Читать книгу The Ice People 22 - The Demon and the Virgin - Margit Sandemo - Страница 6

Chapter 1

Heike – unknown, heard of by no one – arrived at his ancestral farm.

Many years had passed since his father, Sölve, had slipped into oblivion. Now Heike had turned twenty, and all his life he had longed to reach this place and this farm, Gråstensholm, which was his legacy.

He appeared from nowhere. He had come from the south, riding through Sweden to the surprise of his Swedish relatives, because they had had no idea of his existence. Conceived in hatred, born in despair, guilty of his mother’s death at the very moment he saw the light of day, Sölve had mocked and despised him. He had been saved by his father’s horrible death.

Heike had been baptized casually by an indifferent father and given a name that might just as easily be for a girl or a boy. But attached to his dark form, it became synonymous with masculinity, strength and power.

Heike, his fate was loneliness. Forever.

His body still bore the scars of his father’s terrible stabs, because teasing a snarling child in a cage had been such fun. His soul still bore scars from the torment that went far beyond what the human mind can comprehend.

Heike, ostracized by the human world.

On the day he arrived at his ancestral home in Norway, he stopped at a vantage point by the road. The first thing he saw was a manor house so large and beautiful that he brushed the thought aside. That couldn’t be the house he had inherited. It was impossible. It was almost as big as a castle. His eyes took in the whole parish.

Heike was incredibly ugly to look at. His hair was dark brown, so thick and unruly at the back that you would expect to see a pair of troll’s eyes peering out from under it when he turned around. His eyes, yellow as fire, shone and sparkled in a bony, sharply chiselled face. His teeth were big and sharp, white as snow against his brown skin. He had broad, sensitive nostrils, hollow cheeks and a chin as pointed as that of a fox.

His shoulders were huge, a deadly legacy for the women of the Ice People who gave birth to demons like Heike. He was one of the cursed, one of the worst afflicted of the Ice People if you judged him only on his appearance. But all who met him spoke of the sadness and sorrow in his heart, and his infinite empathy for anybody who was suffering.

The yellow catlike eyes searched the vista. They saw an avenue of very tall trees leading up to a modest farm not far from the big house. The trees were gnarled with age, as if they had stood there for years and years. There were smallholdings and small farms scattered around the valley ...

In the centre was the church and close by it a very fine farmstead by a lake. That house wasn’t as big as the first one, but it was beautiful nevertheless.

That must be Elistrand, and the small farm could be none other than Linden Avenue.

But then ...

Thoughts whirled around in Heike’s mind. Then the large building had to be his. Gråstensholm.

He sat for a long time on his horse, trying to take it all in. Was he – a nonentity who owned nothing – was he to be master of all this? Fields and meadows, barns and houses all over the parish? And the estate itself, the stately mansion up on the hill!

His mind wandered.

The treasure was inside that house: the Ice People’s sacred treasury of herbs and witchcraft and, most importantly, Shira’s fantastic vessel, the bottle of rock crystal. It contained water from the pure source inside the Mountain of the Four Winds. The bottle was hidden in the house there on top of the ridge. He intended to take that water to the Ice People’s secret valley and use it to destroy Tengel the Evil’s power – find his jar or whatever it might be, the vessel containing the dark water of evil, and lift the curse with the aid of Shira’s water.

Heike felt that this was his task. He didn’t know whether he was right or not but he wanted to try. He frowned. Something was moving on the farm. Creatures who looked as small as ants were moving back and forth between the stables and the house. There should have been nobody there because there was nobody left of the Ice People to run it. That is, unless Vemund’s young daughter had ...? He would have to wait and see.

Gråstensholm Parish ... Finally, he had come home! His journey had been long but now it was over.

Heike stood up on the mountain ridge for a long time. He wasn’t sure what to do. He dreaded the thought of having to talk to strangers, seeing their horror when they saw him. That was something that he would probably never get used to. The problem was that he had never been able to settle down anywhere, because once people got to know him, everything was fine. Then he was quickly accepted. But Heike had been doomed to travel from one place to the other all the way from Slovenia. Superstitious people hadn’t taken kindly to him. He was tired, dead tired, of having to explain his good intentions. Having to tell people who he was and why he looked the way he did. He was so shy that he had always avoided villages, keeping to the forests and plains. And now he had finally reached his goal.

