The Son Avenger (20 page)

There was great shortage of fodder in Hestviken that year, as they had Jörund’s beasts as well as their own, and they had had to make use of an old byre that had been in a tumbledown state as long as any could remember. It was mended in some sort, but the starving animals suffered horribly in it. Cecilia would come out in tears when she had been feeding the cattle there. Not often had anyone seen her weep for what might befall folk, but one evening as she came from the byre and met Eirik in the outer room, she threw her arms about his neck in the darkness.

“Eirik—you who pray so much to God, can you not pray that spring may come early this year?”

“I do so, you know it well.”

After Olav had gone to bed that evening, Eirik went to him in the closet and told his father what he had been thinking—that they should take up the farm in Saltviken again. Olav thought they had more profit of the land, using it as they did now, for pasture and hay, than if they let it out at rent. Eirik replied that he did not mean they should take a tenant there, but should carry on the farm with men from here: “if Jörund is to keep ten cows and four horses here at Hestviken, then we ourselves must raise far less stock than before, or move some of it out.”

At last he got a kind of consent out of his father. Eirik took with him Knut and Svein, Ragna’s young sons, and rowed south only a couple of days later with two boatloads of fencing. They
spent a whole week there, making ready what they could. No sooner was the frost out of the ground than he set off again, this time with some of the cattle; and before Harvard’s mass
⁶
Eirik had fenced in most of what had been the home fields, with bush fencing if with nothing else. In time even his father would have to grant he was right—this could be made a good farm.

Olav Audunsson himself had been in to Oslo for the winter fair. And as usual he had made some bargains, which were to be completed by Halvard’s mass. He would now send Eirik in to the town, and Eirik asked Jörund to go with him.

The brothers-in-law stayed in the town a couple of days over the feast; they had met acquaintances, and in the evenings they drank in one house or another. Eirik had a care of himself—he would not enter any of the places where formerly he had been too well known; this was one of the reasons he had asked Jörund to accompany him: if he was with a married man it seemed more natural that he should refuse to go to the common inns and confine himself to the halls of the guilds and the townsmen’s houses. Another reason was that he guessed Jörund was weary to death of Hestviken.

The evening before St. Eirik’s Day
⁷
they both came home late to the armourers’ yard and they were in drink, so that Eirik overslept next morning. On that day at any rate he had meant full surely to hear mass among his own brethren—he had not succeeded in reaching the convent since the first day he was in town—but once more it was too late. The masses were now over in all the churches except St. Halvard’s; he would have to go there, and to the Minorites’ for vespers.

But as he prayed during the mass, the thought came to him that he would ask at the convent for some cuttings of the great cherry tree below the hill. Near the houses in Saltviken was a hollow beside a sunny ledge of rock, just the place where fruit trees might thrive. There were many places at Hestviken too, but his father had laughed at him when he proposed it: this was no knightly manor, that they should plant rose gardens or pleasances. But Eirik already thought of Saltviken as his own manor.

When he came back to their lodging he heard from Galfrid that Jörund had gone out with some men who lived in Brand’s Yard. He went after him and found his brother-in-law in a house
at the far end of this yard, in company with some men who kept cocks there. First they watched the cockfight, and then they went into an upper chamber and drank. After a while some women came in—one of them, called Gyda Honeycake, Eirik had known in old days. She seated herself on his knees, and he drank with her, fondled the wench too a little, thinking all the time that the wisest thing he could do was to go his way, but feeling ashamed because of the other men. Then the dice-box was brought out. Eirik had no desire for gaming, since he had promised to keep himself from such things—but it was not always possible. At the same time he was shy of refusing before the others. There happened to be a man there, one whom Eirik did not know, who said he cared not to throw dice, but was there anyone who would play chess? Here he was freed from two temptations at one stroke, since he could not play chess with Mistress Honeycake in his lap; so Eirik declared himself willing and set the girl down, not without a secret regret at being rid of her. But the stranger, Helge, was so good a chess-player that Eirik soon forgot all else in the game. He would have liked to stay away from vespers too, but when the bells began to ring he remembered the cherry trees, and now he had set his heart on them. So he took his leave. Jörund stayed on. Eirik saw that he was already far gone in drink; he himself had been sobered by his zeal for the game as soon as he had found how skilful an opponent he had. Jörund was playing wildly, but Eirik gave little thought to that: the man was always lucky at dice; besides, he was married now, he could surely take care of himself.

