The Son Avenger (40 page)

He did not believe there had been a shadow of truth in Jörund’s talk. It was not like her—nor like Aslak either. With this man his sister was in good hands, and the manor was in good hands. He would have liked to go up to the stream and look at the mill Aslak was building—he was tired of carrying his corn round to Hestviken by boat, he said. But he felt he never had any desire to seek out his brother-in-law, though they were always good friends when they met. He liked Aslak and thought well of him, but there was no help for it.

He had said to Eldrid one day: “I know not what it is, but when I am in company with Aslak it always comes over me that the man finds life irksome.”

“That is likely enough,” said his wife with a kind of smile. “But I do not believe he finds it so irksome as you do.”

Eirik looked at her in surprise: “No! You are right there,” he replied with a laugh.

He went over to the cherry orchard and looked at it. The first cuttings he had planted were now trees with trunks as thick as a child’s arm, and glossy bark; ground shoots had come up all about them. The little plantation was full of yellow buds ready to burst. In time there would be a whole grove here as in the convent garden.

He rowed homeward in the course of the afternoon. On the shore, before one rounds the point of the lookout crag, there is a little strip of sandy beach below the rust-red rocks. Eirik saw that his father stood there with his little bow; he was struggling with it once more, trying if he could train himself to use his half-palsied arm and hand. It hurt Eirik anew whenever he saw that Olav
could
not give up—again and again he attempted to conquer his disability.

He lived in continual anxiety for his father when the stricken old man was wandering out alone. Far away over the high ground to the south he dragged himself; the housefolk had seen him sitting there looking down into Saltviken. But when Eirik asked if he should sail him out thither one day so that he could have a sight of the manor, Olav shook his head. Round the whole bay he
walked, up Kverndal or along the ridge of the Bull. He might easily fall over the edge or have another stroke, lie there and perish. But Eirik dared not send anyone after him to keep an eye on the old man—he had seen that nothing would distress his father more. And he must be left to go his way—he could not possibly endure to sit ever indoors or drag his crippled body about among the houses of the manor.

Not a day passed but Eirik renewed his prayer to be allowed to bear the penance in his father’s stead. And each time he felt it with a deeper thrill—disablement, helplessness, inactivity—it made him afraid. For he knew a man cannot feel it otherwise than as a humiliation—a more bitter shame than being a bastard. Never before had he seen so clearly that of all vainglory the sweetest is that which springs from pride in one’s bodily strength and perfect health.

But none other than Eldrid guessed that he laid upon himself penitential exercises; he had to use such measure that none might observe any change in him in his daily work. Then his wife said to him one day:

“Now all is otherwise than when we first met, Eirik. Then we were driven on by such desires as are kindled by hate and anger and scorn. I will speak no more of it now, but you must know that I am willing, whenever you wish that our life together shall come to an end.”

“You must consider well, Eldrid,” said her husband quietly. “What you have in mind would be a good issue, but not unless we are both agreed on it.”

A
NOTHER
winter went by, and then came the spring—early that year. As soon as the ground began to be clear of snow, Olav’s unrest came upon him again; he wandered abroad early and late, though he no longer went so far as before. From the manor they constantly saw the dark, bent, and crooked figure moving slowly against the sky on the sun-baked rocks by the shore or under the brow of the wood beyond the fields. He often went to the river-mouth, where the Kverndal stream falls into the bay. A little way
from the beach there was a stretch of dry sward below an overhanging crag—Eirik had haunted the place, digging for Lapps’ arrows, when he was a boy. There they often found Olav sitting.

It had become the custom for Eldrid to go out and fetch him home to meals. From her first coming to Hestviken Olav had met his son’s wife with a lingering shadow of the quiet and charming courtesy that had become him so well in his younger years—whenever he was willing or remembered to show it. Eldrid had slipped into the life of the manor much more easily than, for instance, Aslak, and Eirik guessed that Olav liked his wife. By degrees it had come about that Olav seemed less worried at accepting help from the mistress of the house than from anyone else.

