In the Wilderness (18 page)

They came out on some little crags, and beneath them lay a great bog, which would be tiresome to go round; so Olav sat down to let the Tveit folk get ahead. But now it sounded as if they had come to a halt on the path just below here—they made no move, and Gudbrand vomited with loud retching, while the others formed a ring and made sport of him. Eirik lay on his stomach on the close-cropped grass, laughing quietly and mimicking to his father the words and noises that came up from below.

“Look at the moon, Father,” said Eirik. The half-moon was near its setting now, floating on its back above the tree-tops in the west, with a few thin strips of golden cloud lying under it. Near it was a great star blazing alone in the pale blue sky.

“Ay,” said Olav. “We shall have wind.”

“It looks like a ship,” said Eirik, laughing quietly at his own idea, “sailing on the sea—and the big star is like a dog running after the ship.”

“Nay, Eirik”—Olav could not help smiling—“how can a dog run after a ship that sails on the sea?”

“Oh yes,” said the boy eagerly, “they have left it behind—and now it runs along the shore, in and out among the headlands, barking and howling after the boat.”

The boy’s words reminded Olav of something—he had once heard or dreamed something like this about a dog that ran along
the shore wailing after a ship that sailed away—a dog, or a man, that had been left behind.

He looked down at the lad’s upturned face—quite pale it seemed in the twilight, and the wide-open eyes were dark in the shadow. It was as though the man in moving had tightened the invisible bond between them.

“Of the noise of cats’ treading and the beards of women and the roots of the rocks and the breath of the fishes and the spittle of the birds—” it was a rigmarole he had known as a child, of someone who had forged a chain, and it was more pliant than silk and bound faster than fetters of steel—a wild beast was to stay bound in it till doomsday.

It was quiet down on the road. “Come,” said Olav, and unconsciously he let his hand drop on the boy’s shoulder, kept it there a moment.

They went down and found the path again. Of the Tveit folk they saw no more and reached without delay the booth where Olav had hired night quarters for them.

The bed was exceedingly narrow. Eirik fell asleep at once, and very soon he turned over in his sleep, so that he almost lay on top of his father.

In the narrow, uncomfortable couch, with the darkness around thick with the smell of men, Olav lay feeling the pressure of Eirik’s thin, slender body, the warm scent of his skin and hair—without distaste, with an unreasoning sense of pity. Though only God and His blessed Mother could tell why he should have compassion on Eirik. He knew of nothing to make him pity his son, but it was as though the lad’s very youth made him soft-hearted—though that is a fault one soon grows out of, thought Olav.

Olav got no proper sleep, but lay, as it were, rolling back and forth between sleep and waking like a piece of driftwood on the beach. But after an hour or two, when he heard some men moving in the other rooms, Olav gently withdrew from beside the sleeping lad and went out to see to the horses himself. He had not the heart to wake the boy.

T
HE FRIENDSHIP
that had grown up between Olav Audunsson and his kinsfolk at Rynjul and Skikkjustad was declining again. Una had gone so far, that day in the spring when he sailed her home, that they could not honourably carry the matter farther. And Olav made no move. So they avoided each other. But that the people of Rynjul resented it Olav was well aware.

How his conduct was interpreted by his neighbours he had a chance of hearing one day when he met Sira Hallbjörn down on the wharf. The priest burst out in his abrupt way:

“A great gull you were, Olav, to take up again with that Torhild woman—she coaxed you into buying her wretched cot and, worse than that, you let her spoil a good marriage for you.”

“What idle talk is this?” Olav’s face turned red as fire. “I ask counsel of no one, either in buying land or taking a wife—in such things I do as I
will.”

“Pooh! You think so, I can well believe. You thought, no doubt, you had your will with her when she did as she willed. Torhild Björnsdatter is the wiser of you two. Beware now, Olav, that she make not another halter for you of her girdle.”

Olav replied angrily: “Howbeit, this can be no concern of yours, Sira Hallbjörn, so long as I have not lain with her again. Belike I may take counsel where I will—I have not begged it of you!”

He turned his back and leaped down into his boat.

