Cold Sea Stories Read online

  The words stuck in his throat. By the bonfire sat a man, the one who had disembarked from the sloop at the foot of the cliffs. Bjorn could not take another step. He was sure that when the stranger turned his face from the fire, he would die, for no one can look death in the eyes twice; but what happened was different. He did turn to face Bjorn, but Bjorn did not die. The face was the one he remembered from before the night in the forge.

  ‘Do not be surprised,’ said the same, deep voice. ‘Do not be afraid. It is I who need your help.’

  ‘First I want to know,’ said Bjorn, barely advancing a step, ‘who you are. If you won’t say, I will leave. What I saw then...’

  ‘Was not for you. Each man may see only as much as he is destined.’

  ‘So first I must know what I am destined.’

  Having said this, Bjorn was surprised by his own boldness. He no longer called him ‘Sir’, he had raised his voice, and yet this man, if he was a man, was capable of far more than a hundred squires from Ventlinge; if he was not a man, things could take an even worse turn.

  ‘Believe me, it is better not to know. He who knows the future suffers doubly, and sometimes four times over. You do not deserve that.’

  ‘Your speech is not clear,’ said Bjorn, approaching the bonfire, ‘so who are you?’

  ‘One of the three, though not the first or the last.’

  ‘You do not wish to say much. Where do you come from?’

  ‘We wandered from a far distant country. It is the land of the wise men, so they say. And our return was foretold at the right time. But,’ he said, looking hard at Bjorn, ‘you cannot always return to a city by the same gate.’

  ‘Do you live in Kalmar? Can’t you get back there? No, you must be from far away. Somewhere much further than Kalmar,’ said Bjorn, and paused for a moment. ‘Are you from Venice?’

  ‘I was there very long ago. But Venice is not the land of the wise men.’

  Only now did Bjorn approach the fire. Slowly he sat down opposite the stranger. He was hungry, so he broke some bread and handed it to his guest. The man took a wineskin from his bag and two silver cups. Bjorn savoured the drink very slowly.

  ‘Have you never drunk wine before?’ asked the stranger.

  ‘Never,’ replied Bjorn. ‘Sometimes, after the harvest, I have tasted beer. This,’ he raised his cup, ‘is better than beer.’

  The stranger smiled, and it occurred to Bjorn that anyone who ate bread and drank wine in such an ordinary way could not really be a demon, even though his speech was rather unclear. But he did know that gentlemen could be terribly eccentric, so if not for that moment in the forge, now he would no longer have been at all afraid.

  ‘So what does your city look like?’ he asked, as the man poured him more wine.

  ‘It has twelve gates. Three at each point of the compass. Before that one must cross a desert and climb a mountain.’

  ‘And you cannot return by either?’

  ‘Sometimes the gate is too tight, the road too narrow.’

  ‘What is the desert like?’

  The stranger poured more wine in silence as he sought a definition. Finally he drew an arc in the air and replied: ‘It is almost the same as here, except that instead of moss and grass there is sand everywhere.’

  ‘Did you travel through so many lands to find me? And what,’ asked Bjorn, gulping, ‘what was that, there in the forge?’

  ‘I will explain everything. But first could you tell me a story? Your story? What you remember.’

  The request amazed Bjorn. No one had ever asked him about his life. Nor had he ever confided in anyone. Occasionally he went back to the past in his dreams, but it caused him pain. He regarded his fate as closed, as if a large, invisible hand had stamped a heavy seal on it. But at the same time there was something tempting about this proposal, some inexplicable hint of hope, which prompted his first words, and then a lot of simple, shyly uttered sentences.

