outlaw. He found there before him in the wilderness another outlaw,
a fisherman from the outer-most islands, who had been accused of
stealing a herring net. They joined together, lived in a cave, set
snares, sharpened darts, baked bread on a granite rock and guarded
one another's lives. The peasant never left the woods, but the
fisherman, who had not committed such an abominable crime, sometimes
loaded game on his shoulders and stole down among men. There he got
in exchange for black-cocks, and long-eared hares and fine-limbed red
deer, milk and butter, arrow-heads and clothes. These helped the
outlaws to sustain life.
The cave where they lived was dug in the side of a hill. Broad
stones and thorny-sloe-bushes hid the entrance. Above it stood a
thick growing pine-tree. At its roots was the vent-hole of the cave.
The rising smoke filtered through the tree's thick branches and
vanished into space. The men used to go to and from their
dwelling-place, wading in the mountain stream, which ran down the
hill. No one looked for their tracks under the merry, bubbling water.
At first they were hunted like wild beasts. The peasants gathered as
if for a chase of bear or wolf. The wood was surrounded by men with
bows and arrows. Men with spears went through it and left no dark
crevice, no bushy thicket unexplored. While the noisy battue hunted
through the wood, the outlaws lay in their dark hole, listening
breathlessly, panting with terror. The fisherman held out a whole
day, but he who had murdered was driven by unbearable fear out into
the open, where he could see his enemy. He was seen and hunted, but
it seemed to him seven times better than to lie still in helpless
inactivity. He fled from his pursuers, slid down precipices, sprang
over streams, climbed up perpendicular mountain walls. All latent
strength and dexterity in him was called forth by the excitement of
danger. His body became elastic like a steel spring, his foot made
no false step, his hand never lost its hold, eye and ear were twice
as sharp as usual. He understood what the leaves whispered and the
rocks warned. When he had climbed up a precipice, he turned toward
his pursuers, sending them gibes in biting rhyme. When the whistling
darts whizzed by him, he caught them, swift as lightning, and hurled
them down on his enemies. As he forced his way through whipping
branches, something within him sang a song of triumph.
The bald mountain ridge ran through the wood and alone on its summit
stood a lofty fir. The red-brown trunk was bare, but in the
branching top rocked an eagle's nest. The fugitive was now so
audaciously bold that he climbed up there, while his pursuers looked
for him on the wooded slopes. There he sat twisting the young
eaglets' necks, while the hunt passed by far below him. The male and
female eagle, longing for revenge, swooped down on the ravisher.
They fluttered before his face, they struck with their beaks at his
eyes, they beat him with their wings and tore with their claws
bleeding weals in his weather-beaten skin. Laughing, he fought with
them. Standing upright in the shaking nest, he cut at them with his
sharp knife and forgot in the pleasure of the play his danger and his
pursuers. When he found time to look for them, they had gone by to
some other part of the forest. No one had thought to look for their
prey on the bald mountain-ridge. No one had raised his eyes to the
clouds to see him practising boyish tricks and sleep-walking feats
while his life was in the greatest danger.
The man trembled when he found that he was saved. With shaking hands
he caught at a support, giddy he measured the height to which he had
climbed. And moaning with the fear of falling, afraid of the birds,
afraid of being seen, afraid of everything, he slid down the trunk.
He laid himself down on the ground, so as not to be seen, and dragged
himself forward over the rocks until the underbrush covered him.
There he hid himself under the young pine-tree's tangled branches.
Weak and powerless, he sank down on the moss. A single man could
have captured him.
* * * * *
Tord was the fisherman's name. He was not more than sixteen years
old, but strong and bold. He had already lived a year in the woods.
The peasant's name was Berg, with the surname Rese. He was the
tallest and the strongest man in the whole district, and moreover
handsome and well-built. He was broad in the shoulders and slender
in the waist. His hands were as well shaped as if he had never done
any hard work. His hair was brown and his skin fair. After he had
been some time in the woods he acquired in all ways a more formidable
appearance. His eyes became piercing, his eyebrows grew bushy, and
the muscles which knitted them lay finger thick above his nose. It
showed now more plainly than before how the upper part of his
athlete's brow projected over the lower. His lips closed more firmly
than of old, his whole face was thinner, the hollows at the temples
grew very deep, and his powerful jaw was much more prominent. His
body was less well filled out but his muscles were as hard as steel.
