Margit Sandemo: The Ice People 22 - The Demon and the Virgin

The Demon and the Virgin

The Legend of the Ice People 22 - The Demon and the Virgin

© Margit Sandemo 1984

© eBook in English: Jentas A/S, 2018

Series: The Legend of The Ice People

Title: The Demon and the Virgin

Title number: 22

Original title: Demonen och jungfrun

Translator: Anna Halager

© Translation: Jentas A/S

ISBN: 978-87-7107-575-5

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

All contracts and agreements regarding the work, translation, editing, and layout are owned by Jentas A/S.

Acknowledgement

The legend of the Ice People is dedicated with love and gratitude to the memory of my dear late husband Asbjorn Sandemo, who made my life a fairy tale.

Margit Sandemo

The Ice People - Reviews

‘Margit Sandemo is, simply, quite wonderful.’

- The Guardian

‘Full of convincing characters, well estabished in time and place, and enlightening ... will get your eyes popping, and quite possibly groins twitching ... these are graphic novels without pictures ... I want to know what happens next.’

- The Times

‘A mixure of myth and legend interwoven with historical events, this is imaginative creation that involves the reader from the first page to the last.’

- Historical Novels Review

‘Loved by the masses, the prolific Margit Sandemo has written over 172 novels to date and is Scandinavia's most widely read author...’

- Scanorama magazine

The Legend of the Ice People

The legend of the Ice People begins many centuries ago with Tengel the Evil. He was ruthless and greedy, and there was only one way to get everything that he wanted: he had to make a pact with the devil. He travelled far into the wilderness and summoned the devil with a magic potion that he had brewed in a pot. Tengel the Evil gained unlimited wealth and power but in exchange, he cursed his own family. One of his descendants in every generation would serve the Devil with evil deeds. When it was done, Tengel buried the pot. If anyone found it, the curse would be broken.

So the curse was passed down through Tengel’s descendants, the Ice People. One person in every generation was born with yellow cat’s eyes, a sign of the curse, and magical powers which they used to serve the Devil. One day the most powerful of all the cursed Ice People would be born.

This is what the legend says. Nobody knows whether it is true, but in the 16th century, a cursed child of the Ice People was born. He tried to turn evil into good, which is why they called him Tengel the Good. This legend is about his family. Actually, it is mostly about the women in his family – the women who held the fate of the Ice People in their hands.

Chapter 1

Heike – unknown, heard of by no one – arrived at his ancestral farm.

Many years had passed since his father, Sölve, had slipped into oblivion. Now Heike had turned twenty, and all his life he had longed to reach this place and this farm, Gråstensholm, which was his legacy.

He appeared from nowhere. He had come from the south, riding through Sweden to the surprise of his Swedish relatives, because they had had no idea of his existence. Conceived in hatred, born in despair, guilty of his mother’s death at the very moment he saw the light of day, Sölve had mocked and despised him. He had been saved by his father’s horrible death.

Heike had been baptized casually by an indifferent father and given a name that might just as easily be for a girl or a boy. But attached to his dark form, it became synonymous with masculinity, strength and power.

Heike, his fate was loneliness. Forever.

His body still bore the scars of his father’s terrible stabs, because teasing a snarling child in a cage had been such fun. His soul still bore scars from the torment that went far beyond what the human mind can comprehend.

Heike, ostracized by the human world.

On the day he arrived at his ancestral home in Norway, he stopped at a vantage point by the road. The first thing he saw was a manor house so large and beautiful that he brushed the thought aside. That couldn’t be the house he had inherited. It was impossible. It was almost as big as a castle. His eyes took in the whole parish.

Heike was incredibly ugly to look at. His hair was dark brown, so thick and unruly at the back that you would expect to see a pair of troll’s eyes peering out from under it when he turned around. His eyes, yellow as fire, shone and sparkled in a bony, sharply chiselled face. His teeth were big and sharp, white as snow against his brown skin. He had broad, sensitive nostrils, hollow cheeks and a chin as pointed as that of a fox.

His shoulders were huge, a deadly legacy for the women of the Ice People who gave birth to demons like Heike. He was one of the cursed, one of the worst afflicted of the Ice People if you judged him only on his appearance. But all who met him spoke of the sadness and sorrow in his heart, and his infinite empathy for anybody who was suffering.

The yellow catlike eyes searched the vista. They saw an avenue of very tall trees leading up to a modest farm not far from the big house. The trees were gnarled with age, as if they had stood there for years and years. There were smallholdings and small farms scattered around the valley ...

In the centre was the church and close by it a very fine farmstead by a lake. That house wasn’t as big as the first one, but it was beautiful nevertheless.

That must be Elistrand, and the small farm could be none other than Linden Avenue.

But then ...

Thoughts whirled around in Heike’s mind. Then the large building had to be his. Gråstensholm.

He sat for a long time on his horse, trying to take it all in. Was he – a nonentity who owned nothing – was he to be master of all this? Fields and meadows, barns and houses all over the parish? And the estate itself, the stately mansion up on the hill!

His mind wandered.

The treasure was inside that house: the Ice People’s sacred treasury of herbs and witchcraft and, most importantly, Shira’s fantastic vessel, the bottle of rock crystal. It contained water from the pure source inside the Mountain of the Four Winds. The bottle was hidden in the house there on top of the ridge. He intended to take that water to the Ice People’s secret valley and use it to destroy Tengel the Evil’s power – find his jar or whatever it might be, the vessel containing the dark water of evil, and lift the curse with the aid of Shira’s water.

Heike felt that this was his task. He didn’t know whether he was right or not but he wanted to try. He frowned. Something was moving on the farm. Creatures who looked as small as ants were moving back and forth between the stables and the house. There should have been nobody there because there was nobody left of the Ice People to run it. That is, unless Vemund’s young daughter had ...? He would have to wait and see.

Gråstensholm Parish ... Finally, he had come home! His journey had been long but now it was over.

Heike stood up on the mountain ridge for a long time. He wasn’t sure what to do. He dreaded the thought of having to talk to strangers, seeing their horror when they saw him. That was something that he would probably never get used to. The problem was that he had never been able to settle down anywhere, because once people got to know him, everything was fine. Then he was quickly accepted. But Heike had been doomed to travel from one place to the other all the way from Slovenia. Superstitious people hadn’t taken kindly to him. He was tired, dead tired, of having to explain his good intentions. Having to tell people who he was and why he looked the way he did. He was so shy that he had always avoided villages, keeping to the forests and plains. And now he had finally reached his goal.