  It was hardest of all for him to talk about Venice. He was four-and-a-half when he and his father, a painter of urban alleyways and human faces, had boarded a ship and set off for the Swedish king’s court. For several years they had done perfectly well, although his father had not gained the title of court painter. He was a Catholic and refused to change his faith. However, he had commissions and money. He told his son, soon we will have saved enough to afford the return journey and a happy life. But good fortune had turned its back on them for ever. Arrested on a charge of conspiracy and tortured, he had taken poison, which friends had provided. From them Francesco – for in those days he was not yet Bjorn – had learned that the officials had taken everything his father had put aside. He had been taken into service, first to a stable, then to a pastor. He had had to adopt their faith and take a new name. He ran away from that house, became a vagrant and ended up in prison. The pastor had bought him out, but when the plague had devastated whole villages on the island of Öland, and people were being sought to work there, he had handed the disobedient boy to the estate at Ottenby, taking compensation from the royal game warden. Bjorn had sailed to the island with some prisoners, with whom he spent almost two years putting up the King’s wall. Then, taken into service at Ventlinge, he could choose himself a house to live in. Many of them still stood empty after the plague. He chose the one on the cliff top, at the edge of Alvaret plain, situated furthest away from people and from the village. He did not have the money to be a tenant farmer or a smith. The steward needed shepherds, so he had become one. For the first few years he thought about giving it up, but he had nowhere to go back to. Later on he came to like solitude, and so a good fifteen years had gone by, if he had not made a mistake in the reckoning. The kings had changed, so had the squires of Ventlinge, and the royal game wardens at Ottenby, while each year he followed the same clouds and the same stars in the sky.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Bjorn concluded, ‘I dream of strange things. A year ago, when I lost the flock, I saw a city with four gates. Apparently it stood here, in the middle of Alvaret, before the people left it in long boats. Jansen heard that a thousand years ago they built a kingdom in the south and that they captured Rome. And now,’ he said, drinking up the wine, ‘I shall listen to your tale.’

  What the stranger talked about was not simple, because it had no definite beginning. There was some sort of quarrel in Edessa, during which he had hoodwinked two avaricious Persians. Then there was a conversation with a Sufi in Smyrna, convoluted, too complicated; next a voyage by ship to Tagaste, with no results. Bjorn listened avidly, but understood little. His attention was riveted by a recurring word: the Book. Found, but lost forever, as if it were everywhere and nowhere all at once. He did not know if he had understood properly, but it emerged that this Book was older than the Bible, and that it contained everything that has been, is now, and has yet to be, from a grain of sand at the bottom of the sea to the boundlessness of the starry sky, from the word that was in the beginning, to the terrible riders of the very last days. Something else had been worrying Bjorn ever since he had vaguely yet adequately understood that if the stranger were telling the truth he must have witnessed events so remote in time that he could not possibly be an ordinary mortal. He had seen other great books, forgeries and copies, sometimes so perfect that his mission had seemed to be over. As he described examining these pages and symbols, time seemed to flow by in his story like an unfolding, moving image of something that never actually changed. Imperceptibly he passed into explanations: in a prophecy unknown to him before, which he had found in the scriptorium at the monastery of Notre Dame d’Aiguebelle in Provence, he had come upon a description of the island and the shepherd. He had hired a ship and headed here, to the North, where he had never set foot before.

  Bjorn listened in extreme concentration. And when the stranger had finished, he asked to hear the prophecy.

  ‘Neither Ahuzat, nor Abimelech, nor Phichol, but still one of the three, a son of the Orient, a son of the Supreme Light, the one who, having made obeisance with the
others lost the Book on the way, this one, I declare, who for all time has never set his bones to rest, will travel across the cold sea to an island. Its shape a wingless butterfly, its countenance rock and pasture, and girdling it the wall of an irascible king, that fawn nor hind may not leave it.’

  The stranger’s lips quivered as he uttered these words. Bjorn tossed another log on the fire and leaned forward to avoid missing a single word.

  ‘You will take a lone shepherd from a foreign land, pure and just, who will not crave gold, who will break bread with you, and will accept your wine. By a spring at sunrise let him send forth a lamb to pasture; I shall guide it, and wherever it stops, you shall seek that which I sealed in the beginning, until you shall find and I shall open the gate, and wide will be your road again – so say I, whom you worshipped in the form of fire, before I opened the Word to you.’

