Last Stories and Other Stories

THE WHITE-ARMED LADY

Inside the tiny white house, he sat at the head of the table, listening to the seagulls, his stare fettered from below by the white lace tablecloth, whose flower-whorled spiderweb knew how to trap his eyes, and occluded by the low-hanging lamp, whose candle never guttered within that scalloped breast of glass. Unblinkingly he peered through the windows curtained with white lace, and across the narrow lane at the other white houses. Again it began to rain. Silver drops clung to the windows.

He could hear somebody cutting wood.

In nearly every window of each of the other white houses he could see a potted plant beneath the white curtains. All of the pots were white. One window presented a narrow-necked green vase and a green watering can. He liked that window the best without knowing why.

Up the street came a man, who stopped, shoved his hands in the pockets of his heavy coat, and gazed right into the window. The one at the table wondered how deeply he could see, and when he would go away.

The man went away.

There was a white-haired old woman in white, bent over her walking stick, who used to pass by twice each day, first going left, then going right. She never raised her head. He grew fond of her, and then one morning she passed to the left and never returned again.

Closing his eyes, he heard rain splashing on the cobblestones. He looked up. Now the other white houses were going grey; the windy day was fading.

At night the rain prickled and pulsed down on the roofs of those little white houses, spattering loudly on the cobblestones, shining on the windows between the greenish-white curtains; now it sounded like marbles on the roof, and over the table the lamp began to twitch. The trees shone almost day-green in the streetlights; the windows of the other white houses were black. He sat at the table staring.

At the center of the tablecloth’s lace spiderweb lived the white spider named Hungry, who also waited; whenever the man tired and lowered his head, or found himself allured by one of the lovely white links of spider-chain, then, no matter how fiercely he struggled, bit by bit Hungry pulled his gaze inward. To a heartless stranger their contest might have appeared playful, for the man’s head spiralled round and round. When Hungry had finally dragged him to the center, so that he must look upon his enemy, the battle was done; and the great spider, which had disguised itself as a many-whorled lace flower, rose up, leaped upon the man’s face, and sucked all the life out of his eyes. Hungry was greedy, but not impatient, so it took longer than one might imagine before the last desiccated sinew of hand or foot had been reeled in through the eyesockets of the miserable skeleton that sat there. Even then, Hungry hesitated to go away, for his victim’s brain endured within. But against the skull’s forehead a magic jewel had been strapped — the gift of the woman called White Arms. Hungry could drink; any flesh he could suck until it liquefied, and retracted into his star-shaped mouth; and he could sting, but he could not bite, and so the jewel and the leather circlet which held it, being grooved into the bone itself, remained impervious to him. Thus after awhile Hungry grew sleepy, returned to the center of the tablecloth, and closed his red eyes. Then, slowly and wearily, stalks of nerve, meat and vein began to grow down from the man’s brain, until he was whole again. As soon as he was able, he jerked his head up from the tablecloth. Hungry still slept, and therefore could not keep him. Because his heart regenerated last, the man was spared from his anguish until he sat upright. But even when he could not feel, he remained condemned to think. He thought considerably about Hungry, as one might imagine; and doubtless Hungry thought about him. They were neighbors, like those two women whom every day he saw chatting with a white picket fence between them.

A redhaired woman opened the white picket-gate, reached up, dreamily caressed a leaf from the maple at the side of her house, strode into her back garden where he could no longer see her, then presently emerged, lowering her head against the wind as she unlatched her picket-gate. Suddenly she raised her head and peeped into his window, the instant enduring more than long enough for him to read the horror on her face. To her, he was a skeleton hedged with fire. She strode quickly away, down the cobblestoned lane toward the harbor and the seagulls which he could never see. He owned one window at the lefthand edge of his vision, whose curtain’s lace flowers and diamonds dulled down the white light. Waiting, sitting, he hoped that in the instant of framing herself there she would look back at him, even in horror. She did not, and never returned home.

Humiliated, he told himself: I hate the others who are not as I.

Sitting in the darkness, the hanging lamp now resembling a polished tuber or a skull in chains, he inhaled the ancient smell of the house, although his chest never moved, and he gazed out through the windows into the sloping, streetlit lane called Bergsmauet, whose cobblestones he could see only by day and only through the righthand window, his room leaking darkness through the triangular wounds between curtains; there the greenish light held its own. He studied the faint shining of streetlight and moonlight on the tablecloth. Just inward of the wave-patterned edge ran a zone of doubled columns adorned with berries and connected to each other by many thin cross-lacings; then came the girdle of wheel-flowers beyond which it was not safe to look; when he tired, and his head began to sink, he counted the horizontal stitches between the double columns; there were sixteen, and when he obtained a different number he knew that he was worn out, and then Hungry might get him. Heartsick, he sat among pallid self-assertions of the unlit candles, the lampshade, the well-mated borders of old prints in their dark frames on the wall, and the scaly, glistening anomaly of the one lace curtain which received the most streetlight; he awaited his lady with the white arms.

His white-armed lady had departed him at dusk, their shadows large against the pine wall upstairs when they stood kissing. Called away by a spell, she pulled off her black nightdress and stepped into her long blue dress. She promised to return whensoever she could, while for his part he swore to wait for her. Her shadow withdrew from his; and he followed her down the steep narrow stairs, bending his head. She undid her jewel and fastened it around his forehead. She unlocked the door. She was the one with white arms, the woman in the long narrow blue dress. She descended the three slate steps, the point of her fringed cape hanging down her back. He locked the door. He stood by the window watching her stride out of sight. Then he sat down at the table. On the instant of her arrival within the many-toothed gate fashioned by those who hate the light, he found himself fettered. She had been his bride. He awaited her, remembering the time when they used to make a shadow together.

Again the chain-hung lamp was shining, for it was day. He sat there, a skeleton at the table in the white house, never denying that his death was of his own making, but wearying of the eternal misery of his loneliness in that narrow white grave. The red gaze of Hungry burned his breast invisibly. White Arms did not come. Casting his heavy eyes upward, he felt newly shocked at the way that his face oozed and snarled in the glass of the antique mirror. Behind the picket fence, the neighbor’s maples, still green in defiance of the season, began to sway. Hungry awaited him as patiently as ever a woman wefted her warp. He resisted. His neck could not endure his head’s weight much longer. Bitterly he glared around the walls at the faded oval portraits, the life bleached out of those fog-white unsmiling faces. He closed his eyes, then quickly opened them. Already his head was tilting down, and the girdle of wheel-flowers ranged across the world. In terrified defiance he craned his head back up, barely in time, and stared out the window, awaiting his bride of the white arms. Had he been capable of locking his elbows on the table and cradling his chin in his interlocked hands, he could have held out longer. The misery grew up into his chest like cancer.

Among other women, whose hair was the color of sunset, of copper, of yellow butter, white butter or honey, or even as orange as egg yolk, White Arms was the rarest, for her hair was as gently white as the winter sun. When they went up the steep stairs, her breath tasted of sweet butter. The one window was on her side of the bed. His side was by the stairs; he gave her the window, because her arm grew utterly white where the autumn sun fell on it. By night the pallid extremities of the bed remained barely visible even to a long-accustomed gaze, the weak projection of the windowpanes on the wall no more than patterned deficiencies of the darkness, while some narrowly clotted form stood on the verge of stirring in the mirror’s greyish obscurity, beside the black rectangular tombstone of the doorway to the bedroom which would have been their child’s. Sometimes there was moonlight to brighten her arms while she lay beside him. Then the moon departed them, and they listened to the rain-wind plucking at the windows.

His head could no longer stay upright. He had already passed beyond the tablecloth’s wave-patterned edge. Seeking to delay his inevitable progress through the zone of doubled columns by counting the fifteen or seventeen horizontal stitches between them, his glassy gaze nonetheless devolved through the girdle of wheel-flowers; and although he struggled to regain the front windows through which he might even then see White Arms returning to him, although he wished that it were day, for then the dull glare of the hanging lamp stimulated his consciousness by stinging his eyes, his wishes and intentions could not save him from meeting the stitch-bristling lacy white arms of Hungry, which rose up at once to grip his face.

Now it was autumn again, or remained so, the sky as faint a blue as the veins in his white-armed lady’s neck; and he had cohered once more; even his heart must have taken new root behind his breastbone, for hate and anguish pressed there. This time, he said to himself, I will hold out and hold out. Hungry can do nothing by himself. It is my weakness which empowers him. I will try to starve him.

Closing his eyes, for the first time since she had gone he squeezed away all memories and hopes of the white-armed woman, forgetting her in her long blue narrow dress which the sky sometimes matched, so that he grew as still as those potted flowers which looked out the window at the whipping leaves of autumn, his death a barely perceptible nausea, forgetting her whiteness in her black nightdress when she lay beside him upstairs in that bedroom as rawboarded as a coffin, and her white arms, her white arms, and her white hand sleeping across the breast of that sad black dress so sweet with her smell, and the way that when raindrops struck the dark harbor their compact white ripples rode the waves for a good instant, becoming as immovable as the wall built of clay bones, the silvery sun greying down the white picket fence across the lane even as it yellow-stained the lace curtains, and something struggling to get at him, caressing him like that breeze that springs up before an autumn rain, ruffling the seagulls’ feathers; he knew not whether it was Hungry or the woman with the white arms; his determined refusal to remember her resembled some lichened stone disk with a hole bored through it; now he had forgotten even her white arms, considering only Hungry, commanding himself: I must starve Hungry, his stone skull tilting, the zone of doubled columns fleering at him like white riverweeds in the current, his misery withering in his breast, Hungry’s red gaze stinging him, and there was someone whom he longed to remember in order to return meaning to his waiting, but he craned his skull up and back until his eyes were clear of even the wave-patterned edge, fixing his mind on Hungry, dying to kill Hungry, his own red eyes closing, his skull creaking forward, the lace tablecloth writhing into a hypnotizing lattice of hooks whose long necks looped and snaked across one another in a fashion no woman could weave; and at last his forehead struck the table.

He opened his eyes. In the center of the tablecloth was nothing but another white whorl, slightly larger than the flowers, eyeless now, and fangless.

Now he could rest while he awaited his white-armed bride.

He rose, and it was night. He unlocked the door, but descended only one step. Standing in the chilly rain, he gazed down the slant of grey cobbles at the black harbor. Had it gone dry, he would not have cared. Inhaling the various freshnesses of unseen stormclouds, he descended the second step, looking up and down the street for her, then hesitated, anxious out of habit, as if Hungry could still harm him. His tired gaze began to creep down toward the street, as if he were seeking the footprints of this white-armed woman who had gone so long ago. Going backward, he returned inside and shut the door, refraining from locking it in case she had lost her key. Awaiting her, he would sleep.

So he ascended the three full stairs, then turned the corner landing and the seven steep stairs (his heels projected into space when he climbed them), white autumn light now melting the green banister, because it must have been day; at the top he turned one more perpendicular on the bare pine floor and took the last raw pinewood step to the chamber with the sloping unpainted ceiling of smooth planks and cracked beams where on her side of their bed she lay on her back, rotten and grinning in the rags of her black nightdress, her eyesockets spuriously astonished that within her ribcage nested the spider called Thirsty.

WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS

Just as it is not unheard of for a church, of all places, to get haunted, so a pious heart may come to be tenanted by evil sometime after it has been lowered under the turf; but before anyone criticizes the mechanism which makes this possible, please remember that the least pleasant aspect of being dead, its monotonous too-lateness, practically demands to be circumvented by souls of the slightest self-respect; for what makes life bearable is our illusion that we can undo the mistakes of our condition, be they the sins we inflict on ourselves or the impoverishments of fate; why shouldn’t postmortem aspirations be the same? Now it once happened that when an orphan from Kvitsøy named Astrid Audunsdottir, poor but pious, good-looking and of respectable family, got married off by her uncle, who had thus fulfilled his obligation of guardianship in obedience to the Preacher’s writ, Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, she exchanged a chilly, hungry existence for miserable terror, her husband being a cruel man who never passed a day without beating her. Of him it was said that he had formerly been moderately openhanded, but before he lost his youth some form of epilepsy overcame him, worsening his character. Like most explanations of the inexplicable, this but described what it pretended to elucidate; nonetheless, it served to close the question, and Loden Gudmundsson did seem better left uninvestigated. His family was comfortably off, and until recently he had kept gathering in wealth; his factors shipped timber from Ryfylke, and he also owned a dry goods store on Breigata Street. Everyone agreed that he had approached Astrid’s uncle decently enough; his white beard was as clean and delicate as pipesmoke from the best quality tobacco, and his house, it was said, wore three stained glass windows; so that although no one thought him the most winning sort, at least he could be counted on to provide for the girl. One of the most likeable characteristics of a rich man, unsleeping activity, he certainly showed, even down to demanding the briefest possible engagement, such was his eagerness to enter the nuptial state, and of course Astrid’s uncle expressed no objection. Strange to tell, once the marriage had been settled he retired from business, remarking that since he now possessed both money and a wife he would as soon keep to home. At first the neighbors thought they knew why, and shook their heads to learn that even so hardheaded a man, never mind his years, could be enslaved by lust. But when Astrid first came to church in Stavanger, they looked her over, and liked what they saw, for she was not only pretty, but meek. First of all, she spoke only when spoken to, and then in a whisper. Better yet, unlike other rich women, who wore wide white skirts or crisp black skirts as they flitted across the clean wide gravel of Nedre Holmegate, she kept to the patched clothes of a thrifty islander, for which the old people praised her. One might have supposed that it reflected poorly on Loden to let her go around so; on the other hand, all men would live more easily if their own wives came as cheap as Astrid Audunsdottir! Of this Astrid it is told that she remained all her life a wondrous good Christian, turning the other cheek and praying for her tormentors, so that even the minister used to wonder whether she were feebleminded. On Sundays it remained the custom for neighbors to greet each other after worship, commenting on the weather and suchlike important subjects; but Astrid, who seemed to be getting more shy by the month, preferred to sit inside the church with the Bible open on her lap until Loden or his sister, having finished whichever pleasantries they allowed themselves, came to take her away. While awaiting them she invariably pored over a particular verse, the one in which Jesus says: To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened. What so simple a creature could see in that nobody knew, when the minister himself could barely explain it. Her head was always bowed, in signification of her condition; and as bad as it was to be Loden’s chattel from dawn to dusk, her nights were worse; for once the servants had gone to bed, he became monstrous. The best recourse was to crouch utterly still and quiet on the stairs, for if all went well he might lie brooding upon their bed, with his eyes half closed and a sour smile on his face. But should anything remind him of her, he would darken with rage. Summoning her with obscenities, he would slap her face, pull out her hair, scratch her breasts with his long fingernails, and that was just the beginning. On a winter night as black as an iron stove he knocked out two of her teeth. By the time she had lived with him for three years, the rest had gone the same way, and her remaining patches of hair were grey. Clasping her bluish-grey hands over her Bible, she bowed her bony head, praying for him, for his sister Magnhild, and for her faraway uncle’s family. Now she began to be thought of as a woman with a secret — a secret which they all knew. The neighbors saw it all that summer afternoon Loden threw a brick into her face when she came home carrying water from the well. In spite of his kicks she managed to get to her feet, and turned straightaway back to the well, since the water had been spilled. That evening the minister paid them a call, but how it turned out nobody learned, except that he returned silent and shamed. For a fact, Astrid never complained. Sometimes she even smiled a little, when a breeze brought the clean smell of ocean which reminded her of Kvitsøy. Loan her a measure of flour and she’d return you double; so people said, although how could they know, since Astrid scarcely went out enough to borrow anything, and anyhow which supplies didn’t Loden keep at his store? They all felt sorry for her, without a doubt. In her fourth year she became a gaunt and crooked old cripple; her fifth was her last. People said the shroud was stained around her head, but Magnhild, who never liked her, had done such a thorough job of sewing her in that nothing was certain; and for a fact, it was best not to cross that terrible family. Whatever Loden had held against her nobody knew; perhaps it was merely the revenge of age upon youth; for, having outlived her, he quickly declined, and before Easter they dug him down beside her. At any rate, no one had any doubt of heaven for Astrid Audunsdottir, at least so long as they recollected her (and you very well know that remembrances of compliant victims are inconvenient). Loden endured more substantially in their thoughts, having left tangible property which an intelligent man might get his hands on, for example by marrying Magnhild, sourpuss though she was; moreover, Loden had been by every measure more remarkable than his wife, who in the neighbors’ anecdotes had always been old; whereas him they liked to describe as being more watchful than the verger who keeps poor men awake at church — a truthful summation, whose horror was softened by the rains of time, until he became merely comic; and what do the living like to quaff more than humor, when they lack the means to buy brandy? Eventually they even grew proud of him. And so, turning away their minds from the friendless woman in the ground, the residents of Stavanger sought to live as best they could, and no one was there on that muffled clammy Sunday morning, the white sky treasuring up rain, orange leaves blowing down from the trees in the center of the square, so that moment by moment their branches grew more like black bones; and in the churchyard, a counterpart breeze blew underground, in the neighborhood of the Gudmundsson family’s graves, the soil gelatinously quaking beneath dead leaves; and by afternoon the trees in the square appeared to grow out of an island of orange and yellow leaves upon that sea of grey cobblestones, which rippled whenever the churchyard did, although far less perceptibly; but by then the autumn rain was roaring and the wind was singing, which was why all the living who could manage it sat indoors watching the fingers of water on their windows vanish behind coffee-steam and soup-steam while they prayed and dreamed; as for Astrid, her black fingers now spread out against the sky, grubbing at the orange leaves until she had awakened sufficiently to clear them away from her face. And if you find her reemergence strange, I would say to you that she befitted that autumn, which tinctured everything in Stavanger just then, even in the Vågen, where each sloop’s tawny sail resembled yellow leaves dropping from a tall and narrow tree.

So she came out, and looked at herself, and thought on the days of her girlhood when she had been yellow, pink and white like the flower called guldå. Her mother’s hair had also been yellow, they said, but Astrid could not remember her. Indeed, how much do the dead understand of anything? Ask the Preacher, and he will tell you that this matter also is hidden. Between Astrid Audunsdottir and the living past lay a single spider-strand glittering over wet moss.

Magnhild’s hair had darkened when she bore children and lightened again when she grew old, until it became as blonde as when she was a child. She was proud of her hair until Astrid came. How she had hated Astrid for her shining yellow hair! Now Astrid was dead, as were all Magnhild’s children. She lived alone with one servant in her dead brother’s house, whose routine continued as in his time, except that the inmates burned candles more freely nowadays; Loden had never permitted anyone but himself to expend tallow.

Like most of us who have committed cruelties, Magnhild got through life by not thinking about them. On the occasions when that shield slipped aside, she could thrust out with sharp reasons and justifications; and when those failed, she simply needed to envision Astrid before her, in order to be renewed in her hatred. Just as a man who hates dogs might correctly anathematize their greed, their odor when wet, and their enthusiasm for rolling in filth, without yet explaining, even to himself, why he must hurt them at any chance, so did Magnhild cherish up her reasons as blackly distinct as the hymn numbers posted on the cathedral’s wooden board, unlike Loden, who had never stooped to explanations. In brief, she despised Astrid because she loved her brother; and how he could be loveable to her and why he hated Astrid from the instant she belonged to him are two more of the Preacher’s far-off and deep things.

Magnhild was in some respects an excellent woman. Her greatest pleasure lay in hearing the choir’s melodies echoing and blending until they seemed to butter the cold stone pillars of the church. On that evening, which Marianne had off, Magnhild felt ill and cold, so she went to bed early, listening to the rain and that freshening autumnal wind. The beauty and comfort of the hymns she had sung in her life nourished her as she lay there reading her Bible, and presently she slept. But just before she began to dream, she made the error of remembering a certain pretty girl of long ago, who once slipped into the Domkirke to hear her neighbors at choir practice; in those days Magnhild had had a fine contralto voice, whereas this pretty Anne Kristin, the one with the long yellow hair, could not sing, and married far away, so that Magnhild had forgotten her for many a year; and one cannot blame her for missing this innocuous girl’s susceptibility to being employed as a disguised emanation of Astrid, whom it was best never to think about at bedtime.

On that evening Magnhild was dreaming of a group of hooded women in long dresses carrying water from the well. In this well lay something poisonous, and these women, whoever they were, were coming to make her drink of it. She woke up with her heart rattling in her dry old chest.

The next dream proved worse; yes, here lies the tale of a woman who lives overlooking a graveyard and one dark night hears something scratching against her window; when she parts the curtains she finds herself looking into a hateful whitish-yellow face framed in long hair, and before she can even scream, the thing has smashed out the glass with a single furious blow of its skull; then its bony fingers reach through, gripping the ledge fast; it pulls up its shoulderblades, locks its skinny arms; and in another rush it is through and biting her to death.

Magnhild woke up screaming. She lit a candle, rose and went to the head of the stairs. Something was ascending toward her; perhaps it had an osprey’s white neck and dark breast. No, its breasts were as pallid as the autumn cabbages which they sell in the street near the cathedral. As for hair, there seemed to be none. It opened out long black rakes of fingers. It said: Magnhild, give me your hair, just for awhile. Magnhild, give me your hair.

With her mouth wide open, the old lady backed away, all the way into the wall, believing that she whispered the verse I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers, when in fact her tongue would not move. Gruesomely smiling (when it comes to ghosts, any expression is worse than none), the specter drew near to her, so that all her nightmares of her life grew as bright as the reflections of ships in the cold harbor. Its stench took root in her nostrils. She closed her eyes. But not seeing proved unendurable, so she looked, and found that the thing was upon her. Its eyes were red, its teeth had the chilly glitter of a stained glass image late in an autumn’s day, and its groping fingers resembled the dark high ribs in the ceiling of the Domkirke. Magnhild now realized who it was.

It commenced to caress her head. The worst thing was the way it looked at her. Wherever it touched her, her tresses fell out. Once Magnhild had been utterly denuded, the ghost removed its skull, rolled it around the floor, and thus gathered up her hair unto itself. Replacing its death’s-head upon its spine, it rose, hovering near the ceiling and preening itself, as if it too were now one of those blue-eyed blonde Norwegian women who retain the beauty of health as they age. And it smiled with its withered black lips, which had once been pink like the bells of a valurt-flower.

When the dirt gave way in the Gudmundsson family plot, and several monuments upended themselves, the sexton took both helpers and commenced smoothing everything over as decently and rapidly as possible. By then Magnhild had already been dead for eighteen years, with the paint going grey on her rotting house, which no one could afford to buy; and several prominent men had erected a statue of Loden Gudmundsson, who inspired the rational modernization of timbercutting in this part of Rogaland. Around his gravestone the earth appeared especially disturbed. Feeling called upon to disprove a rumor that certain graves had been tampered with, the sexton fetched a crowbar, which turned out to be unnecessary in Loden’s case, since the lid of his box had collapsed. Strange to relate, in place of the viscera which the ribcage had once contained there lay a hoard of old silver coins as variably irregular as scales of herring-skin. The sexton could not help remembering the verse which runs: Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Magnhild and Astrid had been placed on either side of that wicked miser.

Near the century’s turn, on a winter night when the men had been drinking until they grew as cheerfully red as the enamel on a housewife’s coffee mill, and the talk turned on old times, when herring had enriched the sea, bread sold for a fair price and children obeyed their parents, the sexton, now retired, confided to his son Eirik, who was himself somewhere between middle-aged and elderly, that the most hideous experience of his life had been opening a certain woman’s coffin and finding it choked with its decomposed occupant’s tresses which had grown out with such unnatural vitality as to be on the verge of worming through the lid. — Yes, father, said Eirik. I know who you’re talking about.

And well you should. Parish history is our family’s bread and butter.

Come spring I’ll renew the sod on that section. Blonde hair, isn’t it? It’s coming up again.

Silently the old man poured himself more brandy.

And what about Magnhild?

No, son, it’s Magnhild I’ve been speaking of.

But she—

Went bald in her old age, quite suddenly, it seems. Was it the scurvy? I remember seeing her coming to church, always with her bonnet on, summer or winter. Almost a scandal it was. Your mother used to say—

You see, father, that hair, wherever it might be rooted, it’s spread all through the Gudmundsson section, just like dead grass. So I thought—

No, it’s Magnhild’s. Astrid, now, perhaps I should have left her in peace, since her coffin was perfectly sound, but in those days I was still curious about things, like you. Marianne Olafsdottir, who used to serve in that house, was not yet demented, so on the following Sunday I had a chat with her. She said that in her youth Astrid used to have beautiful long hair, which I didn’t remember at all, but one woman’s not likely to forget such a thing about another.

What else did she tell you?

That poor Astrid always returned good for evil. Marianne was fond of her, for a fact. Once she dropped a porcelain cup, and Loden was out for blood! Somehow Astrid helped her make up the money — in secret, of course.

All right, father. So what was in Astrid’s coffin?

Nothing.

How belatedly these unpleasant happenings might have been prevented is another of the deep matters unknown to me; but Lady Justice (when she isn’t blinking) can descry murder’s signature even on the rottenest corpse ever carried on a hurdle to the coroner’s jury. Ten or twenty years in the ground need not leave a case unknowable, in witness of which I remind you of those occasions when daring memento-hunters (whom the law calls by other names) have recognized this or that disarticulated skeleton by the nitrous jewel amidst its bric-a-brac. And so, had someone dared to exhume Astrid, he might have noticed that her skull was half smashed in! Then what? We could have pulled out Loden’s remains and burned them, or at least cast them out of the churchyard. The Devil already held that soul, without a doubt, but the living would have been edified, and Astrid gratified. Or we could have burned her; that’s what grim old Bishop Eriksøn would have done, had this story taken place in his time.

Were justice too much to expect, why not appeasement? In the Domkirke I have found people praying as industriously as ever bondsmaids can turn a millstone; so what if we had uttered heart-winged words for Astrid’s comfort? Some say the dead know nothing, but the minister assures me that at every funeral he perceives ghosts screaming around our prayers like a flock of gulls. And so when Astrid died, we could have had a sermon on the subject of Blessed are those who are persecuted, or, if that was too daring, Blessed are the meek; at least we could have paused en route to the churchyard and offered her a eulogy, even one as simple as any of the heliographic cutouts on my cast-iron stove; for the old people remember that she was easily pleased.

THE MEMORY STONE

In the Mary Church in Old Stavanger leans a great stone from ages ago, smoothed along one side and then carved in runes so tall that they stretch from edge to edge: Kjetil made it and erected it to the memory of his dear wife Jorunn. Who they both were is forgotten.

When Birgitte and Olav were wed in that church, he promised to remember her as well as Kjetil did Jorunn, at which Birgitte said: Not good enough. I’ll expect you to follow me.

Yes, wife, I’ll follow you… — at which his drunken cousin clapped him on the back.

She was a girl with a star at her throat and her scarf’s narrow ends hanging straight down below her breast. Then she was a goldenhaired young mother clenching her hands against the cold, and every morning she rocked the cradle, singing the song of the spider and the brooch, but their baby died.

She was never well; she was always as whiteskinned as a young wooden house. When her doom grew certain, she leaned against him, and slowly they walked up the hill, looking down over the steep roofs of the wooden houses at the narrow, streaming brilliance of the Vågen. The Østhavn was empty but for one or two great ships; the picket fence was going grey with dusk; the maple leaves were already black.

Again he swore to ride the day-ship and the night-ship, with the sail his wife should weave for him; and so she passed the rest of her life, vomiting and fainting, rolling her sailcloth upward on the warp-weighted loom as she formed the stuff. Just as a woman in her moon-bloody shift runs round the barley field before her husband sows it, so that the earth will bear, thus Birgitte uttered all her paling magic into the cloth she made, until her lips turned black. After she could no longer speak, she still stretched her arm toward him whenever he came to sit with her. Her hand closed tremblingly around his fingers. She learned how to make the good death once the leaves were new.

