C4 Chapter 4

Heike had led a good life with his foster parents, probably due just as much to his own abilities as to Elena’s and Milan’s kindness and understanding.

Of course, things didn’t go entirely smoothly when the couple first settled down in the small village of Planina in Slovenia with their strange foster son.

Many people in the village regarded the changeling with disapproval. The little five-year-old did not resemble a normal person. And then that evil father he had had ...

And he seemed to have great difficulty adjusting to the everyday world after living in that cramped cage for several years. He wasn’t a perfect specimen to begin with – far from it! Elena experienced many bitter moments when she asked herself whether she had done the right thing by taking him in as she did.

The first thing she did when she brought him home with her was to take him out of Milan’s strong arms and give him a hot bath. Milan fetched the sheep shears and cut off all his tangled hair, right down to his scalp. That may sound like a simple thing to do but it was far from easy. Heike considered both the bath water and the cutting of his hair to be the worst kinds of torture, and had it not been for Milan’s strength and friendly voice the whole procedure might never have been completed.

The first day was therefore a nightmare for all parties.

And the child’s mysterious talisman frightened them as well. They were afraid to touch it because people of the Mediterranean region knew of its great powers. But they had to let the boy keep it since they didn’t dare take it away from him.

That night Heike tried for the first time to sleep in a proper bed. He lay there, his cheeks drenched with tears, looking up at Elena and Milan through the two yellow slits that were his eyes in his grotesque face. He felt deeply unhappy and forlorn, yet at the same time a wonderful feeling was spreading through his body.

He got used to that feeling and soon felt so safe with Elena and Milan that he was terrified if they left him, even for a moment.

But things didn’t go so smoothly in the village. Elena and Milan were married and moved into Milan’s house, prompting their neighbours to paint crosses on their own doors. Milan and Elena felt ostracized from the community. On top of that, bringing up Heike wasn’t at all easy.

That was how it went at first.

But over the following years the boy became more accepted, because nothing unusual ever happened.

And then the children came – that is, Elena’s and Milan’s own children. They had one each year, and they couldn’t have asked for a better babysitter. There wasn’t a thing Heike wouldn’t do for his little siblings. He cared for them from when they were born, as well as helping Elena around the house and Milan in the fields. And gradually, as his siblings grew older, they came to look up to their older brother, while the other children of the village worshipped him. His hair grew back and he grew into a big, strong boy who, according to the other children, could do “everything”.

He soon befriended someone else in the village, a stranger just like himself. Dimitrie had fled his homeland of Wallachia for political reasons. At first the people of the village did not really want to accept Dimitrie because they could not understand what he was saying. So little Heike was the one who saw to it that the young man did not feel lonely. At first Dimitrie didn’t want to have anything to do with the ugly boy, but they soon became good friends.

Heike taught Dimitrie how to speak the local language, and in return he learned Wallachian, which is the same as Romanian. In general, Heike had a great deal of linguistic talent. He picked up Slovenian very quickly and he had previously learned Swedish and German. And he could now add Romanian to the list of languages he had mastered. Of course he couldn’t speak the language perfectly, but he could make himself understood in a conversation with Dimitrie.

The two of them spent a lot of time together for a year or so. Then the Romanian decided to leave for Venice in pursuit of happiness there. There was something about a village girl who had chosen someone else. The young man took it hard, and Heike had to console him for a whole night while Dimitrie drowned his sorrow in the local schnapps, growing more and more sentimental and calling Heike his “little devil” in his mother tongue.

The farewell was sorrowful, and Heike missed Dimitrie for a long time.

But apart from that he had a good life at home with Elena and Milan, who really came to appreciate the boy with the ugly face and the warm heart. They had no idea how they would ever have managed without him.

The other adults in the village eventually accepted Heike, apart from a few old men who saw in him an enemy of the church. But no one ever listened to them anyway.

If a sheep managed to get lost in the forest, the farmer would send Heike to go and look for it. In contrast to everyone else, Heike was not afraid of the forest, and he always managed to locate the runaway animal. In most cases he brought it back home alive, but he would also bring it home if it was dead so that its owner would know its fate.

His trips into the forest astonished many. However, he never went to the forest around Adelsberg. Most people assumed that was because it was where his father had been hanged.

They knew nothing about Heike’s friend, who was known as the “Wanderer of the Darkness”. He was seen less often now and none of them had any idea that it had been he who prevented Heike from getting too close to the resting-place of Tengel the Evil. As soon as the boy approached the forest near Adelsberg, the big, silent figure would appear, warning him to stop. Then Heike would smile, nod and turn around.

You might think that it was Tengel the Good who was shielding his distant relative. But it wasn’t. Exactly who it was would become apparent much later, when the solution to the riddle of the Ice People would become much clearer.

