The Son Avenger (34 page)

“And since I found out what you meant by having such folk settled at Rundmyr—and I can guess ’twas irksome for you and your father that you were not suffered to pursue this noble trade in peace—”

Eirik had drawn his sword and was drying it as best he could with heather and tufts of grass. “If you do not go home, I will baste you with the flat of this!”

“More likely you will run it through me, now you have me unarmed.” But he began to move.

Eirik did not know what to think: whether Jörund himself believed all this or was only feigning.

The house-folk in the yard stared at these two as they walked up, all wet. Eirik bade one of them tell Cecilia that they must have dry clothes. Then he followed Jörund, who went toward the great room; as he came in he saw that they must be living here now. He hung up his sword and seated himself, opposite Jörund; and there they sat in silence.

But when in a little while Cecilia came in with her arms full
of clothes, Jörund looked up with an ugly smile at his young wife. “Have
you
time to give
me
a thought? I did not think you could tear yourself from the corpse of your bold paramour, the six-legs that I chastised yesterday.”

“Nay, Jörund,” said Erik below his breath, but with a shake in his voice, “if you are never so mad—you can still go too far. That you could raise your hand against a poor cripple—”

“’Tis her way to have a fancy for cripples, this wife of mine.” Again he smiled, that horrid, imbecile smile. “The first one she played the whore with, he was a limping cripple too—”

A sudden change came over Cecilia’s face; there was an icy green glint in her great bright eyes. Instinctively Eirik sprang to his sister’s side.

“I saw it myself,” the man went on, “the halting misshapen wretch—and she big with my own child—”

Cecilia’s cold voice was sharp as a knife: “If you thought you saw aught unseemly—how was it you did not come forward till this halting cripple was so far away that he could not defend me when you trampled me underfoot?”

Eirik seized his sister by the arm. “Come out!” In a flash he had seen the depth of Cecilia’s hatred of her husband, and he was afraid.

“Nay, I cannot bear the touch of Jörund’s clothes,” he said, when they had come into Ragna’s house. “There are some old things of mine in the chest above in the loft.—Did you not once learn of Mærta,” he asked as she turned to fetch his clothes, “how to brew draughts that send a man to sleep? Better mix something of the sort in his ale tonight. I will go over and find Father this very evening; and I am afraid to leave this house unless I can be sure that he is fast asleep.”

When he had changed into some of his old clothes, he went up into the loft in which they had laid Olav Livsson on straw. There were two candles burning by the dead man’s head, and he was wrapped in a good linen cloth. Eirik uncovered the face only: that too bore black marks of ill usage, but the narrow white features were peaceful, as though the lad had fallen asleep. Under the winding-sheet the body looked ungainly in its length, with its thin, withered limbs.

Eirik kissed the ice-cold forehead, knelt beside the bier, and recited the prayers and the litany for the dead; and those of the
household who sat there murmured the responses:
“Ora pro nobis”
and
“Te rogamus, audi nos.”

Afterwards he spoke in a low tone with the house-folk. They had not dared to send word to the priest, but they themselves had sat by the corpse the night before, and they promised to take turns at watching tonight as well. Eirik said that he would make provision for the funeral when he came back on the morrow, but now he must go out to Saltviken and speak with Olav. They had heard nothing of Arnketil and Liv; the houses at Rundmyr had stood empty since yestermorn, so they must have fled with all their flock from terror of Jörund, for he had threatened them with fire and murder.

He had asked Halstein to take supper in to Jörund and stay with him till he fell asleep—Halstein was a big, strong man. Now Eirik looked into the room before going down to the boat. Jörund was asleep. The door of the house could be locked from the outside; Eirik gave the key to Halstein and bade him bring Jörund his breakfast betimes in the morning.

When he landed in Saltviken it was already dusk. Nothing was left of the sunset but some copper-red edges below the grey clouds that lay over the west country. The sea was dark, crisped by the evening breeze, and broke against the faintly gleaming curve of the beach with the low rippling murmur he knew so well.

