The Axe

  All the way down, the children had followed the brook that ran north of the houses at Frettastein. On nearing the village it became a little river—on the flat, before it fell into the fiord, it spread out and ran broad and shallow over a bed of large smooth stones. The lake here formed a great round bay, with a beach strewed with sharp grey rocks that had fallen from the mountainside. A line of old alder trees grew along the bank of the stream right out to the lake.

  At high-water mark, where beach and greensward met, the path led by a cairn. The boy and girl stopped, hurried through a Paternoster and an Ave, and then each threw a stone upon the cairn as a sign that they had done their Christian duty by the dead. It was said to be one who had slain himself, but it was so long ago that Olav and Ingunn at any rate had never heard who the poor wretch might be.

  They had to cross the stream in order to reach the point where Olav had thought he could borrow a boat. This was easy enough for him, who walked barefoot, but Ingunn had not gone many steps before she began to whimper—the round pebbles slipped under her feet and the water was so cold and she was spoiling her best shoes.

  “Do but stand where you are and I will come and fetch you,” said Olav, and waded back to her.

  But when he had taken her up in his arms, he could not see where he put his feet, and in the middle of the river he fell with her.

  The icy water took away his breath for a moment—the whole world seemed to slew over. As long as he lived, this picture remained burned into him—all that he saw as he lay in the stream with Ingunn in his arms: light and shade dropping in patches through the alder leaves upon the running water, the long, grey curve of the beach beyond, and the blue lake glittering in the sunshine.

  Then he got to his feet, dripping wet and ashamed, strangely ashamed with his empty arms—and they waded ashore. Ingunn took it ill, as she swept the water from her sleeves and wrung out first her hair-plaits and then the edge of her dress.

  “Oh, hold your mouth now,” Olav begged in a low and cheerless voice. “Must you always be whining over great things and small?”

  The sky was now blue and cloudless, and the fiord quite smooth, with small patches of glittering white sunshine. Its bright surface reflected the land on the other shore, with tufts of light-green foliage amid the dark pine forest and farms and fields mounting the hillside. It had become very warm—the sweet breath of the summer day was heavy about the two young people. In their wet clothes it felt cold merely to enter the airy shade of the birches on the point.

  The fisher-widow’s cot was no more than a turf hovel boarded at one end, in which was a door. There was no other house in the place but a byre of stones and turf, with an open shed outside to keep the stacks of hay and dried leaves from the worst of the winter weather. Outside the cabin lay heaps of fish refuse. It stank horribly and swarms of blue flies buzzed up as the children came near. These heaps of offal were alive and crawling with maggots—so as soon as Olav had made known his errand and the widow had answered that they might have the boat and welcome, he took the wallet and went off under the trees. It was an odd thing about Olav that ever since he was a little boy it had given him a quite absurd feeling of disgust to see maggots moving in anything.

  But Ingunn had brought with her a piece of bacon for the widow, Aud. She came of the folk of Steinfinn’s thralls and now she was eager for news of the manor, so Ingunn was delayed awhile.

  The boy had found a dry and sunny spot down by the water; there they could sit and dry themselves as they ate. Soon Ingunn came, carrying in her hands a bowl of fresh milk. And with the prospect of food, and now that it was settled about the boat, Olav was suddenly glad at heart—it was grand after all to be out on his own errand and to be going to Hamar. At heart he was well pleased too that Ingunn was with him; he was used to her following him everywhere, and if at times she was a little troublesome, he was used to that too.

  He grew rather sleepy after eating—Steinfinn’s house-carls were not used to early rising. So he stretched himself on the ground with his head buried in his arms, letting the sun bake his wet back, and he made no more ado about the need of haste. All at once Ingunn asked if they should bathe in the fiord.

  Olav woke and sat up. “The water is too cold—” and all at once he turned red in the face and blushed more and more. He turned his head aside and stared at the ground.

  “I am freezing in my wet clothes,” said Ingunn. “We shall be so fine and warm after it.” She bound her plaits in a ring about her head, sprang up, and loosened her belt.