But afterwards a raging desire for Torhild flared up in him again—day and night, day and night. Simply to take her to him in defiance. If folk were resolved to meddle with his affairs, then let them have something to meddle with. And Björn—he had banned the child’s memory, driven back his thoughts whenever they would go that way. Now it came upon him—was it worth the trouble? So many a thing had gone amiss with him, should he not after all take what good there was to take?

Waking and sleeping, he dreamed of his son. But behind the image of the little fair-skinned boy he saw the other fair child—Cecilia. For her sake he must stand firm and deny himself that which he desired. It would not be good for her to grow up in a
house of which her father’s leman was mistress. Not yet had he wrecked Cecilia’s future, and he would not do so either.

Olav saw little of his daughter now. If she ran out into the yard to play and her father stopped to speak to her, Cecilia had scarce time to answer him. At night she slept with Ragna in Torhild’s old house. But Ragna was only a poor serving-woman, unfitted to rear the daughter of a man of Olav’s condition when the maid grew a little older. Moreover Ragna had all the household duties to perform and her own three children to herd. The eldest lay outside the house door all day long, drivelling and snoring and rocking his great head—the poor child lacked something of his wits—but the year-old twins were lively as kittens and could be seen creeping and crawling everywhere in the yard and across the thresholds.

Olav was at his wits’ end to know what to do with this daughter, to have her brought up in seemly fashion. Maybe
this
would have been easier if he had married Disa—though one never knows with any woman how she will turn out as a stepmother.

And there was this Liv hanging about the place early and late-Cecilia clung to her—she remembered no mother else.

Then quite unexpectedly a way appeared out of these difficulties, it seemed to Olav. One day two townsmen from Tunsberg came to him with a message that Asger Magnusson lay dying in the Premonstratensian convent in their town and would speak with him. Olav had nothing special to do that day, and the wind was fair; so he sailed over at once.

It seemed strange to him that they should thus come up again in his life, one after another, the men he had known in his youth and for years had wellnigh forgotten. It was almost as if he had come out of the fairy hill—and as they say of those whom the fairies have carried off, so it was with him; he felt a stranger among these men and cared little for them one way or the other. Not that there had ever been any warmth of feeling between him and Hallvard Steinfinnsson or the men of Tveit. Asger in any case had been his friend: they were distantly related to each other, and when he was in Denmark he and Asger had associated not a little, though they had never had much to say to each other—this friendship was the only tie that had not broken of those he had formed in his days of outlawry. Apart from this the years with his uncle
at Vikings’ Bay seemed to Olav like a half-forgotten dream. But Asger had come hither to Norway with the banished Danish lords, and so they had been brothers-in-arms on the raids against Denmark. At the thought of those war summers Olav’s heart rejoiced—he longed to see his comrade again. He caught himself feeling thus as he stood at the steering-oar keeping an eye on the familiar sea-marks. Asger was surely not so near dying as the townsmen said, ’twould not be like him.

But next morning after mass when he was taken to the upper chamber where the Dane lay abed, he saw at once that death could not be far off. Asger’s great broad face was greenish grey beneath his red beard, and his powerful, rather hoarse voice had shrunk to a broken wheeze. And he said as much himself as soon as he saw his friend: “ ’Tis all over with me now, Olav.”

On a chest under the little dormer in the gable sat an old woman and a little girl. The woman stood up and gave her hand to Olav when he greeted her. Her appearance was such as to cause some wonder in Olav: she was a good head taller than he, broad-shouldered, thin and erect in her black weeds; outside her coif she wore a dark-blue widow’s veil. The narrow face, white as bone, must once have been passing fair: her great blue eyes still shone beneath bushy, iron-grey brows, and the ridge of her fine hooked nose was glossy as ivory. But her cheeks were furrowed with long wrinkles and she had strong tufts of grey hair at the corners of her mouth. She was the mother of Asger’s wife, and her name was Mærta Birgersdatter. Olav had never before heard of any living woman being called Mærta, but this one looked as though she brought no shame on her patroness, the good lady of Bethany.

