Wolf Winter (10 page)

“Even her husband wanted her trial to go ahead,” Lisbet answered her husband.

“To get her officially exonerated,” Henrik said.

This wasn’t a new discussion.

“The bishop didn’t listen to us,” Lisbet said. Her face was gaunt. “She was let go, and now we will all pay for this decision. She’ll get us one by one …”

Henrik was looking out the window. “Are you managing for food?” he asked Maija.

Maija could see what he was doing. She tried to follow him onto ordinary matters such as the graylings they had caught and salted, the partridges and the hares that were hanging from the roof beams of the food store, the turnips growing in the earth, and the field, full of barley.

“Yes,” she said. “So far, it’s been good.”

“The month of rot will soon be over,” he said.

Before coming to the mountain Maija hadn’t known the rot of July—the smell of death that hovered over everything. You couldn’t finish your dinner; you thought you’d save it for breakfast, and in the morning it was unrecognizable. Made your stomach quiver to think you had ever eaten that. Yes, month of rot, harvest, and then winter.

“Be careful,” Lisbet said when Maija left, her eyes large. “Don’t let your children out on their own.”

As she came home, Mirkka was there, although it was only afternoon. Maija walked close to her. She hung her arms across the back of the cow, felt the soft hair and warm skin against her cheek, smelled grass and animal, a trace of manure.

“There was a hearing for sorcery here too,” she told the cow. “Would you have believed it?”

Perhaps that was why the others had said it was wolf that killed Eriksson. Wise people were afraid of fear. Maija thought of Lisbet’s warning and felt her heart shrink. It was hard not to get caught in the webs of other people’s fears, especially if it concerned your children. But that’s when you had to remain level-headed and remind yourself you knew otherwise.
Protect and preserve,
she thought, as always when something concerning her children was too difficult even to contemplate. She sent the thought, perhaps to a God.
Protect my children and preserve them the way they are now, unspoiled by the rest of us.

“Lucky, lucky we found you,” she said and patted the cow’s flank. “Little Mirkka.”

And she thought of milk and butter all winter long.

Sometimes when you had a thought, it refused to leave. You rejected it, disowned it, sent it away, to find, moments later, that you were still spending time with it. It might have a different shape or use different words, but there was no mistaking: it was the same one. It happened to her mother all the time, and her mother grew distracted and ill-tempered. Then her father noticed, and worry lines grew deep on his face. Now Frederika knew how her mother must feel. As soon as she relaxed the slightest, Eriksson’s body was before her, the image jolting her like a penknife prick in her chest.

Frederika was standing by the edge of their homestead. Her mother had said they now needed bark to make their flour go further. She’d asked her to get it. Above Frederika the spruce trees pointed into blue sky, thirty, forty, fifty meters—she didn’t know—enough to dwarf everything else. She had a feeling the trees had both thinned and blackened. Their massive branches drooped almost vertically. The spaces between made them seem lost, although they stood together. She turned. Their cottage was a light-brown block between the tree trunks. There was still time to go home. She didn’t have to say she was frightened—oh no, she could see her mother’s brows stitch up. She could say that she’d forgotten.

Use the speed of the wind,
she thought,
you’ll be back here in no time.
A memory skidded through her mind. It had been autumn. Hiding with Jutta in the forest. Fear making her ears pulsate, her mouth dry. Soldiers so near they had to feel them—how could they not? Insane impulse to stand up and scream: “I’m here,” unable to bear the tension. Meanwhile Jutta, clasping her, whispering litanies. “The shrewdness of the fox, the wisdom of the owl, the strength of the bear …”

And then, on the ground, behind the squatting Jutta, dead Eriksson again.

Frederika sighed.

Bark. Birch bark. She liked it better. The bread tasted more of bread and less of tree. She had seen birch by the river. She began to run.

Frederika reached the river at a spot not far from where they had washed their clothes. The river moved fast. Further downstream pale trunks leaned over the water, small green hands twirled in the air. Red-veined grass grew in a pinkish fog.

Once, when she was small, Frederika had been allowed onto water. It had been back home, when her father still went fishing. He had showed her how to angle for grayling from the edge of the boat. She was impatient, but her father’s hands were jittery and she held back, worried that if he thought she wasn’t listening, he would not let her come. They had got in the boat and floated. As they drifted, her father closed his eyes. His face softened and its angles disappeared. He seemed different from the man she knew. When he relaxed, her father looked old. The river poured from his lifted oars with the sound of waterfalls.

Now there was another water sound. There was someone in the river. A woman, swimming. Red frizzy hair—elf hair—the waxen arcs of her body glimmered beneath the surface. She took a couple of strokes upstream, then turned over and floated down on her back. Frederika had never seen the woman before, and yet she knew her. She was certain she did.

“Can I come?” she shouted, knowing full well that her mother would not allow this and would never forgive it, yet all of a sudden feeling she could not stand it if this woman said no. But the woman called out, “Yes. Come!”

Frederika stripped off, taking care to fold her dress on a stone. The water was freezing and its force so strong that for one moment she thought that this was too much—it was a mistake. At first the panic and later the sensation of wickedness made her scream with
what she would remember as joy. The woman laughed at her with her mouth wide open, and then she screamed. Together they howled with all their might with the fear and the happiness in being alive.

Spent, they sat on the stones to dry.