Because her life and death were in part secret to others, Olav’s nightmares grew brighter than the sea. Beside their child he buried her in her finest cloak, pinned with a golden trefoil brooch. Her stone read: Olav made this in remembrance of his dear wife Birgitte. As far as others were concerned, she had now been cast away, forgotten beneath the grass, avoided like dead wet leaves on the path — his mother spoke of fresher women, and the slanders of others resembled fallen poison-berries crimson on rock stairs — but Olav took mind of his promise, although he felt uneasy enough, to be sure, because where Birgitte had gone was as dark as a forest at a glade’s end.

Just as in a green hollow, a school of obedient dark stone heads stands aligned — a cemetery — so his nights now ranked themselves until a certain old witch in a double-brooched scarlet dress finished weaving the sail, spitting onto it to give it more woman-power.

Now the time had arrived for Olav to set out upon his journey, but first he wished to visit the husk of her whom he sought. Because he had paid the witch what she asked and more, she grew friendly, and even accompanied him that day, carrying the shovel. The church was cold. A man and boy bent over the votive candle which they had just impaled upon one of the equatorial spikes of the skeletal iron globe whose North Pole was a black cross, and when they had departed, Olav entered the churchyard, while the witch stood watch, reading the sun. An hour and more it must have been. Grimacing, she said: Do it now. I’ve locked the gate.

So he opened Birgitte’s grave, kissing her rotten face most lovingly, whispering in the hole where her ear once was that he would come to her now, and when he touched the heart-mud between her ribs, her lead cross went white with reflected gold-light, its triple rows of runes shining copper-red in their grooves. — Now she knows, said the witch. I wish I’d had a husband like you.

On the following day, Olav left home, with the witch-cloth rolled under his arm. The witch called up a breeze for him, then went her way. He said: Birgitte, prepare to welcome me. — Rainy wind on the slippery mossy rock, beech trees bursting from the dark rock, these sang to him when he put his feet in the two ovoid footprints, because in this very stone, dead people had made clean long ship-carvings: three vessels, one over the other, with people or animals or other beings on them. But what they had meant by it no one could say. Olav carried a silver neck-ring for his wife. Glorious white flowers were all he sorrowed to leave behind. Here he unrolled his sail. The keel sprouted before his feet. The wind caught him up.

Olav flew above the tongue of city into the Østre Havn, with small islands ahead: Plentingen on his left and Natvigs Minde on his right. Just like a duck paddling rapidly in cold black water, then diving, so his night-ship scored a wake in the day, then descended to the sea. His day-ship slit open the night; his night-ship found light; his day-ship carved darkness. Sometimes a sound as of wind came beneath the hull, but more often he heard slappings and sloshings; while after dark the ocean always sang like the choir back home in Stavanger. He grew as lonely as a dandelion flower high on its stalk. From Karmøy to Bukkøy he sailed, through shade and silver-wet grass, way-lit by the thunderglow of silver-blue lichen on black boulders, wife-lit, rune-lit, his ship’s swan-neck so dark-lit by water that it seemed to be its own thing, a snake; and as he travelled he began to wonder whether he crossed waves or was but a shadow upon blackberries and petroglyphs by the sunny sea, so many broken shells and mouse skulls did he pass over upon that cracked rock-shelf with its black and silver-white lichens and grasses growing up gold in the cracks, until after sailing through many rains he began to forget some of this Birgitte whom he sought, voyaging ever more lightly over green island-heads in the pale blue water. But he would not release his grip on her memory. He kept dreaming of her dead breasts because he sailed between rosehips as large as suns, while her dead womb became a red crabapple in autumn.

Ahead came the desired land, and on the grass, the outspread arms of rock. Olav kissed Birgitte’s neck-ring. The ship became an eight-legged horse whose eyes were dandelions. He sailed into the rock’s embrace where white water leaped up out of the dark water it struck, the rock pale and nearly green in the light. He hovered over green moss and lichens, breasting the leaves which waved at the sheep-clouds on the grass-sky. Cloud-sheep grazed on the green horizon.

He called out to Birgitte, but she did not yet answer. So he rode his horse across the trees, watched by blurred Dorset faces on a wand of antler. — Now I’ll roll up this horse and carry him under my arm, he said to himself. — He leaped across the dark lake, then across the river like a silver sword.

Far away where the blue-grey sea was writhing under a double bank of purple cloud, the sky glowing whitish-yellow at sunset, he approached the steeply tapering wooden roofs of Valhalla. Up rose mead-worthy woman-ghosts: Ingrid, Mari, Signe, Johanna, Karen, Elisabeth, Anna, Margaretha, Inga, Juliane — but Birgitte happened to be the one on whom he’d set his heart. So again he mounted his horse whose eyes were dandelions and rode down to Hel, whose dark hills are wound-gashed with red leaves. The ogres were greyish-blue like cold clay, and the trolls were as black as berries in a wall of green thorns; the giants were boulder-hearted, and the night-elves were pond-eyed. Sometimes they were grandly terrible; then they became as leaf-shadows. Scattering them all, even the monster with an ovoid head and closed ovoid eyes, he lifted a stone, and up rose Birgitte.

She wore a brooch made of crumbling green rust; perhaps he had once given it to her. Her hair had grown longer, and she was younger. She declined to open her arms. She was whiter than a birch tree, and her fingernails were paler than evergreen tips.

He held out her neck-ring, and unsmilingly she slipped it over her head, saying: If you teach me to love you again, I’ll show you why dark water catches light.

He drank water from the moss beneath her arms. Her voice kept the high sound and the low sound of a stream.

She said: Your memory stone is choking me.

What shall I do with it, Birgitte?

Birgitte’s not my name.

You told me to come here.

Go home and roll your stone away.

When Olav opened his eyes, the sun hurt them. The ground chilled his back. He was lying in his wife’s opened grave, with dribs of rotten sailcloth between his fingers and the memory stone on his chest, facing downwards. He managed to push it off, then clambered back into the sunlight. As soon as he stood upright he felt as if he had recovered from a drawn-out illness.

Although he felt curious as to whether the silver neck-ring remained in her coffin, burning her bones with precious frost, he remembered the words of Christ: Let the dead bury the dead.

So he called workmen to haul the stone away. The gravediggers filled in the hole and laid new turf over it.

Then he remarried — a sweet young girl named Jorunn, who had long been on his mind. She promised to outlive him, which she did. He left instructions to be cremated.

THE NARROW PASSAGE

In 1868 some Rogalanders remained in hopes that the herring would swim home to them, and a few even believed it, for it is always an insult when good things depart, and one readymade defense of the insulted is faith. That great wooden hand still pointed upward in the window of Mr. Kielland’s shop, as if to remind us where those good things go; while the herringmen reached in the opposite direction, praying even yet for silver treasure in their nets. Out where the coast unrolled page after page of rock-stories, it seemed as if some secret fish-hoard might yet give itself, pallidly pure, like autumn light breaking weakly through the clouds; and since the herring occasionally pretended to return, the believers went on believing, awaiting their own continuance, watching the stillness of black water in the rain. Fortunately, universal afflictions manifest themselves in our neighbors before we need to confess the symptoms in our own faces. In other words, Karmsundet grew impoverished more rapidly than Stavanger, whose shipwrights and merchantmen made do thanks to lobster if not lumber; but even in Stavanger the unluckiest fishermen presently began to pack up for America. They were followed by carpenters whose iron-jacketed mallets had rusted, servant-girls expelled from their fine situations beneath the master’s stairs, stevedores whose great shoulders went unhired and whose despondent women had given up expecting to stand in mountains of herring, gutting and salting by the hour; ropemakers whose only use for their product would have been to hang themselves, bankrupt farmers and other apostates from the silvery faith.

The shipping companies’ agents promised easy terms and golden lives to any who would buy their tickets. After all, isn’t gold superior to silver? To be sure, certain crows kept croaking about the Amelia, which departed Porsgrunn Harbor with two hundred and eighty souls, seventy-nine of whom died of sickness. But some of her survivors came out rather well. One family even bought a piano, in a place called Minnesota. Although not all emigrants could expect that, they stood a fine chance of doing worse at home. Even the Rosenkilde family, it was said, was suffering: they now ate red meat but thrice a week.

Many Stavanger emigrants signed up with Mr. Køhler, his family having dwelled thereabouts since the Late Bronze Age, which rendered him nearly trustworthy and his passengers nothing if not civically patriotic. But not all were satisfied in the end. The ones who got buried at sea declined to complain, but their widowers and orphans wrote home that America had cost them twelve weeks belowdecks in a stinking prison of verminous, vomitous bunks, scuttles locked tight and not even enough water to drink — never mind the thieves in Liverpool and the road agents in New York.

So when Øistein Pederson and his wife Kristina prepared to make the adventure, they wondered whether Mr. Køhler’s competitors might be any better. Kristina had already been dismissed from the cannery, for slackness, so the foreman said, but to her husband she tearfully swore before God that she had never for a moment slowed down; even between fish-barrels she kept on, cleaning the floor or sharpening the gutting-knives, nor had there been complaints about her. Øistein believed his spouse, who was honest in all things; moreover, the factory immediately took in a horde of hungry young Swedish girls who worked for less. A week later they hired her at Magnussen’s, and it seemed as if they could live as before, weary over their bowls of soup on the narrow wooden table, so early it was still dark, a sheen of her gold hair reflected like aurora borealis on the dark frosted window. Then Magnussen’s closed.

Øistein was a cooper. For three months they got along on his earnings, but the canneries ordered ever fewer barrels, so he and Kristina began to quarrel. On a certain cold night, Øistein slept badly, awoke in a fever, and because the room was so close and squalid, he fancied himself already dead, trapped in the cold black earth, open-eyed, blind, unable to catch his breath. What could he do but suffer forever? Of course he had simply lost himself beneath the bedclothes. With a gasp he threw them off, disturbing Kristina, and gave thanks when he saw her shape in the pallid nightdress. Although he kept this experience to himself, it changed him. In brief, he conceived a horror of rotting away in Stavanger.

Come to think of it, horror of constriction might have been his very nature’s foundation-stone. When he was a boy of five or six, his mother, who once saw it, told him how the great stele of Saint Mary’s needle leans ever closer to Haakon’s church; some believe that when they touch, Doomsday will arrive. Of all the children, Øistein was the only one affected by this tale. He could almost imagine himself caught in that inevitable evil hour — pinched, chilled and crushed. Seeing how readily he grew disturbed over nothing, his father realized that the child had too much time on his hands, and set him to the most wearisome tasks of coopering, which he soon mastered, after which nobody could find any fancies of which to disapprove in that quietly straightforward young man. Kristina’s father, and perhaps even Kristina, would have been surprised to know what sort of person had joined their family. Naturally, they themselves might have presented a few astonishments to Øistein, had there ever come time to get to know each other in that way.

After his nightmare, he asked himself: If the herring never come back, what’s the best we can expect? — The answer untricked his mind.

To say that Kristina and Øistein loved each other conveys less than I would wish, for doesn’t marriage often commence with some kind of love? After three years their passion had not waned to nothing; but it had lessened, for a fact. On the other hand, they had learned how to be loyal helpmates each to the other. Øistein thought matters through, from his wife’s point of view and his own. If there was no money then there would be more quarrels, in which case the chance of their remaining true friends appeared as unlikely as a happy ending to one of those tales which begin with a pretty girl luring a man into the churchyard. Anyhow, even if the old plenitude returned, why should Kristina spend herself in gutting herring by candlelight? Sometimes when they lay down together he could barely endure the smell.

His father-in-law, that gaunt and bearded believer, had stood against emigration, but on one of those dark mornings he lost his capacity to wake up, so they buried him beside Kristina’s mother and began to consider in earnest. Now was the time. Øistein’s parents were already dead. No children had come yet; they retained a sack of coin from better days; as to their future, the landlord had increased the rent, and next month would bring three more boarders into that tiny house.

It was Sunday. When they all got home from church, two of the other tenants commenced disagreeing over a pair of boots, while Øistein stood watching raindrops on the window, the harbor trembling, reflections of red, white and yellow edifices barely pinkening or blueing the water. Then he opened his heart to Kristina, who said: I’ll do whatever you think best.

He loved his wife’s hair. In America, perhaps, she might not be compelled to kerchief her face against the stinging herring-brine. Then he could admire it every day. One could breathe in America, it was said. There was cheap good land, and the taxes were low.

Bypassing Mr. Køhler’s, they went to Mr. Kielland’s cousin Nils, who ran a clean business, everyone said. His passengers tended to be rich, but Øistein hoped that a berth in steerage might not be too dear. So the Pedersons awaited their turn, gripping the railing-narrow counter while the officials sat far away around their square wooden island of a desk-table, writing in their ledgers, counting money received and placing it in envelopes, never opening their tall black safe before the public. Some of these men Øistein had seen across the nave on Sunday, and some he had never met before; they looked nearly as grand as the Rosenkildes.

Finally the Pedersons stood before the high clerk, who asked what they wanted. From his tone they could have been unemployable Pietists. Looking him in the eye, Øistein demanded his cheapest price to America.

America, now, that’s a wide place. Where in America?

New York.

We sail only to Québec nowadays.

Then you could have said so at the beginning, sir.

Good luck to you. Next!

How much to Québec?

For two?

That’s right.

The man wrote down a number on a scrap of paper. Øistein led his wife out of that office, passing framed etchings of sailing ships and frowning rich men.

Fortunately, Kristina’s aunt had been watching out for them. She said that there was nothing as easy to keep an eye on as that raven-suited agent who rushed so busily across the winding walls of white houses. He usually flittered by in mid-morning, when women had given up standing outside the canneries. The next day the Pedersons stood waiting for him, and here he came.

In his black suit he reminded Øistein of the dark narrow column of a mink standing up, its little hands dangling against its breast. Under his throat he wore a high white collar, whose clasp was a ruby-eyed herring cast out of pure silver.

He extended his hand, but Øistein stepped back.

So it’s America you’d go to?