She went out at once, and Olav seated himself on the edge of his friend’s bed. Asger was now an outlaw both in Norway and in Denmark; he had had the misfortune to slay a rich man in his home district of Hising, where his wife had brought him an estate. And the slain man was a friend both of King Haakon and of Count Jacob. Nevertheless he had fled hither to Tunsberg; he was well known of old in the convent here, and so sick was he that they might well let him rest in peace while treating for his atonement, or die in sanctuary. For the Abbot maintained that this convent had right of asylum, though it was doubtful if this had ever been confirmed. But whatever might be the upshot of this, there
was his mother-in-law and his child; would Olav take them in? Olav said yes at once and gave Asger his hand on it.

He had heard at the time that Asger had made a good marriage in the south. But now Asger told him that his wife had died three years before, and he himself had been broken in health of late years, after he had been shipwrecked one winter; he had suffered some inward hurt and since then he had been spitting blood and had little joy of his food.

“And
yet
you were not so broken but that you cut down Sir Paal in his shirt of mail?” asked Olav, and could not resist smiling.

Asger laughed and coughed weakly. No—It was the mother-in-law, Olav guessed, who had been most helpful in drawing Asger into these quarrels—ay, she looked to be the right one for that, and Asger had never been wont to sing small either. But the man was used to the ups and downs of fortune, and now he took his ill luck calmly. But his child’s future seemed to weigh heavily on the father’s mind.

Olav turned his eyes to the little girl sitting on the chest; he held out a hand to her. “Come hither, Bothild, my foster-daughter-to-be—shall we talk together, you and I?”

The child sat still as a mouse, and when the strange man spoke to her, she dropped her eyelids—she had thick black lashes. She was a little bigger than Cecilia—six winters old, her father said.

Olav saw that she was a most comely child—though she resembled Asger. She had the same broad face as he, a low, broad forehead, eyes far apart, and a short, square chin, but her skin was bright and clear, her forehead white as milk under the smooth, auburn hair that lay in two heavy plaits over her chest. When she looked up at Olav for an instant her eyes were a pure sky-blue. The lay brother who came up with Olav had given her a big apple, and there she sat clasping it untasted with both hands—she looked so still and timid, as though she understood how friendless and forlorn she was in the world.

Olav had never liked the smell of apples—it seemed to him mawkish or musty—and now it was mingled with the smell of sickness and bed-straw and fusty woollen garments. And the sight of the child’s motionless grief stirred up a flood of vague tenderness and pain in Olav’s breast. Memories of all the defenceless children he had seen in the course of his life, of mortal wounds inflicted on the weak and helpless, and every thought he had had
of his own children, if they should be orphaned, of the child whose father he was, but over whom he could never have a father’s right—all this passed through his mind like a stream of shadows. He went over to where the little maid was sitting and caressed her soft, cool cheek.

“Will you not look at me, Bothild? I mean you well. I have a daughter at home, Cecilia—you are to be foster-sisters and live together. How will that please you?”

Without a sound Bothild slid down off the chest and slipped under Olav’s arm. She was away to her father’s couch, nestled up to him, and took his hand in both hers.

“I will be with you, dear Father mine,” she said miserably.

Olav picked up her apple from the floor and gave it to her.

Asger Magnusson opened his little bright-blue eyes wide, as though in great pain; his voice was feeble with helplessness:

“You must not take it amiss, kinsman Olav. I have given this daughter of mine her way more than was good for her.” He put his arm about her and clasped the child’s dark little head against his shoulder. “You must not think ill of her for this.”

“Nay, nay.” Olav sat on the bedstead and turned his eyes away. He felt quite abashed with pity for them both.

About a month later Olav received a message that Asger Magnusson was dead, but it was not till after Yule that he could sail down and fetch the old woman and the child. The Abbot told Olav that the dead man’s goods had been seized, but doubtless Mærta Birgersdatter had saved no small store of movables in that great chest of hers. Since Asger when living had always proved himself a friend of the monks, the Abbot offered, if Olav would rather escape the charge of the poor child, to give him a letter to the lady Groa in Oslo, asking if she would take Bothild for the love of God—the little maid seemed well fitted to be a nun, for she was quiet and gentle, a winning child. Olav thanked him, but said he had promised the dead man to be to Bothild in the place of a father.