The Axe (6 page)

She had a motive for it, which she kept to herself. Once, long ago, she had visited the convent with her father, and then they had been given wine, which the monks made from apples and berries in their garden. So good and sweet a drink she had never tasted before or since—and she secretly hoped that Brother Vegard might offer them a cup of it.

The parlour was but a closet in the guest-house; the convent was a poor one, but the children had never seen another and they thought it a brave and fine room, with the great crucifix over the door. In a little while Brother Vegard came in; he was a middle-aged man of great stature, weatherbeaten, with a wreath of grizzled hair.

He received the children’s greeting in friendly fashion, but seemed pressed for time. With awkward concern Olav came out with his errand. Brother Vegard told them the way shortly and plainly: past Christ Church eastward through Green Street, past
the Church of Holy Cross, and down to the left along the fence of Karl Kjette’s garden, down to the field where was a pond; the smith’s house was the biggest of the three that stood on the other side of the little mere. Then he took leave of the children and was going: “You will sleep in the guest-house tonight, I ween?”

Olav said they must set out for home after vespers.

“But milk you must have—and you will be here for vespers?”

They had to say yes to this. But Ingunn looked a little disappointed. She had expected to be offered other than milk and she had looked forward to hearing vespers in the minster; the boys of the school sang so sweetly. But now they durst not go elsewhere than to St. Olav’s.

The monk was already at the door when he turned sharply, as something came into his mind: “So that is how it is—Steinfinn has sent for Jon smith today? Are you charged to bid the armourer come to Frettastein, Olav?” he asked, with a trace of anxiety.

“No, father. I am but come on my own errand.” Olav told him what it was and showed the axe.

The monk took it and balanced it in both hands.

“A goodly weapon you have there, my Olav,” he said, but more coolly than Olav had ever thought a man could speak of
his
axe. Brother Vegard looked at the gold inlay on the cheeks. “It is old, this—they do not make such things nowadays. This is an heir-loom, I trow?”

“Yes, father. I had it of my father.”

“I have heard of a horned axe like this which they say was at Dyfrin in old days—when the old barons’ kin held the manor. That must be near a hundred years ago. There was much lore about that axe; it had a name and was called Wrathful Iron.”

“Ay, my kindred came from thence—Olav and Torgils are yet family names with us. But this axe is called Kinfetch—and I know not how it came into my father’s possession.”

“It must be another, then—such horned axes were much used in old days,” said the monk; he passed his hand along the finely curved blade. “And maybe that is lucky for you, my son—if I mind me rightly, bad luck followed that axe I spoke of.”

He repeated his directions, took a kindly leave of the children, and went out.

•   •   •

Then they went off to find the smith. Ingunn strode in front; she looked like a grown maid in her long, trailing dress. Olav tramped behind, tired and downcast. He had looked forward so much to the journey to town—scarce knowing what he looked for in it. Whenever he had been here before, it was in the company of grown men, and it had been a fair-day in the town; to his serious and inquiring eyes all had been excitement and festivity: the bargaining of the men, the booths, the houses, the churches they had been in; they had been offered drink in the houses, and the street had been full of horses and folk. Now he was only a raw youth wandering about with a young girl, and there was no place where he could turn in; he knew no one, had no money; and they had not time to enter the churches. In an hour or two they must set out for home. And he had an unspeakable dread of the endless rowing and then the walk up through the fields—God alone knew what time of night they would reach home! And then they might look for a chiding for having run away!

They found the way to the smith. He looked at the axe well and long, turned it this way and that, and said it would be a hard matter to mend it. These horned axes had gone wellnigh out of use; ’twas not easy to fit an edge on them that would not spring loose with a heavy blow, on a helm, to wit, or even on a tough skull. This came from the shape of the blade, a great half-moon with barbs at either end. Ay, he would do his best, but he could not promise that the gold inlay should come to no harm by his welding and hammering. Olav considered a moment, but could see naught else to be done—he gave the axe to the smith and bargained with him as to the price of the work.

