There were two days to go before Christmas. As I stood at the railway halt in total darkness by now, all alone, hearing the roar of the sea on both sides of the narrow, sandy spit, it occurred to me that this story had in fact been recorded by the chroniclers: it must have happened to the legate between 1243 and 1254, because those were the years of Innocent IV’s reign at the Holy See, and he was the pope who sent Sedenza to Eric IV, king of Denmark.
In the empty compartment it smelled of fish: in my bag lay some herrings, three fair-sized cod, and also a turbot – which we had never eaten before, not even on Christmas Eve. Whether Alojz Depka was a descendant of the pirate whom Duke Świętopełk’s sentence made into a living torch, I never did find out. I remember that as the train rolled slowly along the very seashore, getting close to Puck, that year’s first, thick flakes of snow appeared outside the window. The turbot was fabulous, and outstripped the cod by miles.
Öland
For my friends
THE SEA HERE is always severe. Even on sultry summer days, when the rocks are as hot as a tile stove, the bright blue surface is eternally coated in the same, forbidding chill. Bjorn was thinking about it as he drove his sheep out of the croft. There weren’t many of them – two young ewes and one old one. A year ago he had had more, but after a hailstorm, when lightning bolts had struck the plateau in quick succession, only three of them were left. Does fear destroy an animal’s sense of direction? That he did not know, but the image of the disaster endured in his memory down to the last detaiclass="underline" the ram – the bellwether – had run straight for the precipice and disappeared, with almost the entire flock after him. Then the stupid, black-horned ram had lain at the foot of the cliff, under a pile of other dead animals, with the waves licking at them. Bjorn had had to report it, and the entire way across the plateau he had trembled with fear. The steward was a bad man, whose lips cast nothing but curses from under his thick, flaxen moustache. So it was this time, too – when he finally grasped what had happened, he flew into a dreadful rage, seized Bjorn by the scruff of the neck, pinned him to the ground and hissed: ‘For such a big loss you will stand before the master – the master will have you hanged!’ But the squire from Ventlinge – whom Bjorn had never seen before – proved merciful. He heard out the steward, stood up from his chair, pointed to the crucifix and said: ‘He tells us to forgive’; then after a pause for thought, addressing the culprit he added: ‘For each ewe you will work out a year, and for each ram two. Then you will leave my land for ever.'
That evening, when Jansen came to the bottom of the cliff with a helper to dress the carcasses on the spot, all three of them had laughed about it. No peasant or even a tenant farmer here had a lifelong right like that: there had been twenty-five sheep and four rams, including the bellwether. Bjorn listened avidly to their stories about the master from Ventlinge. Since returning from the war on the other side of the sea, he spent long evenings alone by the fireplace, reading the Bible aloud. Sometimes he could also be heard through the closed door, calling for his comrades who were killed in battle – those from Dalarna, those from Uppaland and those from Scania. Surrounded by the enemy cavalry, they had fought like lions, but as well as their sabres the Poles had the force of Catholic incantations behind them, and it was those that caused the field by the river to be strewn in hundreds of Swedish corpses that day. Maybe that was why the master from Ventlinge, since returning to Öland from the war, never took part in the royal hunts, had hung his rapier on the wall and read the Bible aloud? At around midnight they finished the work; Jansen loaded a cart with all that could be saved, which belonged to the estate, and the rest they laid on a pile of brushwood. A great, sizzling flame lit up the cliff, and the odour of burning tallow and innards trailed along the stony beach until morning.
However, some odds and ends had been left over from that feast of the gods, and now as he gazed at the pasture, the sheep and the clouds, Bjorn could smell the long forgotten aroma of roasted meat, and with it he felt a gnawing pain in his stomach. He reached into his sack for a piece of dried fish. As he chewed it, he walked up to the precipice. The daily view of the open space where water and air merged together somewhere very far away had never consoled Bjorn, for although the hues and shapes of the clouds often changed here, as did the colour of the sea, the empty void was always the same, unencompassed, like the wind roaring in the grasses on the plateau and the waves splashing against the boulders. Only occasionally, when the visibility was good, could his eyes spy out in the distance the small outline of a ship heading for Kalmar, or south to Karlskrona, but Bjorn had no telescope and was spared the joy of identifying the flags or the sight of the full sails.
But since last year the edge of the precipice had changed out of all recognition. Where the plateau ended, as if cut off by a knife, and the cliff fell away at an almost vertical stroke, a low stone wall had arisen on the orders of the steward, the fruit of several months’ work, and now almost finished. Bjorn leaned his hands on the stones and gazed at the sea. From the southern side, on the dark-blue line of the horizon a small dot had appeared. It was too far away to tell what kind of ship it was, and anyway, what did it matter? The island was bypassed by merchants and mariners. Bjorn turned away from the stone wall and made himself comfortable upon the grass. The sun was already quite high, seagulls, larks and siskins were calling to each other shrilly, the last patches of snow had disappeared from the plateau a couple of weeks ago, and the smell of thawed earth was finally heralding some long, warm days. Bjorn thought about the master from Ventlinge: how noble he must have looked on his charger, rapier in hand, beneath the fluttering banner of the royal ensign, as he gave the order to attack. But what could be the meaning of the incantations Jansen had mentioned? Were the Catholics in a pact with the devil? And if so, why had God given them the victory? Under his drooping eyelids Bjorn could see a nameless river, with the corpses of the masters from Dalarna, the masters from Uppaland, and the masters from Scania floating along it. Their proud emblems, estates, jewels and titles – what were they now, as they lay dead in a foreign land? For a while longer Bjorn’s thoughts revolved around the tumult of battle, until at last, to the tune of the sea’s monotonous roar they lost focus, imperceptibly crossing the border into a dream.
It started with the light, quiet strokes of long oars. The boat was long too, and both ferrymen, dressed rather gaudily, rhythmically leaned forward from the prow and the stern over the calm water, in which the façades of churches, the arcs of bridges and the gates of palaces slowly shifted in mirror image. The passengers – a man of about thirty-five and a small boy – were not talking to each other. Only when the boat had sailed away from the city and its cupolas were glowing honey-gold in the distance did the man place a hand on the boy’s arm and repeat the word: ‘Serenissima!’ The boy began to cry. The boat came alongside a galleon at anchor in the bay. The boatswain’s whistle sounded, and the sails were set. The ship moved off majestically, and the city disappeared in the dawn of the rising sun as suddenly as if it had never existed.