The woman’s breasts unfolded into pink suns, her flesh splayed over the stone. She had spider webs of blue on her thighs. A breeze rippled the water, swept up over the shore, and made the tiny hairs on Frederika’s legs and arms stand up straight. She reached for her dress and pulled it over her head.

The woman rose and put on her white blouse and fastened its hooks. She put a pin in her mouth, tried to untangle her hair with her fingers, but gave up and swirled it together at the crown of her head. She stepped into her skirt and tied the wide ribbons around her waist. She bent at her hips and reached down to smooth away the creases with firm strokes.

“I saw honey-paw this morning—bear,” she said. “He came almost all the way up to the cottage.” Her eyes widened as if she’d seen something on Frederika’s face. “You’ve seen him too.” She nodded to herself. “You know the meaning of seeing bear, don’t you? Ancestor, coming with a warning. I am now thinking it might have been for you.”

“For me? Why?”

“Oh, I’m not that good.”

“Then how do you know he didn’t come to warn you?”

“Clever …” The woman laughed. “I don’t. Though I do think that whatever was supposed to happen to me has already happened. Signs are like that. You half make things up, half know. Most often you are right.”

“I saw black crows—what does that mean?”

“Whatever you think it means.”

The woman turned to look out at the river. She stood for a long time and watched it, eyes narrow. She sighed. Sometimes Frederika too felt she loved a place so much, she could eat it with her eyes.

“And what brought you here?” the woman asked.

Frederika had forgotten. She scrambled to get up. “I have to get bark for the bread. I wanted birch.”

“You’re in the wrong place. Go to the valley. I am going that way. I can show you.”

The woman began to walk upriver, and Frederika followed her. She took the path that led to the top of the mountain. Frederika hadn’t realized they would have to pass the glade. She wondered if the woman knew what had happened, but she didn’t know what to say, and so she said nothing. When they reached the summit, the woman stopped to look out over the valley, shading her eyes with her hand. There were erratic bursts of fierce color in the landscape, which otherwise seemed to have dulled since Frederika was last there.

“This place is holy,” the woman said. “At least that is what they used to say, the people who lived here first. One can understand why.” She pointed to a flat boulder some meters away. “We call this the ‘King’s Throne,’” she said and laughed. “This is where our men come to sit and look at the world as if they owned it.”

Frederika couldn’t concentrate. The glade insisted behind her. She stepped sideways to keep it in the corner of her eye.

“Something happened here,” she said.

“Lots of things have happened here. It is that kind of a place—it attracts things. Maybe it is the view.”

“Is it evil?”

“The place? Whatever evil you find here is not of the worst kind. The obvious things rarely are.”

“My mother says I should try to make Blackåsen my own,” Frederika said. “There is an awful lot to Blackåsen, isn’t there? If a person wanted to try to make it their own.”

“And then perhaps it’s not up to you to choose,” the woman said. “Come. I’ll show you something.”

She walked toward the pass. As the path narrowed, she dragged her hand along the rock wall. At the crevice she paused, glanced at Frederika, and then walked straight into it. Frederika stopped.

“Come on,” the woman said.

Frederika followed her into the mountain. There was a thread of blue far above her in between the rock walls. At the end of the path there was a boulder, and there the fracture cut to the right. There had been a landslip. Large rocks and small stones made a hill against the rock, all the way up into the blue.

The woman stepped up on one of the larger stones and reached with her hands to climb further.

Frederika touched the rock. She began to climb.

They reached the summit, and there was a level part. Around them the mountain fell away. Frederika gasped. The woman was watching her, eyes small slits.

“The men on the King’s Throne don’t know about this,” she said. “It makes me laugh that they sit there pondering a sliver of land, while just a bit further up there is the whole world.”

The woman pointed. “West—our marsh, forest, Norway, and then the oceans.”

Blue forest became blue mountains and then blue sky.

“South, lies the valley.”

The valley was a vibrant green, sprawling fingers of silver waterways. “The town lies beyond the hill.”

The woman put her hands on Frederika’s shoulders and turned her around.

“East,” she said. “Our lake, forest, the sea. Finland.”

At the horizon a mere haze. Air.

“North, our river, more forest, the mountains. Up there, where green turns brown, they say we are all one: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.

“You can see the homesteads,” the woman said and turned around in a circle, pointing out small patches of cleared ground at regular intervals in the forest. “Henrik by the river, Nils by the
marsh, Daniel in the valley, me in the deep forest, you by the field, Gustav by the lake. All of us close to the mountain. None of us on the mountain itself.”

“Trees, trees, trees,” her father had muttered on the porch this morning.

And yes. The land was old spruce leaning in over them with shaggy branches, pine trees, no more than a hand high, jabbing at their ankles. There were hollow trees, tree stumps, and fallen trees flaunting snarled clods of roots and earth …

But more than that, most of all, this land was sky.

The forest in the valley dozed in the heat. She stirred when they came, as if rising from some dream before sinking back into slumber. Through the spruce trees the marsh sparkled: green moss with yellow star shoots and, further out, black water. If she turned left now, Frederika would come home.

The fir trees stopped behind them and gave way to bright, young trees.

“There was a fire here once,” the woman said. “That is why this bit of forest is leafy. It will take a long time before the spruce grows back. Bishop’s weed, polypody, nettles—you’ll find it all here. In late autumn there are a lot of rowanberries.”