  “I will not,” muttered Olav in a hesitating voice. His cheeks and brows pricked with heat. Suddenly he jumped up and, without saying more to her, turned and walked up the point into the grove of firs.

  Ingunn looked after him a moment. She was used to his being vexed when she would not do as he said. He would be cross for a while, till he grew kind again of himself. Calmly and caring nothing, she undressed and tottered out over the sharp grey stones, which cut her feet, till she reached a little bank of sand.

  Olav walked quickly over the grey moss, which crunched under his feet. It was bone-dry already on these crags that jutted into the lake—the firs stifled it with their vapour. It was not much more than a bowshot to the other side of the point.

  A great bare rock ran out into the water. Olav leaped onto it and lay down with his face in his hands.

  Then the thought came to him—she could never drown? Perhaps he ought not to have left her. But he could not go back—

  Down in the water it was as though a golden net quivered above stones and mud—the reflection of sunlight on the surface. He grew giddy from looking down—felt as if he were afloat. The rock he lay on seemed to be moving through the water.

  And all the time he could not help thinking of Ingunn and being tormented by the thought. He felt plunged into guilt and shame, and it grieved him. They had been used to bathe from his canoe in the tarn above, swimming side by side in the brown water, into which a yellow dust was shed from the flowering spruces around. But now they could not be together as before-It was just as when he lay in the stream and saw the familiar world turned upside-down in an instant. He felt as if he had had another fall; humbled and ashamed and terrified, he saw the things he had seen every day from another angle, as he lay on the ground.

  It had been so simple and straightforward a thing that he should marry Ingunn when they were grown up. And he had always looked to Steinfinn to decide when it should be. The lad might feel a tingling when Steinfinn’s house-carls told tales of their commerce with women. But to him it had been clear that they did these things because they were men without ties, while he, being born to an estate, must keep himself otherwise. It had never disturbed his rest to think that he and Ingunn would live together and have children to take the inheritance after them.

  Now he felt he had been the victim of a betrayal—he was changed from what he had been, and Ingunn was changed in his eyes. They were wellnigh grown up, though none had told them this was coming; and these things that Steinfinn’s serving men and their womenfolk had to do with—ah, they tempted him too, for all she was his betrothed and he had an estate and she a dowry in her coffer.

  He saw her as she lay there face-down on the short, dry grass. She rested on one arm beneath her breast, so that her dress was drawn tight over the gentle rounding of her bosom; her tawny plaits wound snake-like in the heather. When she had said that about bathing, an ugly thought had come over him—together with a meaningless fear, strong as the fear of death; for it seemed to him that they were as two trees, torn up by the spring flood and adrift on a stream—and he was afraid the stream would part them asunder. At that fiery moment he seemed to have full knowledge of what it meant to possess her and what to lose her.

  But what was the sense of thinking of such things, when all who had power and authority over them had ordained that they should be joined together? There was no man and no thing to part them. None the less, with a tremor of anxiety he felt his childish s
ecurity shrivel up and vanish, the certainty that all the future days of his life were threaded for him like beads upon a string. He could not banish the thought that if Ingunn were taken from him, he knew nothing of the future. Somewhere deep down within him murmured the voice of a tempter: he must secure her, as the rude and simple serving-men secured the coarse womenfolk they had a mind to—and if anyone stretched out a hand toward her that was his, he would be wild, like the he-wolf showing his teeth as he stands over his prey; like the stallion rearing and snorting with rage to receive the bear and fight to the death for his mares, while they stand in a ring about the scared and quivering foals.

  The boy lay motionless, staring himself dizzy and hot at the play of light in the gliding water, while he strove with these new thoughts—both what he knew and what he dimly guessed. When Ingunn gave a call just behind him, he started up as though waked from sleep.

  “You were foolish not to care for a swim,” she said.

  “Come now!” Olav jumped down to the beach and walked quickly before her. “We have stayed here far too long.”