He began to slowly ride down, uncertain of what he ought to do first. He hadn’t gone far when he met an old man with a cart coming towards him on the road. He reined in the horse and considered fleeing into the forest, but thought better of it. He just had to learn to face whatever might happen. The people here would have to get used to him and he had to begin somewhere.

The old man screwed up his eyes to look at the strange rider.

Heike prepared for the worst. “Peace be with you,” he began.

Things didn’t turn out the way he had expected. The old man’s toothless mouth trembled and so did his voice. “Peace be with you ... Heavens ... aren’t you ...? No, I must be imagining things.”

Heike was about to say “No, I’m not the devil,” but thought better of it when he realized that the old man’s voice and eyes were full of hope.

“Pardon?”

“Well, for a moment I thought that you must be old Paladin. But of course you can’t be.”

“Paladin?”

“Yes, they used to call him Ulvhedin. But he’s not a ghost. He was a nice man.”

Heike smiled and got down from his horse. “I’m not Ulvhedin but his relative. I’m Heike, grandson of Daniel – the son of Ingrid and Dan Lind of the Ice People.”

The old man’s chin trembled more eagerly than ever. He had tears in his eyes as he walked up to Heike and took his hands in his.

“Daniel’s grandson? Young Mr Daniel’s grandson? Are you really? Oh, what a shame that Mrs Ingrid isn’t living at this moment.”

“Yes, it makes me sad too,” Heike replied.

“Fancy having one of the Ice People in the parish again. We thought it was all over. My dear friend, you’re most welcome! I can see that you’re cursed?”

“That’s true, but I’m not one of the evil ones.”

“No, nor was Paladin; perhaps at the beginning but later on he became good. Now I can see that you’re someone else. In fact, you’re not terribly like him.”

“Only in our grotesque appearance,” Heike smiled. “And the shoulders.”

“Yes, you’re right.”

Heike asked: “Who are you?”

“I’m Eirik,” the old man replied, “and I served at Elistrand in Jon’s time and also when Mr Ulf was there, but Mrs Tora was a real bitch so we didn’t get along so well. Now that I’m old, I have my own smallholding.”

Heike said: “I see. Who lives in Elistrand now?”

The old man became serious. “Oh, dear. Nothing is as it used to be in the parish. Not since Mrs Ingrid, then Vemund Tark and his wife, the noble Elisabet, passed away. One of the henchmen of the state resides at Elistrand at the moment. He wants to give the impression of being jovial but he’s quite the opposite! He thinks he owns the farm. And at Gråstensholm ...” Eirik lowered his voice. “That’s where the evil one himself lives. He acquired the estate unlawfully; the whole village is whispering about it. But there was nobody of the Ice People to take it over.”

“Well, I’m here now,” Heike said, casting a glowering glance at Gråstensholm. “Do you mean to say that there are no descendants of the Ice People here in Norway?”

The old man leaned forward and whispered: “Nobody knows. Mr and Mrs Tark had a daughter but she disappeared.”

“What do you mean?” Heike asked.

Eirik replied: “They say that she was seen up on the ridge a couple of years ago.”

He pointed discreetly in case anyone saw. Heike followed his gaze towards the huge mountainside behind Gråstensholm.

Then Heike said: “I would like to hear more. Can I come with you to your smallholding? I don’t think I want to appear too intrusive at Gråstensholm and Elistrand just yet, and I need to know all the details.”

“You’re welcome in my humble abode,” Eirik said solemnly. “But it’s very poor.”

Heike gave Eirik a warm smile. “Believe me, I know what it means to be poor. Before I do anything about the farms, I need to see to the most important thing of all: I have to find out whether Elisabet and Vemund’s daughter is alive.”

