The Snake Pit (22 page)

On St. Olav’s Eve, Olav himself was busy hanging up the tapestry. He moved along the bench and fastened the long piece with wooden hooks, which he drove in between the topmost log of the wall and the roof. Eirik followed him on the floor, gazing at the worked pictures: there were knights and longships with men on board. He knew that soon the best picture of all was coming—a house with pillars and shingled roof like a church and a banquet going on inside with drinking-horns and tankards on the table. Eirik had to peep into the roll of stuff that still lay on the bench—and in so doing he chanced to pull down a long piece of that which his father had just made to hang right.

Olav jumped down, pulled the boy from under the folds of tapestry, and flung him on the floor:

“Out with you—you are ever in my way, bastard, doing mischief—”

At that moment Ingunn appeared in the door of the anteroom with the lap of her gown full of flowers. She let her burden fall straight on the floor.—He saw that she had heard.

Olav did not get a word out. Shame, anger, and a confused feeling that soon he would not know which way to turn made a tumult within him. He stepped up on the bench and began to hang up the tapestry that had been torn down. Eirik had fled out of the door. Ingunn picked up her flowers and strewed them over the floor. Olav dared not turn round and look at her. He did not feel equal to talking to her now.

One morning a few days later Ingunn was sitting with Eirik on the top of the crag behind the houses of Hestviken. She had been down to Saltviken—a path led over the height; it would serve at a pinch for riding, but was little used: the common way between Hestviken and Saltviken was by boat.

There was sparkling sunshine and a fresh breeze; from where Ingunn sat she saw the fiord dark blue, dotted with white foam. The breakers dashed up in spray, glittering white along the reddish rocks that planted their feet out into the water all along the coast. The morning sun still lay over Hudrheimsland. From the height where she sat she could see a little of the cultivation on the hillside—it was for that she liked this spot. And up here it sounded fainter and farther off, that intolerable roar of the sea which tormented her at home at the manor till she thought it must come from within her own weary, bewildered head. But there was a kind of taste of salt, and that flickering of light from the sea in the uneasy air—she could never accustom herself to that. She grew tired of it.

Eirik lay half in his mother’s lap playing with a bunch of big bluebells. One after another he tore off the flowers, turned them inside out, and blew into them. Ingunn laid her thin hand on his cheek and looked down into his sunburned face. How handsome, how handsome he was, this son of hers—his eyes the shade of bog water in sunshine, his hair as fine as silk! It had grown much darker in the last year; it was brown now. Eirik scratched his head.

“Louse me now, Mother mine. Ugh, they bite so hard in this heat!”

Ingunn gave a little laugh. She took out her comb from the pouch at her belt and began to clean the boy’s head with slow, caressing strokes. It made Eirik sleepy—and the scent of the fir woods in the sun’s heat and the sourish fragrance of the hair-moss on which she was lying, the clanging of bells from the cattle moving on the slope farther up the valley, lulled Ingunn to sleep.

She started at the little sound of a dog that came swimming through the high bilberry bushes. It sniffed at the two, jumped without a sound over their knees, and set off again down the path.

Her heart still trembled from being waked so suddenly. Now she heard horse’s hoofs on the rock far below. Her head fell back against the trunk of the fir tree by which she sat—oh, that he should be back already! She had felt so sure he would not come home before evening at the earliest, perhaps not before the morrow.

They came over her again, the same thronging fears and despair. This thing that she had gone in dread of the last month—she could not face it, she felt that; it would be her death this time. And she could almost have wished it—had it not been for Eirik’s sake; then he would be left alone with Olav. And in the midst of her great dread this little anxiety started up—why had Olav come home so soon? Had he not been able to accomplish his errand in the neighbouring parish, or had he fallen out with those folk?—and maybe he came home in yet worse humour than when he set out.

Instinctively she had thrown her arm about her child, as though to protect and hide him. Eirik struggled and freed himself:

“Let me go now—father is coming.” He got on his feet, and his mother saw that he turned red as he went along the path, seeming a little uncertain and hesitating. Ingunn followed.