His hair grew suddenly grey.
Young Tord could never weary of looking at this man. He had never
before seen anything so beautiful and powerful. In his imagination
he stood high as the forest, strong as the sea. He served him as a
master and worshipped him as a god. It was a matter of course that
Tord should carry the hunting spears, drag home the game, fetch the
water and build the fire. Berg Rese accepted all his services, but
almost never gave him a friendly word. He despised him because he
was a thief.
The outlaws did not lead a robber's or brigand's life: they supported
themselves by hunting and fishing. If Berg Rese had not murdered a
holy man, the peasants would soon have ceased to pursue him and have
left him in peace in the mountains. But they feared great disaster
to the district, because he who had raised his hand against the
servant of God was still unpunished. When Tord came down to the
valley with game, they offered him riches and pardon for his own
crime if he would show them the way to Berg Rese's hole, so that they
might take him while he slept. But the boy had always refused; and
if anyone tried to sneak after him up to the wood, he led him so
cleverly astray that he gave up the pursuit.
Once Berg asked him if the peasants had not tried to tempt him to
betray him, and when he heard what they offered him as a reward, he
said scornfully that Tord had been foolish not to accept such a
proposal.
Then Tord looked at him with a glance, the like of which Berg Rese
had never before seen. Never had any beautiful woman in his youth,
never had his wife or child looked so at him. "You are my lord, my
elected master," said the glance. "Know that you may strike me and
abuse me as you will, I am faithful notwithstanding."
After that Berg Rese paid more attention to the boy and noticed that
he was bold to act but timid to speak. He had no fear of death.
When the ponds were first frozen, or when the bogs were most
dangerous in the spring, when the quagmires were hidden under richly
flowering grasses and cloudberry, he took his way over them by
choice. He seemed to feel the need of exposing himself to danger as
a compensation for the storms and terrors of the ocean, which he had
no longer to meet. At night he was afraid in the woods, and even in
the middle of the day the darkest thickets or the wide-stretching
roots of a fallen pine could frighten him. But when Berg Rese asked
him about it, he was too shy even to answer.
Tord did not sleep near the fire, far in in the cave, on the bed
which was made soft with moss and warm with skins, but every night,
when Berg had fallen asleep, he crept out to the entrance and lay
there on a rock. Berg discovered this, and although he well
understood the reason, he asked what it meant. Tord would not
explain. To escape any more questions, he did not lie at the door
for two nights, but then he returned to his post.
One night, when the drifting snow whirled about the forest tops and
drove into the thickest underbrush, the driving snowflakes found
their way into the outlaws' cave. Tord, who lay just inside the
entrance, was, when he waked in the morning, covered by a melting
snowdrift. A few days later he fell ill. His lungs wheezed, and
when they were expanded to take in air, he felt excruciating pain.
He kept up as long as his strength held out, but when one evening he
leaned down to blow the fire, he fell over and remained lying.
Berg Rese came to him and told him to go to his bed. Tord moaned
with pain and could not raise himself. Berg then thrust his arms
under him and carried him there. But he felt as if he had got hold
of a slimy snake; he had a taste in the mouth as if he had eaten the
unholy horseflesh, it was so odious to him to touch the miserable
thief.
He laid his own big bearskin over him and gave him water, more he
could not do. Nor was it anything dangerous. Tord was soon well
again. But through Berg's being obliged to do his tasks and to be
his servant, they had come nearer to one another. Tord dared to talk
to him when he sat in the cave in the evening and cut arrow shafts.
"You are of a good race, Berg," said Tord. "Your kinsmen are the
richest in the valley. Your ancestors have served with kings and
fought in their castles."
"They have often fought with bands of rebels and done the kings great
injury," replied Berg Rese.
"Your ancestors gave great feasts at Christmas, and so did you, when
you were at home. Hundreds of men and women could find a place to
sit in your big house, which was already built before Saint Olof
first gave the baptism here in Viken. You owned old silver vessels
and great drinking-horns, which passed from man to man, filled with
mead."
