Wolf Winter (8 page)

“Her year of grace will soon be over.”

The priest nodded. The widow would have to abandon the vicarage and its lands.

“It’s a shame they did not have any children.”

The bishop flipped a few pages. “I see you managed to solve a dispute among the women about their seating arrangements.”

“Oh, that.” The priest crossed one leg over the other. He nipped at his cloak to make it fall straight.

“No, but how did you do that?” The bishop’s oval eyes did not blink.

“I preached about why all Jesus’s disciples were men.”

The bishop burst out laughing, a deep laughter that made his stomach hop. The priest hadn’t heard one of those for a long while. The bishop shook his head. “We have such a problem. All over Sweden. The country is being torn asunder, and the women fight against their status, striving to sit underneath the pulpit. God help us.”

The bishop looked up to the roof as if he expected God to lift it off and intervene at this precise moment. “Very well,” he said. “What about the parishioners?”

“Twenty-two new children since last year—all baptized. Ten of them are Lapp children who were given new, Swedish names. Last winter there were twenty-eight funerals, this spring eight. There are four bodies buried at different locations that will be transported to the church when there is snow: two from the area of Storberg, one from Vanberg, and one from Blackåsen.”

“From Blackåsen?”

“A settler. Eriksson,” the priest said. “Wolf,” he added.

“Eriksson is dead?”

The priest nodded.

“Wolf had him?”

The priest hesitated. “One or two people seem to think otherwise.”

The bishop got to his feet with astounding agility for a man of his age. He walked to the window. His large frame blocked out the light. “What do you mean ‘otherwise’?”

“A new settler woman, a Finn. She thinks Eriksson was killed by someone. Everyone else says wolf.”

The priest wasn’t certain why he said so much. It was a fine balance between not neglecting to tell anything you’d later be blamed for concealing and giving your senior too much say in how to manage your congregation. It was one of the predicaments with being in such a remote place: you lost your astuteness.

“Where on Blackåsen was he found?” the bishop asked.

“On the top.”

“Close to what they call the Goat’s Pass?”

“I believe so.” The priest hadn’t realized the bishop knew Blackåsen that well. The bishop had been in the district much longer than himself, but still, to know such detail …

The bishop turned around. “Your judgment worries me,” he said, with early thunder in his voice, a low rumbling the priest felt rather than heard.

“Anything, anything at all regarding Blackåsen and in particular regarding the Goat’s Pass is of highest priority.”

“I don’t understand,” the priest said.

“I know your predecessor died before you arrived, but you ought to have familiarized yourself with your parish by now.”

“I have read the Church Books.”

“Not everything is in the Books. Especially not what concerns the Prince of Darkness and those who are with him
in pactum
.”

The Prince of …

“What do you mean?”

“There was a hearing against Eriksson’s wife, Elin.”

“That, I know. For acts of sorcery. You resided over the inquiry. She was found guiltless, fortuitously.”

“Guiltless.” The bishop swung his large head. “She didn’t deny anything—claimed to have received her sagacity from God. No, I deemed we couldn’t afford rumors of sorcery on Blackåsen, and so I closed the hearing down.”

The priest looked away, to give himself time to arrange his features. It was as if the bishop were telling him he believed in magic. But they knew that the trials of the previous century had been misguided. The bishop had turned back to face the window.

“Blackåsen is full of the old,” he said. “The old and the ugly. The Lapps used the mountain for their worshipping. In one of the missionary’s stories he tells how he came upon them after they had raised a pillar toward the sun—I have read the account myself. What isn’t written down, but what people believe, is that during the tumult that followed, one of the old Lapp women pushed the pillar so it fell.
It hit the mountainside and the mountain split open. She reached down and pulled the Devil out by his tail, tied it around one of the boulders inside the crack, and put a spell on him so he couldn’t leave the mountain. ‘You think your god has all powers?’ she is supposed to have said. ‘Let’s see then how strong he is.’ They burnt her at the stake.” The bishop turned to face him. “That’s how the name ‘the Goat’s Pass’ arose. And now, whenever something happens on the mountain, people claim it is the Devil. They say that on that mountain God does not rule. They say that whatever is said on the mountain will echo for generations.”

“There is talk of some … disappearances? I’ve heard it said that children disappear?” The priest tried a chuckle.

The bishop tossed his head. “I looked into that when I first came to the district. Two children have gone missing over ten years. It’s no more than anywhere else. Most likely they got lost or there was some accident their parents want to hide, but it’s enough to keep the fear alive.”

The bishop interrupted himself. “I want to know with certainty what happened to Eriksson,” he said.

“I will send a message to the law enforcement officers by the coast.”

The bishop hit the desk with his fist. It was so sudden, the priest jumped. The bishop remained so, leaning on his knuckles on the desk.

“No,” he said. “I don’t want fear to spread. I want you to find out what happened, but discreetly. You report back to me.” He rose. “Anvar’s widow, Sofia, could have told you things like this. She was her husband’s right hand. Nowhere else have I seen a woman contribute as much to the service of the Lord. Have you made her acquaintance?”

“Yes, of course.” The vicarage was just across the green.

“I mean really made her acquaintance,” the bishop said. “It is not normal for a priest your age not to be married. It would make it easier on the funds of the Church as well if there was one vicarage instead of two.”