When Heike was fourteen years old something strange started to happen. He was the only one who knew exactly what was happening, but everybody associated the occurrence with him.

Elena and Milan had many children now, and Milan worked hard to feed them all. He got a lot of help from his foster son, Heike, who worked day in and day out to cultivate the poor, stony soil. The farm had always been one of the poorest in the country. It was a big piece of land, but what was one to do with boulders and stony fields?

One night, after the little ones had gone to bed, Heike and his foster parents were sitting at the kitchen table. The children slept on the floor as well as in the beds, wherever they could find room.

Elena and Milan were dejected. The farm wasn’t doing sufficiently well and they knew they didn’t have enough food to get through the winter.

“Mother and Father,” Heike began in a low voice – that was what he called them. “As you know, I come from a strange family ...”

They nodded.

“Sölve told me a lot about my ancestors,” Heike continued. “And I am carrying an evil legacy. I saw what that legacy did to Sölve, but I know that some of my ancestors managed to conquer the evil and develop in its place a goodness that was equally powerful.”

Milan placed his hand on the boy’s angular brown fist. “I think you are following in their footsteps, Heike,” he said warmly.

“I am trying. But it is much harder than you think. Every so often a powerful sense of evil arises within me. It is a destructive feeling and I have to use all my willpower to keep it in check. And recently that sense of evil has begun to weaken.”

“We know that,” Elena laughed. “My goodness, how angry you could get in the first years you were with us! Our cups and saucers would go flying through the air when you didn’t get your way. But that’s a long time ago. Now you’re the best thing we have, Heike.”

“After your children.”

“You are one of our children, Heike.”

Touched, he thanked them. “But I don’t know whether you realize that with the evil legacy comes the ability to do things that ordinary people can’t.”

“Yes,” Milan answered bleakly. “I’ve noticed one or two things actually. But I didn’t want to interfere. Like that time Elena was giving birth ... if you hadn’t had been there to place your hand on her neither one of them would be alive today. What was it you murmured?”

“Oh, that was just something in my own language,” Heike answered, evasively. “But I’ve never harmed anyone with my talents.”

“I know.”

“Well, now that we all know that we will soon be in want ... will you let me try something? Something I have never done before but which, according to Sölve, can happen?”

They knew that he never called Sölve “father”. There was good reason for that. A man who has tortured a little child has no right to call himself the child’s father.

Milan answered hesitantly. “What you have in mind ... will it harm anyone?”

“No.”

“Does it entail any kind of danger?”

“I don’t think so. I just know that it breaks all conventions, so you probably shouldn’t mention it in the village. And least of all to the priest!”

“We cannot tolerate a Satanic cult of any kind.”

Heike shook his head. “It has nothing to do with Satan.”

“Can’t you tell us anything about it?”

“I’m not allowed to,” Heike said. “And then there is the risk that others will hear about it and come to us ...”

Then Milan understood what Heike had in mind. He briefly nodded. “Do it! Try! We don’t want to know anything about it.”

Elena looked at them quizzically but they didn’t say any more.

That night Heike went out to the little barn to sleep because he wanted to be alone. Milan helped him make a bed next to the sheepfold. Milan nodded to Heike before he walked out.

Heike was only fourteen years old. And he was scared. But he had to help those who had so unselfishly taken him in.

When the farm was quiet, he sat down on his bed and took off the mandrake, which he always wore around his neck. He looked at the old, grotesque root, which he could never feel when he was wearing it but which not even Sölve had been able to touch.

The mandrake had taken part in many things, most of which Heike was unaware of. He knew that it had once belonged to Tengel the Evil but that he had been forced to part with it. And in that way the mandrake had proved that it belonged to the good and that it fought against Tengel the Evil.

A long time had passed since it re-emerged with Tengel the Good. After that came Sol, who had been a bit too “touched” for it to thrive with her. Tarjei had never received any help from the mandrake, perhaps because he never valued it properly. But Kolgrim, poor Kolgrim had taken it with him to his grave and the mandrake had disappeared from the face of the earth. Until Ingrid, Ulvhedin and Dan had ventured into the Valley of the Ice People to look for it.

That was when they witnessed something horrifying. They saw that the mandrake had, using its own power, crawled out of the grave and tried to creep to where there were people. It hadn’t got far: it had taken it four years to travel just a few meters.

Ingrid had taken it but then it had given clear signs that it wanted to belong to Daniel, her son with Dan. It had saved Daniel’s life many times and it had indirectly been responsible for the fact that Shira was able to complete her death walk through the caves in the “Mountain of the Four Winds”.

Daniel had given the mandrake to his own son, Sölve, because Sölve had begged to have it. But the mandrake did not get on with Sölve or – any longer – with Daniel.