And it had already passed out of his mind when he stood once more in his own church and joined in the singing of
Ave Maris Stella
and the Magnificat. After the service several of the brethren came down to him and he went with them into the convent; now he had to talk with them all, and soon the hour of the evening meal arrived. The end was that Eirik was to sleep in the guest-chamber that night; next morning after mass they could take up those shoots for him. The fruit trees were far advanced, but Father Einar thought that if the shoots were well wrapped in moss and birchbark and he sailed straight back to Saltviken and planted them that evening, they would take root.

Eirik was in church for complin and slept in the guest-chamber, and in the light spring night he was roused by the monk who came
with his hood drawn over his head and whispered:
“Benedicamus Domino.”
And he went to matins, and back to bed again, and to mass. Then for the first time he remembered the purse with the money he had received for his father—it lay at the bottom of his bed in the Richardsons’ house—but surely it was safe enough there.

When once the brethren had procured the cherry-tree cuttings for him, they found many another thing to give him from their garden. Eirik carried the whole load down to the boat, got hold of an old sail, and wrapped his cuttings to keep them from the sun. It was high noon ere he returned to the armourers’. There he was told that Jörund had come in for a moment the evening before, but he had not been home that night.

Eirik walked into the town to seek out his brother-in-law. In Brand’s Yard he met Helge, and from him he heard that late in the evening he had gone with Jörund Rypa to a house where no man would have liked to find his sister’s husband. He was still sitting there when Helge left. Eirik asked Helge to go thither with him, but when they came to the house they were told that Jörund had gone home a little while before. So Eirik went back to their lodging.

There he found Jörund, engaged in packing their belongings. He looked somewhat the worse for wear. Eirik could not bring himself to say a word. He put together the last of their baggage. When he felt in his bed for the purse, it was gone.

“I have taken charge of that,” said Jörund. “I could not tell how long you would be taken up with those brethren of yours—”

Eirik turned sharply on his brother-in-law. But then he swallowed the answer that was on the tip of his tongue. ’Twas bad enough as it was—would be made no better by talking.

So they went down to the boat. During the sail they did not exchange an unnecessary word. Eirik was glad enough they had none of the house-folk with them, so Cecilia would not hear of her husband’s doings.

After supper that evening Eirik gave his father an account of how he had discharged his business. “Jörund has the purse with the money on him.”

Jörund Rypa stood up. “Dear father-in-law of mine—sooth to say, I have not the money here. It fell out that I met a man who made a claim on me—I was in his debt for a mark and a half of silver—a dalesman it was, the man who sold me Greylag, but he
had gone home when I had the money for him—so now I borrowed this money of yours, to be rid of the old debt.”

Olav stared at his son-in-law till Jörund was out of countenance.

“Ay, we were throwing dice too—I am so used to having luck with me in my play; I had looked to win enough to pay this Simon what I owed him. But here is this stoup, which is worth much more than the silver I borrowed of you—” Jörund took a handsome little cup from the folds of his kirtle and placed it on the table before his father-in-law. “You must take this—”

Olav seized the cup, crushed it in his hand, then flung it right in the face of Jörund Rypa.

“I have not asked for your stoup. My silver I will have—neither more nor less!”

Eirik had leaped up. For a second he saw something in Jörund’s face—and he was chilled through with fear—this should not have happened!

Jörund looked down at the twisted cup that lay before him. Then he put his foot on it and trod it flat.

“Take your stoup,” said Olav, so that his son-in-law obeyed.

Then Jörund went out.