The gravel crunched under his feet and the wind whistled in the bent grass; on the scanty strip of pasture with its tall junipers lay some bullocks. Ah, he had not set foot here since the day he rode out to seek Gunhild. And now there was not a thing in his life that he had forgotten so completely as Gunhild.

He had expected the folk to be in bed at the farm, but as he came up between the fences he saw a dark figure standing by the gate—his father.

“It is I, Father”—instinctively he wished to forestall the old man, so he spoke hurriedly: “I come from Hestviken; it has come to such a pass there that Cecilia thought we must all take counsel what is to be done; she sent for me.”

“It has long been so,” said Olav. “But of you we heard never a word. It can hardly be worse now than it has been all this time, when you felt no call to see how things were at your own home.”

But it was his father himself who had forbidden him to come. His youthful anger reverberated in Eirik: could his father never be fair and just toward him? But he controlled himself—to justify his actions would only make bad worse.

“I never heard other than good tidings—but you may be right; one can never trust hearsay.”

Knut and Signe slept in the living-room, said Olav—they would have to go into the upper chamber, where his own bed was. It was dark as the grave in the room above, and Eirik stumbled and ran against things that lay scattered about. And in the darkness, with the door ajar to the spring night, they sat and talked together. Eirik told of what had happened at Hestviken and what was in his own mind: “Cecilia cannot live with Jörund after this.”

“No, that must fall to you and your wife. And ’twill be a merry life at Hestviken when you three share it.”

The bitter scorn in the voice that came out of the darkness put an end to Eirik’s patience. “There has never been a merry life at Hestviken, Father. You wore down Mother—I know not whether of set purpose or not. Since then you have done all in your power to wear us down, till we were of the same mind, Cecilia and I—that anything was better than to dwell in the same house with you. Remember that, when she comes to live here—and be like a Christian man and not like a mountain troll to her children—even if they have mouse’s ears.”

“Would to God I had never seen you!” came in his father’s voice, shaking with passion. “Would to Christ and our Lady I had let you stay where you were, at the back of beyond!”

“That was in other hands than yours—I came whither I was meant to come. But for that I say it would have been as well for me to have stayed there—and for you too: in one way or another it seems you were fated to deal unjustly with every child you have begotten.”

“You I have not begotten! You are not my son!”

“Shame on you!” Eirik sprang up in his wrath. “What is this strain that is in such men as you and Jörund? When the world goes against you, you cry shame upon your own wives with infamous words—”

He heard Olav breathing hard in the darkness and restrained himself.

“But this is an ill season for us to take up our old quarrels, Father—and I beg you forgive me if I spoke too hotly. But you might spare Mother your insults”—he was on the point of firing up, but checked himself again. “Let us to bed now, Father—best that we set out for Hestviken as soon as it is day.”

With that he rolled himself up on the bench. Sleep was impossible—his mind was in a whirl: the long day’s ride, and Jörund, and his struggle with the madman in the water, and the dead lad in the loft, the deserted cottage at Rundmyr, and Cecilia—the sudden distortion of her pale features into the very face of naked hate, the icy glint in her deep clear eyes. Fear for his sister made him shudder—never could Cecilia stray on those false paths that Eldrid had followed, but it dawned upon him that hate knows many roads, and they all lead to the same goal at last.

Then he recalled his father’s words—and he recalled his childhood’s terror of one day being driven out as a bastard. Could it be that there had been some reason for his fear, that he had once heard words of which he had forgotten all but the fright they gave him—that his father had suspected his poor mother, persecuted her, as Jörund persecuted Cecilia, as he himself had persecuted a woman to death with shameful suspicions?

A longing for his home at the Ness came over him, an irresistible temptation to take flight. But thither he could never more return, he knew that. But at the same time he knew that if he and Eldrid were forced back into this foretaste of hell, he had a wife on whom he could rely. Never had he put so secure a trust in any human being as in her, whose soul had breasted torrents unbearable.

His father was not sleeping either, he felt sure. And now his anger gave way to pity for the old man.