Frowning, the young man nodded.

I’ll quote you a fine price!

What price?

Whatever others charge, Captain Gull will be less. Just bring a bill for proof.

Where is he?

This way.

That’s not to the harbor! Øistein exclaimed.

It is, it is! A short passage! laughed the sailing-ship agent.

Following him up that steep lane whose twistings were nearly stifled by hordes of square-windowed wooden houses which watched every passerby like standing stones, they unaccountably found themselves back at the docks. Little single-masted vessels scuttled in and out of the Vågen, quick to tie up at their favorite warehouse before someone else could. The agent led them past the line of weary women in the salty stench of the herring wharves, some of whom tried to smile at Kristina, and just past Eystein’s warehouse they arrived at a door in a small warehouse. Naturally they were subjected to no passenger ship office, and certainly not to any clock with Chinese figures on its towering plinth, let alone some white door marked PRIVAT. This went far to explain why it might have been that the instant they saw Captain Gull, they liked him, although, come to think of it, this was unaccountable, for Øistein partook of a distrustful nature. With a name like that,* the fellow should have been a German goldsmith with six pink, roundcheeked children. As it was, he gave off a prosperous enough impression: narrow spectacles, fine white hair with a few strands of red still in it. His breath was scarcely beery at all.

Two more for America! said the agent.

Kristina wished to know how long the voyage would last. — Not above three weeks, said Captain Gull.

Impossible!

Not at all. Given fine weather it will be even less. You see, I’ve found a short passage.

Kristina was smiling. Alarmed, her husband took her hand, which even now remained blotched and inflamed from herring-brine.

Captain Gull was explaining that this shorter route to America had been worked out long ago. It was the way that Leif Eiriksson had revealed to no one, not even the ill-fated Vinland voyagers, who were his own kin; Captain Gull had followed up certain hints in the sagas, and claimed it for himself. — And you must promise to keep my secret, he continued.

He took them down to see the Hyndla. She was a pretty enough vessel, white, black and green. Øistein tapped his forefinger on the railing. Smiling, the agent said: Sound ship-wood — straight from the Ryfylke forest! And look here; this is interesting.

Her bowsprit was as impressive as an iron spear — for walrus hunting, chuckled Captain Gull.

We’ll think on this, said Øistein, to which the agent replied: Don’t think too long, Mr. Pederson. We have only half a dozen berths left.

In steerage?

They’re all in steerage.

What’s the price? And this time I want a figure.

Smiling, Captain Gull turned away. The agent murmured. It truly was unbelievably good.

Oho, said the agent. Three more emigrants coming! Excuse me now; perhaps I’ll see you again.

After a glance at his anxious eager wife, Øistein said: We’ll book our passage now.

Kristina’s face was as shiny as her best possession, the brass teakettle that her mother had bequeathed to her.

Buying dried foodstuffs for the voyage at Mr. Kielland’s store, Kristina felt even happier than she had been when Øistein first came courting. She laid in potatoes, flatbread, jugs of soured milk — and salted herring, of course; there was still a supply of it. In America, where food was cheap, she might be spared from eating that fish anymore. She bought plugs of tobacco for her husband, and a few onions against scurvy. Receiving Mr. Kielland’s permission, the apprentice loaded the wagon and took her home with all her groceries. — Write us a letter if you get time, he said. Kristina thanked him, knowing that he would pray for her.

Her cousin Eyvind reached into his sailmaker’s horn full of needles, and pulled out an awl which could pierce through anything. He gave it to her with a prayer and a kiss on the forehead.

Meanwhile her husband was packing up his trunk: wool mittens made by his sister, a striped white shirt, a cap, oilskin trousers and jacket, linens, a bit of rope, then all the farm tools the relatives could spare. How long he and Kristina could manage in America without work was as tedious to calculate as the number of green herring to fill a barrel. The uncertainties of the passage disquieted him, but after all, no man can see down deeply into the future. They had made their agreement and must be content. At least the voyage would be brief; moreover, his wife was too strong and good to complain.

On the last day, standing side by side, the Pedersons overlooked the few sailing-ships in the Vågen; and devouring the chilly breeze, which was purer by far than the air in most port cities, the water streaming blue and grey, they promised to be brave and true to each other. Half a dozen undermanned herring-boats were heading out to sea in hopes that the silver wealth might have come back; they went slowly, slowly sailing, their brass bells faintly ringing.

And so the emigrants ascended the gangway, Øistein and Kristina and all the other young women with their white collars buttoned up to the throat, stern old men, wide-eyed children, all the families leaving behind their white-painted wooden houses, disconsolate fishermen altered into hopeful farmers, butterwives who’d sold their fat sweet cows for next to nothing (the buyers being apprised of their circumstances), beneficiaries of the short passage on the pretty ship Hyndla, bound for Québec, the leavetakers’ view of them interrupted by many tall cables. Among them stood Kristina’s Aunt Liv in her lace shawl and collar, sternly seeing them off, and at the last sadly bending her head like a good cow before the axe. Øistein hastened into steerage to guard their place and possessions. The smell was nauseating, but he could certainly get used to it. Glancing around him, he found that he knew no one except for Reverend Johansen, who had intended to leave last spring but stayed to care for his mother in her final illness. Well, there were so many families in the narrow white houses of Stavanger! And from the sound of their speech, some people must be from Hjelmeland or Suldal. The reverend and Øistein nodded to one another. Kristina would be pleased. When she came down, her husband pushed his way back onto the foredeck, ostensibly to wave farewell to Aunt Liv and Cousin Eyvind. He looked down and saw a fish skeleton hanging complete just beneath the surface of the oily harbor. Swans, gulls and pigeons bickered on the pier, the coy sun gilding the cobblestones for an instant. The young man now gazed across the water and up the street, into the house where he and Kristina had lived. Øistein had always been remarkable for his eyesight, and so he made no mistake when he perceived how upstairs the windows parted, and in the widening column of darkness between the pairs of triple panes, a pallid face, never before seen, gaped its mouth at him. But two other men jostled him, and he swung round, ready to defend himself if need be; the men apologized, and they all agreed that three weeks belowdecks would be superior to attic-dwelling forever in Stavanger. Cousin Eyvind waved his hat at Øistein and went away. Aunt Liv sought to make herself conspicuous for that instant, but the crowd half crushed her. She too used to stand in the sheds with her hands buried in the silver hoard of herring. And before anyone expected it, the Hyndla was underway, the glamor of separation now gracing those tiny, narrow white houses which shone so softly through the beech trees.

At first the instants of their voyage were distinct, like mackerel-bubbles in dark seaweed at dawn. Kristina told herself that she must never forget this creamy dawn sea so black and orange around those low Norwegian islands which resembled translucent flints knapped and polished down by giants. Øistein held her hand. Once they reached America, they might not find such leisure again, at least not until they were old. The water seemed viscous, and the red sun-shield shone over the islands. All day they sped toward the short passage, which Captain Gull had explained was a trifle narrow in spots, this being the reason he had not replaced the Hyndla with a larger ship (doubtless, thought Øistein, the true reason must be that Captain Gull lacked the means — and thank goodness for that, since otherwise he would have increased the fare, perhaps even up to Nils Kielland’s price). It was peculiar, to be sure, the way they kept on following the coast northward, when America lay to the west; but no doubt the master knew what he was about. There came another dawn to the black sea, the ship foaming through ribbons of green-chambered white lace on either side; and still the ship lay never so far off the coast as to be out of soundings. By now several children had vomited, making the stench of dirty feet and fish-oil even less pleasant, but Kristina reminded herself that she was not some rich girl who can afford to get queasy in her stomach from a surfeit of butter. And wasn’t this preferable to the stink of the herring-barrels? She went among those young mothers who wore lovely lace at their throats — attic-sharers, no doubt, from those square-windowed wooden little houses — and tried to be helpful; sometime she might need the same. Then she attempted sitting on the edge of her bunk, but the ceiling was too low. Pulling out her trunk, which had formed a very close acquaintance with three others beneath the bed, she seated herself on it and began to knit a pair of socks for her husband, who had gone above in hopes of establishing a business association with some other men. Presently she grew melancholy, because somebody was flatulent and the ship tilted nauseously on the rushing grey ocean, with hasty low sunlight glancing unpleasantly into the scuttles, and something unknown to her whistling and piping outside. Kristina was a landswoman; she had never been on a ship before. An icy feeling established itself behind her breastbone, or maybe higher up than that — almost up to her collarbone, in fact, but there and only there, like burning cold metal inside her; she felt that she could not get warm; well, no, it wasn’t just there anymore; her wrists were freezing where they emerged from the sleeves; her toes were numb. Just as she had begun to wish they had never set out for America, a shaft of sunlight turned the royal grey water into blue, revealing many forested islets, cormorants and seals. So the weather came and went, in conjunction with her moods, and they approached the short passage, after which every passenger would be compelled to resume the weariness of getting a living.

Early next morning the helmsman was fixing their position by means of careful sextant angles, as Øistein approvingly perceived. This must be the place where they would turn straight west, out into the Atlantic.

But why’s that fellow folding in the spinnaker sail? a Hjelmeland man said, as if to himself. Two tall sailors approached him. They inquired: Is it to tell us our business that you’d be wishing?

Øistein was sorry for the Hjelmeland man, but ours is a hard world, and so he turned away.

The Hyndla was shortening sail, for a fact. Perhaps her master had determined to take in extra water or supplies.

Greeting Øistein, the reverend gazed over the side and remarked: I almost became a fisherman like my father.

Then you escaped a bad destiny.

So it seems. But where did the herring go?

We fished them out, that’s all, said the Hjelmeland man. Greed and folly. And if they ever come back, we’ll do it again.

Without a doubt, said Øistein.

The rising sun-shield’s three or four reflections skipped across the water like a stone; then there were nine of them, and they merged into a vermilion road between wrinkled dark islets. The topman was yanking in the throat halyards of the foresail, and Øistein went down to see whether Kristina needed anything. She looked nauseous but smiled at him, knitting a sweater.

Come on up, wife, and see the eider ducks swimming.

His wife beckoned him closer. When he leaned down toward her, she whispered in his ear: That Dorthe Magnusson from Suldal has been complaining since dawn. When she went topside to take some air, someone stole a pound of tea right out of their trunk.

A shame, said Øistein, shaking his head. Can we spare her a bit of ours?

Of course, only—

Now go take a turn on deck, and I’ll mind our goods.

Thank you, husband.

He sat there in the close air, passing the time with a Suldal man named Bendik Hermansson, whose brother had already emigrated to that district called Minnesota. By all accounts, a man had room to breathe over there. The Indians used to make trouble in those parts, but nowadays they were practically finished. Land and cattle were cheap. Øistein listened, embellishing his own dreams for himself and Kristina once the passage should widen out into American infinitude. Like most of the others, he had a gift for patient endurance, so that the hours receded easily, green and grooved like Norwegian islands. When Kristina returned, looking much better, they lunched on hard bread and tinned herring from Mr. Kielland’s store.

It was best not to be overexacting in one’s expectations as to the duration of the short passage. Captain Gull had said something about three weeks. But of course it might go a week more or less, depending on accidents. Anyone from Stavanger knew about stormy weather, not that any was in the immediate offing, for when Øistein climbed the ladder to the foredeck, the late afternoon sun peeped out to gild a lovely tree-hedgehog of coast, and off the stern lay a pastel island of high yellow and green shadows, the ocean almost reddish-grey against it. Ahead stretched a promontory of some sort. The Hyndla was sailing parallel to a cloud-pleat, aiming for a ridge of blue knuckles (the sea very calm, the glass falling slowly). Two sailors footed in another sail. Bendik Hermansson, who had also sought out good air just now, remarked that he had never seen such peculiar seamanship. Øistein declined to reply, for he had begun to wonder whether this fellow talked too much to no purpose. So they stood smoking their pipes while the glass fell a trifle further, and presently the waves roughened, so that the grey sea was sliming the scuttles belowdecks as the grey coast grew blurry. Preferring to delay his return into the odors of vomit, fish-oil and fouled diapers, Øistein remained on deck for another half-hour, until one of the Suldal men said he could make out some sort of high black shining, about two or three points on the starboard bow.

Now the sea began to foam in earnest, and waves rained down across the scuttles. The passengers were all good Norwegians, even the landsmen, so however they might have felt, they showed no fear of those glassy, icy sheets of spray in the milky sea. Presently the horizon disclosed mountains like the long black teeth of a wool comb. Øistein, who had never sailed far up the coast, but trusted in his calculations of how far the Hyndla had gone, supposed that this might be Ytre Sula or Sandøyna, not that either place boasted cliffs as grand or dark as this.

Passengers to their berths, said Captain Gull. The sailors were already unreefing the mainsail, an action which the former herring fishermen among the emigrants thought incomprehensible. Now the foresail had descended, and they were winching down the spar.

Belowdecks the four-tiered berths ran perpendicular to the ship’s axis, interrupted by a narrow corridor. At the top of each bunk on its corridor-facing end was a knurled knob whose purpose Øistein had not perceived. Two tall sailors now came in and gave each knob seven turns. With each turn the berths contracted a little into the wall. Kristina inquired what they were doing. A sailor said: You’ll see. It’s a narrow passage.

And so they approached a cliff of hard grey rock, which suddenly gaped open for the Hyndla to enter, then closed behind her. All the passengers could tell was that the scuttles went dark — for the passage was as narrow as the Vågen itself, that long sea-mouth whose jaws are studded with hordes of white wooden house-teeth.