But when Olav told where he came from, the smith looked up and scanned his face: “Then you would have it back in all haste, I trow? So that is the way of it—are they making ready their axes at Frettastein these days?”

Olav said he knew naught of
that
.

“Nay, nay. Has Steinfinn any plan, he is not like to tell his boys of it—”

Olav looked at the smith as though he would say something, but checked himself. He took his leave and departed.

•   •   •

They had passed the pond, and Ingunn wished to turn into a road between fences which led up to Green Street. But Olav took her by the arm: “We can go here.”

The houses in Green Street were built on a ridge of high ground. Below them ran a brook of dirty water at the edge of the fields behind the townsmen’s outhouses and kale-yards. By the side of the brook was a trodden path.

Ashes, apple trees, and great rosebushes in the gardens shaded the path, so the air felt cool and moist. Blue flies darted like sparks in the green shadows, where nettles and all kinds of coarse weeds grew luxuriantly, for folk threw out their refuse on this side, making great muck-heaps behind the outhouses. The path was slippery with grease that sweated out of the rotting heaps, and the air was charged with smells—fumes of manure, stench of carrion, and the faint odour of angelica that bordered the stream with clouds of greenish-white flowers.

But beyond the brook the fields lay in full afternoon sunshine; the little groves of trees threw long shadows over the grass. The fields stretched right down to the small houses along Strand Street, and beyond them lay the lake, blue with a golden glitter, and the low shore of Holy Isle in the afternoon haze.

The children walked in silence; Olav was now a few paces in front. It was very still here in the shade behind the gardens-nothing but the buzzing of the flies. A cowbell tinkled above on the common. Once the cuckoo called—spectrally clear and far away on a wooded ridge.

Then a woman’s scream rang out from one of the houses, followed by the laughter of a man and a woman. In the garden a man had caught a girl from behind; she dropped her pail, full of fishes’ heads and offal, and it rolled down to the fence; the couple followed, stumbling and nearly falling. When they caught sight of the two children, the man let go the girl; they stopped laughing, whispered, and followed them with their eyes.

Instinctively Olav had halted for a moment, so that Ingunn came up beside him and he placed himself between her and the fence. A blush crept slowly over his fair features and he looked down at the path as he led Ingunn past. These houses in the town that Steinfinn’s house-carls had talked so much about—for the first time it made him hot and gripped his heart to
think of them, and he wondered whether this was one of those houses.

The path turned and Olav and Ingunn saw the huge grey mass and pale leaden roof of Christ Church and the stone walls of the Bishop’s palace above the trees a little way in front of them. Olav stopped and turned to the girl.

“Tell me, Ingunn—did you hear what Brother Vegard said—and the smith?”

“What mean you?”

“Brother Vegard asked if Steinfinn had sent for the armourer to Frettastein,” said Olav slowly. “And Jon smith asked if we made ready our axes now.”

“What meant they? Olav—you look so strangely!”

“Nay, I know not. Unless there is news at the Thing—folk are breaking up from the Thing these days, the first of them—”

“What mean you?”

“Nay, I know not. Unless Steinfinn has made some proclamation—”

The girl raised both hands abruptly and laid them on Olav’s breast. He laid both his palms upon them and pressed her hands against his bosom. And as they stood thus, there welled up again in Olav more powerfully than before that new feeling that they were adrift—that something which had been was now gone for ever; they were drifting toward the new and unknown. But as he gazed into her tense dark eyes, he saw that she felt the same. And he knew in his whole body and his whole soul that she had turned to him and clutched at him because it was the same with her as with him—she scented the change that was coming over them and their destiny, and so she clung to him instinctively, because they had so grown together throughout their forlorn, neglected childhood that now they were nearer to each other than any beside.

And this knowledge was unutterably sweet. And while they stood motionless looking into each other’s face, they seemed to become one flesh, simply through the warm pressure of their hands. The raw chill of the pathway that went through their wet shoes, the sunshine that poured warmly over them, the strong blended smell that they breathed in, the little sounds of the afternoon—they seemed to be aware of them all with the senses of one body.

