She rested her head against Halgard’s shoulder. “Let’s keep trying,” she murmured. “I’m sure we’ll be blessed before too long.” But she knew she was lying, and that more questions lay ahead, questions she would have no answer to.
Then disaster struck. Vardø’s small fishing fleet was caught in a summer storm in the waters off Skaldenes, and three of the four boats sank. Halgard survived, but many of his companions were lost. Good men, who would be sorely missed. On Halgard’s return, there was talk of bad luck descending on the community. An evil eye. Netu was an outsider, one of the few who had not been born and raised in the place. During the weeks of mourning that followed the drownings, she became the object of malicious gossip and suspicion, and the fact that her husband had been spared was used as evidence against her. Elsebe redoubled her attacks. Finally, she had the sort of ammunition she had been looking for.
One evening, while Halgard was out fetching wood, she asked Netu how long she had been in Vardø.
“You know how long,” Netu said.
Elsebe’s one eye seemed to gleam, like something that had recently been polished. “Remind me.”
“Nine years.”
“And yet you haven’t changed at all.”
Netu didn’t know how to respond.
“My son has aged,” Elsebe went on. “Little lines at the edges of his eyes, a few white flecks in his beard. But you—you’re like a freshly minted coin…”
Again, Netu had no answer.
By this time, Halgard had returned with the firewood. “Are you saying I look old, Mother?” He wore his usual easy smile.
But Elsebe was still staring at Netu. “You’re not a Sami by any chance, are you?”
With Elsebe, no question was ever straightforward, but this, Netu immediately understood, was intended as a calumny, since Sami people were sorcerers who had been known to sell favorable winds to foreign traders arriving by ship. Their spell-casting and enchantments could be lethal, both to people and to animals, and they were often persecuted, or hunted down and killed. She wasn’t about to admit she had Sami blood—and certainly not to someone like Elsebe.
“Mother,” Halgard was saying, “she’s blonde.”
“They can be blonde.” Lurching forwards, Elsebe grasped a fistful of Netu’s hair. “So beautiful—like a völva.”
Netu twisted free. “Völva? What’s that?”
Elsebe’s good eye glittered. “It means ‘witch.’ ”
“That’s a slander,” Netu said. “I know nothing of their craft—”
Once again, the old woman leaned forwards in her chair. This time, she seized Netu’s left hand and pointed at the scar between her thumb and her forefinger. “What’s this, then?”
“I burned myself—baking the flatbread…”
Elsebe dropped the hand and sat back with a self-righteous, knowing smile. “The Devil pinched you with his claws.”
“Mother,” Halgard said.
“You come out of nowhere with your red mouth and your yellow hair,” Elsebe said. “You cast your spells, and you ensnare my son—”
“That’s not how it happened,” Netu said.
“And now some of the finest men in the community are dead, and this whole place is cursed—”
“What’s that to do with me?”
“Yes,” the old woman said, still as a snake. “That is the question.”
Netu turned to Halgard, appealing to him to intervene.
“Leave her alone, Mother,” Halgard said.
But his tone was weary and grudging, and there was no force or conviction in his words. He hadn’t taken sides. He was just trying to keep the peace.
A few days later, while Halgard was out hunting, Elsebe and Netu attended a meeting of the village elders. To Netu’s horror, Elsebe began to speak out against her, castigating her for her beauty and her barrenness. She tried to leave, but two or three of Elsebe’s close friends held her back. She disturbed the heart of any man who saw her, Elsebe was saying. Yet nothing grew in her. She was a girl who would never become a woman. They had been harboring an aberration in their midst. Elsebe’s words were like whips, goading everyone who listened. How was it they hadn’t realized? How could they have been so blind?
“I, too, was blind.” The old woman’s voice had lifted, and she struck her chest with one closed hand. “I took her in and gave her everything I had—including my son.”
They needed somebody to blame for the loss of their menfolk. They were looking for a murderer.
“Look no further,” Elsebe cried.
Later that day, the people of the village put her in a cart that was like a cage and drove her towards Vardøhus Castle. Though it was still light, they carried torches soaked in seal fat, the smoke soiling a sky that was the luminous gray white of a pearl. She was in no doubt as to what they had in mind. The new district governor, a Scotsman by the name of Cunningham, had moved into the castle, and he had made it his business to cleanse the land of witches. Apparently, he thought of little else. She would be taken before him and required to confess. If she failed to cooperate, she would be tortured. She already knew what instruments he favored. Arm chains, heated sulfur on the skin. The rack. Later, she would be bound hand and foot and dropped in deep water. If she sank, she would be considered innocent. If she floated, she would be found guilty and burned to a cinder at the stake. Either way, she was done for. In those days, in Finnmark, that passed for justice.
As the cart jolted along the shore, the jeering faces of Vardø women all around her, she squatted behind the bars. She began to talk to herself, her voice pitched low. She was calling on the spirits of those who had come before her. Her ancestors. If I exert myself, let five exert themselves. For I am alone. Did the words come from inside her or from somewhere beyond? She couldn’t have said. When she first left her parents’ house, she would, at any given moment, name what surrounded her—the plants, the rocks, the trees, the animals, the water. If you describe something, you have a chance of controlling it. Whatever is well-disposed towards you can be enlisted. Whatever is hostile can be disarmed. There is great power in naming. Crouching on the cart’s unsteady floor, words came to her unpremeditated, as though rising from some dark place where they had been waiting. If I appear with five, let ten rise up to side with me, for I have no one. Let them stand before me and behind me, and deliver me from harm.
When they were just a mile from Cunningham’s headquarters, a miracle took place. Mist stole in off the sea, growing thicker as it passed over the land. The women were swallowed up. Snuffed out. Their faces, their torches. Even their harsh voices. The mist came up close and wrapped itself around her as she shivered in the rocking prison of the cart. She seemed to become one with it, made of something other than blood and bone, made of soft gray air. Though the gaps between the wooden staves that held her were no wider than a hand’s span, she slipped clean through, and off she went, across the burnt-orange, furze-like grass, not walking, not flying, somewhere between the two. She didn’t worry that she might lose her way, spill off the edge of the world. She had been delivered. There were cries of She’s escaped! and Where the devil is she? There was a distant howl of rage. Her mother-in-law, perhaps. No one would ever know what became of her. She would be a story that was told to children. A cautionary tale. A fable.