Following up his earlier supposition, Øistein decided that they must have turned in to the Sognefjorden, which is the widest introitus hereabouts, but not a single town appeared; moreover, two of the Suldal men had fished the fjord as far up as Balestrand on many an occasion, and they swore that this was no place they had ever seen. Bendik Hermansson, however, was certain of their proximity to Balestrand, for there was nowhere else that they could be. Now it is common knowledge that as it runs upstream at Balestrand, the Sognefjorden jogs sharply north by northeast and narrows into the Færlandsfjorden, presently passing Sogndalseggi to the east before reaching the many-armed spider-lake called Jostedalsbreen. Even if they could have somehow missed Sogndalseggi, which was practically impossible, the Suldal men said, the channel should have widened out. And why they should be carried deep inside Norway was beyond them. Bendik Hermansson persisted in his position that they had not yet reached Balestrand. Once Øistein, who was of a practical disposition, realized that they knew no better than he where the Hyndla had carried them, he returned to his berth to see how his wife was getting along. Reverend Johansen sat on a trunk, reading aloud from his Bible. An old man was groaning and vomiting. The women knitted. Kristina had grown quite fond of the minister, and in truth she might have wondered once or twice how it would have gone with her, had she married so distinguished a man. He had just come to the verse which runs: Carry me, O LORD, that I may cross this circle of guttering fire; and against my enemies lend me Your sword that strikes on its own. Against the trolls deliver me; from the blue flames deliver me, that I may come safe into the Kingdom.

There was a fisherman named Einar Sigvatsson, who had sailed widely in the days when people still hoped that the herring might be found. His brother had finally persuaded him to go out of the country. So both Sigvatssons were on board, with their wives and children, together with Einar’s mother-in-law. Kristina and Øistein had struck up a liking for that family.

Coming back on deck once the whistle sounded the all-clear, Øistein discovered that the Hyndla appeared considerably smaller, for not only had all her sails disappeared but even the mast was broken down, its lowest stalk lashed tight against the deck and the remainder unscrewed into lengths of pole. Meanwhile the sailors were already turning certain knurled knobs upon the corners of the forecastle cabin, so that its roof crept down toward the deck. This accomplished, they unstepped the walls to fold them in. Now they turned other screws, and all along either side of the Hyndla uprose a low wall of oarlocks.

They had entered a very deep and narrow gorge, whose river, strange to say, flowed away from the sea. Overhead Øistein saw unfamiliar stars. This river was very dark, so that its ripples resembled silver inlay in a black iron axehead. Øistein stood watching for a long time, while the other passengers murmured around him. Presently there came a sort of dawn, and he began to perceive that the cliffs between which they sailed were white-patterned with petroglyphs of long ships which resembled worms rolling up their necks in agony because they had been pierced with upright rows of little sticks, which must have been either their masts or their passengers. Then the cliffs drew apart, so that he commenced to hope that the short passage might become more quotidian, but soon enough he saw that they had merely passed into a long ovoid lake, with a rocky islet in the middle; and evidently the cliffs closed in again not far ahead.

He wondered how Kristina might be faring belowdecks. At that moment she was quieting Einar Sigvatsson’s daughter Ingigerd, who was a fine girl, well brought up, but passing fearful of the dark, as it now came out; so Kristina entertained her with tales of the cannery, where she used to stand with the other girls at the gutting tables, her toil lit by candles planted in heaps of herring. Ingigerd inquired whether she had been afraid. — Kristina laughed at her. — Afraid or not, child, we did the work. Now don’t worry. Your father will come down for you soon.

For whatever reason, some voyagers had grown shy of the captain. Spying him behind the helmsman, Øistein went straight up and asked for an explanation.

Haven’t you seen a neap tide before? laughed Captain Gull. The sailors were all grinning at Øistein, who knew well enough that this was no neap tide.

Men commenced to raise their voices. Bendik Hermansson and the reverend essayed to come forward, but the two tall sailors informed them that since it was dangerous to crowd around the helm, they must wait their turn.

Captain Gull was smiling a little, his strangely refined white fingers stroking his beard, and he said: Øistein, you and your wife are reasonable people. I’m trusting in you to make the other passengers see reason.

Then kindly do the same for me. Where have you brought us, captain?

I informed you at the outset that this route is my business. Other masters would love to learn it, not that there’s much danger of that. Are you satisfied?

Why is your crew contracting the ship?

Well, well, it’s a very narrow passage, you see. And several of you embarked with too much luggage, against my advice—

We got no such advice! shouted Bendik Hermansson.

That’s as may be. We’ll be stopping at that island, where we’ll cache all unnecessary things. One valise per household can be kept, and no more.

But, captain, that’s not right! You never told us before—

Øistein, most people aren’t prepared to consider what a voyage of this sort entails. Had I warned you in advance of every conceivable difficulty, you might have backed out and gone to my competitors, who would have told you what you wished to hear. Then you would have been no better off, since everybody goes to the same place.

That’s not so. Some ships sail to New York and some—

Believe me, you all would have come to this sooner or later.

But, captain, how will I manage in America without my tools and seeds? What about the people who laid out every kroner they had on food and extra clothes, or Reverend Johansen, with all his books?

Overgazing him with angelic eyes, that seraphic oldster replied: Øistein, we all hold onto what we think is precious. We even convince ourselves that we’ll never manage without it. When your father-in-law died — see, I know about that! — your good wife could hardly endure to live, as you well remember, but then she persuaded herself to live, for you—

Who told you that?

And now our Kristina’s living for herself again, as she ought to. An admirable woman you have there! And Reverend Johansen only needs one book to practice his calling. As for you, my friend, I don’t mind letting you in on a secret: There’s treasure ahead! In the place where I’m taking you, you’ll find something that will set you up for life. This is for the best, you’ll see. Tell everyone. Now leave me to my business, for the helmsman needs me.

Finding nothing more practical to do, Øistein did as the master had told him; and on account of his clear and simple manner, not to mention those intimations of treasure, the passengers stayed calm, their pallid faces flowing in the darkness like stained glass figures framed in lead, Reverend Johansen comforting them with the verse which goes: For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few. Meanwhile Kristina proved yet again that no one on this earth is as hopeful as an emigrant bride.

But soon the passage became rather narrow even for its own passengers. The Hyndla was now not much more than a keel. Her freeboard had so far diminished that Øistein could have knelt on deck and touched the waterline. The thwarts had already been swung into place and the sailors were sitting down to row, while the purser sat on the harness cask, neatly crossing names out of the ship’s register. Indeed, a number of emigrants had disappeared, Bendik Hermansson for one, and there seemed to be small use in searching for them. Several people had turned against Øistein, whom they considered to be, if not an accomplice, at least a pawn of the captain, but when he asked what else he should have done, they found nothing to say. The women kept weepingly outstretching their hands to the island where their possessions had been offloaded; its rock-darkness was nearly out of sight now. The Suldal men huddled together, evidently meditating the seizure of the ship, and although it pained Øistein that they distrusted him, he could not judge their notions; at any rate, they too soon vanished, together with all their families. Although the orange lanterns still shone on either side of the forecastle, as if the voyage were continuing well, as perhaps indeed it was, the shrinkage of the vessel, and the diminution of the people on it, soon became more rapid. The Hyndla appeared to be increasing speed; foam flashed against her sides. In a single long chest abovedecks remained all possessions that the passengers could not wear or carry; and their quarters had contracted to such an extent that sitting up was out of the question. Kristina thought that they might as well have been herring laid side by side into a rectangular tin.

Einar Sigvatsson’s mother-in-law Holmfrid now fell sick, and although the other women did everything they could for her, it appeared that she might not recover. In the morning she too was gone, and nobody could say where she had taken herself; that was peculiar enough, and very upsetting to little Ingigerd, of whom Kristina had grown fonder than ever. She told the child all the other stories she knew, good tales like herring shining in the sun; but presently she ran out of anything to tell, and so lay in her bunk, staring up at the bottom of the next berth while the child wailed and fretted. Reverend Johansen continued reading aloud from the Scriptures, and wondrous pretty his verses sometimes proved, especially the verse Glasir stands gold-leaved before Sigtyr’s halls. But where might Øistein be? He had always been known as someone who thought for himself. Couldn’t he save them from any of this? After all, Captain Gull appeared to listen to him. So she tried to be calm and awaited better news.

Kristina had once imagined that she knew sorrow, when only now, on this narrow passage, had it truly begun. Whatever we are used to, however unpleasant it may be, is better than being deprived of everything. Well, God willing, we won’t lose everything! By now all she wished for was to be restored to the miseries which had troubled her. Lying on her back side by side with the other passengers in the stinging acid stench of vomit, the vinegary smell of sweat and the sour-sweet reek of foul fish, with the ceiling pressing ever more closely in, again she made the time pass, if only to herself, by remembering her old home, since America was but a void to her, and this narrow passage did not seem like anything to be fancied. For a fact she should have comforted little Ingigerd, but instead she lay silent with her eyes shut, slowly chewing on a bit of flatbread. Yes, she felt homesick for the sweating, crowded blocks of wooden houses of Stavanger; even the slopridden mud-alleys between them were wider than her present situation. Once upon a time she had belonged to the triple line of pretty young women in their dark dresses and white aprons, their hair bobbed tight as they stood over the great salting-kettles, each nearly as large as the one which Thor won from the giant Hymir. Kristina’s frying pan was as large across as three burly men. Although she used to dislike the smoky fishy smell, racked barrels and salt-burned wooden ladles, enduring those years only because she could get no other work, she missed the cannery now; she would have been grateful to wake up unemployed in Stavanger again, quarrelling with her jobless husband, looking forward to hungry years. The patient dread in Øistein’s face, which he ingenuously supposed he concealed from her, sickened her with worry; and that was how she finally learned that her late mother had warned her well: Marry carefully, Kristina! Young people think they can put on a ring and get help and pleasure for nothing. Really the best you can expect is an exchange of burdens. — In any event, she could hardly blame her husband as some of the other women on the Hyndla were doing, since they both knew very well that it was she, Kristina, who had chosen this conveniently short passage.

She still kept a few kroner hoarded up, thinking to spend them in America; but all at once it came to her to approach Captain Gull, who had appeared so sprightly and kind back at home. Perhaps money would save the Pedersons. Instructing Ingigerd to guard what remained of her property, Kristina ascended to the deck. She found the master standing smilingly at the bow, while the helmsman dismantled the wheel. Before she could speak, he laid a hand upon her shoulder, and once again it came to her how fine he was. — Still you refuse to trust in me? was all he said. Have faith, Kristina; everything will come out for the best.

Too soon, they reached their next narrowing. Ice-walls rose ahead like terraces of frozen waves, riddled with electric-blue cracks.

It’s my duty to go this time, said Reverend Johansen. And I’d like to leave three things behind for your help, but the captain informs me there’s only room for one. So choose, dear friends!

But quickly, please, said the purser. We’re coming to a particularly narrow part.

What are the three things, reverend?

Faith, hope and charity, of course. Now, I can’t help but wish you’ll choose faith—

Hope, said Kristina, and nobody contradicted her.

So be it, said the reverend, and withdrawing a sky-blue jewel from his waistcoat pocket, he slipped it into her hand, perhaps because he liked her best. It was a lovely stone which reminded her of the many-ledged glacier wall above the milk-blue sea.

He was smiling at her. Gazing into his face, she murmured: Did I choose wrongly?

Well, from my own selfish point of view, hope was the easiest to give up. I wouldn’t be much good in my vocation without faith, and charity comes in handy just now—

All right, sir, come along! said the purser, and the two tall sailors grabbed the doomed man under his arms and heaved him over the side. He sank instantly. His killers sat down with their mates. Slipping their oars into the crutches, they began to pull, so that the blue terraces on the dull white glacier passed slowly by.

A broad low cave now opened in the wall of whitish-blue ice-teeth, and with uncouth gestures the nameless helmsman guided the rowers in. Down went the Hyndla, far beneath the bottom of the greeny-grey sea.

As you can well suppose, the emigrants’ situation had become as narrow as the square entrance to a turf-roofed mound, all square inside. Remembering his old nightmare of suffocation, Øistein found himself in need of unceasing efforts (not unlike a rower determined to go forward) to keep his horror at bay. Sometimes the nausea in his throat or the cold wet constriction in his chest grew indistinguishable from panic, and when the last children still remaining began to scream, goggle-eyed like the old wooden-carved gods, he was tempted to violence, just to quiet them, because their cries bore the timbre of his own soul’s desperate voice, the useless wailing of life itself when death’s fingers close about our throats. Gasping in deep moldy draughts of darkness, he reminded himself that there was no hope in any event, so that to act ignobly could not purchase him a single extra breath. He had sought to persuade the other passengers to keep watch night and day upon the deck, so as not to be tricked anymore, but they were too terrified to creep abovedecks, even the Sigvatssons, from whom he would have expected better help. The last of the Suldal men concealed themselves beneath some planks, hoping to be forgotten, but they too disappeared. Well, after all, even the narrow passage must reach an end. Determined to retain his evenness, Øistein reminded himself that in every ancient barrow, so it was said, one must worm-crawl through the entrance tunnel, but once inside, it grew possible to stand, and perhaps even with outstretched arms remain unconfined by the dank dome of darkness overhead. Perhaps the passage would be like that. Chewing a plug of tobacco, he comforted himself with the parable of the thread within the needle’s eye. He surrendered as well as he was able to the Lord’s will. But what helped most of all was Kristina’s strength for him, and her need. They had married until death. Well enough. He would not be so cowardly as to let the earth cave in on him first, so that his wife must die alone.

Now the sailors set to their oars, which were actually spades, of course; and the Hyndla proceeded like a millipede through the dark earth. Actually it was not as dark as one might have imagined, the ceiling being thick with glowworms, which gave the Stavanger people comfort, reminding them of when racks of head-skewered brislings and of herring like long silver jewels illuminated the old days of the canneries. Well, never again would they hear winches and chains bearing that treasure of silver tins. No, this narrow passage was not the pleasantest place, but it would surely end soon enough; and even now there was something merry in Captain Gull’s flittering blue eyes. So they sailed blackly under the worm-stars, and the loudest thing they heard was the singing in their own skulls. Einar Sigvatsson whispered into Kristina’s ear the rumor that trolls had been heard coming on board in great numbers, but she turned away, declining to listen. From time to time the cook opened the harness cask, from which he fed the crew a meat of salted dead men. The passengers for their part had almost nothing to eat; most of their food had been cached on that island in the dark lake. Beside his wife Øistein sat quiet, clenching his fists. His horror and terror of asphyxiation kept fingering him, in much the same way that in the sagas that blind and treacherous prisoner-king Rörek continually explored his cousin, King Olaf, to find out whether he were armored; for what he wished above all was to stab him. In this situation, Øistein, who yet half believed in the treasure beyond price which Captain Gull had promised him, sometimes found it helpful to row along with the sailors, not least because, good son to his father, he hated idleness. But presently anxiety for his wife arose in him, so, laying by his oar (at which the sailors shot him wolfish grimaces), he returned into the darkness where the passengers lay, and there was Kristina with her hands across her breast, silently praying, the drops of sweat on her face as richly silver as the hordes which once came to light in the dark water back in the days when the nets rose up full. Again her beautiful desperation strengthened him.