Again Berg Rese had to look at the boy. He sat up with his legs
hanging out of the bed and his head resting on his hands, with which
he at the same time held back the wild masses of hair which would
fall over his eyes. His face had become pale and delicate from the
ravages of sickness. In his eyes fever still burned. He smiled at
the pictures he conjured up: at the adorned house, at the silver
vessels, at the guests in gala array and at Berg Rese, sitting in the
seat of honour in the hall of his ancestors. The peasant thought
that no one had ever looked at him with such shining, admiring eyes,
or thought him so magnificent, arrayed in his festival clothes, as
that boy thought him in the torn skin dress.
He was both touched and provoked. That miserable thief had no right
to admire him.
"Were there no feasts in your house?" he asked.
Tord laughed. "Out there on the rocks with father and mother!
Father is a wrecker and mother is a witch. No one will come to us."
"Is your mother a witch?"
"She is," answered Tord, quite untroubled. "In stormy weather she
rides out on a sea to meet the ships over which the waves are
washing, and those who are carried overboard are hers."
"What does she do with them?" asked Berg.
"Oh, a witch always needs corpses. She makes ointments out of them,
or perhaps she eats them. On moonlight nights she sits in the surf,
where it is whitest, and the spray dashes over her. They say that
she sits and searches for shipwrecked children's fingers and eyes."
"That is awful," said Berg.
The boy answered with infinite assurance: "That would be awful in
others, but not in witches. They have to do so."
Berg Rese found that he had here come upon a new way of regarding the
world and things.
"Do thieves have to steal, as witches have to use witchcraft?" he
asked sharply.
"Yes, of course," answered the boy; "everyone has to do what he is
destined to do." But then he added, with a cautious smile: "There
are thieves also who have never stolen."
"Say out what you mean," said Berg.
The boy continued with his mysterious smile, proud at being an
unsolvable riddle: "It is like speaking of birds who do not fly to
talk of thieves who do not steal."
Berg Rese pretended to be stupid in order to find out what he wanted.
"No one can be called a thief without having stolen," he said.
"No; but," said the boy, and pressed his lips together as if to keep
in the words, "but if someone had a father who stole," he hinted
after a while.
"One inherits money and lands," replied Berg Rese, "but no one bears
the name of thief if he has not himself earned it."
Tord laughed quietly. "But if somebody has a mother who begs and
prays him to take his father's crime on him. But if such a one
cheats the hangman and escapes to the woods. But if someone is made
an outlaw for a fish-net which he has never seen."
Berg Rese struck the stone table with his clenched fist. He was
angry. This fair young man had thrown away his whole life. He could
never win love, nor riches, nor esteem after that. The wretched
striving for food and clothes was all which was left him. And the
fool had let him, Berg Rese, go on despising one who was innocent.
He rebuked him with stern words, but Tord was not even as afraid as a
sick child is of its mother, when she chides it because it has caught
cold by wading in the spring brooks.
* * * * *
On one of the broad, wooded mountains lay a dark tarn. It was
square, with as straight shores and as sharp corners as if it had
been cut by the hand of man. On three sides it was surrounded by
steep cliffs, on which pines clung with roots as thick as a man's
arm. Down by the pool, where the earth had been gradually washed
away, their roots stood up out of the water, bare and crooked and
wonderfully twisted about one another. It was like an infinite
number of serpents which had wanted all at the same time to crawl up
out of the pool but had got entangled in one another and been held
fast. Or it was like a mass of blackened skeletons of drowned giants
which the pool wanted to throw up on the land. Arms and legs writhed
about one another, the long fingers dug deep into the very cliff to
get a hold, the mighty ribs formed arches, which held up primeval
trees. It had happened, however, that the iron arms, the steel-like
fingers with which the pines held themselves fast, had given way, and
a pine had been borne by a mighty north wind from the top of the
cliff down into the pool. It had burrowed deep down into the muddy
bottom with its top and now stood there. The smaller fish had a good
place of refuge among its branches, but the roots stuck up above the
water like a many-armed monster and contributed to make the pool
awful and terrifying.
On the tarn's fourth side the cliff sank down. There a little
foaming stream carried away its waters. Before this stream could
find the only possible way, it had tried to get out between stones
and tufts, and had by so doing made a little world of islands, some
no bigger than a little hillock, others covered with trees.
