The Axe (25 page)

“Nay, you may see that,” was all Ingunn said.

Aasa Magnusdatter had a house to herself at Berg with a loft-room and two maidservants to do the housework and cooking, and to spin and weave all the flax and wool that fell to her share. Grim and Dalla, the old bailiff and his sister from Frettastein, looked after her beasts, which stood in Lady Magnhild’s byre; these two had been given a little cot to dwell in, close by the cow-house, but they were counted as part of Aasa’s household.

Ingunn then had nothing to do at Berg but to be, as it were, at the head of her grandmother’s little household and to be a solace to the old woman. She mostly sat with her grandmother when the maids were at their work.

As Lady Magnhild had said, Aasa was now grown somewhat childish, she remembered little of what was said to her, but asked again and again about the same things day after day. Sometimes she asked after her youngest son, Steinfinn, whether he had been there lately or whether they expected him soon. Often, however, she remembered that he was dead. Then she would ask: was it not four children he had alive? “And you are the oldest? Ah yes, I know that very well; your name is Ingunn—after my mother, for Ingebjörg’s mother was still living when you came, and she had cursed her daughter for running away with Steinfinn. Ay, he was simple-minded and glad of heart, my Steinfinn, and it came to cost him dear that he was so nice in his choice of a leman that he carried off a knight’s daughter by force.…” Aasa had never liked Ingebjörg, and she used often to talk of Steinfinn and his wife, without remembering that it was their daughter she spoke to. “But how was it now—did not a great misfortune befall one of these little maids of Steinfinn’s? Nay, that cannot be so—they cannot be so old yet?”

“Dear Grandmother,” Ingunn begged in her embarrassment, “you should try to get a little sleep now.”

“Oh ay, Gyrid, perchance that were best for me—” Aasa often called her granddaughter Gyrid, taking her for a Gyrid Alfs-datter, a kinswoman who had been at Berg some fifteen winters before.

But all that had happened in her young days Mistress Aasa remembered clearly. She spoke of her parents and of her brother Finn, Arnvid’s father, and of her sister-in-law, Hillebjörg, whom she both loved and feared—although Hillebjörg was much younger than Aasa.

When fourteen winters old she had been given to Tore of Hov. Before that he had lived with that Borghild for over ten years, and very loath he was to send away his leman—she did not depart from Hov until the morning of the very day when Aasa was brought there as a bride. Borghild continued to have great power over Tore as long as she lived—and that was for twenty years after the man’s marriage. He consulted her about all matters of importance, and he often took his true-born children to her, that she might foretell their future and judge whether they seemed promising. But Tore bestowed his greatest efforts and his love chiefly on the four children he had had by his leman. Borghild was the daughter of a woman thrall and a nobleman—some said, one of those kings that Norway was full of at that time. She was fair and wise, and a bold schemer, but haughty, rapacious, and cruel to folk of low degree.

Meanwhile Aasa Magnusdatter was mistress of Hov. She bore her husband fourteen children, but five died in the cradle, and only four lived to grow up.

Aasa remembered all her dead children and used to speak of them. She mourned most for a daughter, Herdis, who became palsied from having slept out on the dewy ground. She died four years afterwards, when she was eleven winters old. A half-grown son had been kicked to death by his horse, and Magnus had lost his life in a brawl on board the ship, when coming home across the lake from a banquet in Toten together with other drunken young men. Magnus had just been married, but there was no child after him, and the widow married again in another part of the country. Aasa had liked her best of her daughters-in-law.

“But tell me, Grandmother,” asked Ingunn, “have you had naught but sorrow in your life? Have you no good days to think upon now?”

Her grandmother looked at her and seemed not to understand. Now, as she lay waiting for death, she seemed to take as much pleasure in recalling her sorrows as her joys.

Ingunn did not thrive ill in this life with the old woman. Weak she was, even now when she had her health, and she had never liked to have to do anything that demanded hard work or continued thought. She would sit with some fine needlework that there was no need to finish in a hurry, lost in her own thoughts, while she listened with half an ear to her grandmother’s talk.

