The Axe (4 page)

And among the band of children at Frettastein, of whom none took any heed, these two, the eldest, kept together, because they knew that, whatever happened, one thing was certain—that they should be together. This was the only sure thing, and it was good to have something sure. The boy, growing up alone in the home of a stranker kin, struck root, without knowing it, in her who was promised to him; and his love for the only one he well knew of all that was to be his grew as he himself grew—without his marking the growth. He cherished her as a habit, until his love took on a colour and brightness that showed him how wholly he was filled thereby.

Things went on this wise until the summer when Olav Audunsson had ended his sixteenth year. Ingunn was now fifteen winters old.

O
LAV
had inherited from his father a great battle-axe—with pointed barbs, steel edge, and inlays of gold on the cheeks; the shaft had bands of gilt copper. It had a name and was called Kin-fetch.
It was a splendid weapon and the boy who owned this treasure thought its match was scarce to be found in Norway, as was like enough. But he had never said this to any but Ingunn, and she believed it and was as proud of the axe as he himself. Olav had always kept it hanging above his sleeping-place in the hall.

But one day this spring Olav saw that the edge was notched, and when he took it down, he found that the steel edge had parted from the iron blade and worked loose in the welding. Olav guessed that it would be vain to try to find out who had used his axe and spoiled it. So he said nothing to any but Ingunn. They took counsel what he should do and agreed that next time Steinfinn was from home Olav must ride to Hamar; there dwelt a famous armourer, and if he could not set it to rights, no man could. And one morning in the week before John’s Mass Ingunn came and told Olav that today her father was going north to Kolbein; so it might be a timely occasion for them to go to the town next day.

Olav had not thought to take her with him. It was many years since either of the children had been in the town, and Olav did not rightly know how far it was thither; but he had thought he might be home again to supper if he rode down early in the morning. But Ingunn had no horse of her own, and there was none in the place that he could take for her. If they were to take turns at riding his horse, Elk, they could not reach home again till far on in the night—and then it would be so that she must ride and he walk the whole time; that he knew well from the many times they had gone together to mass in their parish church, in the village below. And they would surely be very angry, Steinfinn and Ingebjörg, if they heard that he had taken Ingunn with him to Hamar. But Olav only made answer that they would have to go down to the shore and row to the town—they must set out betimes in the morning.

It was a good while before sunrise when he stole out of the hall next morning, but it was daylight outside, calm and chilly. The air was cold with dew—good as a bath after the dense fumes of man and dog within. The boy sucked it in as he stood on the threshold looking at the weather.

The wild cherry was white with a foam of blossom between the cornfields—spring had come even here in the hills. Far below,
the lake lay glistening, a dead grey with dark stripes where the current ran: it gave promise of showers. The sky had a wan look, and dark shreds of cloud drifted low down—there had been rainstorms in the night. When Olav stepped out on the grass of the yard his high boots of yellow undyed leather were darkened with moisture—little reddish splashes appeared on his boot-legs. He sat down on the doorstone and pulled off his boots, tied the laces together, and slung them over his shoulder to carry them with his folded cloak and the axe.

Barefoot he went across the wet courtyard to the house where Ingunn had slept that night with two of the serving-maids, that she might be able to slip away without being seen. For the journey to town Olav had dressed himself in his best clothes—a long kirtle of light-blue English cloth and hose of the same stuff. But the dress was somewhat outgrown—the kirtle was tight across the chest and short at the wrists and it scarce reached to the middle of his calf. The hose too were very tight, and Ingebjörg had cut off the feet the autumn before; now they ended at the ankle. But the kirtle was fastened at the neck with a fine ring-brooch of gold, and round his waist he wore a belt set with silver roses and Saint Olav’s image on the buckle; his dagger bore gilt mounts on hilt and sheath.

Olav went up into the balcony and struck three light blows upon the door. Then he stood waiting.

A bird began trilling and piping—it burst forth like a fountain above the sleepy twittering from the thickets round about. Olav saw the bird as a dot against the sky—it sat on a fir twig against the yellowing northern heaven. He could see how it drew itself in and swelled itself out, like a little heart beating. The hosts of cloud high up began to flush, a flush spread over the hillside with a rosy reflection in the water.—Olav knocked at the door again, much harder—it rang out in the morning stillness so that the boy held his breath and listened for a movement in any of the houses.

Soon after, the door was opened ajar—the girl slipped out. Her hair hung about her, ruffled and lustreless; it was yellow-brown and very curly. She was in her bare smock; the neck, which was of white linen, was worked with green and blue flowers, but below, it was of coarse grey stuff, and it was too long for her and trailed about her narrow pink feet. She carried her clothes over her arm and had a wallet in her hand. This she gave to Olav, threw
down her bundle of clothes, and shook her hair from her face, which was still flushed with sleep—one cheek redder than the other. She took a waist-band and girt up her smock with it.

She was tall and thin, with slight limbs, a long, slender throat, and a small head. Her face was a triangle, her forehead low and broad, but it was snow-white and finely arched at the temples under the thick folds of hair; the thin cheeks were too much drawn in, making the chin too long and pointed; the straight little nose was too low and short. But for all that her little face had a restless charm of its own: the eyes were very large and dark grey, but the whites were as blue as a little child’s, and they lay in deep shadow beneath the straight black lines of her brows and her full, white eyelids; the mouth was narrow, but the lips were red as berries—and with her bright pink and white complexion Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter was fair now in her young girlhood.