Olav was taking his usual walk across the fields one fine morning. Along the high balks the pale grass of the year before lay crushed, but the bright new blades had come up so well in the last few days that soon they would cover the old. Every time Olav had to stand still for a moment, he stared at it, unseeing—the dark spines of withered meadowsweet and angelica were surrounded at the roots with thick wreaths of new crisped leaves. He leaned heavily on the spear that he used as a staff. He had grown used to the pains in his legs, till he felt them without a thought; his sound leg ached in the joints and was always tender and tired, but the half-dead one was full of a dull pricking and shooting.

The trees at the edge of the wood were breaking into leaf, but some of them were already quite green. Every year it was the same trees that came out first—earliest of all hereabout was the young wild cherry that grew at the foot of Hvitserk’s mound up in the great field. Today he noticed all at once that it had grown into an old and ample tree, spreading wide its summer foliage.

Birds winged their way among the thickets; their piping and chirping came from the wood. Some osiers down by the river were yellow as gold with blossom, and their scent hung in the air, mild and over-sweet.

Olav crossed the bridge, struggled up the hill to his seat under the rock. Then he heard that at the bottom of the slope a band of children were bathing in the sea. He dragged himself farther, stood behind a clump of bursting alders, and looked down at the youngsters.

The same stretch of dry sward ran here between small rocks up to the wood on the flank of the Bull. Here the bay was shallow, with a bottom of fine light clay, so that the water had a milky look about the naked bodies of the children who splashed and played in it. Kolbein was one of them—he knew his grandson’s straw-coloured mop of hair. The boy was now ten, so thin that the bones of his chest showed plainly, and his joints were knotted like growing glades of grass. The others were the children of the new foreman who had succeeded old Tore, and some no doubt belonged to the new folk Eirik had taken in at Rundmyr.

Kolbein was swimming a race with another boy—blowing and kicking far too much, thought the old man. Right up on the edge of dry seaweed toddled a little one—it was the foreman’s youngest, a boy, he saw, the little tot that grubbed about in the courtyard at home every day. Now and then he gave an angry yell, for the rocks pricked his feet, but no one turned round to look at him, and so he managed to get along by himself. His sister, who must have been in charge of the little ones, sat on a big rock far out in the water, and before her a tall, handsome boy stood in the water up to his middle. Those two were older than the rest, perhaps twelve or thirteen. The girl took the mussels that the boy opened and handed to her—she was white and fair, her bosom slightly rounded already; her dark hair dangled down her back.

All at once it seemed it could not be half a hundred years since they had been the two biggest of the band of children who played about the tarn in the forest to the north of Frettastein. It was more like a dream he had dreamed, and not so long ago.

The fat little boy had come right up to the grassy slope. Solemnly straddling, with stomach thrust out, he came along—and at that instant Olav descried, just in front of where he stood and right in the child’s path, a great adder sunning itself on some stones. He went forword—instinctively he walked more steadily as he hurried to where the snake lay. But as he was about to thrust at it with his spear, it raised its head, hissed, and struck at the flashing steel—then glided in under the stones.

The little child had set up a howl. When Olav looked back, the children stood at the edge of the water staring, while the big sister dashed toward them, splashing the water all about her.

Awhile after, as he lay beneath the crag, the children came walking past along the path hidden by the bushes; they were on
the way home. The big sister was leading the little boy by the hand, hauling him after her, as she chatted to her friend:

“Nay, afraid of him we are not. Mother says we have but to make the sign of the cross when we see him, then he cannot harm us. But an ugly sight he is, Olav the bad. He has been like that since he stood before the church door in Oslo to take his oath upon the book—a false oath it was, and then he was
struck
so. His left hand is
black!”

Instinctively Olav looked at his palsied hand—black it was not, nor does one make an oath with the left hand. It was surely nothing but child’s talk. Although—could children have made up that about the oath, and the name—Olav the bad?

