The Snake Pit (19 page)

“Then is it certain,” asked Olav, “that Audun can never come forward and oust Eirik from his right as our first-born?”

“Certainly he cannot,” said the priest decisively.

“Nay, nay. I wished but to be sure how this matter stood.”

“Ay, ’twas natural enough,” replied Sira Hallbjörn.

Olav thanked him for his information.

While his mother was lying in, Eirik took to talking of one he called Tötrabassa. At first the grown people thought this was a beggar woman—one of those who came in greater numbers now that the house was overflowing with food and drink.

Ay, Tötrabassa was a woman with a bag, said Eirik. But another day he said that Tötrabassa had been there and had played with him in the field behind the barn. There was a little hollow in the meadow where he was fond of going with his things. Tötrabassa was a little maid. No one paid much attention to this—they were all used to the queer nonsense Eirik so often talked.

But after a while he began to tell of more playfellows, and they all had strange names like Tauragaura, Silvarp, Skolorm, Dölvandogg, and Kolmurna the Blue—whether they were men or women, grown-up or children, it was not easy to make out.

The house-folk grew alarmed. It still happened sometimes that a whole household left croft or cabin, great and small, and took to the wood, either because they were pursued by the law or from sheer poverty, and chose a vagabond life, in summer at any rate, rather than be brought to justice. Just at this time a fat sheep was lost that had been kept in the home pasture, and now the house-carls thought that these friends of Eirik’s must be vagabonds of this sort, who lived chiefly by pilfering and stealing. Folk kept an eye on Eirik, when he was playing in the hollow, whether any unknown children or grown people might come to him. But nothing was seen. And one day the sheep’s carcass was washed up in the bay—it had fallen from the cliff.

And now the people of Hestviken were afraid in earnest. This must be some of the underground folk. They asked Eirik if he knew where they came from. Oh, from away under the crag. But when he saw how frightened the others were at this, he was a little scared himself. Nay, they came from the town, he said—in
a sledge they came. Or maybe they sailed, he corrected himself, when Olav said no one could drive a sledge from Oslo in summertime, he must not talk such nonsense. Anyhow, they came from the woods—ay, they dwelt in the woods, Tauragaura had said. Tauragaura was the one he talked most about.

Ingunn was quite beside herself with despair. These must be the evil spirits who had turned all luck from this house, generation after generation; now they were surely after her children. Eirik was shut up in the women’s house and watched—and then he talked and talked of these friends of his, till it looked as if his mother would lose her wits with despair. She would have Olav fetch the priest.

“Now, you are not lying, Eirik, by chance?” asked Olav severely one day when he had been listening while Eirik replied to his mother’s anxious questions.

Eirik stared in terror at his father with his great brown eyes and shook his head vehemently.

“For if I find out one day, boy, that you bear untruthful tales, it will go ill with you.”

Eirik looked at his father in wonder, seeming not to understand.

But Olav had conceived a suspicion that the whole story was a thing the boy had invented—unreasonable as such an idea appeared to himself, for he could not make out what object the child could have in spreading such vain and purposeless lies. And the next day, when Olav and a man were to mow the meadow that lay below the hollow, he let Eirik come with them, promising Ingunn that they would keep a sharp watch on the child all the time.

Olav did so, looking out for the boy now and then. Eirik pottered about, good and quiet, up in the hollow, playing with some snail-shells and pebbles that the boatmen had given him. He was quite alone the whole time.

When the other man and the girls went up to the morning meal, Olav came up to Eirik. “So they did not come to see you today, Tötrabassa and Skolorm and the rest?”

“Oh yes,” said Eirik radiantly, and he began telling of all the games he had played with them today.

“Now you are lying, boy,” said Olav harshly. “I have watched you the whole time—none has been here.”

“They took to their heels when you came—they were afraid of your scythe.”

“Then what became of them—where did they run to?”

“Home, to be sure.”

“Home—and where may that be?”

Eirik looked up at his father, puzzled and a little diffident. Then his face brightened eagerly: “Shall we go thither, Father?” and he held out his hand.

Olav hung his scythe on a tree. “Let us do so.”