She saw the white horse among the trees; Olav was walking by its side. When Ingunn came up he was showing Eirik something that lay at his foot—a great lynx.

“I found her over on the mountain here to the south—she was out in broad daylight. She has young in her lair—her teats are full of milk.” He turned over the dead lynx with his spear, shooing off the dog, which lay on its front paws barking, and holding the uneasy horse. Eirik cried aloud with joy, squatting down over his
father’s quarry. Olav smiled at the boy. “We could not find the lair—though it cannot have been very far away. But there was a scree with fallen trees on it—she must have had her track among the trees.”

“Will they starve to death now, the young ones?” asked Ingunn. Eirik fumbled in the light fur under the belly of the lynx, found the swollen teats, and squeezed them—the boy’s hands were all bloody. Olav was telling him how it was easy enough to get the lynx when it strayed out in broad daylight.

“Starve to death?—ay, or else they will eat each other in the lair, the strongest will come through. Unless they were born very early in the summer—that is like enough, since the dam was not with them.”

Ingunn looked at the dead beast of prey. A soft and warm place the young had had as they huddled together, nosing for the sources of milk in the light fur under her soft belly. The heavy thigh that she had protected them with was tense with muscle and sinew, the claws were like steel. When she licked her young, the cruel white fangs showed up. The tufts of hair in the ears had been given her to make her the more wary and sharp of hearing; the black streaks in her yellow eyes had been like keen slits. She had been well fitted to protect and defend and discipline her offspring.

Her own child, he had such a poor wretch of a mother, unable to defend her own. And she herself had brought it to such a pass that he had none to protect him, and most he needed protection against the man he called father.

“I cannot believe even Mary, God’s Mother, will pray for a mother who betrays her own son,” Tora had said. And she had already betrayed her child when she suffered him to be begotten; she saw that now.

Olav and Eirik were pulling up bunches of moss and wiping away the blood that had got on the saddle and had run down the side of the white horse. Olav helped the boy into the saddle and placed the reins in his hand.

“He is so quiet, Apalhvit; Eirik will be able to ride him home, though it is a little steep below here.” He walked a few steps down, cheering the boy and the horse with kind words. Then he returned to the lynx, bound its limbs together with thongs; now
and again he looked up, watching the boy on the big white horse, till they were lost among the trees.

“Nay, we came to no agreement—’twas vain to stay there disputing with those Kaaressons,” he said. “I think that Eirik ought to have Apalhvit—is he not seven winters now, the boy? ’Twill soon be time he had his own horse—and ’tis unsafe to let the boy ride Sindre, he is too skittish.—What are you crying for?” he asked rather sharply, as he rose to his feet.

“If you gave Eirik the fairest colt ever bred—with saddle of silver and bridle of gold—what would that serve, Olav, if you cannot alter your feelings—can never look at the boy without a grudge?”

“That is not true,” said Olav hotly. “You are heavy too, you sow of Satan”—he had got the lynx on his spear and hoisted it over his shoulder. “Do use your wits, Ingunn,” he went on, rather more gently. “Can I have any joy of the son who is to take this manor after me, if he is always to hide behind your skirt, now that he is of an age to need a father’s teaching and discipline? You must venture it now, to let
me
take Eirik in hand; else there will never be a man of him.”

The breeze up here on the height fluttered his long grey cloak; the wide brim of his black cloth hat flapped. Olav had come to look much older in the last few years; he was no stouter than before, yet his figure seemed much more burly, broader and rounder behind the shoulders. And the pale eyes looked smaller and even sharper than of old, as his face was now browned by the weather. The whites were somewhat bloodshot, no doubt because the man had too little sleep.

He felt her staring at him, till he was forced to turn his head. He met her complaining glance with a hard eye.

“I know what you are thinking of, Ingunn, I spoke a word in wrath—God knows I wish it unsaid.”

Ingunn crouched as though expecting a blow.

Olav began again, forcing himself to be calm: “But you must not act so, Ingunn, as to entice him away from me, as though you were afraid I should—Never have I chastised Eirik excessively—”

“I do not remember that my father ever laid a hand upon you, Olav.”

