down by the Wolfs Neck. They cursed loud and long over Lovis’s inhuman heartlessness, but they scrubbed themselves as she had told them. They did not dare do otherwise.

  Only Noddle-Pete stubbornly refused to roll in the snow. “I may die anyway,” he said, “and I want to do it with the dirt I’ve got on me.”

  “Just as you like,” said Lovis, “but before you do, you could at least tidy up the hair and beards of those other wild goats.”

  Noddle-Pete would be glad to, he said. He was skillful with the shears when there were sheep and lambs to be clipped, so he could certainly make short work of any old wild goat

  “But I’m going to leave my own two little tufts of hair alone. No unnecessary fuss, for I’ll soon be under the ground,” he said, stroking his bald pate contentedly.

  Then Matt flung his mighty arms around Noddle-Pete and lifted him a good way off the floor. “You stop that about dying! I haven’t lived a day of my earthly life without you yet, you old fool, so you can’t just go and die behind my back, as you very well know!”

  “We shall see, little boy, we shall see,” said Noddle-Pete, looking thoroughly pleased with himself.

  Lovis spent the rest of the day washing filthy robbers’ clothes in the yard of the fortress, and in the wardrobe room the robbers looked for clothes to put on while their own were drying. Most were garments that Matt’s grandfather had stolen and brought home in his time. How could anyone in his senses have worn getups like these? Fooloks wondered, doubtfully pulling a red shirt over his head. It was all very well for him, but it was much worse for Knott and Little-Snip, who had to be content with petticoats and c
orsets, since all the men’s clothing had already gone when they came to look. It did not improve their tempers, but Matt and Ronia were kept amused for a long time.

  Lovis served chicken soup that night to make up for everything with her robbers. They sat sulkily around the long table, scrubbed clean and cut tidy and quite unrecognizable. Even the smell was different.

  But when the powerful scent of Lovis’s chicken soup spread down the long table, the robbers stopped sulking. And as soon as they had eaten, they sang and danced as they used to do, though a little more tamely than usual. Knott and Little-Snip in particular avoided any of the more violent leaps.

  Eight

  And then spring came like a shout of joy to the woods around Matt’s Fort. The snow melted, streaming down all the cliff faces and finding its way to the river. And the river roared and foamed in the frenzy of spring and sang with all its waterfalls a wild spring song that never died. Ronia heard it every waking hour and even in her nightly dreams. The long, terrible winter was over. The Wolf’s Neck had long been free of snow. There was a turbulent stream rushing down it now, and the water splashed around the horses’ hooves when Matt and his robbers came riding early one morning through the narrow pass. They sang and whistled as they rode out. Oh, ho, at last their splendid robbers’ life was beginning again!

  And at last Ronia was going to her woods, which she had missed so much. The moment the snow melted and all the ice thawed away, she should have been there to see what was happening in her domain, but Matt had stubbornly kept her at home. The spring forests were full of dangers, he claimed, and he would not let her go until it was time for him to set out with his robbers.

  “Off you go then,” he said, “and don’t drown yourself in some treacherous little pool.”

  “Oh, yes, I shall,” Ronia said. “To give you something to make a fuss about at last.”

  Matt gazed gloomily at her. “My Ronia,” he said with a sigh. Then he flung himself into the saddle, led his robbers down the slopes, and was gone.