Eirik beamed: “Now I can tell that you’re a true son of the Ice People. People first and then possessions! If you could find young Miss Tark, you would make everybody in the village happy. It’s terrible when somebody just disappears.”

Heike, who knew a lot about this, said: “Yes, it’s the worst thing possible.”

Her name was Vinga. She was named after Villemo, one of the Ice People’s strongest characters. Her home was Elistrand but she didn’t live there anymore. Nobody knew where she lived now: it was her secret. She had sought refuge on a derelict smallholding up on the mountain. It was a place that Tengel and Silje had given Klaus and Rosa two hundred years before. Nobody had lived there since their great-grandchild, Elisa, married Ulvhedin and moved to Elistrand. It had been empty for a hundred years.

The place was falling down, but Vinga had managed to make just one room habitable. She had worked very hard, clearing away the rotten timbers that had fallen down, the ruined furniture and kitchen utensils and other junk. She had supported the crumbling ceiling with fresh birch trunks that she had felled with an axe she had found. Unfortunately, she was having to limit her living space more and more as parts of the ceiling collapsed or leaked. More than half of the room was now uninhabitable.

Food was another matter. She had brought two big hams with her from Elistrand. They were hanging from the ceiling, notably smaller than when she took them, wrapped up to protect them from flies and mice. She had taken a goat from the farm on the night she ran away. It had once been her pet kid. Now the goat lived in the room with her, providing her with milk and cheese in return for the hay Vinga gathered and stored in the barn for winter.

There must be someone living on the farm by now. All she knew was that they were not her relatives.

Both her parents had passed away. She couldn’t believe it! Her strict but kind father, Vemund, and her sweet mother, Elisabet, were both dead.

Why did they have to die? She gazed at the sky and asked what evil they had committed that meant they had to die in the epidemic that nobody knew the name of. At their funeral, a well-meaning woman had said to her: “You mustn’t be sad, Vinga. Your mother and father were such good people. The Lord loved them so much that He wanted them to be with Him.” But were they ready to leave this life? Did Vinga want to part with them? Clearly, the Lord didn’t seem to ask such questions. Vinga was obviously not good enough, because He couldn’t care less about how she was managing.

The strict man had come ...

“The farm must be confiscated, Vinga. It’s mortgaged and you haven’t met the repayments.”

“I didn’t know ... I can sell the barley...”

“Times are tough, Vinga, and you’ve no barley to sell. Too many years of austerity meant that your father had to borrow money to make ends meet. That won’t work any more!”

He looked at her with cold, greedy eyes, the sly old toad. Mr Snivel was his name, and he was a civil servant of some kind.

“The farmhand and I can work.”

“The farmhand tells me he hasn’t been paid since your parents died. He’s found a job elsewhere.” The tall Mr Snivel might have added “with me”, but didn’t. “Now the whole of Elistrand will come under the hammer.”

Elistrand! Dear Elistrand, adored by Villemo and everyone else.

“Then I’ll move to Gråstensholm!”

Mr Snivel smiled forbearingly but contemptuously at Vinga. “Since Mrs Ingrid died, nobody has put in a claim for Gråstensholm. The Crown has other plans for the farm.”

He could have told Vinga: “Gråstensholm has been promised to me now that there’s no owner, and my nephew will get Elistrand, so the auction will be a sham.” But Mr Snivel was cunning and kept his mouth shut.

Vinga was desperate. “I can take care of Gråstensholm until my relatives come.”

“As far as we know, there are no longer any legal heirs to Gråstensholm,” he replied. “Besides, how would you take care of such a big farm? After all, you haven’t even been able to take care of Elistrand.”

Vinga said: “I was doing a good job of it, but nobody had told me about the farm’s financial state.”

Mr Snivel reflected that this was fortunate for him, and gave Vinga an ugly smile.

“Well then, I’ll move to Linden Avenue,” she said. “That was our original family home.”

Mr Snivel replied: “That’s been leased, as you know, and you have to face facts! You’re all alone! Deserted by everybody!”

Alone ... deserted by everybody ... In the coming years, those words were to echo in her ears.