Olav waked him—just as he had fallen asleep, he thought. The sun rose as they rounded the Horse. Then Olav broke the silence:

“When we come up,” he said, “I must ride inland at once—Svein and I. They cannot be left out in the woods with all their children and Gudrun. I must get Anki and Liv back to Rundmyr first of all—you will herd Jörund meanwhile. He shall be made to pay the full penalty for the lad he slew and for their daughter whom he has debauched. Then, I think, next time his wit is about to fly from him, he will remember to catch it by the tail.”

As Eirik held the boat against the pier for his father to step out, he heard Olav say: “What is afoot, Halstein?”

The house-carl looked strange and pale. He waited till Eirik had joined his father.

“Jörund is dead this night, Olav,” he said in a low voice.

After a pause Olav asked: “Is it—?”

“The wound is from a dagger. Straight in the breast. More I know not.”

“He was wild and out of his wits,” said Eirik hastily. “God have mercy on his soul—he cannot have been in his right mind when he did it.”

The house-carl gave him a look but made no answer.

Father and son went together into the living-room, Halstein followed them. He had not touched the body. Jörund lay in the south bed—his great naked body with the left leg and arm and shoulder hanging out, the head bent to one side: it looked as if he had tried to get up. There was a wound in the left breast below the nipple, and blood, but not very much, on the white skin, clinging to the tuft of curly hair. On the bench by the bedside still stood the food that Halstein had brought in when he found him.

Eirik was almost as pale as the dead man: in his father’s face he read nothing but the same hate as he had seen in the eyes of Jörund’s wife. This had been his friend—the thought of the other’s derangement and ignominy and miserable death broke his heart as he lifted the ice-cold body and disposed it with the head on the pillow; he tried to close the dead eyes and press together the nostrils.

Olav raised the coverlet, felt about the body. “Where is the dagger?”

The wound was three-cornered, as though made by one of those foreign daggers with a triangular blade; it was clean, and of such size that the weapon must have been thrust in with force right up to the hilt.

Halstein crossed the room quietly and barred the door.

“I must say what has to be said—you are the next friends of the dead man—and it was I who was to answer for him. But when Eirik gave me the key yestereven, I knew not there was another way into this house—”

“Another way—” Father and son said it together.

“When I came in this morning,” whispered the house-carl, pointing to the north bed, which had been Eirik’s when he lived at home, “it was all tumbled in a mess of straw and bedclothes, half across the floor, and the hatch was not quite closed, for some straw was caught in it.”

The two stood stiff and speechless. The north-western corner of the house did not rest upon the rock, but upon a wall of masonry, and when Olav Ribbung built it after the fire, in the time of the Birchlegs, he had made a postern here toward the sea, with a hatch leading to it from the bottom of the north bed. In Olav Audunsson’s time this secret passage had never been used, but it was certainly known to the oldest members of the household, and Eirik himself had sometimes tried it when a boy.

He saw his father was leaning his hand on the table, stooping lower and lower—it looked as if the old man would fall forward in a heap. Eirik took hold of him—Olav half raised his head, and the grey, scarred old face looked as ancient as sin; the mouth was open, but the eyes were close shut. He raised one hand, gently pushed Eirik aside, and went toward the bed, swaying like a blind man.

He bared the breast of the corpse again, fingered the wound, and pushed aside some bloody hair that clung to one of its corners. Then he felt again all over the bed, searching for the dagger.

When he turned round, his son saw that the sweat ran down his forehead below the soft white hair. He looked hither and thither as though at a loss.

“Father?” said Eirik inquiringly, seized with anxiety—but he could not guess what this was.

Olav was moving away, with a strange padding gait, like an animal caught in a pitfall.

“Father,” said Eirik again, “we must go and find Cecilia.”

Olav supported himself against the doorpost of the closet, which was carved with the figure of Gunnar:

“Go you—I shall come—”

“We must make fast the door,” replied Eirik in a low voice, “till we have collected men to view the corpse.” He saw the terror in his father’s eyes. “Remember, his brothers must be fetched.”

Olav gave one loud groan. Then he went out, following his son.

When they entered the women’s house, the widow sat crouching in the farthest corner of the room. Ragna, the old serving-woman, was with her. Cecilia shrank yet closer to the wall, staring at the men with eyes that were wild with terror.