Margit Sandemo - The Ice People 19 - Dragon´s Teeth

Good power! Sölve wasn’t so sure about that. But it was certainly a powerful force. A great conspirator. The wonders he could achieve with it!

Slowly the mandrake settled down about his neck. Sölve had opened his shirt, revealing his bare chest. The mandrake was bigger, much bigger than he had imagined. It would definitely get in the way!

It just lay there then. Right against his skin.

“How does it feel, Sölve?” his father asked hopefully.

The boy was disappointed, “It feels ... dead, Father. Heavy and dead. As though there is no life in it.”

“Then we’ll remove it.”

“No!” Sölve nearly shouted, stopping his father’s hands, which had already started to lift it off. “No, I’m sure it’s not dead. But it is not writhing in discomfort, Father. It has nothing against me.”

“Let’s face it, Sölve, you mean nothing to it. But on the other hand, it is not resisting you. Perhaps you ... no, let me try it for a moment. Then we’ll see the difference.”

As much as it felt as if life itself was being taken away from him, Sölve allowed his father to remove the mandrake and place it about his own neck.

“Well?” asked Sölve when the silence had gone on too long.

“It’s strange, but it feels dead to me, too.”

“Well, then ...”

“Perhaps its calling is over since Shira managed to find the source of life? Perhaps it is now just an ordinary mandrake root.”

“Well, then, perhaps I can have it, Father? As a keepsake?”

“I don’t know, my boy. It feels so heavy and dead. More dead than an ordinary root would have seemed. I think that it still has some magical capabilities. I just don’t know how or what it represents now. Sölve, do we really dare ...?”

“Maybe it is just resting here at home, at Skenäs, because it is so calm and safe here,” Sölve said with such eagerness that he managed to stumble over his own words. He couldn’t lose the mandrake now when he almost had it; he should never had said that it felt dead. “Maybe it will come back to life again if I am suddenly in danger.”

“I don’t know, Sölve. I don’t know.”

Daniel was amused by Sölve’s eagerness. Naturally the mandrake was exciting to him at his age, but it was no toy.

“Please, Father!”

The two children had always managed to wrap Daniel around their little fingers. Daniel had married so late, and mostly because he had been pressured by the family to do so. He had chosen a lady from a good family and she had not been quite young either. The marriage had started purely as a formal arrangement. But their respect for one another grew over the years; they never became tired of one another, showed each other consideration and behaved properly towards one another. It was certainly not a bad marriage, although the only signs of tenderness they displayed were limited to friendly smiles or absentminded little pats on the shoulder or arm.

His two children had awakened a tenderness in Daniel that he had never thought he was capable of. He would do anything for them, beautiful and intelligent as they were, to his great surprise. Never had he thought that he would have such exceptional children! Not that he didn’t think he would have loved them just as much had they been imperfect in some way, and perhaps then his love would have been even greater. But it never ceased to surprise him how well they turned out, and he was so exceedingly happy to have them.

A sensible father would have put his foot down during the discussion they had had earlier that day. He would have said, “That’s enough. Sölve is to have the farm here and Ingela is to have Gråstensholm.” Or the other way around. At any rate, the children would not have been allowed to object or protest in any way. But Daniel didn’t see them like that. Perhaps he was humbled in the face of these two fantastic creatures who were of his own creation?

For that reason he sighed deeply, gazing at Sölve with a loving smile. “Yes, my boy, then that’s how it will be. You can borrow it. I mean, it serves only benevolent purposes, so it cannot harm you.”

Sölve let out a sigh, long and trembling. The mandrake was his!

In 1770, the same year that Elisabet Paladin of the Ice People found her Vemund Tark and married him, Sölve Lind of the Ice People travelled to Vienna. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna had journeyed ahead of him and wrote to inform him that he had managed to secure Sölve an excellent job with a Swedish business in the city. He had also found lodgings for his friend.

So they met in the Habsburg capital, two young men with not enough money in their pockets to be able to get by. Johan Gabriel was twenty years old and Sölve was twenty-one.

But they were in good spirits. Johan Gabriel had already succeeded in finding a new and inaccessible love and Sölve ...

Well, Sölve had the mandrake, which no one would get to see.

Only one thing cast a shadow on his happiness.

The mandrake didn’t seem the least bit interested in him.

But it did not object to him. Sölve, who was becoming increasingly sensitive to things outside of everyday life, had the very clear impression that the mandrake was biding its time.

It was waiting for something. But what? Sölve couldn’t figure out what that could be.

He would sit for a long time holding it in his hands, looking at its “face”, which was nothing more than some vague, sketchy lines in its “head end”. The “arms” and “legs” were much longer than his hands – the ends of the root that were supposed to be its toes tickled his underarm. But there was no movement to be registered in the mandrake. He tried to talk to it, make himself its master, wishing that it would perform a miracle for him.

But the mandrake remained mute.

Chapter 3

Vienna was Europe’s centre of culture. Haydn lived there, as did old Glück, whom Sölve found to be rather boring: at least his music was – Sölve never had the opportunity to meet the great composer in person. And then there was Haydn’s friend, a child prodigy, a fourteen-year-old boy by the name of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Sölve had gone to a concert with Johan Gabriel to hear the boy’s music and he had been rather impressed. He imagined himself sitting there, the centre of everyone’s attention, producing exquisite melodies. He decided that that was what he wanted to achieve some day: fame and power.

But on reflection he realized that he did not belong in the world of music. He would have to pursue a different path.

It was impossible for two poor youths like himself and Johan Gabriel to keep up with the lavish lifestyle of the upper class. But they could stroll around and look at all the works of art in Vienna in the form of architecture, sculptures and paintings. So that was what they did, and it was on such a stroll that Johan Gabriel confided in Sölve about his latest impossible love: a doctor’s wife by the name of Susanne Frid. Johan Gabriel was so much in love with her!

The husband was extremely jealous, so Johan Gabriel had to make do with admiring her from a distance, but that was something he was used to. The most important thing about the romance was that he had produced a number of fine poems and letters (which were never sent) that had a strong feeling of Rousseau about them. Because at that time the poet was obsessed with Rousseau and his ideas.

Sölve pondered whether he should make friends with this Susanna Frid. So that she really would approach Johan Gabriel. But he decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. In part because his friend would soon find another impossible love on whom to dote, and in part because Sölve feared moving too much into the spotlight.

Right now he had his own career to think about.

He learned the language quickly. He managed his job in the office of a Swedish business consultant very well, although he found the work exceedingly boring. Meanwhile he became an irreplaceable asset to the consul by coming up with certain suggestions that he later implemented by applying some of his exceptional talents. The consul was impressed and, without knowing what kind of snake he was feeding, he let Sölve ascend in rank and promoted him to become his own personal secretary.