  After rowing awhile he grew calmer. It felt good to swing his body in steady strokes. The beat of the oars in the rowlocks, the wash of the water under the boat, lulled his agitation.

  It was broiling hot now and the light from the sky and lake dazzled and hurt the eyes—the shores were bathed in heat haze. And when Olav had rowed for wellnigh two hours, it began to tell on him severely. The boat was heavy, and he had not thought how unpractised he was at rowing. This was not the same as poling and splashing about the tarn at home. He had to keep far out, for the shore wound in bays and inlets; at times he was afraid he might be clean out of his course. The town might lie hidden behind one of these headlands, invisible from the boat—perhaps he had already passed it. Olav saw now that he was in strange country; he remembered nothing from his last journey in these parts.

  The sun burned his back; the palms of his hands were sore; and his legs were asleep, so long had he sat with his feet against the stretcher. But the back of his neck ached worst of all. The lake gleamed far around the tiny boat—it was a long way to land on every side. Now and again he felt he was rowing against a current. And there was scarce a craft to be seen that day, whether far out or close under the shore. Olav toiled at the oars, glum and morose, fearing he would never reach the town.

  Ingunn sat in the stern of the boat facing the sun, so that her red kirtle was ablaze; her face under the shade of her velvet hood was flushed with the reflection. She had thrown Olav’s cloak about her, for the air on the water was chill to her, sitting still, she said; and then she had drawn the hood down to shade her eyes. It was a fine cloak of grey-green Flanders cloth with a cowl of black velvet—one of the things Olav had had from Hestviken. Ingunn had a well-dressed look in all the ample folds of her garments. She held one hand in the water—and Olav felt an envy of the senses; how good and cool it must be! The girl looked fresh and unweary; she sat and took her ease.

  Then he pulled harder—all the harder for the pain he felt in hands and shoulders and in the small of his back; he clenched his teeth and rowed furiously a short space. It was a great deed he had undertaken for her sake, this rowing; and he knew, with pride and a melancholy sense of injury, that he would never have thanks for it: “there she sits playing with her hand over the side and never has a thought of my toiling.” The sweat poured off him, and his outgrown kirtle chafed worse and worse at the arm-holes. He had forgotten that it was his business that brought them; once more he pursed his lips, swept his arm across his red and sweaty face, and took a few more mighty pulls.

  “Now I see the towers over the woods,” said Ingunn at last.

  Olav turned and looked over his shoulder—it hurt his stiff neck past believing. Across the perfectly hopeless expanse of a fiord he saw the light stone towers of Christ Church above the trees on a point of land. Now he was so tired that he could have given up altogether.

  He rounded the point, where the convent of preaching friars lay far out on raised foundations; it was a group of dark timber houses about a stave-church, with roofs of tarred shingles, one above another, dragon heads on the gables and gilt weathercocks above the ridge-turret, in which the mass bell hung.

  Olav put in to the monks’ pier. He washed the worst of the sweat from him before he climbed up, stiff and spent. Ingunn was already at the convent gate talking with the lay brother who had charge of some labourers; they were bearing bales of goods down to a little trading craft. Brother Vegard was at home, she told Olav as he came up—now they must ask leave to speak with him; he could best advise them in this business.

  Olav thought they could ill trouble the monk with such a trifle. Brother Vegard was wont to come twice a year to Frettastein and he was the children’s confessor. He was a wise and kindly man and always used the opportunity to give them such counsel and exhortation as the young people of that house lacked all too often. But Olav had never spoken a word to Brother Vegard unbidden, and to put him to the pains of coming to the parlour for their sake seemed to him far too bold. They could well inquire the way to the smith of the brother porter.

  But Ingunn would not give in. As Olav himself had hinted, it was perhaps a hazardous thing to hand over such an heirloom to a smith of whom they knew nothing. But maybe Brother Vegard would send a man from the convent with them—ay, it was not impossible he might offer to go with them himself. That Olav did not believe. But he let Ingunn have her way.

  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.