In the Wilderness (30 page)

Awhile after, he walked back across the bridge, as in a dream, so heavy was his head—amid the stream of strangers who were returning. But he had bethought him of his axe before going down from the tower; as in a dream he remembered striding over dead bodies that lay inside the barbican at the bottom of the ladder, and as in a dream he heard the shouts of the men who manned the towers, making ready to defend them again, if there were need. He had to make way for two men who were carrying a third by the shoulders and knees. Drowsily he noticed that the planks of the bridge were dark and slippery with blood, and he turned a little giddy at the sight of the black water that rushed under the bridge and thundered over the fall.

When he had come a little way up the hill toward Aker church he stopped and laid down his axe—he wanted to take off the helmet that pressed so painfully on his head, and it was horrible with this splintered steel among the torn and tender flesh of his mouth. A man stopped and helped him with it. The sweat burst out anew all over his sweat-drenched body, and the tears came into his eyes, before the other had got the helmet off him, and his cheek was gashed worse than before. The stranger offered to take him under his arm, but Olav shook his head, tried to laugh, but could not, for his face had grown so stiff and seemed enormous. Then the other picked up the axe and the helmet and gave them to him, said something, with a laugh, and went on. Olav tried to wipe away some of the blood that trickled down his neck, it made him so disgustingly wet underneath his clothes.

The sun was now high in the heavens, he noticed; it was past midday and had turned to the clearest and finest of winter days.
The tree-tops round the church shone against the blue sky as though it were springtime, but the light hurt his eyes.

He came up to a farm on the hill and went into one of the houses. It was packed full of men, but he saw none he knew. Several spoke to him when they saw his shattered face, but he could not get out a word. Some of them made room so that he could sit on the floor in front of a bench, and one who sat on the bench took his head in his lap, and then weariness overcame him. He did not really sleep, for the pains in his head increased, as though tearing out his very skull, and he felt himself growing chilled and numb, but he sank into a sort of lethargy.

Once he was roused from it—a bulky, elderly woman had told of him. A half-grown girl with solemn, staring eyes stood by, holding a bowl from which steam rose, and the woman dipped a towel, which was now stained brown, and washed the blood from his face and neck with lukewarm water. Dizzy and impatient with fatigue and pain, he had to submit to be helped up, so that he could sit on the bench—gazing the while with longing at the great blaze on the hearth, for he was shivering. The woman and a man stripped away his elkskin hauberk, peeled off his jerkin and shirt, which stuck fast to the skin; naked to the middle, he sat shivering as they washed him and tended his wound, a cut reaching upward to below the left nipple; and then they drew on his clothes again, which were now soaking wet.

He staggered to his feet and tried to go and sit by the fire, but a woman who was like Torhild took him by the arm and led him to a bed that had been made on the floor. When once he had lain down, it was good indeed to stretch out his limbs and lean his back and neck against the big sacks of hay. She who looked like Torhild spread a thin coverlet over him and offered him a warm drink, but he could not take much into his mouth and it was too painful to swallow. But soon he felt the warmth of the rug, and of a big, black-bearded man against whom he was lying, and the warmth was an unspeakable relief, though his head felt as if it would burst with pain.

After a while he was again roused from his doze; they wanted him to go out with them. He went. It was almost dark outside, the southern sky a greenish yellow; great white stars were shining in the frosty evening. Up by the church great red bonfires were burning, around which moved black figures—the stables and the
church barn were crowded with men. The main door of the church stood wide open, and he saw that many candles were lighted in the choir, a flood of song welled out, but his companion led him past, to a group of houses.

He came into a room where many men were assembled—he recognized Ivar Jonsson and one or two from home. Some of them were busy about a bench, and on it lay a naked corpse they were washing. Olav stepped up and saw that it was Sira Hallbjörn.

He lay on his back, long and white, with his arms hanging down so that the hands rested on the clay floor with the palms upward. The left arm was broken, so that the bones protruded above the elbow. They were just washing the blood out of his grizzled red hair, and there was a faint crackling of broken bone—the skull had been shattered above the left temple. Beside the bench stood a bucket of steaming red water.