In her growing years she had been restless and had found it hard to sit still for long at a time. But now it was different. The strange sickness that had fallen upon her after the separation from Olav seemed to have left behind a shadow that would not give way; it was as though she were always in a half-dreaming state.—At Frettastein she had had all the boys, and Olav first and last, and they had brought games and excitement and life to her, who herself lacked enterprise to undertake anything. Here at Berg there were only women, two old ladies and their servants, and a few elderly house-carls and workmen; they could not rouse her from the torpor into which she had sunk while she lay paralysed in bed, expecting to wither away altogether from among the living.

When Olav was whisked away, she seemed to have no strength to believe he would ever come back. All too many great events had overwhelmed her in the short time between her father’s departure to seek out Mattias Haraldsson and Arnvid’s taking her to Hamar. She felt she had been carried away by a flood, and the time at Hamar was like an eddy, in which she and Olav had been churned round in a ring, slowly but surely passing farther and farther from each other. There all had been new and strange, and Olav had changed till even he seemed to have become a stranger. She could understand indeed that it was right of him never to seek an opportunity for meeting her in secret while they were there. But that he should have taken it as he did when she brought about that meeting with him on Christmas Night—that had frightened her into a corner; she had felt so shamed and
abandoned afterwards that she dared not even
think
of him as she had done before, lingeringly, with a sweet, hot desire for his love. She was like a child that has been corrected and punished by a grown-up—she herself had never guessed there could be anything wrong in it.

Then he had come to her that last night, out of the darkness and the driving snow, worn out and agitated, shaking between tiredness and suppressed ferocity—an outlawed man with her cousin’s blood yet warm on his hands. She had been self-possessed in a way. But when he left her, it was as though all the waters closed over her.

At first, when she was so sick, she too had thought that it was with her as Mistress Hillebjörg said. But as time went on and it became clear that she was not to have a child, she scarce had the strength to feel disappointed. She was so worn out that it would have seemed too much if she had had more to look for, of either good or ill. She bore it with patience that she was so sick and that none could tell what ailed her and that there seemed to be no cure for her. If she tried to look forward into the future, she saw naught but black, waving mists like the darkness that whirled before her eyes when she had her swooning-fits.

Then she plunged deep into the memories of all that had been between Olav and her that last summer and autumn. She closed both eyes and kissed her own plait of hair and hands and arms and made believe it was Olav. But the more she abandoned herself to dreams and desires, the more unreal it seemed to her that these things had happened in truth. That the end of the matter would be that they were united at last, in peace and with full right, she had indeed believed, but never been able to imagine—just as she believed, but was little able to imagine all that she had heard of the priests about a blissful state in the other world.

So she lay powerless, not expecting ever to regain the use of her limbs. With it the last rope was broken that still held her to the everyday life and occupations of other men and women. She no longer hoped that she would ever be lawfully married to Olav Audunsson, would be mistress of his house and mother of his children. Instead she allowed herself to drift as the sport of dreams which she never looked to see fulfilled.

Every evening, when the candle was extinguished and the fire raked out, she played that Olav came and lay down with her.

Every morning, when she awoke, she played that her husband had risen and gone out. She lay listening to the sounds of the great farm, playing that she was at Hestviken; and she played that it was Olav who had the hay carted in, that they were his horses and sledges, and that it was he who set his folk to their work. When Steinar lay still for a moment in her bed, she laid her thin arm about the boy, pressed his fair head against her breast, and to herself she called the boy Audun, and he was her son and Olav’s. Then he wanted to get up and out, struggled to free himself from her embrace. Ingunn coaxed him to stay by giving him dainty morsels of food she had hidden in her bed, telling him stories, and playing at being a mother who was talking to her child.

The first thing that waked her out of her dreams and play when she came to Berg was Lady Magnhild’s taking the coif from her. Never before had she looked upon it as a shame that she had become Olav’s own. At Frettastein she had thought so little, only loved. Only when both Olav and Arnvid were suddenly so urgent to go to Hamar and have Olav’s right to her acknowledged had anything like confusion been aroused in her. But when the good Bishop sent her the modest white linen and bade her bind up her hair, she grew calm again. Even if she had wronged her uncles, who should have been her sponsors after her father’s death, the lord Torfinn would surely make all well again, and then she would be as good a wife as all other married women.