  Bjorn furtively wiped away his tears. Although they contained so many mysterious things, names and expressions, he sensed that these words were referring to him. Someone, maybe as long as a thousand years ago, had known more than even he did about his life, a life which was like slavery, about the King’s stone wall and the pastureland, and about solitude. The stars were still shining overhead, but above the eastern side of Alvaret the first, narrow strip of dawn had appeared.

  ‘Can you tell me,’ he asked timidly, ‘about what was not destined for me?’

  ‘I must gather various books along my way.’ The stranger poured them both wine. ‘The one that you saw is the Book of Light. Some take it for the Jewish Zohar, but they are wrong. It is much older and comes from Kashan.’

  ‘What story does it tell?’

  ‘Not every book tells a story. This one contains the words of all the languages in the world, but only those in which there is the brightness of truth.’

  ‘And your face?’

  ‘You saw the real one. Old age, as it is. Among people I must look different.’

  They fell silent. Then, when the sun rose, Bjorn tied on a linen belt and drove a young ram out of the flock. For some time they followed it together: the shepherd with a wooden stick, the stranger with his saddlebag on his shoulder, and the dog.

  ‘I’d like to go with you,’ said Bjorn, ‘to leave here for ever – take me on board your ship.’

  ‘Where I am going you cannot follow me. But one day you shall leave the island and you will be happy. As it is written in the Bible: “I shall depart from a foreign land across a which the Lord shall build.”’

  These were the stranger’s last words. Bjorn called Harald, and blinking, watched as the man’s silhouette, heading after the ever smaller figure of the lamb, disappeared against the burning disc of the sun, somewhere in the middle of Alvaret.

  IV

  Towards the end of September, the reverend pastor Jons, parish priest at Ventlinge, found Bjorn standing outside his door. He asked humbly if the pastor would possibly be willing to lend him a Bible. He promised to come to church on Christmas Day and to return the book undamaged. If needs be, he would work in the reverend’s field for as many days as he saw fit. The pastor said nothing, but told him to wait outside, and vanished into the house. He came back with a half leather-bound family Bible and handed it to Bjorn.

  ‘Open it at any page and read aloud, if you are able to!’

  It was Chapter Twelve of the Book of Daniel. Bjorn, who had last pieced together the letters of Swedish script many years ago, stammered syllable after syllable, but with each sentence he found it easier, and when at the end he read out fluently: ‘But you, go your way till the end; for you shall rest, and will arise to your inheritance at the end of the days,’ the pastor, somewhat amazed, nodded benignly. Then he asked: ‘What do you need it for?’ and at once added, as if to himself, under his breath: ‘If such people begin to prophesy too, what will it come to?’ However, he lent the Bible, sternly instructing him to treat it like a treasure, for although he had not bought it, merely inherited it from his predecessor, it was still worth a lot of money.

  When, like the others, he drove his flock to the great barns at Ventlinge where the sheep spent the winter, a different time set in for him. He only went to the estate to work off his debt five days a week, and had two for himself. Until the snow fell, he caught and smoked fish, and chopped a supply of firewood. After work he read by the fireside: first the Gospels, the Letters and Acts of the Apostles. He was a little disappointed that only Matthew wrote about the Three Kings. He mentioned gold, frankincense and myrrh, but did not say a word about the lost Book. And he only added that ‘they returned another way to their own land, the land of the rising sun.’ Afterwards, to find the sentence about the ‘fragile bridge which the Lord shall build,’ he carefully read book after book, starting from Genesis. Days went by, his eyes were watering from the flickering firelight, but so far there was nothing about any sort of bridge, let alone a fragile one. Sometimes, when he awoke after a short doze, fearing that he may have overlooked something, he went back two or three chapters and read them again – in vain. If not for the silver cup, he might have thought he dreamed it all one balmy summer’s night, when he fell asleep outside the shelter, stupefied by the scent of herbs and grasses. He set aside the Bible and picked up the vessel. The letters running around it in relief were intertwined with the leaves of a plant he did not recognise. He raised the cup to his nose and slowly drew in air, as if at the very bottom a dried-up drop of wine might give him any sort of explanation.

