Wolf Winter (37 page)

“You asked about their magical powers.”

“Eriksson also had a mark on his finger. You know, when leather skids through your fingers too fast, that kind of a burn. I was thinking perhaps he was holding an amulet and someone yanked it from him.”

“Or he pulled it off somebody’s throat.”

Her mother’s eyes gleamed but then she shrugged. “It doesn’t tell us anything. Everyone wants happiness and love.”

“Or someone used it for health,” Frederika said.

They walked for a while in silence.

“Nils had toothache,” Frederika said.

“I know,” her mother said.

Harried times. Sermons to be held, parish meetings to be led, disputes to be solved. The priest took his evening meals with Mårten Broman, whom he found to be good company. Sofia had introduced the tax man and the priest to each other.

“I think the two of you will find much to talk about,” she’d said.

“Dispensing punishments is a task of the Church,” the priest said that evening. “Or the state. It is not for the ordinary man to decide what is appropriate.”

Mårten leaned back and put one hand on his stomach. His thready cheeks and nose had turned bright red. The priest had contributed turnips, wine, and bread to their meal, Mårten, the meat.

“The guilds have rules that are crucial to their survival. Yesterday at the market I heard there was a tradesman who did not return the right amount after a purchase. His guild dealt with it. They have to—otherwise the confidence in their profession will be lost,” Mårten said.

“So they forced him to take down his trade sign.”

“Shame is a mighty deterrent—who better than the Church to know that? More so when you are humiliated by your own.”

“The removal of the sign seems a slight penalty, but if we allow groups to carry out their own justice, then where will it end? Do you know what the Lapps used to do—and this not long ago? They buried murderers alive, face to face with their victims. Perhaps not worse than the punishment of the crown, but executed without proper trials.”

“The crown …” Mårten said.

They fell silent, each man in thought.

“The crown,” the priest repeated. Their eyes met.

“How are things?” the priest asked.

Mårten hesitated. “Not good,” he said. “He sees treachery everywhere. Now he has dismissed Arvid Horn from his Council.”

“But … the King respects Arvid.”

“Apparently, no longer. It seems the King now blames him for the dissent in the Council.”

The priest had first met the politician when he was still one of the King’s generals and again when he began undertaking diplomatic missions. Arvid had been one of the King’s most loyal men, and he was sensible. Very sensible.

“And is he? Part of it?”

Mårten shook his head. “Who knows?” he said. “Rumors have it that some members of the Privy Council meet in secret to draft a new constitution.”

The priest gasped. Did the King know? No. The King’s punishments were swift. If he thought the Council was scheming against him, it would soon be dissolved. He shouldn’t have dismissed Arvid. Had the King begun to believe his army was enough? It wasn’t. The King needed his politicians too.

“Who knows,” Mårten said again.

There was a knock on the door and both men froze. It was the housekeeper, her cheeks red and her lips squeezed together. She wrung her hands.

“I am so sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but he refuses to leave until he’s spoken with you.”

“Who?” the priest asked.

“Bengt Svensson.”

“Excuse me,” he said to Mårten Broman.

The maid’s father was standing in his hallway, hat in hand. The maid herself was nowhere to be seen. The housekeeper crossed her arms.

“You can leave us now,” the priest told her.

She stared at him, then turned on her heel.

The old man was gray. There was white stubble on his sunken cheeks.

“It’s about the enlisting,” he said.

The priest nodded.

“What if I pay someone else to go?”

But who would you pay?
the priest wondered.
And by what means?
The old man reminded him of his father. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder, felt the bones under his fingers.

“I don’t want to die out there,” the man said.

“I know,” the priest said. And this man would. Alone. Cold and hungry.

“I want to die here among those I love.”

“The King has demanded we send soldiers. We need to trust in him.”

“I look around me,” the old man said, “and I don’t see anything that makes me trust him.”

Treason.

The priest placed his fingers in front of the old man’s mouth. Don’t say a word. He half-turned. The hallway behind him was empty, the door to the big room, closed. He shook his head to the old man.

“Go now,” he said.

When he went back inside, Mårten Broman was standing looking at the books in the bookshelf beside the door, his wineglass between two fingers.

The priest hesitated. But the door had been closed. The tax man turned to him. He wavered slightly. He might have had more to drink than the priest had thought.

“I heard about Eriksson,” the tax man said. “What happened to him?”

“Did you know him?”

“Of course. He often came to the coast.” The tax man snorted. The priest couldn’t tell what was implied by this response.

“We don’t yet know what happened. He was killed, but by whom or why. The bishop has demanded we find out, but I am at a complete loss. I just don’t know how to go about it. He’s sure to visit again at Candlemas, and here I am, with no progress.”