Not until Heike was born did it wake up to a new life. It had powerfully shielded the helpless Heike against Sölve, and against the presence of Tengel the Evil.

So there was no doubt that the mandrake belonged to Heike now.

This meant that it intended something for him, just as it had wanted to assist Daniel on his long journey to the distant land of Taran-gai.

Now Heike was going to test it for the first time.

He knew exactly what it was capable of, because Sölve had told him. Among many other things, the mandrake could work as a magnet. That is, it could attract wealth to its owner.

Heike had no intention of doing anything that would harm others. For example, he did not want it to attract money that belonged to other people.

He looked at it gravely and then said, with his hoarse voice that was just breaking: “You are my friend, and I am yours, you know that. We must do something for the people who have given us shelter and treated us with such kindness through the years. Give me a sign to show I can help them. I want to do it honestly, preferably with my own hands, but you are the one with the ideas. Will you help me?”

The mandrake did not move. He hadn’t expected it to because the only time it ever did so was in emergency situations.

A thought suddenly struck Heike. “Perhaps you are saving yourself until I am old enough to see the world? To go back home to the North? Perhaps you don’t feel like doing anything right now? But we must help those who have treated us so well, and I can’t do it alone. I am asking you, my dear friend, you who stayed by my side through thick and thin in those evil years that now only return to me in my nightmares and show in the fact that I can’t stand being confined anywhere. You can feel that, can’t you? How I am gripped with fear and panic if a room becomes too confining for me, if I have to go down into an underground cellar or get locked in somewhere. Mother and Father know it: they’ve had to slap my face to get me to calm down if I’ve been stuck somewhere or have been held down or have had a nightmare.”

Heike looked at the root of the Mandragora plant, which so weirdly resembled a human form. It was extremely well preserved, despite all the wear and tear it had experienced. You couldn’t tell by looking at it. It seemed perfectly well and alive.

He hung it up on a hook next to his bed and crawled under the covers. The extent to which the mandrake would help him was now up to the mandrake itself to decide.

Not for one moment did he question what he had done or think of it as the least bit silly. A normal person would probably have considered him to be crazy the way he sat talking to an old root! But Heike didn’t give it a second thought.

The stillness of the night was broken only by the sound of the animals chewing the cud or turning in their stalls. Meanwhile Heike was dreaming.

It was one of the possibilities that he had taken into consideration. He knew from the stories about the mandrake that its influence often emerged in dreams. For example, that was what had happened to Ingrid.

And that was also what would happen to Heike, the tiny shoot on the branch of the Ice People that had landed so far away from his family and who constantly longed to go north to join the others. To join his equals who would understand him.

In his dream he once again saw Elena’s old house where they now let the animals graze on the infertile slopes. Sölve’s house, where Heike had suffered so inhumanely, was nowhere to be seen – it didn’t exist in the dream.

Instead he saw the slopes clothed with strange shrubs or bushes. At first, he couldn’t really see what they were but then he realized that they were grapevines. He moaned in his sleep. How hard the work was on those dry slopes! No one in Planina cultivated grapes: they would never think of it. They grew in the more fertile regions elsewhere in Slovenia, but not here!

Heike dreamed that he and Milan slaved away obsessively in their attempt to grow good grapes. Then a lot of people came and admired their work and bought wine from them and thanked them for trying to do the impossible.

After that the rest was just the confused frenzy so typical of dreams, which you hardly remember in the morning.

But the dream about the vineyard remained in Heike’s memory when he woke up the next morning, and he hurried to tell his foster parents about it.

Elena clapped her hands. She didn’t understand what had really taken place. But Milan looked at his foster son thoughtfully for a long time. For a long time they held each other’s gaze. Then Milan said, “We’ll try it.”

“You’re crazy!” Elena gasped.

But it went as Milan predicted. In the face of great ridicule and local indignation he fetched grapevines from southern Slovenia, only very few the first year, and planted them in the soil Heike had cultivated. Sölve’s house was torn down – Milan did it himself to shield Heike from all the bad memories – and they cultivated more soil. Never had they transported so many stones as they did that summer. Milan got pains in his back so Heike often had to work alone.

But finally the vineyard was finished.

Five years later Milan was the richest man in Planina.

There were others who tried their hand at wine growing then, and they had great success, but nobody had vineyards as large as Milan’s. His wine became well known outside the region; it was named after Heike and had a characteristically full aroma that was extremely popular.

By this time, Heike had grown into a handsome young man of nineteen. Well handsome in some ways. He was tall but stocky and had the characteristically broad, slightly pointed shoulders that had killed his mother. If you came near him you would be repulsed by his frighteningly ugly face until you looked into his yellow eyes and saw all the human compassion they expressed. It was almost touching to look into them, it seemed as though your chest filled with happiness.