Here where the encircling cliffs did not shut out all the sun, leafy
trees flourished. Here stood thirsty, gray-green alders and
smooth-leaved willows. The birch-tree grew there as it does
everywhere where it is trying to crowd out the pine woods, and the
wild cherry and the mountain ash, those two which edge the forest
pastures, filling them with fragrance and adorning them with beauty.
Here at the outlet there was a forest of reeds as high as a man,
which made the sunlight fall green on the water just as it falls on
the moss in the real forest. Among the reeds there were open places;
small, round pools, and water-lilies were floating there. The tall
stalks looked down with mild seriousness on those sensitive beauties,
who discontentedly shut their white petals and yellow stamens in a
hard, leather-like sheath as soon as the sun ceased to show itself.
One sunshiny day the outlaws came to this tarn to fish. They waded
out to a couple of big stones in the midst of the reed forest and sat
there and threw out bait for the big, green-striped pickerel that lay
and slept near the surface of the water.
These men, who were always wandering in the woods and the mountains,
had, without their knowing it themselves, come under nature's rule as
much as the plants and the animals. When the sun shone, they were
open-hearted and brave, but in the evening, as soon as the sun had
disappeared, they became silent; and the night, which seemed to them
much greater and more powerful than the day, made them anxious and
helpless. Now the green light, which slanted in between the rushes
and coloured the water with brown and dark-green streaked with gold,
affected their mood until they were ready for any miracle. Every
outlook was shut off. Sometimes the reeds rocked in an imperceptible
wind, their stalks rustled, and the long, ribbon-like leaves
fluttered against their faces. They sat in grey skins on the grey
stones. The shadows in the skins repeated the shadows of the
weather-beaten, mossy stone. Each saw his companion in his silence
and immovability change into a stone image. But in among the rushes
swam mighty fishes with rainbow-coloured backs. When the men threw
out their hooks and saw the circles spreading among the reeds, it
seemed as if the motion grew stronger and stronger, until they
perceived that it was not caused only by their cast. A sea-nymph,
half human, half a shining fish, lay and slept on the surface of the
water. She lay on her back with her whole body under water. The
waves so nearly covered her that they had not noticed her before. It
was her breathing that caused the motion of the waves. But there was
nothing strange in her lying there, and when the next instant she was
gone, they were not sure that she had not been only an illusion.
The green light entered through the eyes into the brain like a gentle
intoxication. The men sat and stared with dulled thoughts, seeing
visions among the reeds, of which they did not dare to tell one
another. Their catch was poor. The day was devoted to dreams and
apparitions.
The stroke of oars was heard among the rushes, and they started up as
from sleep. The next moment a flat-bottomed boat appeared, heavy,
hollowed out with no skill and with oars as small as sticks. A young
girl, who had been picking water-lilies, rowed it. She had
dark-brown hair, gathered in great braids, and big dark eyes;
otherwise she was strangely pale. But her paleness toned to pink and
not to grey. Her cheeks had no higher colour than the rest of her
face, the lips had hardly enough. She wore a white linen shirt and a
leather belt with a gold buckle. Her skirt was blue with a red hem.
She rowed by the outlaws without seeing them. They kept breathlessly
still, but not for fear of being seen, but only to be able to really
see her. As soon as she had gone they were as if changed from stone
images to living beings. Smiling, they looked at one another.
"She was white like the water-lilies," said one. "Her eyes were as
dark as the water there under the pine-roots."
They were so excited that they wanted to laugh, really laugh as no
one had ever laughed by that pool, till the cliffs thundered with
echoes and the roots of the pines loosened with fright.
"Did you think she was pretty?" asked Berg Rese.
"Oh, I do not know, I saw her for such a short time. Perhaps she
was."
"I do not believe you dared to look at her. You thought that it was
a mermaid."
And they were again shaken by the same extravagant merriment.
* * * * *
Tord had once as a child seen a drowned man. He had found the body
on the shore on a summer day and had not been at all afraid, but at
night he had dreamed terrible dreams. He saw a sea, where every wave
rolled a dead man to his feet. He saw, too, that all the islands
were covered with drowned men, who were dead and belonged to the sea,
but who still could speak and move and threaten him with withered
white hands.