“Make haste,” said Olav, as she sat on the stair winding her linen hose tightly around her legs; and she took good time about it. “You were best carry hose and shoes till the grass be dry.”

“I will not go barefoot on the wet ground in this cold—” the girl shivered a little.

“You will be warmer when once you have made an end of putting on your clothes—you must not be so long about it—’tis rosy morning already, cannot you see?”

Ingunn made no answer, but took off her hose-band and began again to wind it about her leg. Olav hung her clothes over the rail of the balcony.

“You must have a cloak with you—do you not see we shall have showers today?”

“My cloak is down with Mother—I forgot to take it with me last night. It looks now like fine weather—but if there comes a shower, we shall find some place to creep under.”

“What if it rains while we are in the boat? You cannot walk in the town without a cloak either. But I see well enough you will borrow my cloak, as is your way.”

Ingunn looked up at him over her shoulder. “Why are you so cross today, Olav?”—and she began to be busy with her footgear again.

Olav was ready with an answer; but as she bent down to her shoe, the smock slipped from her shoulders, baring her bosom and upper arm. And instantly a wave of new feelings swept over the
boy—he stood still, bashful and confused, and could not take his eyes off this glimpse of her naked body. It was as though he had never seen it before; a new light was thrown on what he knew of old—as with a sudden landslip within him, his feelings for his foster-sister came to rest in a new order. With a burst of fervour he felt a tenderness that had in it both pity and a touch of pride; her shoulders sank so weakly in a slant to the faint rounding of the shoulder-joint; the thin, white upper arms looked soft, as though she had no muscles under the silky skin—the boy’s senses were tricked with a vision of corn that is as yet but milky, before it has fully ripened. He had a mind to stoop down and pat her consolingly—such was his sudden sense of the difference between her feeble softness and his own wiry, muscular body. Oft had he looked at her before, in the bath-house, and at himself, his hard, tough, well-rounded chest, his muscles firmly braced over the stomach, and swelling into a knot as he bent his arm. With childish pride he had rejoiced that he was a boy.

Now this self-glorious sense of being strong and well made became strangely shot through with tenderness, because she was so weak—he would know how to protect her. He would gladly have put his arm around that slender back, clasped her little girlish breasts beneath his hand. He called to mind that day last spring when he himself had fallen on his chest over a log—it was where Gunleik’s new house was building—he had torn both his clothes and his flesh. With a shudder in which were mingled horror and sweetness he thought that never more would he let Ingunn climb up on the roof with them at Gunleik’s farm.

He blushed as she looked at him.

“You are staring? Mother will never know I have borrowed her smock; she never wears it herself.”

“Do you not feel the cold?” he asked; and Ingunn’s surprise was yet greater, for he spoke as low and shyly as though she had really come to some hurt in their game.

“Oh, not enough to make my nails go blue,” she said laughing.

“No, but can you not get your clothes on quickly?” he said anxiously. “You have goose-flesh on your arms.”

“If I could but get my smock together—” The edges at the throat were stiff with sewing; she struggled, but could not get the stuff through the tiny ring of her brooch.

Olav laid down the whole load that he had just taken on his back. “I will lend you mine—it has a bigger ring.” He took the gold brooch from his bosom and handed it to her. Ingunn looked at him, amazed. She had pestered him to lend her this trinket before now, but that he himself should offer to let her wear it was something new, for it was a costly jewel, of pure gold and fairly big. Along the outer edge were inscribed the Angel’s Greeting and
Amor vincit omnia
. Her kinsman Arnvid Finnsson said that in the Norse tongue this meant “Love conquers all things,” since the Lady Sancta Maria conquers all the malice of the fiend by her loving supplication.

Ingunn had put on her red holy-day garments and bound her silken girdle about her waist—she combed her tangled hair with her fingers.

“You must even lend me your comb, Olav!”

Although he had but just collected all his things again, he laid them down once more, searched out a comb from his pouch, and gave it to her without impatience.

But as they plodded along the road between the fences down in the village, Olav’s dizzy exaltation forsook him little by little. The weather had cleared and the sun was broiling hot—and as time went on, it w
as
a load: wallet, axe, cloak, and boots. True, Ingunn had once offered to carry some of it; but that was when they were passing through the forest and it was cool beneath the firs, with a grateful fresh scent of pine-needles and hair-moss and young leaves. The sun barely gilded the tree-tops, and the birds sang with full throat—and then the boy was still swayed by his new-born emotion. She bade him stop, she had to plait her hair anew, for she had forgotten her hair-band—ay, ’twas like her. But her tawny mane waved so finely over her forehead as she loosed the braids, making shady hollows at the temples, where the first short hairs lay close and curly, it softened his heart to look at it. So when she spoke of carrying, he only shook his head; and afterwards he heard no more of it.

Down here on the fiord it was full summer. The children climbed a fence and made straight across an enclosure; the meadow was a slope of flowers, pink clouds of caraway and golden globe-flowers. Where there was a thin patch of soil among the rocks, the violets grew thick as a carpet, and within the shade
of the alder brake red catchflies blazed amid the luxuriant green. Ingunn stopped again and again to pluck flowers, and Olav grew more and more impatient; he longed to get down to the boat and be rid of his burden. He was hungry too—as yet neither of them had tasted food. But when she said that they could sit down and eat here in the shade by the brook, he replied shortly that it would be as he said. When they had got hold of a boat, they could make a meal before rowing away, but not till then.