His hair was pitch black and bristly and his hands were big and felt safe. Heike had a secret strength that derived from his love for those he considered to be his closest relations: Elena, Milan and all his siblings.

But he knew that the time had come to break away. The house was filled with children large and small, and his longing to go home to the Ice People, his own kin, grew stronger with each day that passed.

Elena cried. “We don’t want to lose you, Heike.”

“It is the law of nature, Mother, that children leave their home when they are old enough. And anyway, you’ll have one less mouth to feed.”

“You shouldn’t say that, my friend,” Milan said in a hoarse voice. They were sitting at the table talking that night as they always did. Heike was much older than the other children and had always belonged more with the adults, they felt. “We had hoped that you might settle down here in the village. Find a girl ...”

Heike smiled wryly. “I might have liked that. But I am obliged to go home to the North. Sölve was supposed to have taken over a farm in Norway. And his sister knows nothing about what happened to him. Not that I intend to tell them everything about him, but she ought at least to know that he is no longer alive. My place is with my own kin now. The estate is standing empty and without an owner. It’s my inheritance, after all.”

“We understand,” Milan said, “But your siblings will miss you bitterly. The whole village! The children, the elders ...”

“How will you manage that long journey?” Elena cried.

“You will, of course, have a horse from me,” Milan said. “That’s the least I can do.”

“Yes, but will people understand?” Elena persisted. “Won’t they be frightened by your features without noticing the wonderful being that dwells behind them?

Heike smiled. “I’ve thought about that, Mother, and I realize that I am not exactly handsome ...”

“It’s not just that. You don’t seem human at all at first glance. That is your misfortune and it is so unfair.”

“Don’t worry, Mother,” Heike said. “I have a great protective force accompanying me, as you both know.”

Milan nodded. “That’s good to know. And ... Heike ... I haven’t wanted to talk about this before, but there are many other things you are capable of, aren’t there?”

Heike looked dreamily into space. “Yes, there are. But I have been afraid to use my talents.”

Now Elena looked at him. “Dear child, I have often wondered ... When you were little you used to recite some strange chants that I didn’t understand a word of. Later you stopped doing it. What did those words mean?”

“They are within me,” Heike answered, smiling wryly. “They are there, but they are mute now. To be honest, I have no idea what they mean. They are not in Sölve’s language. They are completely unfamiliar to me. They are just there.”

“One day you’ll understand them,” Milan said.

“Yes, I think so, too. Because one of my ancestors, Ulvhedin, would also recite such chants, which seemed to come out of nowhere. And also someone named Hanna, who lived a long, long time ago. Ulvhedin used them against some evil beings that rose from the soil of the moors in a land far away from here.”

Elena shuddered. “That sounds scary! I’m happy that you haven’t used your talents here, Heike. The neighbours wouldn’t have liked it.”

Then came the moment when it was time to say farewell. Since it was hard for everyone, there is no reason to tell much about it. They knew that there was only a tiny chance that they would ever see each other again, because Heike’s journey home would be a long one. And he intended to settle down there, on his own estate, the name of which was long and difficult: Gråstensholm.

Sorrow has many faces. On this day it emerged as a gentle, quiet form of melancholy and a sense of gratitude that Heike and his foster parents had had the chance to know one another. That they had had fourteen wonderful years together.

When Heike had left the village, he stopped and turned around. He stood for a long time looking down at the small cluster of houses that he knew he would never see again.

Then he turned his gaze towards the forest.

As he expected, when he looked up to the ridge he saw the figure he had met in the forest so many times in recent years. They had never exchanged a single word, for one doesn’t speak with a shadow figure.

But now Heike whispered to the far-off Wanderer of the Dark: “See you!”

The creature lifted his hand in a small gesture of agreement.

Heike smiled, relieved.

Then he rode on.

But he made a mistake when he rode out of Slovenia. In his mind the journey he had taken to get there all those years ago had been in a westerly direction, towards the sunset. It had been the long journey from Vienna to Salzburg.

How was a little five-year-old, a child who had been trapped in a cage inside the carriage, to know that they had turned due south when they left Salzburg. He couldn’t have been expected to know that, or even remember it fourteen years later.

It would prove to be a fatal error for Heike, because he soon realized that he couldn’t ask anyone for directions. His appearance made people run away when they saw him.

That was why he rode east on the horse he had been given by Milan, in the belief that he would reach Vienna that way. He passed Zagreb and the Hungarian town Szeged and after a month on horseback he was on his way through the Mures Pass in the direction of Siebenbürgen – much too far east.

As summer turned into autumn he reached the mountain pass close to the sickening forest ...

But by that stage he was no longer alone.