It was so with him now. The girl whom he had seen among the rushes
came back in his dreams. He met her out in the open pool, where the
sunlight fell even greener than among the rushes, and he had time to
see that she was beautiful. He dreamed that he had crept up on the
big pine root in the middle of the dark tarn, but the pine swayed and
rocked so that sometimes he was quite under water. Then she came
forward on the little islands. She stood under the red mountain
ashes and laughed at him. In the last dream-vision he had come so
far that she kissed him. It was already morning, and he heard that
Berg Rese had got up, but he obstinately shut his eyes to be able to
go on with his dream. When he awoke, he was as though dizzy and
stunned by what had happened to him in the night. He thought much
more now of the girl than he had done the day before.
Toward night he happened to ask Berg Rese if he knew her name.
Berg looked at him inquiringly. "Perhaps it is best for you to hear
it," he said. "She is Unn. We are cousins."
Tord then knew that it was for that pale girl's sake Berg Rese
wandered an outlaw in forest and mountain. Tord tried to remember
what he knew of her. Unn was the daughter of a rich peasant. Her
mother was dead, so that she managed her father's house. This she
liked, for she was fond of her own way and she had no wish to be
married.
Unn and Berg Rese were the children of brothers, and it had been long
said that Berg preferred to sit with Unn and her maids and jest with
them than to work on his own lands. When the great Christmas feast
was celebrated at his house, his wife had invited a monk from
Draksmark, for she wanted him to remonstrate with Berg, because he
was forgetting her for another woman. This monk was hateful to Berg
and to many on account of his appearance. He was very fat and quite
white. The ring of hair about his bald head, the eyebrows above his
watery eyes, his face, his hands and his whole cloak, everything was
white. Many found it hard to endure his looks.
At the banquet table, in the hearing of all the guests, this monk now
said, for he was fearless and thought that his words would have more
effect if they were heard by many, "People are in the habit of saying
that the cuckoo is the worst of birds because he does not rear his
young in his own nest, but here sits a man who does not provide for
his home and his children, but seeks his pleasure with a strange
woman. Him will I call the worst of men." Unn then rose up. "That,
Berg, is said to you and me," she said. "Never have I been so
insulted, and my father is not here either." She had wished to go,
but Berg sprang after her. "Do not move!" she said. "I will never
see you again." He caught up with her in the hall and asked her what
he should do to make her stay. She had answered with flashing eyes
that he must know that best himself. Then Berg went in and killed
the monk.
Berg and Tord were busy with the same thoughts, for after a while
Berg said: "You should have seen her, Unn, when the white monk fell.
The mistress of the house gathered the small children about her and
cursed her. She turned their faces toward her, that they might
forever remember her who had made their father a murderer. But Unn
stood calm and so beautiful that the men trembled. She thanked me
for the deed and told me to fly to the woods. She bade me not to be
robber, and not to use the knife until I could do it for an equally
just cause."
"Your deed had been to her honour," said Tord.
Berg Rese noticed again what had astonished him before in the boy.
He was like a heathen, worse than a heathen; he never condemned what
was wrong. He felt no responsibility. That which must be, was. He
knew of God and Christ and the saints, but only by name, as one knows
the gods of foreign lands. The ghosts of the rocks were his gods.
His mother, wise in witchcraft, had taught him to believe in the
spirits of the dead.
Then Berg Rese undertook a task which was as foolish as to twist a
rope about his own neck. He set before those ignorant eyes the great
God, the Lord of justice, the Avenger of misdeeds, who casts the
wicked into places of everlasting torment. And he taught him to love
Christ and his mother and the holy men and women, who with lifted
hands kneeled before God's throne to avert the wrath of the great
Avenger from the hosts of sinners. He taught him all that men do to
appease God's wrath. He showed him the crowds of pilgrims making
pilgrimages to holy places, the flight of self-torturing penitents
and monks from a worldly life.
As he spoke, the boy became more eager and more pale, his eyes grew
large as if for terrible visions. Berg Rese wished to stop, but
thoughts streamed to him, and he went on speaking. The night sank
down over them, the black forest night, when the owls hoot. God came
so near to them that they saw his throne darken the stars, and the
chastising angels sank down to the tops of the trees. And under them
the fires of Hell flamed up to the earth's crust, eagerly licking
that shaking place of refuge for the sorrowing races of men.
* * * * *
The autumn had come with a heavy storm. Tord went alone in the woods
to see after the snares and traps. Berg Rese sat at home to mend his
clothes. Tord's way led in a broad path up a wooded height.