Mr Snivel leaned back. “We’ve made arrangements for you, Vinga. We’re not heartless. You’ll go to work for Mrs Fleden in her house outside Christiania. That will be your future home.”

His remark sent a shiver down Vinga’s spine. Mrs Fleden was notorious for her tyrannical ways. Those who went there were treated worse than prisoners. Like monks and nuns, they were packed together in small rooms and forced to live lives of prayer, work, hunger and beatings.

That very night, Vinga ran away. She loaded what she felt she and the goat would need onto a small cart and climbed up to the mountain ridge. She would have liked to take a couple of chickens with her but they were too difficult to transport. She didn’t dare to take a cow because she was afraid that the smallholding wouldn’t sustain a large animal.

But all that had been a long time ago. She had managed. She and the goat had survived two cold winters. In the autumn, she emptied the forest of berries and at harvest time she would slip into the fields and glean the leftover ears of corn, which she would grind to make her bread. Sometimes she would turn up before the reapers, because the winter was long and the goat hungry. What did it matter if she stole a few ears of corn? The peasants couldn’t count them all!

Vinga almost severed her ties with the human race. She blended in with the forest and became a part of it. The woodcutters would speak of the forest nymph they glimpsed gliding past them, a tiny creature dressed in skins, with shy eyes and floating, flaxen hair. Someone had the idea that it might be Tark’s Vinga who hadn’t been seen for so long, but the others just laughed and said that they must have been imagining things.

Of course, people out picking berries or walking might pass the smallholding, but from the outside the house looked so derelict that it was impossible to imagine anybody living there. The porch was so rotten that it was impossible to enter the house through the front door. It didn’t occur to anyone that Vinga, who was agile, could jump over all the junk that she kept there on purpose so that nobody would dare to walk in.

She became as wild as a wolf and as shy as a deer. Hunger was her companion and so was the cold. She moved like an animal, swiftly, nervously and fearful. Her eyes were always searching, ready to signal a warning to her body that it had to flee. She would start at the slightest sound, no matter how vague it was, and she was alert to any noise that was different from the usual ones.

She didn’t lose her ability to speak, because her goat was used to receiving confidences. But she had forgotten how to weep. That was something that belonged to her first, lonely year.

Her treasured moments were those when she sat at the very edge of the mountain ridge, looking down on the parish.

There lay Gråstensholm, deserted, abandoned, with the wind howling through the empty windows of the tower. The colour on the walls was fading. Leaves rustled in the courtyard in the autumn, because there was nobody to rake them up. The fields were still ploughed, probably by the tenant farmer at Linden Avenue. But the house itself was empty.

But recently, she had seen activity on the farm. Ladders were raised against the walls and they were repainted with dark-brown tar. Big animals were led into the stables. It was something that both delighted and worried her.

Might they be her people, come from Sweden? Should she venture down into the village?

One day, a carriage drove up to her smallholding on the mountain ridge and a heavy man waddled out and up the step. He behaved as if he owned the place. It was the man who had sent shivers down her spine when he had suggested that she could work at Mrs Fleden’s establishment.

Mr Snivel.

He had no business at Gråstensholm. Vinga was filled with anger but she was too shy to interfere.

Elistrand was too far away for her to see whether there were people there or not.

The era of the Ice People was over in Gråstensholm Parish.

She thought she might be the only one left – there had been two families living in Sweden but she knew nothing about them. There had been so few of them. There was Ingela and her son, Ola. And there was Arv Grip, who was on his own. That was all. Besides, Vinga didn’t know where they lived. She had almost forgotten them.

One day in the spring of 1794, Vinga was running about picking the first shoots of fresh herbs, which she wanted to make into a soup.

She loved spring. Now she no longer had to sleep up against the goat while the snow was blowing through the cracks in the walls and the holes in the ceiling; she no longer had to tear bark off the birch trunks and grind it to make bread; she no longer had to ration the goat’s food and hear it bleating piteously with hunger, and she didn’t have to feel its skinny chest under her hand.