Eirik and Olav stood in silence without looking at each other. Then the father asked in a low, angry voice: “And you—were you gaming too?”

Eirik shook his head. “He must have done this the last evening we were in Oslo. We went each our own way. He went to one of his kinsmen, and I was with the brethren, stayed there the night.”

“Did you know no better,” asked Olav cuttingly, “than to lie out there playing with your rosary—when you had
him
with you?
You
ought to know your friend. ’Tis an ill thing to set a sheep to herd a fox.”

Eirik stood in silence. (“For all that, you should not have done it, Father”—but he dared not say it.)

Eirik could not fall asleep that night. He ought not to have left Jörund—his father was right there, more than he knew himself; for he did not know what sort of company it was he had left Jörund in. He might have tried to get Jörund to church with him, but he had shrunk from that; he had wished to be left in peace with those friends of his for whom he had a different kind of affection from that he felt for Jörund.

For all that, his father should not have done it—flung the stoup
in his face and treated him as a thief. Eirik gave a low groan—Jörund would never forget this against his father. And if they were now to live together here—He had a feeling that foreboded, he knew not what disasters.

Then he bethought him of what he had lying in the shed at the waterside, wrapped in a ragged sail. He must have it in the ground as soon as might be, both Father Einar and Brother Hubert had told him that. Eirik would just as soon avoid meeting either his father or Jörund or Cecilia on the morrow. He got up and stole quietly out.

The fiord lay pale and calm in the spring night, which was already turning to dawn. The gently heaving swell licked at the yellow band of seaweed under the rocks, the gulls sat on the surface like white spots—now and then one rose and flew out. But in the pine forest that filled every hollow of the mossy grey hills along the shore, the song of birds awoke little by little. The pale-grey clouds in the south were tinged with red and the northeastern sky turned to orange as he rowed along the broad, curving, white sandy beach of Saltviken. Inland was a great plain, poor pasture, with a few alders that the salt-boilers had spared, and huge old junipers, in shape like gigantic spearheads. Eirik rowed past; he had a mind to look at the nets that he usually had lying out off some rocks in the south of the bay—whether the boys had seen to them while he was from home. As he rowed back again, a score of fish lay floundering in the bottom of the boat.

The houses stood a little way from the beach, half-hidden from the sea behind a low ridge of rust-coloured rock that looked like the back of a gigantic whale. Inland the soil was broken by more such whale-backs as it sloped up to the edge of the forest.

As he passed the door of his house, Eirik heard his dogs—they knew of his coming. He let them out, received their joyful welcome. But the boys, his house-carls as he called them, slept heavily—Knut and Svein in one of the beds and Olav Livsson on the bench. Eirik had moved him hither, for he could see that his beadsman was irksome to them at Hestviken; he would serve in any case to mend their clothes while they lay out here with no woman’s help.

But he had to shut up the dogs again while he was planting—they would scratch up the seedlings as fast as he put them in. He had almost finished his work when he heard the boys going to the
byre. The sun had already been up some time; the fiord and the land on the other side lay bathed in the fresh, pale morning light. When the lads had brought out the cows and let them into the fenced field that he meant to sow with corn next year, his task was done.

He went down, greeted them, and gave orders about the fish. Then he threw his muddy garments to Olav Livsson, took a deep draught of the warm morning milk, and flung himself into his bed, feeling that now he would sleep on till evening.

E
IRIK
spent most of his time at Saltviken that summer. It seemed as if he had transferred all his affection for his ancestral home to this place; he no longer felt happy at Hestviken, and when he was compelled to stay there for some days, he simply longed to get back to the deserted manor and thought of what he would next turn his hand to there.

His father gave him angry words for it: “Soon you will be of no more use to me than my son-in-law.”

“Ay, he can be no great help to you.”

Olav laughed wrathfully.

Eirik worked hard to have the outhouses put in such state that some men could stay here next winter with half a score of cattle. He had only the two young lads and the cripple with him, but he made shift with them. Olav had two salters in the bay that summer, and they lay up at the manor.