Ivar Jonsson came up to Olav. He told him in a whisper that they had found the priest’s body in a thicket of briers close up to where the Swedes’ catapults had been posted—half-naked and plundered: his arms were missing, as was his seal-ring and the gilt Agnus Dei that Olav remembered Sira Hallbjörn always wore about his neck.

His brother, the knight Finn Erlingsson, was among those the Swedes had taken prisoner, but his sons, Eindride and Erling, were here, Ivar went on to tell him. Olav looked at the two slight red-haired lads who stood by their uncle’s body, and nodded. Ivar was still talking—there had been Lidungs, Ringerikings, and men from Modheim parish among the levies, and a little band from Valdres led by Sir Finn.

The dead man’s face was grey and calm as a stone image. The men who stood by were discussing what the scars could be that the priest carried on his body: the left shoulder and upper arm were scored as though the flesh had been torn, and on the left pectoral muscle were four deep little pits; from there a silver-white furrow ran down across the stomach. But the scars were old, so it was hard to say what kind of wild beast he had been at grips with.

Olav knelt down together with some others, but his wound and his whole head ached so that he could say no prayer. When he rose to his feet they had dressed the corpse and moved it to the bier. Now Sira Hallbjörn lay like a priest, dressed in an alb and
an old chasuble, with sandals on his feet and a pewter chalice between his clasped hands: some of the priests of Aker church had provided what was fitting for their dead brother.

Olav accompanied the bier as it was carried down to the church; several other biers were already standing before the chancel arch. But he had not the strength to stay and hear the vigil. The man who had accompanied him to the mortuary chamber took him under the arm and led him back to the farm where he had found shelter; it was Little Aker, the other told him.

Bodily pain was a wholly new experience for Olav Audunsson. Wounds and scratches he had known many a time, with smarting and fever, but they had always been such as he counted for nothing—flesh wounds that healed rapidly and cleanly.

But this wound in his face was downright torture: a racking and shooting pain in his skull and an intolerable aching in the jawbone and in the root of the broken tooth. But worst of all was the loathsomeness of it—his mouth was always filled with the foul taste of matter from the wound.

Now and again he had high fever, and then it was as if the bed he lay in rose up and up and his body felt flat as an empty bladder, while something round and heavy that had been inside his head rolled down over him, and visions hovered along the ridge of his brows—creatures that were neither beast nor man, faces that he recognized without knowing who they were. In particular there was a beggar without feet who darted along at a terrible pace on boards fixed to his hands and knees; it tormented him more than anything when that vision came.

One night he saw Ingunn—she stood a little off the ground against the wall at the foot of his bed and leaned forward over him, so that her light-brown hair swept over her thin bare arms and fell forward like a mantle. He thought she was clad in nothing but a shift, which was embroidered at the neck with little green flowers, so that all the little coloured spots danced before his eyes. Olav raised his hands to keep her from coming nearer, for just in those days his wound was angry and stank foully; but she sank down upon him like a wave of warmth and sweetness, he was flooded as it were with the goodness of her—then he lost his senses, fell into a kind of swoon.

In the morning he was able to spit out a whole mass of matter
and splinters that had worked out of his jaw; the woman who tended him could wash the wound fairly clean, and he felt better. He was weak and cold, and as he could only lie on the left side, it felt as if the bones were coming through the flesh there, so tender was it. At the same time he was famished; he had hardly been able to swallow anything of what they brought and tried to make him drink.

They had been to see him almost every day, one or another of his companions-in-arms, but he had not been fit to pay much attention to what they told him. But this morning came Ivar Jonsson himself and some more; they could scarce conceal their exultation. The Duke had withdrawn from Oslo at daybreak; it was clear he had lost his relish for trying his teeth on the walls of the castle of Aker, sick as he was himself, and with three thousand men of the country levies posted on the high ground. And Munan Baardsson had received reinforcements and was thought to have put the castle in excellent posture of defence.