Once spring arrived, she and the goat would run about, finding nourishing green shoots under the withered leaves. The goat nibbled the buds of the young birch trees and the new green shoots on the fir trees gave Vinga renewed energy.

She couldn’t help registering that her life had been reduced to nothing but a struggle for survival. There was no longer anything constructive about her existence because there was no time for anything else.

Nevertheless, a thought was working in her subconscious mind. She had a goal, although it was growing weaker as the years went by: she wanted to take back what had been stolen from her.

There were voices in the forest, young and happy. Vinga stiffened, looked anxiously about, and saw that the goat was grazing in a dip where it would not be noticed. She herself ran as lightly as a gazelle to hide, but on second thoughts she edged closer to the voices, frightened but curious, like the forest animal she had turned into.

She crouched behind some fallen tree trunks. There they were. A young man and a young woman. They were walking hand in hand, talking and chattering, with their eyes cast down.

Vinga felt a deep pang of yearning in her soul. There were two of them, and they were together. It didn’t interest her that they were of opposite sexes, because that was a world she had not yet learned about. She just couldn’t forget the fact that they were a pair.

The couple stopped. They looked each other in the eye, holding hands. Their eyes radiated something that Vinga had almost forgotten: something that she would occasionally see in her dreams. Mother’s and Father’s eyes, full of love, warmth and tenderness for her: Mother ... and Father! She wanted the couple to go away so that she could be alone with her grief. Fortunately, her pain didn’t last long. They walked away slowly, and if they detected something that shone white behind the fallen trees, something that looked like alert, cautious eyes following them as they walked ... well, then ... it must have been a patch of sunlight on the grass, or a squirrel wondering who was walking in its forest.

“Come! We’re going home!”

A goat isn’t a dog, but Vinga’s goat was so used to her that it obeyed her commands. It did what she wanted it to do straight away. After all, the two of them were the only living creatures in their world, and Vinga meant food and warmth and company and protection against wild animals. There weren’t very many wild beasts in the mountains around Gråstensholm, but one can never be too sure.

Now they were back home again and Vinga was talking nineteen to the dozen as she searched for something to eat: “The crows are shrieking dreadfully today, they’re probably building a nest, and did you hear the starling this morning? I think it wants to build a nest in the box I put up last year. Back then, it only came to take a look at things. No, they’re my leaves, surely you can go elsewhere? You’ve more to choose from than me. Eat a thistle or a shrub and leave the nice food for me! No, sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s all yours because you’re all I have.” She knelt down, pressing her forehead against her friend so that the goat was covered in her blonde hair.

Yet again, the sad thought entered her mind that one day she might lose the goat. After all, goats didn’t live as long as people and the thought made Vinga very sad.

Then she lifted her head like a vigilant deer. “Hush! What was that? In we go, quickly!”

They sprinted over the rise, Vinga jumping over the treacherous logs that had fallen from the porch with the goat at her heels. It knew the way in, easily avoiding the rotten patches.

Vinga looked out through a crack in the wall. Then she relaxed.

“It’s just the elk. We know her, don’t we? The only ones who are dangerous are human beings. You know that. They mustn’t catch us. Then they’ll put me in a terrible house and take you from me. I won’t allow them to do that!”

They crouched together, Vinga with her nose buried in the goat’s coat. The goat was more relaxed than she was, turning its head away and starting to chew the cud.

Vinga didn’t dare to start making the soup until she felt sure that the young couple had left the valley. Then she lit a fire in the fireplace and set a pot over it that she had brought with her from Elistrand. She stirred together a sticky mixture that even the poorest of the poor would have wrinkled his nose at. But for the two of them it was a gourmet meal: the first green plants of spring!

Next morning, Vinga detected a new element in her small world. She was no longer alone: somebody was quietly walking about in the forest. It must be a stranger because she had never experienced anything like this. Vinga, who knew all the trails – who could make herself invisible in the darkness of the forest – was anxiously on the look-out for whoever was roaming about, because the stranger was just as good at hiding himself as she was. She knew there was somebody there but she couldn’t get too close without being seen.

It filled her heart with horror.