There were hardly any passengers left. Einar Sigvatsson remained, with his youngest son Arnvid, but his wife and daughter and all his brother’s people had been taken, with ogres and trolls now snatching people right and left. Katrina felt very sad about little Ingigerd, but most likely the child was in heaven. Einar appeared half crazed. Øistein said to him: Now we know for certain that they mean us ill, so I propose that we attack them before they thin us out again.

Einar answered: That’s all right for you to say, because you have no children, and your wife could get through life without you, but some people prefer not to leave their dependents alone in the world.

Then Kristina said: Let me go and speak again with Captain Gull, which everyone approved, even Øistein, because it postponed the moment when something must be risked.

So once more she crept forward, and there stood the captain, looking as ready and cheerful as ever, although most of the crew had disappeared, and just then the purser leaped headfirst over the side, burrowing greedily into the earth. As Kristina had borne him a grudge ever since the death of Reverend Johansen, this sight caused her less horror than one might have expected; and in any event she had come on business.

The master inquired how she was, and she could not but reply that she was well. Something about him put her at ease, as if even now matters must come out for the best. Aside from Øistein, he was the only one whom she now could see and hear without some sensation of distance. He smiled at her, and his blue eyes sparkled. Laying a hand on her shoulder, he remarked: Sooner or later, my good woman, emigrants discover that patience is better than hope. Because when hope is gone—

But I still have that, said Kristina, confidingly drawing out the blue jewel that Reverend Johansen had bequeathed her.

May I see it? he courteously inquired.

She placed it in his hand, and for a moment he closed his fingers around hers. Holding the lovely stone close to his eyes, he studied it for an instant. Then he blew on it, and at once it turned black.

Counterfeit, said Kristina dully. Who would have thought…?

Not at all! laughed Captain Gull. But it was perishable. I’ve preserved it for you, in a less brittle form. Don’t thank me. We’re through the worst, my dear! Go encourage the others, for I’ve got much to do.

When he returned the stone into her hand, she discovered that it had grown heavy and cold. Nothing could be accomplished by complaining, so she slipped it into her pocket and crept back into that tight and chilly coffin where the last passengers lay, and all of them as utterly white as halibut-flesh. She had little to tell them; their voices came faint in her ears. The matter of the jewel confused and in some measure discredited her, so that it seemed just as well left locked up in her breast. Einar kept praying aloud with his son. When she offered to share the last piece of flatbread, they would not take it. She could barely hear her own husband, who whispered something about this villainous Captain Gull, whom I hope to see hanged in chains.

Now came footfalls, and to avoid turning into figures of bygone people scrimshawed on cracked ivory they fell silent and lay very still. As usual, it was no use. This time, instead of sailors it was trolls who threw back the lid and reached in. They bit people’s heads off and ate them right there. Then they went away, and only Øistein, Kristina and Einar were left.

They lay in silence until they heard someone coming. Desperately Kristina seized her husband’s hand. He could feel the blood pulsing in her fingers. For his part, dread tightened down upon him like his dead father’s great vise, the diameter of whose screwthreaded cylinder exceeded a grown man’s clasp; for a moment it comforted him to remember those hand-planes and pulleys, the staves steaming, his father smilingly tightening the iron hoop on a new barrel, then shaking hands with Mr. Kielland’s father, with the wooden-wheeled cart of crates, baskets and sacks all lashed down tight. Øistein encouraged himself: My father was never afraid of anything.

He stared at Einar, who kept watching him as if he were the sort who steals Bibles from a church.

Again the lid creaked back, and they saw the last worm-constellations overhead in that moldy dirt. Captain Gull bent smilingly over them. Remembering that pale face which had watched their embarkation from between the pairs of triple panes of their old home, Øistein could not decide if there were one or two of those specters. What could he do but clench his fists?

From here on out, said their master, we’ll only have room for two passengers. I’ll return for your decision.

The instant he turned away, leaving their prison open, Einar rose up with an old-time ryting-knife* and attacked Øistein, who, expecting this, immediately struck him down with punches. Trolls gathered around, howling with laughter. Making use of their acquiescence, Øistein, who had not been wounded, began to drag Einar toward the railing.

Help me! he shouted at Kristina.

No, she said. I refuse to murder.

He shouted: Would you rather it was I?

Just then Einar got to his knees and stabbed Øistein in the thigh. The trolls applauded. Enraged, Kristina thrust her knitting needle under the man’s ear. He fell more permanently, and the couple heaved him over, but not before they helped themselves to his ryting-knife. He had little time to rest, for the instant he landed, a greenish-grey hand burst out of the dirt and snatched him away.

The ship was neither more nor less than a large casket now, sliding down across the dark dirt by itself. The sailors were long gone, while the trolls leaped on and off the bowsprit as easily as walruses, and presently dove down into the ooze until not even their hairy feet could be seen. Øistein stood motionless. His good wife took his hand. She had come to resemble her mother, who in her last years grew stooped from carrying too many buckets, and grey-faced from malnutrition. Now for a long time the Pedersons stood clasping hands, and Øistein’s heart grew hard and cold to anticipate the passage’s next narrowing. He whispered: When he comes—

Turning toward them, Captain Gull gently said: If you, Kristina, and you, Øistein, do not yet hate each other and yourselves, then you cannot continue on with me.

Oh, yes, Kristina assured him, patting her husband’s hand. We hate each other.

At this the master laughed, and then, one by one, removed his eyes, which until now the Pedersons had never realized were made of glass. He flung them up into the air. Two ravens swooped to swallow them.

The captain’s eyesockets were a trifle horrible, to be sure, but so many peculiar things had already happened that Øistein and Kristina made no remark. Besides, Stavanger people have no time to be squeamish.

Now he was removing his face like a hood. When they perceived his true appearance, it seemed to the Pedersons somehow right, which is to say in accordance with his true nature — but if so, why had they not much sooner perceived what he was? A case may be made that the Hyndla’s passengers should have seen through the captain at the outset, but I disagree, for the face of death, whenever it remains unveiled, is customarily concealed by the living. Six feet of earth, and then we turn away! Oh, but we know — or should know — but why bring little Ingigerd to nightmares and tears? True love defies “reality” for as long as it can — and besides, Captain Gull had always been such a pleasant old gentleman!

Until then, Øistein and Kristina had been prepared to give up everything simply to get through the narrow passage. But they declined to give up each other.

Well, said the skeleton, are you ready to decide? At this stage I like to invite the last pair to gamble—

The Pedersons knew what to do. Øistein gripped Einar’s ryting-knife in his right hand, while in her left, Kristina held her cousin Eyvind’s awl, whose end was as sharp as a marline spike. While the skeleton cocked its skull in a soothing grin, no doubt supposing itself still in command, they rushed over the railing and leaped straight down, Kristina comforting herself with the words of Christ, Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it. This must be the end. Truth to tell, she felt much the same way that she used to on those black January mornings in Stavanger when she had finished making her husband’s breakfast and must now go out into the miserably cold streets if she were to arrive at the cannery on time. As for Øistein, he likewise expected the trolls to tunnel up and devour them right away. They had not very far to fall. And so they struck the dark moss-riddled ooze.

Strange to say, perhaps because they had consigned themselves to the soil of their own volition, they did not sink; nor did any wound-eager entities wriggle evilly up. The coffin kept speeding away at a good pace, as if it were still somehow a ship under benefit of tailwind, and the skeleton stood motionless on it, watching them. Soon they could no longer distinguish its dark eye-holes. — What became of Captain Gull? I myself ask this after every funeral. Reader, you might suppose that he turned into a seagull and flew away, for his purpose was completed this time; he had brought the monsters their prey, and could now return to fetch more, such being the weird which had been cast upon him; how disappointed he felt at the Pedersons’ escape is another matter of which I feel uncertain, being unadept at reading the facial expressions of skulls. But there is no purpose in my going on about him.

Well, said Øistein, what now?

It’s too far to go back, replied his wife.

Yes—

Then we’d better dig.

And with Cousin Eyvind’s awl she began to bore them a crawling-hole. Øistein did his best to help. Feeling hard up in the clinch, as the saying goes, he kept muttering: No hope for it, no hope… — You may be sure that by now they both were homesick enough for the fish-perfumed grey cobblestones of Stavanger, but emigrants cannot take great account of sorrows and difficulties; they must keep right on; and so Øistein cleared away the dirt that his wife so magically loosened, while she for her part kept digging straight down, almost cheerfully as when she used to help her mother carry the family’s dirty clothes to the pond behind the Domkirke; sometimes the melodies of choir practice would reach them as faintly as if elves were singing from under a mountain, and then she and her mother would cinch up their skirts and wade into the cold water, soaping and scrubbing, chatting at first, until they grew too chilled to speak; and other women and children dirtied the water all around them, so that one could not expect to get one’s underdrawers much whiter than grey, which success being accomplished, Kristina and her mother walked shivering beneath the yellow-leafed trees, through the mucky meadows, circling the long steep spine of the Domkirke’s roof, fronted by its twin turrets, silent now, commanding the grove around it, beyond which the first hints of wooden-house multitudes peeked here and there, loud children weeping and fighting, outhouses stinking; although Stavanger hardly went much farther than Sølvberggata in those days, the walk home seemed to take forever, especially with the wet laundry so heavy, and they had to descend nearly all the stony narrow windings of Finklamauet Street to the house where they lived in those days, when her father was a herring fisherman and liked to be near the harbor; by then they would have warmed themselves into a sweat, and if her mother were cross she would stride on ahead as rapidly as the longhaired witch who bends her face toward the earth, while the girl struggled not to be left behind, but if her mother were in good temper she might tell the adoring child a story, for instance about the great fire, which broke out on Breigata Street and ruined more than two hundred homes; Kristina had been born before then, but of course she could not remember it; and by now they were nearly home, ahead of them the white sails shining in the silvery harbor, so her mother sent her with three copper coins to knock on the diagonal door cut under the corner of the neighbor’s house, and buy eggs and perhaps milk or carrots, then rush straight back to help cook supper: herring, of course. What was there to do but work, and never complain? The last shall be first and the first shall be last, said her mother. Before she was forty-five, she profited the coffin-maker’s shop.

Now they began to hear sounds below them, as if people were cutting up a stranded whale.

Kristina whispered: Dig more quietly, because if any of them hear us, we’ll be hard pressed—

Wife, your advice is always good.

Holding her breath, she pricked their course downward with Eyvind’s awl, which suddenly broke through into phosphorescence — at which point the dirt gave way, and the Pedersons tumbled down into a cavern where there were ever so many weird flames like the points of a skull’s yellow smile. In the air, smooth old Saami ships kept swimming through the long diagonals like rain or sunrays which possibly had already existed in the rock; perhaps it was rock they were in, not earth; or might it be the case that when darkness gets dark enough, the atmosphere itself thickens into something approaching coal? Anyhow, it was certainly a wide open country they’d fallen into. As far as the Pedersons could see, tall grey she-trolls, naked but for necklaces of whorled silver beads, stood smoking corpses over bone-fires. Although she said nothing to her husband, Kristina thought she recognized Bendik Hermansson’s carcass. In fact she was reminded of the cannery, with the lines of herring hanging down from skewers passed through their heads.

Howling like dogs and seals, the monsters now rushed toward them, ready to scream and harry, to burn and bite. Their lank grey hair was fishy-wet, and their teeth resembled the cracked dark rock between glaciers. Kristina overcame her horror by pretending they were women with bad skin from the burns of the herring-brine; she had known many like that back home in Stavanger.

Well, goodbye, wife, said Øistein.

Squeezing his hand, Kristina pityingly replied: It may be worse than that.

Indeed, Captain Gull’s skeleton now arrived, enthroned on the rotten coffin-lid which was all that remained of the Hyndla. Rising, the thing raised its yellow hand, at which the she-trolls halted and gruntingly returned to their business. — Well, well, you certainly made a fool out of me! it chuckled. Got both yourselves here, yes indeed, the full pair. Made an even shorter passage, you did… Quite an occasion, it breezed on. — Welcome, welcome to America! Now stand up tall, both of you, because it’s time to present you to the Great Troll. Kristina, my dear, have you saved the jewel that the reverend left you? You know, the one I helped you with—

Although she felt nothing for that monster but hatred and terror, the woman now found that she could not remove herself from its ascendancy. With a fixed smile she grabbled in her pockets, while Øistein quietly wiped the ooze out of her hair.

Perfect! the skeleton chortled, clapping its fingers together with a hateful hissing noise. Give it here.

The most unpleasant errand Kristina ever undertook was touching that bony hand, but she had to do it, so she did, and the skeleton received her talisman.

Thank you, my dear, it said. Now let me think… Oh, yes! — Capering and sniggering, it lobbed the dark stone into the nearest corpse-fire, while the troll-women ducked back, wiping their sweaty foreheads. For a moment nothing happened, and then the jewel exploded, giving off a sweet incense of blackberries, sunlight and church candles. The trolls wrinkled their noses. The vapor hung there for a moment, then darkened into dust. — One more illusion disposed of! explained Captain Gull.

It now began to lead them downward, into the same cold stillness which comes to Stavanger at the beginning of a rain, deeper and deeper, until the Pedersons had practically forgotten their names, and eternity glowed like blue cloud-light on the domes of their grey skulls.