The Duke had not lost much above half a hundred men in the fight at Frysja bridge; of the yeomen two hundred had fallen, and many had got wounds great and small. But it seemed Duke Eirik thought this might be enough; he had looked for no opposition at all, counting rather that the greater part of the Norwegian nobles would be so discontented with King Haakon that they would make common cause with him.

After his friends had left him, Olav lay feeling how his whole being was now permeated by the pent-up joy and confidence that had lain in the depths of his soul all these long days while his body was one mass of pain and fetid humours and burning fever. In spite of all, this joy had lived within him the whole time like a glow on the hearth of a ruinous house. No pain could take from him the joy of having had the chance to stand up and act and fight for his home and his native soil against the strangers who poured over it. Even if it had availed nothing, that could not have undone the joy it gave him that they
had
risen in defence, he and his fellows in the countryside. But now that it
had
availed, he lay here feeling his tortured body as but a thin and passing scab on sound, healing flesh.

He was glad, deeply and cordially glad, as he had not been since he was young. During all his long years at home, while it seemed as if his life had so shaped itself that in other men’s eyes he had
nothing to complain of—had he not prosperity, health, and peace?—it had been with him in secret as though the snakes were striking and tearing at his heart, as in the image of Gunnar on the door of the closet at home. In his soul he had fought without hope, harried by a terrible dread, against powers that were not of flesh and blood.

He saw now it was not his suffering that destroyed the happiness of his life—a man may be happier while he suffers than when his days are good. And sufferings that are of some
avail
, they are like the spear-points that raise the shield on which the young king’s son sits when his subjects do him homage.

Some days later Claus Wiephart came with a sledge. He proposed that Olav Audunsson should move down to his house and submit himself to his leechcraft. Olav said yes to this—he could not in any case stay longer at Little Aker. Claus tortured and plagued him sorely at first, wrenched out the stump of his tooth, picked out splinters of bone, cut and burned at the wound. Olav bore it all with patience; nothing made any impression on this strange, quiet joy of having fought and seen that it was of use. Not the thought that Claus would surely see to it that he was well paid for the cure, nor all that he heard of the Swedes harrying the countryside as they withdrew from the realm. He could get no word of how things were at Hestviken—whether the manor had been burned—but this touched him little. Had he had women and children at home, it would have been otherwise.

The grass was green in Claus Wiephart’s garden, and great yellow buds were bursting on the trees, when at last Olav could make ready for the homeward journey. The wound was now almost healed and the skin had grown again on his cheek. The day before he was to leave he asked Claus’s leman if she would lend him her mirror. He sat with it awhile, breathed on the bright disk of brass, wiped it, and looked again at his own face.

His light hair had turned all grey, its curls were lank and lifeless, and his square, clean-cut face was furrowed and faded. The right side was spoiled, the cheek so sunken that the whole face was awry, and the great red scar had an ugly look; the mouth was also drawn down a little on that side.

In a way Olaf Audunsson had always been aware that he was an unusually handsome man. Not that it had made him vain, and in
his youth it had annoyed him if anyone spoke of it or if the women let him see that they would be glad to have dealings with him because he was so bright and fair. In an obscure fashion he had felt that his physical grace was itself a part of the tie of flesh and blood that bound him to Ingunn—since he had not yet been fully grown when they were mated. But it had been an element in his knowledge of himself that he was, once for all, a wellfavoured man, rather short than tall, but strong and faultlessly built, without an unhealthy spot in his whole close-knit, shapely frame, fair and bright of hair and skin and eyes, as befitted the race from which he was sprung.

It was something of a humiliation that now this was past and gone, but he took it patiently, as a judgment, that now he must think himself old. Nor was he so many years from the half-hundred, so he must needs bow to it.

And so he came home to Hestviken one fine spring day, to green meadows and bursting leaves in the groves. The houses were standing, but all of them were empty—the Swedes had cut down and carried off all they found. In the byre stood a cow and a heifer that Lady Mærta had bought of Torhild Björnsdatter when she fetched home the children and the serving-maids.