Eirik led him up to the manor, out of the yard and on to the rocks to the west of the houses, where they could see over the fiord.

“They must be down there,” he said, pointing to the little strip of beach that lay far below them.

“I see nobody,” said Olav shortly.

“Nay, they are not
there—
now I know where they are—” Eirik first turned back toward the manor, but then he took a path that led down to the waterside. “Now I know, now I know,” he called eagerly, hopping and skipping as he waited for his father; then he ran on ahead again, stopped and waited and took his father by the hand, dragging him down along the path.

He showed the way to the farthest of the sheds by the quay. Olav hardly ever used this one—there was not so much trade at Hestviken now. Only in spring, when Olav was preparing to visit the Holy Cross fair at Oslo, did he store some of his winter goods here. Now the shed was empty and unlocked. Eirik drew his father into it.

The sea splashed and gurgled about the piles under the floor of the shed. This was leaky and the walls were gaping, so that reflections of the sunlight from the water rose and fell in bright streaks on walls and roof. Eirik sniffed in the salt smell of the shed, and his face sparkled with excitement. He looked up into his father’s eyes with a smile of expectation and, stealing on tiptoe, led him to an old barrel standing bottom-upwards, which Olav used to pack skins in.

“Here,” he whispered, squatting down. “In
here
they dwell. Can you see them—now the cracks have grown so big again, else we could see better, but they are sitting there eating—can you see them?”

Olav turned the barrel on its side and gave it a kick so that it rolled away. There was nothing underneath but some litter.

Eirik looked up smiling and was about to say something—when he noticed the expression of his father’s face and stopped in terror, open-mouthed. With a scream he put up his arms to ward off the blow, bursting into a heart-rending fit of weeping.

Olav let his hand drop—felt it was unworthy of him to strike the boy. So puny and miserable Eirik looked as he stood there in tears that his father was almost ashamed of himself. He just took the child’s arms, drew him away, and sat down on a pile of wreckage, holding Eirik before him.

“So you have lied, I see—’twas a lie every word you said of these friends of yours—answer me now.”

But Eirik answered nothing; he stood staring up at the man’s face, clean dazed—it seemed he could not make it out at all.

The end of it was that Olav had to take Eirik on his knee to stop his bitter weeping. He said again and again that Eirik must never say what was untrue or he would get a beating—but he spoke much more gently now, and between whiles he stroked the boy’s head. Eirik nestled close to his father’s chest and put his arms tightly about his neck.

But he did not understand—Olav was sure of that, and it affected him almost uncannily. This boy that he held in his arms seemed to him so strange and odd—what in God’s name had come over him that he could invent all these lies? To Olav it was so utterly aimless that he began to wonder: was Eirik altogether in his right senses?

Ingunn stayed indoors for nearly nine weeks after her lying-in. She was not notably sick or weak; it was rather that she had grown too fond of her life in the narrow chamber, where all was done for the comfort of herself and the infant, and all was shut out that might disturb her. She let herself sink deep into this new happiness—the infant she had at the breast, and Eirik, who ran in and out of her room all day long. Toward the end Olav began to grow impatient—they had passed so many bad years together, and in all that time she had clung to him. Now she was happy and well, ay, she had recovered some of her youthful beauty, and she barred herself in from him with the children. But Olav allowed nothing of this to appear.

At last, on the Sunday after St. Laurence’s Mass, she kept her churching. Eirik was asleep when the company left home in the early morning, but he was out in the yard when the church folk came back.

A new custom had grown up—although many liked it not, nay, said it was tempting God with overweening pride: young wives at their first churching, especially if the child was a son, wore again on that day their golden circlet, the bridal crown of noble maids, outside their wedded women’s coif.

Ingunn had fastened her white silken kerchief with the golden garland; she wore a red kirtle and her blue mantle with the great gold brooch in it.

Olav lifted his wife from her horse; Eirik stood rapt, gazing at his mother’s loveliness. She seemed much taller in this splendid dress, with the silver belt around her slender waist; her movements were lithe and supple, light as a bird’s.

“Mother!” Eirik exclaimed, beaming; “you
are
Leman after all!”

