Margit Sandemo - The Ice People 26 - The Secret

Her husband merely nodded. His mind was mainly focused on the extremely favourable terms of the lease they had signed. The farmer had hinted that it might be possible to buy the house. It was incredibly cheap. He could rent it out to rich people as a summer retreat. Or divide it up into small apartments and earn an income from several tenants at the same time ...

His thoughts always ran on how much he could make.

The young woman came running down the road. She closely resembled her brother-in-law, Terje, just like all the other villagers. Her hair was dark and fell over her forehead in soft curls, framing her pale grey eyes and making them look even lighter than they were. Her mouth was shaped to be smiling and generous, but now it expressed nothing but anxiety. No one who met her could help feeling great warmth and compassion.

“Surely you haven’t thought of renting it out again, have you, Terje?”

He grabbed her arm brutally and said: “I’ve already done so. He was even interested in buying it. The last idiot hasn’t been born yet. Now off you go home! Straight away!”

“But you can’t do that!”

“Shut up, they’ll hear you. It was just random accidents, nothing but accidents that happened out of the blue: can’t you get that into your stupid head? Now off you go!”

The young woman resisted: “I won’t allow anyone to move into that terrible house.”

“Go!”

With a firm grip on her arm, he marched her down the road until they reached a farm. He hustled her indoors and into one of the rooms, then slammed the door.

“Now hold your tongue or I’ll throw you out – you and your damned brat. You only get to live here on my terms.”

“That’s not right!” she shouted from the other side of the door. “You three brothers inherited this farm and Jolinsborg, and you were to share it equally. And now my boy has the first claim on it, and you know that, Terje! You’re the youngest of the brothers. So the boy and I have just as much right, if not more, to live here!”

“You could just have stayed in Jolinsborg. For heaven’s sake shut up, Solveig!”

He walked off and she knelt down by the child’s bed. She whispered quietly but with moving intensity: “Dear God, merciful God, help us! Help my little boy so that he doesn’t have to suffer any more. Make him well, Lord! I beseech you as I’ve beseeched you for a thousand days and nights! If his suffering can’t be lessened, then take him to you, I beseech you, even if he’s the most precious child on earth and the only thing I live for.”

The child was as pale as a ghost, though his features had relaxed a little now that sleep had somehow alleviated his pain. His eyelids were almost transparent and his skin was taut around his beautifully shaped face. It was his position, the way he was lying, that revealed where the pain was. He had tossed his head back so that his throat was stretched and his neck bent back as far as it would go.

This was how the eleven-year old boy had been lying for several months, in an attempt to alleviate his unbearable headache.

Solveig, his mother, whispered: “My dear little Jolin. Why wasn’t I made to suffer instead of you, you who are the most innocent of all? If only there was somewhere else we could go. But we’re trapped. That devil out there has taken all our money and how are we to move without a penny? How would we get away from here without some means of transporting you? Who would take us?”

She leaned her head against his bed in utter despondency.

Terje Jolinssøn had caught up with his new tenants again. Undeterred, he explained: “My sister-in-law is a widow with a sick son and she can get slightly hysterical at times. But otherwise she’s all right. Anyway, I hope you’ll be happy here ...”

Three weeks later a coffin was carried out of Jolinsborg. The tenant’s wife didn’t walk behind the coffin. She was never found.

Young Eskil Lind of the Ice People spent many months reaching the promising Eldafjord.

At the age of twelve, he had heard about the house in Eldafjord from an itinerant farmhand. At the time, Eskil had been sitting outside the farmhands’ lodgings at Graastensholm, listening with ears that seemed to grow bigger and bigger with excitement. He remembered that it was an autumn evening and the farmhands had lit a fire of straw and dried leaves and other things left over from the harvest. In the end there were only three of them left sitting by the bonfire. One of them was sleeping it off, so Eskil was the only one who heard the fantastic story about the house in Eldafjord. The old farmhand cheered up when he noticed Eskil’s rapturous interest. After all, the boy sitting at his feet was the future heir to Graastensholm.

The farmhand spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “It’s a gloomy valley. It’s as if paganism still exists in every single lump of peat. A man by the name of Jolin built the house. Yes, that was his first name. Jolin ... And this Jolin was extremely rich. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but I don’t think he earned all his money honourably. They said that there were chalices and other pieces of church silver on the farm, and what were they doing there? They should have been in a church, shouldn’t they?”

The farmhand threw some more wood on the fire and put a new piece of tobacco in his mouth. “As you know, young Eskil, nobody lives forever and money is of no use then. Sooner or later, we’re all going to die, and that was something that annoyed Mr Jolin. No one was going to have all that he owned, so he buried it ...”

“He buried the estate?”

“Well, I don’t mean the house, although Mr Jolin couldn’t bear the thought that anyone else would live in his house rent-free. It annoyed him so much that he probably died of sheer anger.”

“Did he bury a lot of stuff?”

“You bet! If you found it, you would be the richest person in the whole world. Well, almost ...”

Eskil’s eyes shone. “So nobody has found the treasure then?”

“No, it’s impossible to find. The old miser keeps watch over it day and night.”

“What? Does he haunt the place?”

“Nobody can live in the house. It’s quite impossible. Many people have searched for the treasure, of course, but they’ve all died. Died or vanished.”

Eskil’s wanderlust caught fire. He sat deep in thought. Then he said: “But I’m one of the Ice People.”

The farmland said: “Yes, I know that. You’re Eskil Lind of the Ice People.”

That was when Eskil realized that he ought not to say too much. The Ice People were immune to ghosts and that sort of thing. It said so in all the books about them. They could control all kinds of devilry. Of course, that was something only the stricken among them could do, but who was to say that Eskil wasn’t a chosen one? There was no one else of his generation who was either damned or chosen. Tula and Anna Maria were both extremely ordinary.

Eskil felt that he was very strong. He had received a double calling: first, to fight the ghosts in the house in Eldafjord, and second, to find the magnificent treasure. He asked as cautiously as he could where Eldafjord was, and the farmhand explained it to him. But he wasn’t particularly good at geography because he was the type who just wandered about without asking where he was. It didn’t make matters easier that he had visited several countries and worked in both Sweden and Iceland, so he mixed the countries up. His brain must have suffered from far too many drinking sprees.

But at last Eskil managed to get a few firm facts about where Eldafjord might be on the map.

He had made up his mind: as soon as possible he would be on his way to Eldafjord and find the treasure, not only for his own adventurous sake but also because he knew just how hard his mother and father had to struggle to keep Graastensholm going, what with taxes and famine and everything. They would be over the moon if he came home with the means of saving it – Eldafjord’s enormous treasure! He hoped that nobody would steal a march on him!