The sign, the sign that he waited for—he watched for it everywhere, in odd or even. In the games of a band of children and the words of a little girl—

In the evening he saw the child again; she was walking with her mother and one of the serving-women toward the break of the woods, and they carried pails and pans, were going to the summer byre. No, there was nothing in her now that recalled Ingunn. He had never noticed before what they called her—Reidun, said her mother.

When Reidun found that he was looking at her, she seemed confused and furtively crossed herself.

Olav had slept but a short space, he thought, when he was awakened by the sharp pain under his ribs—but tonight it was worse than ever before, and he was cold too; an icy chill had lodged between his shoulder-blades, and when he breathed, it seemed to run over, making the cold sweat trickle down his body—his hands and feet were as cold as clammy stones.

He must have lain too long on the grass today, he decided, old wreck that he was.

Then came a sudden wave of heat—hotter and hotter till his head and body were aglow, but his limbs were still as cold as lead. The heat seemed to stream from the great lump of pain that lay embedded in his body at the edge of the chest; it was as though he had a red-hot stone there, and the stinging pains that shot out from it, up into his lungs and through his entrails, filled his whole frame with torment. A ceaseless flight of sparks went on within him; now the rain of sparks reached his head and flew around
within his skull; the skin outside was all acreep; now he
saw
the sparks, they swarmed in the darkness, which turned round and round, and the couch beneath him turned, but the ball of pain under his chest was in a ferment, so that he trembled with the effort not to groan aloud, and the sweat ran off him in streams. Till the qualms forced their way upward, dilated chest and throat, filled his mouth with blood and loathsomeness, and then the surge of rusty blood burst the dam of his clenched teeth.

It gave relief as soon as the vomiting was over. He lay relaxed, feeling the pains ebbing back to their source, and now it hurt him in a clean and honest way, like a wound. He was now shivering with cold too, between the sweat-drenched bedclothes, but that did him good. If only he had been able to wipe away the blood that he lay in—it smelt so foully.

Then all at once he was on a path that led through a gap with screes on both sides and spruce firs growing in the crevices. Beyond the gap he saw water far below; it was grey weather, the land on the other side was shrouded in mist—and he knew the place again; he was at home on the shore of Lake Mjösen, and as he walked he seemed to see himself, at sixteen, clear and distinct as a raw lad in the coolness of his youthful health.

Now he saw that Ingunn was walking a little in front of him—in her old red kirtle; her heavy light-brown plaits fell half-loosened down her slender back. He began to walk faster; she sauntered ahead without hurrying, but press on as he might, he did not gain on her—it was still just as far between them.

He carried a spear on his shoulder—it was one he had hafted for her, with a red shaft and a short point, but after he had given it her, he had always to carry it for her. It had grown so heavy-heavier and heavier it grew, till his shoulder ached and he was bent double—and Ingunn walked there before him, and he could not come up with her.

Then they came down to the shore, walked along a bay. There was a beach of fine white sand with a dark edge licked by the waves, and the waters of the lake were grey. He still saw Ingunn far away, and the spear he carried on his shoulder weighed him down, and in his chest he had a smarting wound from which the blood gushed out—he saw it run down upon the sand, which sucked it up with a thousand greedy little mouths.

Olav awoke in pitch-darkness, knew that he had cried out. He
heard someone tumble out of bed in the room beyond and strike a light. Soon after, Eirik appeared in the doorway with a burning torch in his hand, naked in his cloak, with the flaps of it tied about his waist.

“Are you sick, Father?”

Eldrid appeared behind her husband. They threw the light on him.

“He has thrown up again.” Eldrid found a rag, wiped him and the bed, while Eirik raised his body. He was heavy with sleep and went clumsily about it, so that Olav could not repress a low groan: the sparks of pain began to whirl within him again.

“’Tis all blood and clotted gore.”

“He has been in a sweat. Better lay more over him.” Eldrid fetched a skin coverlet.

“Shall I carry you in, Father—to the other bed?”

Olav rolled his head in refusal—he lay powerless among the pillows.

“Then I must lie in here—it were unwise to leave him alone tonight,” said Eirik to his wife.