And then, above them, the old church bell started swaying. The priest rose in disbelief. The dry clang bellowed from the bell tower, hammered body and soul. The priest opened his mouth, but his voice drowned in the sound.

Maija was by the edge of the marsh. Ducks flitted in and out of the reeds. Uncle Teppo had said their part of the swamp was the part furthest east, the one that clung onto the mountain. But the sedge was not ready to harvest; the green shoots barely broke water. Seven rack wagons of sedge equaled one cow and one sheep surviving winter, that’s what Uncle Teppo had said. They hadn’t harvested sedge before. Paavo believed that once they took the barley, the grass from their field ought to be enough to feed Mirkka and the goats through winter. “If we can avoid the wet …” he’d said.

A crane stepped broad-legged in between tufts, head pecking in a large arc. Beyond the bird the water was black. Apparently Eriksson had said he’d like to see if they could harvest further out in the wet areas. She wondered how far out they reaped sedge now.

She leaned down and scratched her leg. An insect bite that she couldn’t stop itching. A branch snapped behind her. Gustav’s face tightened as he saw her. He sat down not far from her and unlaced his shoes. His lips were moving as if he were talking with no sound.

His feet. Red stumps, scarred and torn.

Maija looked away. When she looked back, Gustav was already on his way out into the marsh, stepping like the crane, legs lifting high. He headed for some planks of wood. He pulled at them and put them in between tufts, making what could have been a path.

So Gustav had been a soldier. So many of them had lost limbs to the frost in similar ways. There had been winters so cold, birds fell dead to the ground, frozen in midflight.

A brisk voice said, “This marsh used to be a lake.”

She swirled around.

The newcomer was clean shaven and his gray hair short. There were deep wrinkles on his forehead and by the sides of his mouth. What might have been a smile turned his face into a different kind
of frown. He was tall and straight. His eyes were streaked red.
He’s been drinking,
she thought. Although sun on water could burn eyes like that too.

“Nils Lagerhielm,” he said.

“Maija,” she said, and curtsied before she could stop herself.

The skin on his hand was soft, not used to hard work. But then, he’d told her as much already. He had a nobleman’s last name.

“The peasants called her Little Lake,” the nobleman continued. “She wasn’t strong enough. The forest seized her and she became swamp. A part of her turned bottomless. The moss keeps growing upward, feeding off itself. It is impossible to say from the surface where there is firm ground and where there isn’t. The planks are put out so nobody goes past them and drowns.”

Nils was watching Gustav, upper lip curled. “Sometimes the spring floods move them. I came to inspect them before people came to harvest, but it seems Gustav has already tasked himself with correcting the matter.”

“There isn’t much to harvest,” Maija said. She was still annoyed with herself for having curtsied.

He turned toward her. “It’s been a cold summer. Where is your husband?”

“He’s at the homestead.”

“I will go and introduce myself to him. I understand it was your daughters who found Eriksson.”

She lifted her head.

“I need to talk to your husband about that,” he said.

Paavo sat on a wooden bench by the barn and sharpened the scythes. He wielded the stone against the edge with long, slow strokes, and the blade sang. Through the laundry on the clothesline Maija glimpsed Frederika trying to shift a boulder with an iron rod.

Paavo rose.

Nils nodded to him. “My name is Nils Lagerhielm,” he said.

Her husband stroked his shirted chest with his hand and mumbled something, impossible to tell what. Nils looked at Maija as if to tell her she could leave now. When she didn’t, his lips narrowed, but he turned back to Paavo.

“I heard your daughters found the body of Eriksson,” he said.

Her husband nodded.

“I came to see they are well.”

“They’re doing better,” Paavo said.

Maija looked for Frederika.
Are you,
she thought,
doing better?
The stone was large, and her daughter leaned her weight on the rod.
Careful,
Maija thought.
You put that kind of pressure on, and something will have to give.
As if she had heard her, her daughter released the rod and inserted it from another angle.

Nils cleared his throat. “I was wondering if there was … was there anything strange about it?”

“He was dead,” Maija said. “That was rather strange.”

Both men frowned.

“There wasn’t anything that appeared … mystic?” Nils asked.

“Mystic?” Paavo repeated.

“It’s not the first time there has been trouble on the mountain.”

Trouble again. But for some reason Maija was certain that Nils would tell them what had happened.

“What do you mean?” Paavo asked.

When Nils spoke again, he’d lowered his voice. “Two children have gone missing on the mountain,” he said. “One, ten years ago. She was going to pick lingonberries and didn’t return. The second, five or six years ago, during the harvest. It’s not strange in itself. We are in the wilderness. But the siblings of both children raved of having seen things in the forest. And then last year a whole family disappeared overnight, the Janssons. One day they were here, the next day they weren’t.”

“People don’t just disappear,” Maija said.

“Precisely,” Nils replied.

Paavo blinked.

“Before they were Christianized, Lapps from far away used to travel to this mountain to see the shaman here. It was said he had uncommon powers. I am an educated man, but out there, on this mountain is … something. And that something isn’t good.”

Sunlight twinkled in the crowns of the spruce trees. A fly landed on Maija’s arm, and she brushed it away.