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By Root 1999 0

a distinct swish and thump, so distinct that she could not dismiss it, but indeed, she little knew where it might be coming from, for it did not seem to be inside the steading. She lay silently. Now Johanna turned over in her bedcloset and hit her knee or her elbow on the side, and it seemed to Helga that the other might have been just such a sleeper’s sound as this, except that Johanna was just there, across the room and to the left, and this other sound had no such particularity. She listened again to the silence, and considered the five women and two little girls in the steading, and after a few moments of this consideration, she sat up where she was, and rearranged the cloaks about her over Unn, so that she was more thoroughly hidden among them. Then she crept out of the bedcloset and began to feel her way toward Oddny’s bedcloset, where Gunnhild slept, intending to do the same thing there, but just then there were a great many sounds—thumps and brushings, and she understood at once that they were coming from the roof of the steading, that someone was trying to get into the steading through the turves above them. Now she reached out her hand in the dark, and put it on the railing of Johanna’s bedcloset, and then upon her sister’s shoulder, which she shook, and then upon her mouth, so that she prevented the other woman from crying out as she woke. Now she turned and leaned into the bedcloset and said in a whisper, “Now we are hard put, for some bear or other beast is trying to get into this nest of women, and indeed, we have no weapons, for everything has been taken on the hunt, and I know not what to do.”

Now Johanna sat up, and her face was pale in the gloom, and she listened to the sounds raining down with little bits of earth from the turves above them. She said, “That’s what demons do in old tales, they ride the roof beam until the steading shakes under their weight.”

“Well, the steading isn’t shaking yet, and old tales aren’t going to make us know what to do in this instance.”

Johanna turned and put her feet over the side of the bedcloset and said, “It seems to me that we should arouse everyone and herd them into one of the other chambers.”

“But this steading isn’t like Gunnars Stead. There is only the one doorway here. The other rooms are blind, for warmth.”

“May we not get into the cowbyre from inside the steading?”

“Vigdis closed off that passageway, for the smell, and the mess of the servants going back and forth.”

“But we may open it again, if we have to. A hole to crawl through at the least.” Now the noises came more loudly, and Helga looked up, afraid. Johanna stood up and began going about the bedclosets, rousing the servingwomen. Oddny got up with Gunnhild in her arms, and Helga heard Unn stir among the bedclothes with a muffled cry, and it seemed to her, in her growing panic, that the child must suffocate, and so she snatched her out of the bedcloset, and held her tightly in her arms. Now she could not remember what Johanna and she had thought of trying to do, and she stared at her younger sister for a long moment, and Johanna stared back at her, but then said, “From what chamber does the passage to the cowbyre go off?” And Helga gathered her wits, and put her arm around Oddny, and said, “This one, here—” but just then she was interrupted by the fall of a man’s figure through the roof and onto the table. The table broke, and the man landed standing up. She saw in the moonlight that came in through the hole in the roof that the fellow was Ofeig Thorkelsson.

He was not so fat as he once had been, and in fact, his flesh was eked out over his long frame like the flesh of a cow at the end of winter. Bits of clothing hung about him, in no order, tied and wrapped with other bits to keep in some warmth. His hood was torn and mended with little skill, and he stood stoop-shouldered. His beard hung in thin locks to the middle of his chest. He was grinning, and he carried, for weapons, an ax and a small knife. Helga saw that his eyes, accustomed to the bright moonlight outside, could not yet make out who was