Øistein said bitterly: A narrower passage than we expected, captain!

Well, man, you paid your money, so make the best of it, and after that no words were said.

Further they went, to Skullheim and below. Øistein felt ever more hopeless, although there was nothing to do but keep Kristina’s spirits up, after the example of that rich man in Stavanger who bought his family a grave beneath the choir, just in case they could still hear the music. Troll-women, muck-furred corpse-gulpers, stretched out their hands to touch them, cold yet hideously active. Everyone was toiling — and on that account, hope returned to the Pedersons like sunlight seen through many columns of drying sardines; they began to realize that they might do well enough for themselves, even here. For all they knew, there might be a passage back to Stavanger — a long one, to be sure, but given time enough they could dig their way with Cousin’s Eyvind’s awl. So, following their master, they entered the monsters’ larder as inevitably as baskets of herring getting winched up the sides of those narrow sharp-roofed warehouses; and there was even a simulacrum of the great wooden hand, ever so familiar, which pointed upward in the window of Mr. Kielland’s shop, with a necklace of amber and carnelian looped about its wrist; at this sight the Pedersons’ memories flew out of their hearts as bright as new wet clots of wool in a farmwife’s dark doorway, and Kristina, feeling ever more at peace, recollected from her girlhood, although she could not have said why it now so consolingly haunted her, the great dew-studded spiderweb of a nettle colony, all plants growing outward from an empty ring, interlacing their bristly leaves. As for Øistein, he contented himself with the faith that at least he and his wife would remain like-minded forever.

The passage was as dark as the nets which hung in the fishermen’s empty houses, but there began to be great phosphorescent side-chambers at left and right. All the people who had ever died lay smoked and gutted like Norwegian brisling, Mediterranean sardines; imagine the cans of sardines laid out in double rows of five in each pan, four pans per rack, on the bed of the lidding press and you can imagine how the human corpses looked, with she-trolls busily laying them in iron coffins and slathering them with oil.

This way, said the skeleton. Here’s where you Pedersons will find yourselves most useful. Øistein, you can still make barrels, I hope?

It led them through the row of furnaces — crisscrossed logs in their dirt — then nine times nine racks of corpses getting smoked; the Pedersons had to admit that even this was better than sharing a house with twenty people forever. But for a moment Øistein impractically wished that he could have seen Kristina once more in some more pleasant place, even the most verminous street of Stavanger, and even with her back turned as she crept wearily away with a bucket of dirty clothes to wash; if he only could have known, he would have run after her, kissed the striped hem of her long grey skirt—

And they came into another cavern, nearly as large as the first, where to support any conceivable silver-weight in their winches’ grasp, slant beams ran down much of the oozy fronts of the tall, narrow warehouses, most of which still sported pointed roofs as in Old Stavanger; within their lightless rooms, dead women, including Kristina’s mother, toiled waist deep in a stream of silver treasure, and the kerchiefs were open like flowers on the women’s heads… and so at last, their hearts like wet grass on an autumn’s evening, Øistein and Kristina saw where all the herring of Rogaland had gone.

THE QUEEN’S GRAVE

My mind bloomed white as yarrow on the queen’s green grave. On the queen’s green grave I lay all night, my face down in the cold wet grass, my purpose right-angled like a wool comb, because Ingrid, beautifully cruel, had promised to leave me unless I brought her a true swan-shirt. It was hardly the first thing she had asked of me, and I wondered how soon she would finish weaving the cloth of her discontent. So far I had wisely bowed my head to her demands. My obedience was resistance, because it delayed our separation. On this occasion her bright and narrow lips had smiled so freshly that I could not imagine refusing her — all the more since she so evidently hoped I would fail. When one is young, and sets his heart on another person, whatever unwillingness she raises may be interpreted optimistically, as mere admonition, rather than as the dreary verdict that it impels: convicted of unloveability; sentenced to loneliness! So I gave Ingrid’s evasions and commandments their most splendid possible construction, hoping that we might yet get along; and because we are all of us passing changeable, at least until our bones get exposed, what could prevent her from possibly discovering more use for me? Three years she allowed me, most of which I spent wandering uselessly among the bird-lakes of Lapland, whose dark shore-rocks are scratched with fleets of swan-necked picture-ships. I importuned goosegirls and witchwives, haunted rookeries by moonlight and was gulled out of all my silver by knowing cormorant-trappers. Guarding my breath within me, I even sought beneath the water the horse, the fish and the iron snake. My perseverance lacking sorcerous qualities, I surfaced with nothing but muck and ice. When I look back on that time I can see that its sorrows and difficulties prepared me for my interview with the queen — but these had begun the instant I met Ingrid; and, for that matter, what would have caused me to love her, had my elders not raised me to love trials for their own sake? To submit, not to Ingrid but to suffering, in order to pay my weird fates their fair price, that was what I did, while the cold water ran out of my aching ears, and I coughed up mud. With what contempt Ingrid would have beheld me then, she who dressed herself so perfectly in black, silver and white, just like the autumn sea! Once more I dove, grappling myself down by the reed-roots, caressing the ooze in those same breaststroke-arcs by which a bellycrawling mason lays down tile, but the most promising thing I could grasp was a pebble. When I crawled out, goose-flocks overflew me, as white and perfect as the breasts of Ingrid.

To be honest, I cannot tell you why I should ever have appealed to her. Almost any other man would have paid three years for the privilege of hunting her a swan-shirt; at least, so the cormorant-trappers told me, grinning. As for me, I loved her, to be sure; I adored the sweet hands of my Ingrid, and the way she watched me with that soft smile of hers whose meaning I thought I knew, not to mention her dark eyebrow-arches. But what does a woman do with a swan-shirt but throw it over her shoulders early one morning and fly away? By now you can tell that my mind circled round and round Ingrid, with more longing than understanding. My dreams and desires concerning her, whatever else they might once have been, had long expressed themselves as mere directional pressure, much as the pallid grasses point downriver from beneath some black current where the salmon no longer spawn.

A certain cormorant-trapper’s widowed daughter, pitying and desiring me, offered not only to weave me a swan-shirt but also to love me and care for me until death, in the fine turf house her dead husband had left her, on the top of a windy hill of reeds. She was a woman of such kind ways that when she came out her door in the morning, ducks, geese and even seagulls would alight in a circle around her, upstretching their necks and opening their beaks, as if for food; what they truly yearned for were caresses, which she gave them. In the side of the hill she had dug a secret cave, which could be reached only through a tunnel behind the kitchen stove; here she hid away cormorants from her angry troll of a father, and when she brought me into that place, simply trusting and loving me, I upraised my candle and saw that in that vast hall of dark dirt she had even made a black lake, glittering with fishes of copper and gold, so that her cormorants could feed and entertain themselves. She and I might well have found joy together. But since I had made up my mind to something else, there was no help for it.

In other words, this story does not exactly begin on the night when Ingrid first asked me for her heart’s desire, nearly closing her heavy eyes as she lay there naked, slyly, sleepily watching me, with one hand on her knee and the other between her gaping thighs. Naturally I wanted to make love right then, but Ingrid refused. Sweetly faithless she had smoothly become, so soon as she felt herself sure of owning me. Whenever I for my part begged for some assurance to keep, my entreaty was as a stone dropped down a dark well; I never even heard the splash. But Ingrid did smile, calmly and beautifully; that was what she gave me just then; I longed to lick her white teeth. Or if she had only slapped me a few times, sharply, so that I could taste each sting, that would have nourished me equally well. I informed my Ingrid that what I wished was for her to trust and depend on me. I desired her to be my linen-goddess — the one I lived for. She replied that she had tried such an experiment once, with someone who brought her such jealous misery that she became abject.

What happened to him? I said.

Oh, one morning he turned into a white pig. Do you want to see him? He’s in the swineyard. You two might find common topics to grunt about.

Well, I’m not him, I told her; you can depend on me.

Then do bring me that swan-shirt, said Ingrid. In not a day more than three years, and in the meantime I don’t promise to be faithful.

I’ll set out in the morning. Will you give me some bread and cheese to carry?

What you don’t understand, said Ingrid, is that any help I gave you would only make it worse.

The cormorant-trapper’s daughter warmed me in her bed, beat the dirt out of my clothes, fed me the best she had, saw me to the door, kissed me, and for a parting token gave me a twisting arm-snake of good red gold. I thanked her with all my heart.

I’ve spoken with the swans, she said, and it seems that swan-shirts are even rarer than they used to be. I wish you’d take mine; it would save so much effort! I’ve only worn it once, to make sure I wove the right magic. Surely Ingrid wouldn’t mind that.

Well, I would, I said.

Have it your way, she answered. All the Valkyries who used to turn into swans have flown away. So you’d need to find a witch to make you one. From what the wind tells me, the greatest witch alive is this Ingrid of yours. Tell me, does she do anything in bed that I can’t do?

Well, she has a certain way of smiling that’s not a smile, and she knows how to leave me lonely when she opens her legs, so that no matter how deep inside her I go, I can never reach her, which makes her a goddess, or at least an infinite dream. And since she never gives me anything, nothing from her appears imperfect.

I wish you joy of her, said the cormorant-trapper’s daughter. My advice is to inquire about swan-shirts at the queen’s grave.

I asked her which queen — for there are as many queens as there are women — and the cormorant-trapper’s daughter replied: Good Queen Hnoss was the wisest of all, or at least so the seagulls tell me, and they’ve flown even to the other side of the sea.

I thanked her again. She smiled at me, quite cheerfully, then went inside and shut the door.

As I set off into the wind, I had to wonder whether I were doing the right thing. The cormorant-trapper’s daughter truly was so goodhearted. Besides, her bed was a veritable nest of eiderdown; no chill could ever get in there. And for some reason I could never even imagine dwelling forever with Ingrid, in her tall narrow house on her meadow of butter-rich grass. But I could see no help for it, so I kept walking, in search of the queen’s grave. Soon the night was as dark as an iron axehead.

Yes, the queen’s name was Hnoss, meaning jewel, which so many precious women have been called since the time of Freya’s elder daughter. She lived in the time when the sea was higher than now, and keys’ heads more complex than their stems. But in her day as in ours the highest human office was that of giver; and indeed this woman gained strange renown for her generosity, as you will hear; for when a friendless old thrall fell down sick before her hall, she had him carried to the hearth and nursed; once he strengthened sufficiently to go his own way, she gave him a gold ring for his family. And as I tell this over, it strikes me that this Hnoss was not so unalike to the cormorant-trapper’s daughter — still another reason I might have done just as well remaining in her company. But how are we to know what others are? Ingrid’s soul, for instance, was lightless, and of course that ancient thrall was not what he seemed. What woe he might already have worked upon our kind is unknown; for what malice he had come there is likewise concealed; but thanks to her kindness and healing leechcraft, the queen became the one and only member of humankind who receives praise in the Jötunsbok, the Book of Giants; and I have even heard that on her account the end of the world was put off by seven years. As for the king, his lendermen and thralls, and all the other hard people who grubbed over that turf until it devoured them, they doubtless took what they could of her. All the Morkinskinna says of her is that she was a good queen, who received everybody well, and furthermore brought good seasons, although ordinarily those are said to be brought about by kings. Never a wife gave birth but the queen sent something to her, be it a cooking-pot or a length of wadmal cloth. She was an unparalleled weaver, and introduced the lovely elf-stitch, which no one alive can duplicate — all the more reason to inquire at her grave about swan-shirts. Besides, when she died she must have gone to her friends, and one of them might know where I could get a swan-shirt for Ingrid.

So I walked all the way around the world, beginning to wonder whether my resolution might prove as fatal as King Swegde’s vow to seek Odin’s dwelling-place; a dwarf enticed him into a boulder, promising him his heart’s desire, and he never came out. The longer I searched, the less I cared for gifting Ingrid and the more I desired the swan-shirt for myself, although perhaps I had no use for it, either. So I became old, hence unworthy of the loving gaze of Ingrid with her freckled young face. I had to remind myself of the fact that I loved Ingrid so very much, because she was beautiful and her vagina knew a special sucking trick. Counting red cows and black cows on the old green grave-mounds, I proceeded toward the queen’s grave, which, as a kindly sexton told me, lay on the sea-meadow just over the hill from Ingrid’s. That night I dreamed three times of Ingrid calmly refusing to make love to me, and each time I woke up in tears with an erection. Tomorrow would be the last day of my three years.

Ingrid lived where the sea resembled the interior of a mussel shell, and in her back meadow, just past the pigsty, rose Frey’s mound, a fine old green hill where long ago, it is said, there was a door with three holes in it, one for gold, one for silver and one for copper; into these people paid their taxes to the god, in exchange for fat cows and good seasons. Since Ingrid had told me to keep away from there — and she never expressed her prohibitions but once — I avoided that place now, with its breath-sucking wind, all the more since I preferred for her not to catch sight of me until I had succeeded or failed. Besides, why should I mind detouring around a hill when I had already circumnavigated the world? Around the hill I went, and then down to the salmon-creeks and sheep-fields where all the lesser mounds were. One cold sunny morning long ago, before I ever met Ingrid, I came here to watch the salmonberries dance in the wind with the sea so bright behind them, while I wondered why I was squandering my life. Now that my life had been safely spent on Ingrid in any event, that flock of regrets had long since flown off to roost on some younger hero’s shoulders. Rich in moss, grass and islands, such most happily remained my life; and even if my travels had not precisely accomplished my hopes, there is something to be said for not sitting at home, especially just now, when, feeling excited that I could soon present myself to Ingrid one way or the other, I enjoyed so sweetly striding along, with ahead of me the sea-ribbon wrapping grey and ultramarine around green grass. Past where I was going, the pale reddish dunes reminded me of Ingrid’s pubic hair.

At first I could see that long green howe among the lesser gravel-scattered graves, but as I drew closer, the lowlier mounds puffed up their own claims, for, after all, every barrow-wight deserves to be noticed, even if he can only boast of dark iron tweezers and a green-rusted cloakpin, while his gruesome neighbor might be squatting on an entire moldy sack of tarnished silver coins with holes in them. I suppose that the scald Einar Audunsson had their realm in mind when he sang:

A troll will scarcely sit at home

if he can dig a new kingdom

— a verse whose main virtue is to frighten children.

