The smell of lime blossom was so heavy and strong—Olav moved his feet languidly; the sweet fragrance seemed to weigh upon him. He felt quite weak with happiness. And now he saw that limes grew all over the ridge on the north side as well.

The sun had left the valley; the dew was falling as he turned homeward. He passed through an enclosure of alders and thought he remembered that there had been a meadow here, where they cut grass; but now it was overgrown with alders. There was a rustling and crashing of leaves and bushes as the cows burst their way through the thicket. They were strange beasts, the Hestvik cattle—long-haired, deep-bellied, with misshapen legs and curiously twisted horns, big heads and mournful eyes. Most of them had but three teats, or some other malformation of the udder. Olav patted their cheeks and spoke kindly to them as he passed through his herd of melancholy beasts.

Ingunn came out on the path behind the barn, tall and slender as a wand in her blue habit, with the linen coif waving about her. Quietly, as though hesitating, she advanced along the path by the edge of the field. Meadowsweet and setwall, which had almost shed its blossoms, reached to her waist and almost met around her. She had gone out to meet him.

When he came up to her he took her hand and led her as they walked homeward. Their guests were to come next day, but this night they two and the old man in the closet were the only ones in the house.

1 The Birchlegs (see note to The Axe, p. 4) were the adherents of the pretender Sverre, who became King of Norway in 1184. The Ribbungs were a remnant of the Church party, opposed to Sverre and the Birchlegs.

2 Kverndal: Mill-dale.

3 Hesten. Hestviken may be translated “Horse-wick.”

4 The Oslo Fiord.

5 This is Gunnar of the Völsunga Saga, the husband of Brynhild. Gunnar was thrown into the snake pit by Atle (Attila); his sister Gudrun, Sigurd’s widow and Atle’s wife, secretly sent him a harp, and by his playing he charmed all the snakes save one, which bit him to the heart.

6 St. Laurence’s Day, August 10.

2

THE fine weather lasted over the late summer. In the middle of the day the bare rocks glowed with heat; the vapour rose from them, and the sea glittered and the spray dashed white beneath the crags, in the places where it was never at rest.

Olav was up early in the mornings, but he did not go out on the rocks now. He would stand leaning over the fence round the northernmost cornfield, where the path from the waterside came up. From there he could see down to the creek and up the valley, almost the whole of his home fields. But toward Folden and southward the view was shut in by a crag that jutted out and gave shelter to the last strip of arable land in Hestviken—of the fiord he had only a glimpse northward past the smooth skull of the Bull and its shaggy wooded neck. Over on the other side lay Hudrheim in the morning sun—a low ridge of waste, with sparse fir trees; the higher ground was tilled, with great farms; he had been over there one day, but from here nothing could be seen of any dwellings.

In the cornfield the rock cropped out in so many places that the pale carpet of stubble seemed riddled with it—here and there a ribbon of soil between two brown rocks. But they often had good corn here—it was manured with fish offal from the quayside—and it ripened early. In the crevices of the rock grew a flowering grass that Olav had never seen before; when he came hither in the early summer it blossomed with fair purple stars, but now the grass itself was blood-red and rust-red in all its fringed blades and bristled with seed-bolls that looked like herons’ heads with long beaks.

The work of the farm was what Olav understood best. He saw that there were tasks enough before him—the old meadows to be cleared of scrub, the herds to be brought up to their number, the houses to be repaired. He had hired Björn, Gudrid’s husband, to fish and hunt seals for him in the fiord during the coming half-year. Of such things he had no experience, but he intended to go out with Björn this winter, to gain a knowledge of the pursuits on which the ancient prosperity of Hestviken had most depended. Björn also advised him to take up again, next summer, the salt-pans on the creek south of the Horse Crag.

But behind his thoughts, which were busy with the work of the day and the work of the future, a deep, happy calm dwelt in Olav’s mind. His day flowed over him now like a stream of nothing but good hours. And since he knew that the dangerous memories lay sunk beneath this stream, and that it was only by virtue of a kind of strength that he was able to let them lie there in peace and not think about them, he felt at the same time proud that he was now happy and safe.

He knew, in a clear and cool fashion, that the old disasters might return and afflict them.