She was chilled with humiliation in the unwonted feeling of being bareheaded, after wearing the married woman’s garb for a year and a half. It was as though she had been immodestly bared by violent hands—as they did with women thralls in the slave market in former times. She excused herself from going across to Magnhild’s house when strangers were there. She did not willingly show herself abroad among folk except in church—there
all
women had to cover their heads. Ingunn drew the hood of her cloak over her face so that not a hair was seen. To make some small amends for having to clothe herself as was unfitting for her, she put away all jewels, wore none but dark, plain kirtles, and did her hair in two hard, stiff plaits without ribbons or other adornment.

•   •   •

Then came the spring. One day the ice sank in the bay, the water lay open and clear and reflected the green hills on both shores. Now Berg was at its fairest. Ingunn led her grandmother out on the sunny side and sat with her, sewing the shirt for Olav Audunsson. Olav had told her that Hestviken lay on the fiord.

She found some trifles to busy herself with in the loft-room that belonged to Aasa. Morning after morning she spent up there, rummaging and tidying. Ingunn took the shutter from the little window and leaned out.

A boat was rowing under the opposite shore—the dark reflection of the wooded hill was broken by long streaks. Ingunn played at its being Olav and the boy who were in the boat. They were rowing this way—Ingunn could
see
it. They put in at the hard and Audun helped his father to make the boat fast. The father stood up on the wooden pier and the boy was busy in the stern of the boat, collecting their things. At last he took his little axe, Olav held out his hand and helped him up—ay, the boy was now as big as Jon, her youngest brother. The two came up the path toward the house, the father first and the son following.

She also had a little daughter, whose name was Ingebjörg. She was out in the yard—she was just coming from the storehouse, carrying a great wooden tray full of bannocks. She broke one of them up and scattered the crumbs to the hens—no, the geese. Ingunn remembered that they had had geese at Frettastein when she was a little child, and there was something grave and imposing about the heavy white and grey-flecked birds. They would have geese at Hestviken.

Softly, as though she were doing something wrong, she stole to the door and shot the bolt. Then she took a coif from her chest and wound it about her head. Ingunn turned her belt, so that the buckle was at the side; she hung on it all the heavy things she could find—a pair of scissors and some keys. Thus adorned she sat on the edge of the empty bedstead that was in the loft; with her hands in her lap she turned over in her mind all the things that had to be done before her husband and children came in.

At Berg it was only now and then that they heard anything of the remarkable events which took place in Norway that year. Almost no news reached Ingunn, shut up as she was in her grandmother’s house. So it was like a bolt from the blue when she heard
one day that Bishop Torfinn had been declared an outlaw and was said to have left the country.

It was their parish priest who brought this news to the house, one day at the beginning of winter. For some months the lord Torfinn had been on a visitation in Norddalen, and from thence it seemed he had intended to meet the Archbishop somewhere in the outer islands. But before he could do so, these barons, who now possessed all the power in the realm, had outlawed the Archbishop and several of the other bishops and persecuted them till they fled the country in all directions. Bishop Torfinn was said to have gone on board a ship, but none knew what had become of him since, or when he might return to his see. The parish priest did not grieve for this—the Bishop had reproved him for indolence and for neglecting to punish the sins of great folks as they deserved; but the priest thought himself a good shepherd enough, and there was no need to treat
his
flock in the Bishop’s way; he had been very angry with that stiff-necked monk, as he called him.

It was clear that the conflict between the bishops and the young King’s advisers was concerned with great matters of state, and this marriage suit of Olav Audunsson was a trifle of no account—although it was brought forward as an instance of the Bishop of Hamar’s intolerable obstinacy and desire to upset the ancient laws of the land. But the parish priest wished to remain good friends with the rich lady of Berg—and perhaps he had no idea how little this affair of the marriage of two children meant outside the parishes where the families of the young people were known. From the way he talked, it might be thought Bishop Torfinn had been outlawed mainly because he had held his hand over the Steinfinnssons’ worst enemy.