Out of a hole now rose an old woman in a moss-colored dress. Her hair was as the lank orange sea-grass between graves, and she said: Love me, and I’ll weave you a mole-shirt, so you can creep among the roots with me forever. — I can’t say this offer left me unmoved, but since I had come all this way (never mind that had I avoided tramping all the way around the world, this place wasn’t but two hours from Ingrid’s house), it seemed most befitting to persist in my purpose, so I gave her a kiss, although her frozen mouth tore the skin right off my lips, which she considerately salved with troll-fat, and then she pointed out my way across the green waves of howes over the fields, to where the queen’s grave rose alone. Where King Yngvar was buried I wished to ask, but dreading either to pay the fee of another kiss or else to disappoint her by turning away from her hard and glistening blue-grey mouth, I thanked her with all my heart, sending my best wishes to her cousins the moles, at which, scratching my shoulder in what she meant to be a caress, she chuckled fondly and melted back under the earth. As for me, I made my way toward those white sheep-ovals in a line halfway up a rock-boned emerald hill all by itself, not as high as some, but all the same it must have cost her thralls and lendermen some pains to build. Between afternoon and evening I got there. Forgetting the old woman with the orange hair, I wondered what could be as chilly as the green-maned shoulder of the queen’s grave, where I threw myself down, breathing in the scent of wet dirt; and now the autumn sun made landfall at the rocky river-mouth, rested upon the sea-horizon like a fabulous egg, then left me, just as Ingrid meant to do.

So darkness oozed up out of the sea, and presently a whole crew of grave-wights wailed and giggled all about me, longing to be givers or takers, if I were only willing; and to me each proposition seemed as good as the next, except of course for Ingrid’s, so I declined them all with thanks, at which some of them turned sour, and even snicked their teeth at me, while the rest either popped back down to their bones or else took on that lovely abstraction one sees on women’s firelit faces when they are plaiting cord. I was introduced to a fetching goddess of an old headdress; I met many goddesses of the serpent’s bed; their dead flesh was as white as the barnacles on black rocks. Without boasting I assure you that had I wished, I could have been suffocated in a troll-woman’s bristly arms; she offered honest lust, and her breath was as cold as frozen meat. An elf-wife kissed her hand to me and gave me a silver coin. A troll-hag took a jab at me with a poisoned ice-needle; that was when I found out that my gold bracelet from the cormorant-trapper’s daughter gave me magic protection, which I had to confess made me all the fonder of her. At any rate, I continued about my business of waiting for the queen. And soon enough, being no less weak and flighty than I, those ghosts and such moaned back down to their holes.

Now indeed came the time to lay down my gift from the cormorant-trapper’s daughter, which I had faithfully kept upon my wrist all over the world, sometimes thinking, I admit, to offer it to my darling Ingrid, although she would have repaid me with anger — for Ingrid could be superstitious; I had found her unwilling to give her arm to be devoured in the gape of a gold bracelet of unknown provenance, in case it enslaved her by means of some spell. Kissing the arm-ring, I laid it down in the grass, and prayed the dead queen of her kindness.

First came a silver-blue shimmering of noble lady-sprites — evidently the mead-maidens and weaving-dames of Queen Hnoss’s court. I bowed to each and all, wishing them joy of the cold air. And presently, when the night once again became as cold and black as an iron axehead, two skeleton-hands blossomed up through the turf, offering me a wide bronze bowl with snakeheaded handles. Even in death she remained a generous queen; her husband King Yngvar must have been very lucky, at least at one time. Had I accepted this gift from her, all might have gone differently, for me if not for Ingrid. Instead, I placed my silver coin in it, and greedily it rushed back under the earth.

Now the queen’s old skull emerged from the turf, without hesitation, as if she did not know or did not care how hideous she might appear to me. In fact I have never met a woman entirely without charm, and this goes equally for dead ones, so the queen and I got on well enough. She wore a long-sleeved, wine-red dress with braids of gold and silver at the sleeve. Her hair, wet like fresh-cut grass, was combed down as carefully as the threads in her warp-weighted loom, and she wore snails for earrings.

She offered me a gold axehead which was shining with engraved serpent-men, but all I prayed of her was that snowy swan-shirt.

That’s good, then, said the queen. You passed the test. You refrained from what you couldn’t use.

I’ve heard of your openhandedness, said I. That’s why I came to you.

I’ll give you all a man desires, she replied. First, I’ll give you a bride.

Ingrid?

Ingrid is not for such as you. It’s wandering she’d rather be, and good riddance to her. Your destiny is the cormorant-trapper’s daughter. Do you remember her name?

Turid, I said. The instant I said it, I fell in love. Turid means beautiful.

That’s right. For the rest of your life, whenever you forget what you need to do, ask Turid. She’ll take care of you. Do you promise me?

I swear by Freya.

You could have sworn by me. But here’s how you get the shirt: Open my grave at sunrise, and dig down to me. Cut off the little finger of my left hand, and leave everything else alone. Cover me up again, or my husband will punish you. As soon as you see Ingrid, throw my finger in her face.

And when the shirt comes, shall I keep it for Turid?

No, man, you must give Ingrid the shirt, so that she has had her use of you. And take back the arm-ring that Turid gave you. It will defend you against Ingrid. Farewell.

On the queen’s green grave I lay all night. A maiden in weeds of gold smiled sadly, reaching for my hair. Whenever trolls sought to choke me in their lichen-scabbed arms, I diverted myself by thinking about Turid. Was she lying awake? When I last left her house, a morning sun-ray had struck the crossbars of her leaning loom, and her bread was rising.

At dawn small dark birds exploded from a leafless tree, and the salmon stream began to glow. I peeled the turf off the summit of the queen’s grave. Then I dug down with a sheep scapula until I found a bog-iron brooch, whose edge scraped the earth as nicely as could be. So I came to the rectangular stone-walled trench. Closest to the surface, but in a side-chamber, I uncovered the skeletons of all those court ladies I had glimpsed the night before, the cruel clay having long since tightened about them, drawing their skulls together like a woman’s yarn bobbins. Begging their pardons and giving them each a kiss, I kept digging, a chore which although it was not easy proved less tiring than my walk around the world. Before noon I reached her. There she lay, rubble of bone in rags of linen, and no sadder thing have I ever seen than the dead queen’s broken twill.

Once she had reigned here with her skeleton-hands outspread across her ribs like fans, but slowly the worms and roots dislodged her finger-rings; then they bent her ribs apart and groped up toward the sun. Then a farmer dug her up and robbed her of her spider-figured golden brooch. A subsequent crofter showed better heart, although his deed might have been misguided; thanks to him a rune-cut lead cross was buried with her in the grave. Gently setting this aside, I stroked away the dirt from the queen’s hand, and found that the little finger was all the poor lady had left. There was no need to cut it off; it came up in my hand.

At her side the tines of her bone comb lay outspread like the fingers she no longer had. At her feet was a cracked bowl of dark clay, with my silver coin in it.

Behind her head a stone passage went down. With the sun now overhead, I could see some way in. There lay good Queen Hnoss, and far beneath her was a boy’s skeleton on its side, gaping like a panting dog.

Bowing to my hostess, I gave her back her lead cross. Then I covered everything up, and replaced the living turf.

It was night when I came home to Ingrid. I fear I was haggard and grubby after my travels. The door opened, and there stood Ingrid, who always made her dresses so elegant with the bright hooks and waves of tablet-woven braid. She was decked out as if for company, in double brooches, and a thrice-bright woven braid across her breast, a chain of silver dipping down. Perhaps it was I she had been waiting for. Her hair was brighter than morning sunlight on the sea, and she was smiling her old smile of mirth without cheer, brightness without friendliness, invitation without promise. Needless to say, I desired her as much as ever.

You didn’t bring it, I see, was the first thing she said.

Straightaway, I threw the queen’s finger-bone in her face, and my poor Ingrid went pale and rigid. Then she began marching into the darkness. Thinking it a pity for her clothes to get spoiled, I helped her out of them, not that she thanked me, and then allowed her to go nightwalking in her shift, as so she plainly desired, with her pretty bottom showing, and her not even knowing it. The last I saw of her, she was already in the sky, trudging obediently off across the moonbeams, her hands out before her as if she were a timid child on horseback who dared not let go the reins.

Thinking I might as well get something for myself out of all this while my darling was gone, I pushed her bedstead aside, which she had told me never to do, and behind it were three secret chambers connected to Frey’s mound, one for the copper, one for the silver and one for the gold. Since there was so much more copper than anything else, I decided not to deprive Ingrid of what she evidently preferred to collect, and contented myself with taking all the gold and silver I could carry. Then I pushed back the bed and sat eating up Ingrid’s bread and cheese, for walking all the way around the world is hungry work, never mind digging up graves, and Ingrid had neglected to offer me anything. After that I felt caught up on my obligations. The only other thing I might have done was to set free her enchanted pigs, but for all I knew they were happier as they were; I myself could have made the best of it as one of Ingrid’s pigs, provided that she pulled my tail every now and then.

Here at dawn came my poor Ingrid, creeping down from the white sky’s grey cloud-cobbles, sinking to the ankle in the wet green pasturage churned up by the cows, shivering and sweating without knowing that she did, with her blonde hair down, her night-shift sopping wet and that swan-shirt, courtesy of the cormorant-trapper’s daughter, held tight against her bosom.

I threw the queen’s finger-bone in her face again, and back to herself she came, my sweet old Ingrid, awarding me quite the hateful look. Needless to say, I was wearing Turid’s arm-ring, so Ingrid couldn’t enchant me. She stood there dripping with dew and rain, and her mouth twitched while she decided how best to lay hands on me.

Good morning to you, I said.

In a rage, she bit her lower lip. Just then she noticed what she had in her arms, and her expression changed. Right away she commenced to coo and sigh over it, kissing the feathers one by one, until she remembered me again and sent her evil eye my way, in case I meant to rob her of her fine swan-shirt.

Where did I get this? she demanded.

You went barefoot to Lapland and back, I said. An easy walk, I should say, since you didn’t get any blisters.

That was when she finally realized that my heart had changed. I should have felt sorry for her, but my indifference resembled the green grass that conquers a pillaged grave-hole.

Sulking, Ingrid rushed off to the duckpond to bathe. I made a point of not watching. When she returned, the morning was strengthening, and she was naked and white to tempt me.

Well, said Ingrid, don’t you even feel like making love?

But your swan-shirt came a day late.

Oh, don’t worry about that, said she, as sweet as I had ever heard. The main thing is that I have my heart’s desire, no matter how. And so we’ll live happily ever after, until I leave you.

When might that be?

That’s no concern of yours. Now, do you want to make love or not? — And she swung her hips a trifle, so that I knew what she wished me to say.

Since doing the opposite of whatever she asked was bringing me such success, I said: Well, well, Ingrid, since that swan-shirt put us both to so much trouble, I’m curious to see how you look in it.

Of course Ingrid could not resist that; she longed more than anything to become a swan and fly away. So she pulled the beautiful thing over her head, slid her arms through the sleeves, and she was naked from her belly down, while from her belly up the perfect white swan-feathers sparkled like sea-waves, each one of them trapped so cunningly in the alternate-leaved V’s of linen, the quills rustling so sweetly with her heartbeats, and her long blonde hair spilling loose and windblown across all that precious whiteness, although I must admit that this set me to thinking of the queen’s hair ornaments scattered about her hairless skull. Turning her back to me, she began singing down to the grey ocean. Then she turned into a white swan and flew off.

As for me, I went home to my Turid, whose ways were as bright as lake-edge flowers. On the way I reburied the queen’s finger-bone in her grave, and poured in a double handful of gold, because a generous queen can never have enough of that. I also gave a gold coin apiece to the elf-wife and the old woman with the orange hair. As for the silver, I scattered that from mound to mound, so that the other wights would have joy of me.

Turid was standing in the doorway smiling, with a serpent-pin at the throat of her soft grey shift. She had the white breast and proud neck of a Norwegian wooden church. We went straight to bed. Once I asked her what she saw in me, and she replied that she liked a man who was easily satisfied. I gave her the rest of Ingrid’s gold, or Frey’s as I should say, which she buried in her cave of cormorants, in case we might ever need it. From what the birds told us, Ingrid was very happy, and enjoyed taking her lovers in the air. (I fear her pigs all starved.) Whenever she flew to our house in hopes of bewitching me again, Turid went out to deal with her, and hid me in her eiderdown nest. In time she gave me a whole brood of bird-children, and our life together grew as moist as sea-wind over the sweet-grassed graves.

STAR OF NORWAY

To never again suffer the failing of the light I thought to give anything. We played on an old mound. The blue-grey light of spring clothed us all night. But to never again suffer the failing of the light, to have done with dancing strings of birch leaves, wasn’t that to change fear for sorrow?

Between grey lakes and black rocks rose a hill — There’s my house. — Take me with you. — Too steep for you!

Behind the hill was her favorite river. — Then let me go there with you. — You’d never come back.

She undid her hair. — Let me touch it. — It will cut you. — Let me marry you. — Then we’re married.

More lovely than white flowers in spring are the blue-black berries of the coffin-tree. — Come with me. Then you’ll understand the old rock carvings. — But I refused to leave the wind-dance of birch leaves. — Come with me. Then I’ll kiss you on the mouth. — Where will you take me? — We’ll climb the coffin-tree into the sky.

Behind the wall of Christmas trees I ate berries from her hand until the cramps began. Then we laughed and went crazy. When I was light enough to stand upon the crest of a pine tree without bending it, I could climb the coffin-tree.

Because she would not hold my hand, I remembered someone else’s arms like birch branches shaking against the grey sky. Had she or someone else been crying? But I’d lost the long stone tunnel into spring.

More lovely than white flowers in spring is the loveliness of a dead woman’s white arms. — Why is it so cold? — It’s not cold. Come to me.