“The bishop …” Mårten sipped at his wine.

“You know him?”

“I’m not sure you can ever know the Church’s men. No offense.”

The priest waved his hand: “None taken.”

The tax man took another mouthful of wine. The priest had a thought. “Someone said that for a Church man, our bishop had shown himself to be unusually merciful …” he said.

“Hmm,” Mårten said.

The priest frowned. Now, he was affronted. He let his gaze speak for him: my table, my meal, my guest.

“He asked me to arrange something for him the year before you arrived,” Mårten said. “A journey south for a family whose young daughter was in a problematic … situation.”

His hand drew a large belly in the air.

“What?”

“Like I said, I arranged it for him myself. The parents were so grateful that he did not sentence her, but helped them.”

The priest had to gasp. Refusing to enquire further into supposed sorcery was one thing, but not sentencing a whore was something different. What in God’s name was the bishop playing at?

“What were their names?” the priest asked.

“I didn’t ask,” Mårten said.

“Was the old priest aware?”

“I don’t think so.”

If there was something about Paavo that you could trust, it was that he was loyal. In fact, he was the most loyal person Maija knew. She reminded herself of this again and again. Even during the five years when she was away she had never doubted that he’d wait for her. And when she returned to the village, there he was, his hair a shade more ashen, a new wrinkle cutting up between his eyes and veering left. “The lonely years’ wrinkle,” they’d call that one later.

“You do go for a long time, when you go,” he’d said as he saw her. He’d been wiping the wood of the hull, though his boat had stood a long time on land and was already spotless.

She had begun to laugh. And he had thrown the rag on the ground and wrapped his arms around her. And then, behind him, a spindly girl who’d been a baby last time she saw her. And behind her, a grandmother whose hair had turned white.

Paavo would have written. She knew he would.

The thought of her visit to the priest at Christmas slithered through her mind, and she shook her head to rid herself of it. That was different. Paavo was different.

The merchants came from the coast. One of them might have met her husband. She began walking from stand to stand, asking, “Paavo Ranta? From Ostrobothnia? Blond, large …”

She didn’t know how to describe him. People shook their heads, gave her pitying looks. Another woman abandoned by a husband.

But one woman said, “Finn-Paavo.” She was plump and gray, her hands moving fast over her goods. Flour, salt. Weighing it up on her scales. Not missing one beat.

“I can get ptarmigans anytime,” she said to the man in front of her. “Fur, to trade, bring me fur.”

“Yes,” Maija said.

“He works in the bishop’s stables. Looking after the horses. Works with my husband.”

“Do you …” She didn’t know what to say.

“Fox, I prefer fox fur.”

“Is he well?” Maija asked.

“Was well enough last time I saw him. He’s got a hand with the beasts. And with people.” With her ladle she hit a child. “I said don’t touch.”

A hand with …

If he was well, why wouldn’t he have written?

It occurred to her that she hadn’t written either during the time when she was away. But Paavo was different. Not sending a message must mean something.

The woman was looking at her.

“Could you please tell him that his family wonders how he is?”

“Of course, of course.”

The woman waved with her ladle. Then, at once, she stopped. Her eyes became narrow. She was looking at someone by Maija’s side.

“Come with me,” said Fearless.

The Lapp moved fast. He seemed to flow between people without them noticing. Maija tried to keep up, bumped into people and got angry stares. In the dark beside her, someone cursed. At moments she lost sight of Fearless, but then she would catch a glimpse of the bright blue of his tunic or his tasseled hat. Fearless took the path up toward the church but didn’t enter. Instead, he walked alongside the long white wall, and she trailed him, half-ran to catch up with him, but couldn’t. They came out behind the church.

The graveyard was a white meadow. They walked straight out into it. Close to the church, the gravestones were solemn blocks of stone. Further away, burial places were marked by simple crosses or not at all. They passed holes in the ground, new graves dug up during
milder weather, covered with planks during snowfalls, and now waiting for their inhabitants to arrive. She shivered. A black shape skulked between the stones.

The Church Grim!
she thought, her heart taking a giant bound in her chest.

Of course not. No. All those stories they were told as children sat rooted like in stone. She wondered if people still bricked up living animals inside the church walls when they built them. As if the church would need guardians.

Fearless stopped.

“What is going on?” he asked.

She shook her head.

He took a step to the side and pointed to the ground at a shrub with black, winter-sleeping branches stretching to the sky. Then she realized it was a set of antlers. There was a dark spatter criss-crossing the snow. Left to right. Up and down. Her heart began to beat hard.