“No, Steinfinn cared not to trouble himself so far on my account as to correct me. But I have never departed from my own
word—not from my word to you, Ingunn, in any case. And now I have let all men know that Eirik is
our
son—yours and mine.”

He saw that she was ready to faint. But it seemed to him that this time he
could
not turn aside—saying some new thing to blot out the traces of what he had already said. He went on:

“’Tis worst for us all if you steal away with your motherly love and dare not take Eirik on your lap when I am there to see. Deal with the boy in hole-and-corner fashion, as though you crept away by stealth to meet a leman.”

He took her hand, pressed it hard and kept it. “Remember, my dear—by so doing you serve Eirik worst.”

On the Eve of St. Matthew,
³
early in the day, Eirik came rushing in to his parents, who were in the hall. He was screaming at the top of his voice. Kaare and Rannveig, the two children Björn had left, who were still with Torhild, came after him, and Olav and Ingunn heard from them what had happened.

The stoat that lived in the turf roof of the sheepcot had had another litter of young, and Eirik had tried to dig out the nest—though Olav had said they were to be left in peace this summer. Eirik had been bitten in the hand.

Olav seized the boy, lifted him up, and carried him to his mother’s arms. Hurriedly he took the child’s hand and looked at it—the bite was in the little finger.

“Are you able to hold him—or shall I fetch in Torhild? Be quiet—say nothing to Eirik. He can be saved if we are quick enough about it.”

The stoat’s bite is the most poisonous of all animals’; the flesh of him who is bitten by an enraged stoat rots and falls from the bones till the man dies, or else he gets the falling sickness, for all stoats have falling sickness. Only if one be bitten in the tip of one finger there may be a chance of saving life and health, if the finger be cut off and the wound burned out.

Quick as lightning Olav made all ready. Among the smaller implements kept in a crack of the wall he found a suitable iron and put it in the fire, bidding Kaare Björnsson blow. Then he drew his dagger and set to sharpening it.

But the serving-maid who had been called in to hold the boy began to scream loudly. Eirik was scared already—now he guessed
what his father would do to him. With a howl of the utmost terror he tore himself away from his mother and ran like a rat from wall to wall howling worse and worse, and Olav after him.

A ladder stood leading to the loft above the closet. Eirik ran up it, and Olav followed him. In the darkness among all the piled-up chattels he got hold of the boy at last and came down the ladder carrying him. Eirik kicked and sprawled and yelled inside the flap of his father’s kirtle, which Olav had had to wrap about his head so as not to be bitten by the maddened child.

Ingunn did not look as though he could expect help of her. Torhild had come in—Olav gave Eirik to her, and the two other serving-women also took a hand. Eirik fought and screamed in mortal fear as they struggled to wind a cloth about his head.

Then the father pulled the cloth from the boy’s eyes.

“Your life is at stake, Eirik—look at me, boy—you will die, if you will not let me save you—”

Olav was in a raging tumult. This was the last of her children and she loved the child as she had never loved him—if she were to lose Eirik, it would be the end of all. He must and would save the boy; if it might cost his own life, he must! At the same time he felt a cruel desire and longing to get home at last on this flesh that had come between him and her, to maim and burn it—and in spite of that, something arose from the innermost depths of his being and forbade him to harm the defenceless child.

“Do not scream like that,” he yelled in fury. “You wretched whelp—do not be so afraid—it is no worse than—look here!”

He set the point of his dagger to the lining of the sleeve at his left wrist and slit and cut till his shirt and the sleeve of his kirtle hung in tatters right up to the shoulder. He quickly wound the rags about his arm, so that they should not be in the way, took the red-hot iron by the tongs, and pressed it against his upper arm.

Eirik had stopped howling from fear and surprise at what his father was doing; he lay limply in the women’s arms and stared. But now he set up a fresh shriek of terror. Olav had had a vague idea of putting heart into the boy, but all he had done was to scare away the rest of his wits: the smell of the scorched flesh, the sight of the spasm that passed over Olav’s face as he withdrew the iron from the burn, made the boy clean mad. A straight stream of blood ran down the man’s white arm as he let it drop; his dagger had entered the flesh as he started.