The pealing of the church bells broke in upon their mute and tranquil rapture—the mighty brazen tones from the minster tower, the busy little bell from Holy Cross Church—and there was a sound of ringing from St. Olav’s on the point.

Olav dropped the girl’s hands. “We must make haste.”

Both felt as though the peal of bells had proclaimed the consummation of a mystery. Instinctively they took hands, as though after a consecration, and they went on hand in hand until they reached the main street.

The monks were in the choir and had already begun to chant vespers as Olav and Ingunn entered the dark little church. No light was burning but the lamp before the tabernacle and the little candles on the monks’ desks. Pictures and metal ornaments showed but faintly in the brown dusk, which gathered into gloom under the crossed beams of the roof. There was a strong smell of tar, of which the church had recently received its yearly coat, and a faint, sharp trace of incense left behind from the day’s mass.

In their strangely agitated mood they remained on their knees inside the door, side by side, and bowed their heads much lower than usual as they whispered their prayers with unwonted devotion. Then they rose to their feet and stole away to one side and the other.

There were but few people in church. On the men’s side sat some old men, and one or two younger knelt in the narrow aisle—they seemed to be the convent’s labourers. On the women’s side he saw none but Ingunn; she stood leaning against the farthest pillar, trying to make out the pictures painted on the baldachin over the side altar.

Olav took a seat on the bench—now he felt again how fearfully stiff and tired he was all over. The palms of his hands were blistered.

The boy knew nothing of what the monks sang. Of the Psalms of David he had learned no more than the
Miserere
and
De profundís
, and those but fairly well. But he knew the chant—saw it inwardly as a long, low wave that broke with a short, sharp turn and trickled back over the pebbles; and at first, whenever they came to the end of a psalm and sang
“Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritu Sancto,”
he whispered the response:
“Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in sæcula sæculorum. Amen.”
The
monk who led the singing had a fine deep, dark voice. In drowsy-well-being Olav listened to the great male voice that rose alone and to the choir joining in, verse after verse throughout the psalms. After all the varied emotions of the day peace and security fell upon his soul as he sat in the dark church looking at the white-clad singers and the little flames of the candles behind the choir-screen. He would do the right and shun the wrong, he thought—then God’s might and compassion would surely aid him and save him in all his difficulties.

Pictures began to swarm before his inner vision: the boat, Ingunn with the velvet hood over her fair face, the glitter on the water behind her, the floor-boards covered with shining fish-scales—the dark, damp path among nettles and angelica—the fence they had climbed and the flowery meadow through which they had run—the golden net over the bottom of the lake—all these scenes succeeded one another behind his closed and burning eyelids.

He awoke as Ingunn took him by the shoulder. “You have been asleep,” she said reprovingly.

The church was empty, and just beside him the south door stood open to the green cloister garth in the evening sun. Olav yawned and stretched his stiff limbs. He dreaded the journey home terribly; this made him speak to her a little more masterfully than usual; “ ’Twill soon be time to set out, Ingunn.”

“Yes.” She sighed deeply. “Would we might sleep here tonight!”

“You know we cannot do that.”

“Then we could have heard mass in Christ Church in the morning. We never see strange folk, we who must ever bide at home-it makes the time seem long.”

“You know that one day it will be otherwise with us.”

“But you have been in Oslo too, you have, Olav.”

“Ay, but I remember nothing of it.”

“When we come to Hestviken, you must promise me this, that you will take me thither some time, to a fair or a gathering.”

“That I may well promise you, methinks.”

Olav was so hungry his entrails cried out for food. So it was good to get warm groats and whey in the guest-room of the convent. But he could not help thinking all the time of the row home. And then he was uneasy about his axe.

But now they fell into talk with two men who also sat at meat
in the guest-house. They came from a small farm that lay by the shore a little to the north of the point where Olav and Ingunn were to land, and they asked to be taken in their boat. But they would fain stay till after complin.