Margit Sandemo: The Ice People 15 - The East Wind

He woke up from his thoughts. For a long time, as he had been watching the night sky that was so familiar to him, he had been convinced that he was at home. But then he looked down at the small, impoverished Russian village lying around him and the reality of his situation came back to him. He felt an unbearable longing and sense of despair burning within him. He hurried to open the door of the small barn and explained to the guard who he was.

It, too, was filled with Swedes, as well as all the people of the farm, who had taken refuge in there now that their house had been seized to house the prisoners. Vendel knew that every single farm in the village was burdened in the same way and he couldn’t help feeling a pang of guilt rush through him, though there was nothing he could do to ease the situation.

The only reason he had gone in there was to see whether there was any room for the poor wretches who were sleeping outside, but he quickly saw that it was full. Every nook and cranny was occupied, so that there was hardly any room for the animals. He went back out to the courtyard and found the well. He accidentally stumbled as he crossed the uneven ground and felt the painful chafing on the top of his foot. It was because his boots had been stolen in an unguarded moment so he had had to make do with a pair of clumsy clogs that didn’t fit him properly. The wound had now ruptured again and that was bad because it might easily get infected; it also made it hard for him to walk on the long daily marches they were subjected to.

As he poured water into a wooden pail, he heard a melancholy Russian song accompanied by a domra somewhere in the building. The singer was someone who had been chased out of his own house and who was attempting to keep his spirits up and create a little warmth in the coldness of the night. “Please stop your sad singing,” Vendel silently pleaded. “It’s hard enough for us as it is, we don’t need an extra reminder of our misery from a sad song.”

He went in to the miserable corporal. Wärja lifted his head and drank greedily.

“You’re a good boy,” he whispered in a hoarse voice and let his head fall back.

“Don’t say that,” Vendel smiled good-naturedly. “I’ve just been lucky enough not to get sick, that’s all. Weeds don’t die easily.”

Afterwards he tried to get a little sleep.

It felt as if only a few seconds had passed when Corfitz was shaking him by the shoulders to wake him.

“It’s Wärja, Vendel,” the captain whispered. “Will you help me?”

At first Vendel thought that the old man was dying but it turned out that it was just the water he had been given that had caused a small accident. They helped each other to get the corporal dried and clean, and Vendel took off his own jacket and put it around the sick man.

“That water didn’t help much,” the boy smiled.

“No, but it still tasted wonderful all the same,” cackled the man, full of gallows humour. “You’ll stay here by my side, won’t you, little friend? I’m a little afraid, you see. I didn’t exactly obey God’s words in my younger days.”

“You’ll be fine,” Vendel reassured him. “I’m sure you’d rather stay here in the village so that you can recover?”

“No! Please don’t abandon me here! I want to come with you!”

Vendel nodded. “I’ll see if I can find some boiled milk tomorrow morning. It’s usually good against the plague.”

The old man made a face at the mere thought.

“With a drop of vodka,” Vendel said to encourage him.

That made the corporal nod his head. “You can say what you want about these heathens, but they know their alcohol! Hold my hand, boy!”

Vendel sat with him until he fell asleep. Then he sat down in his corner on the bench. He had to nudge the man next to him who had stretched out, completely taking over the nice spot that had, until then, remained surprisingly unoccupied.

Corfitz Beck seemed deep in his own thoughts. “Vendel,” he said, “Are you a devout believer?”

“Me? I don’t know. I guess I’m like most people: I fear God but I often tend to forget Him.”

“You’d almost think you had the gift of grace, seeing you with those dying men, the way they practically seek your company.”

Vendel thought about his words for a long time, but he didn’t think there was anything particularly holy about himself. On the contrary, he was often delighted at the sight of the beautiful Russian girls they passed and he had improper thoughts about them. He also had a tendency to use strong swearwords whenever things didn’t quite go his way. And since they were still at war, he often had to stop himself from disrespectfully bursting out laughing over the officers’ tendency to take themselves too seriously or pompously glorify themselves. He simply couldn’t take the conceitedness of military honour seriously. All he could see was the deep tragedy that the Swedish Army had spread along its path. Everything inside him protested against the morning prayer they had to say in which they’d ask God to help the Swedes gain victory. Imagine involving God in warfare between two sides of his own creation? Hadn’t they all been created equal in the eyes of God? How could He be expected to watch with satisfaction as one side slaughtered the other? And now ... heaven forgive him, but he found his captivity only fair. If another army had invaded his own Sweden, the Swedes would have done exactly the same thing. They would have imprisoned the intruders and taken just as much revenge on them. He couldn’t bring himself to participate in the officers’ agitated discussions about the gruesome barbarians who were treating the honourable, innocent Swedes so horribly. He agreed with them that the Cossacks were brutal, often more cruel than anything he’d seen before. But still! As though Sweden had had any right to do what they did!

In short, Vendel was not suited to be a soldier. Very few of the Ice People were.

But whereas war had made his kinsman, Mikael Lind of the Ice People, sick to his soul, Vendel seemed more robust. He had the ability to laugh at all the pomposity and at himself and he found some compensation in almost everything. On the other hand, he could easily be moved to tears and that was good for him and not something he ever tried to hold back. The sick and the dying sensed his compassion, they sought him out to console them and perhaps cheer them up in the midst of all their misery.

Vendel probably most resembled the pure-hearted Mattias, though he wasn’t angelic through and through in the same way. Vendel was more of an extrovert, more frank and fearless.

Corfitz Beck didn’t know anything about the heritage of the Ice People within Vendel. All he knew was that the boy had invaluable capabilities that he hadn’t seen in anyone else.

Vendel was well aware of the curse that haunted his lineage. He knew that at least one member of every generation would be afflicted by it, or chosen. And in his generation there had only been four children. But even though Captain Beck claimed that there was something special about him, he himself knew that he wasn’t the one who had been “touched”.

No, what he did know was that there was someone else. But his mother and grandmother wouldn’t talk about it and he himself had never met the rest of the clan since he was old enough to remember anything.

That is, he had a vague memory, so vague that he wondered whether it was just a figment of his imagination after all that talk about the curse. He had been around four or five when the whole family had gathered in Norway. He faintly remembered meeting someone who was smaller than him. He remembered peering into a pair of eyes that were more cat-yellow than he had ever imagined they could be and that were more powerful than those of the numerous adults whom he had seen with the same eyes. The adults’ names were Villemo, Niklas and Ulvhedin, he knew that because his grandmother Lene had told him not so long ago. But she would not say who the child had been. There were three to choose from and they were all younger than him. Ulvhedin had a son named Jon; Villemo’s grandchild, Tengel the Young’s child, was named Dan. And Alv had married and had a daughter who had been christened Ingrid, after her grandmother Irmelin.