  The day before Christmas Bjorn finished reading the Bible. In none of the books had he found the sentence with which the stranger had so deeply moved him. But the next day he did not return the book to the pastor. There was such a strong blizzard and the snowdrifts were so high that even in the village no one could possibly have dared to go outside. It continued to rage and to snow for the next few days, until finally the sun came out, the wind dropped and a biting frost took hold. Bjorn went out onto the cliff and saw a white expanse, stretching all the way from the island to the distant line of the mainland. The sea had frozen. Never before, since he had been on Öland, had he seen the strait ice-bound. He went home, wrapped some food, the cup, a shirt and foot cloths in a bundle, placed the Bible at the very centre of the table, put out the fire, tied some short, wide slats to the soles of his winter boots, put on his sheepskin coat and hat, called the dog and for the last time closed behind him the door of the house that had never been his property.

  He glided across the creaking snow, occasionally sinking up to his knees, but the further he was from the island, the easier the going, because the drifts were smaller. He also crossed places where the layer of snow blown in by the wind was only a few centimetres deep. At those points he paused, swept aside the snow and looked at the ice, under which was the sea. Harald followed along the trail he cut, pleased not to be sinking up to his belly. The red sphere of the sun had passed midday when they came onto the mainland. Bjorn was not sure whether the trickles of grey smoke rising beyond the hill belonged to Brömsebro or perhaps another village, but it didn’t matter. He had no goal, he felt joy in his heart, and he never once looked behind him.

  They spent a long time climbing up a hill, now master before dog, now dog before master. And once they were at the top, standing beneath the boughs of trees stripped of their leaves, they could see the roofs of a village and fields covered in snow. There were small, dark figures moving along a frozen river and on ponds. The shouts of children, laughter, the grating of skates and the clash of curved sticks could be heard from afar on the crystal-clear air. Sleighs in harness were driving along the road, with people in fancy dress riding in them. On a bonfire outside a tavern, the innkeeper and a woman were roasting a pig. Harald tensed like a string as he scented the smell of fat mixed with the odour of burning bristles. Perhaps it would induce the master to take them there, perhaps for chopping wood and carrying water the master would be given a bowl of pig’s blood soup and a black pudding, and the dog a bone and some gristle; but Bjorn, whose gaze was f
ollowing a bird soaring over the valley, had spotted something he couldn’t tear his eyes away from.

  At the edge of the village, outside a small building that could have been a stable or a forge, or both of them at once, some horsemen were riding up; there were people crowding among them, and some musicians were approaching. A man in a turban was driving a camel covered with a saddlecloth, another was leading a laden donkey by the halter, a drunkard lying in the snow was singing a serenade, a cripple was hobbling along on a crutch and some beggars were plying their trade. Bjorn headed down the hill, with Harald after him; they crossed a stone bridge over a river, passed a few houses, and finally reached the gathering. Snow began to fall in large flakes, despite which more and more people kept coming, trumpets blared, pipes wailed, cymbals crashed, and a pair of village ragamuffins started to dance. Bjorn pushed his way to the entrance, but the local strongmen would not let him through, demanding a penny in payment for this unexpected show; finally by some miracle he managed to slip inside, but only to the door, from where, on tiptoes, he could see something. The same man, one of the three, was kneeling down, holding a long copper canister. Bjorn recognised him, in spite of the fact that he was wearing a shining coat richly shot with golden threads. From his tube he removed a scroll, unfurled it a little and, bowing his head, showed it to the child. The brilliance that shone out in the chamber dazzled everyone, but not Bjorn. People were coming outside, some astounded, some already bored by this spectacle, and now he could go nearer. The King held the scroll up so close to the child that he could touch it with his small, chubby finger. And just then, on the unrolled page Bjorn caught sight of himself and his father, disembarking from a galleon into a gondola. Slowly they went sailing past the church of Santa Maria della Salute. A bright, warm morning heralded a beautiful day.

  ‘How good it is to be home,’ said his father. ‘We shall never go to the North again.’