In an instant his father seized him by the shoulder; the blow of a clenched fist fell on his cheek-bone, making his head swim. Blow followed blow, leaving the child no breath to cry out—only a hoarse whistling came from his throat—till Una Arnesdatter came running up and caught the man by the arm.

“Olav, Olav, curb yourself—’tis a little boy—are you out of your senses, to strike so hard?”

Olav let go. Eirik let himself fall backward flat on the ground; there he lay, panting and whining, black and blue in the face. It was no swoon—half on purpose, the boy behaved as if he were dying. Una stooped down to him and lifted him to her lap; then his tears began to flow.

Olav turned toward his wife—he was still trembling. Ingunn stood bending forward; eyes, nostrils, the open mouth were like the holes in a death’s-head. Olav laughed, a harsh and angry laugh—then he took her by the upper arm and drew her into the hall, where the maids were now bringing in the banquet.

None of the company had heard what the child said. But all thought the same—no matter what he had done, it had been an ugly sight to see the father correct the little boy so roughly. They sat about on the benches, waiting to be bidden to table, and all were ill at ease.

At last Una Arnesdatter came in, carrying Eirik in her arms.
She set him down beside his father’s knee. “Eirik will not disobey you again, Olav—you must tell your son you are angry no longer.”

“Has he told you why I chastised him?” asked Olav without looking up.

Una shook her head. “Poor little fellow—he has cried so he had no power to speak.”

“Never more shall you dare to say that word, Eirik,” said Olav hotly in an undertone.
“Never
more—you understand?”

Eirik was still hiccuping spasmodically. He said nothing, but stared at his father, frightened and bewildered.

“Never again are you to speak that word,” his father repeated, laying a heavy hand on the boy’s shoulder. Till the child nodded. But then Eirik’s eyes wandered longingly to the dinner-table, which was groaning with good things.

And so the company seated themselves.

Eirik was to sleep in Torhild’s house that night, for there were so many guests at the manor. In the evening, when he was going across, his father came after him into the yard. Eirik stopped short, trembling violently—he looked up at the other in such mortal fear.

“Who taught you to say that ugly word—of your mother?”

Eirik looked up, frightened; the tears began to rise. Olav could get no answer to his question.

“Never
say it again—do you hear,
never
again!” Olav stroked the boy’s head—saw with something like a sense of shame that one side of Eirik’s face was all red and swollen.

The boy was on the point of falling asleep when he felt that someone was bending over him—his mother; her face was burning hot and wet.

“Eirik mine—who has told you this—that your mother was a leman?”

The boy was wide awake in a moment:

“But
are
you not Leman?”

“Yes,” whispered his mother.

Eirik threw his arms about her neck, nestled up to her, and kissed her.

A
UTUMN
came early that year. Bad weather set in about Michaelmas, and then it rained and blew, day in, day out, except when the gale was so high that the clouds could not let go their rain. This weather lasted for seven weeks.

At Hestviken the water rose above the quays. One night the sea carried away the piles under the farthest shed: when the men came down in the grey dawn, they saw the old house lying with its back wall, which faced the rock, leaning forward, and the front wall, toward the fiord, sunk half under water. It rocked in the heavy seas like a moored boat, and every time the wreck was lifted by a wave and sank again, the water poured out between the timbers, but most of all through a hatch under the gable. It looked like a drunken man hanging round-shouldered over the side of a boat and spewing, thought Anki.

With axes, boathooks, and ropes the men now had to try to cut the wrecked shed adrift and warp it out of the way; otherwise it was likely to be flung in against the quay and the shed in which Olav stored all the salt he had dried during the summer, and his fish—of this there was not much, for the autumn fishing had failed. In the course of this work Olav bruised his right arm badly.

He paid little heed to it while he was toiling in the spray and the storm, which was so violent that at times the men had to lie flat and crawl along the rocks. But at dusk, as they walked up to the manor, he felt his arm aching and it hurt when he touched it. As he was shutting the house door a gust of wind blew it inr carrying Olav off his feet; his bad arm was given a violent wrench as the man stumbled over the threshold and fell at full length on the floor of the anteroom. He had to call for help to be rid of his soaking sea-clothes, and Torhild bound up his arm in a sling.