The Ice People 16 - The Mandrake. Margit Sandemo

all onto the floor.

      “What a load of rubbish!” she hissed. “He can take them back and use them to wipe himself in the privy!”

      “Ingrid!” Alv said sharply. But he couldn’t punish her. No one ever raised a hand to Ingrid, just as they had never raised a hand to Sol when she was alive. If they tried, Ingrid would take revenge when they least expected it. Berit had tried it once and the next day had found one of her delicate pieces of weaving torn down the middle. Ingrid was punished again. She responded by standing in a corner during dinner muttering some strange words under her breath – and suddenly it was as though Berit’s porridge was filled with disgusting maggots right before her frightened eyes. After that day she never again laid a hand on her daughter.

      Alv sighed. “We gave her as ordinary a Norwegian name as we could in the hope that it would have an effect on her character. Alas!”

      A letter came from Sweden telling them that young Dan Lind of the Ice People was so intelligent that he had been granted permission to study under the Swedish Professor Olof Rudbeck the Younger, who was a linguist and botanist; Dan had also come into contact with other great Swedish scientists like Urban Hjärne and Emanuel Swedenborg.

      Meanwhile, Ingrid’s childhood became a time of concern and bewilderment for her parents, because they loved her so boundlessly and wanted only the best for her. And she most certainly returned their love – in sudden, intense embraces or by creeping into their bed at night in order to avoid all the vile creatures in her room. Not that she was afraid of them, she would tell Alv and Berit, but they made such a noise and racket that she was unable to sleep. It was always quiet and peaceful in her parents’ bed. Many times Alv had gone with Ingrid back to her room in order to chase out the ghosts. But, of course, there were never any to be found. There would only be the moonlight, casting a silvery blue rectangle on the floor.

      Ulvhedin was a great consolation to all of them during those years. He knew what it meant to grow up with the devil inside one and he was able to support and advise the little girl. Ulvhedin and Ingrid became great friends, and Ingrid many a time trudged down to Elistrand to ask Ulvhedin, who was twenty-four years her senior, for advice. It was not that she wanted to be nasty or bad, she would explain, it was just that every now and then all the evil in the world would roam around inside her. And whenever that happened it was good to get some reassurance from Ulvhedin that it was possible to fight off the evil with time.

      Many of the elders talked a great deal about Sol – and Alv had to go down to Linden Avenue and make comparisons with the portraits there. There was no trace of Sol’s little cat-shaped face in Ingrid’s. Ingrid had enormous, amber-coloured eyes and dark brown eyelashes, a small nose and a wide mouth with exceptionally nice teeth. The little fawn-like feature that made the corners of her mouth turn upward was something she had inherited from her father, Alv. There was a streak of recklessness in her wild eyes and about her lips, but on the whole, her face was more classic than Sol’s. They were both very beautiful to look at.

      It was the inner similarity between the two that Alv feared the most. It was alarmingly close.

      Behind Sol’s cheerful madness, she had been deeply unhappy. Oh, how Alv wished with all his heart that his only child, Ingrid, would not suffer the same fate as Sol.

      But the danger was there.

      What frightened them most were all the stories of how Sol would so unscrupulously take the lives of anyone who stood in the way of the Ice People. Alv and Berit put all their energy into bringing up their little girl. They tried to teach Ingrid the difference between right and wrong, yours and mine; they tried to make her understand that other people had feelings just as she did. If she treated someone unfairly, that person would get just as upset about it as she would if it had been done to her. Both parents based their upbringing of Ingrid on the biblical command, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you!” and they hoped that she would gain the ability to identify with the feelings of others.

      Whether or not they had succeeded was, in the beginning, difficult to determine. Ingrid would do the most awful things. Like letting all the horses loose on the oat fields to give them a better life, or announcing to one of the area’s most distinguished ladies when she called that her mother, Berit, was not at home, because Ingrid knew her mother could not bear the lady in question. It was a little embarrassing, then, when Berit suddenly appeared in the hallway.

      But with time it dawned on Ingrid’s parents that their daughter’s mad behaviour derived purely from love. She glowed with love for all the animals and humans she cared about. What they called naughtiness was an expression of sorrow and disappointment, a kind of defence. If she was slapped in the face for doing something she wanted revenge because she couldn’t fathom how those she cared for so ardently could actually strike or punish her.

      Exactly why she conjured up those detestable things in her mother’s porridge, she did not quite understand herself. Maybe she was just giving her mother a taste of her own medicine? Or else she was so deeply hurt that she wanted to draw attention to herself, but it had come out in an awkward way. That she had torn her mother’s fabric to shreds was an expression of her childish impudence but also a fierce jealousy towards the weaving that took up so much of her mother’s time. That and many similar actions showed that she really didn’t understand what her parents meant about there always being a human context and human feelings connected to material things. She had simply been gripped by a wild urge to destroy her rival, which was the weaving. The extreme consequences of her actions, her mother’s sorrow and bitterness over the fact that a meticulously handmade piece of material had been ruined, was not something Ingrid had taken into consideration.

      Whenever her troll-like mood got too wild, she would usually take one of the horses from the barn and ride around the fields as if under a thundercloud. Then people would say, “It looks as if the young lady from Graastensholm is riding out the storm again.”

      At other times, Ingrid could be infinitely sweet, which would make her parents really proud of her: they would tell one another that now she had surely got over her need to use witchcraft.

      Until the next incident.

      She was the spitting image of Sol, but they didn’t realize it because they had never met Sol.

      Villemo, who closely resembled both Sol and Ingrid, had been more fortunate. She was not cursed, but she had been chosen. She had been granted the gift of logical thought. Sol’s and Ingrid’s way of thinking was often very irrational.

      The servants at Graastensholm quickly learned to stay friendly with Ingrid. And she responded to their friendliness through gentle and sweet devotion, so her upbringing ended up being more or less harmonious. (Of course, there were a few minor incidents hardly worth mentioning, like the time the new farmhand ventured to pat the pretty young girl on her behind. The next moment he found himself in the pigsty covered with mud. How he had landed there he never quite understood, even though he wondered about it for the rest of his life. He was, by the way, kicked out of Graastensholm two days later.)

      But then there was the issue of Ingrid’s great intelligence going to waste. Jon at Elistrand was happy to study with her, but he was unable to keep up with the speed of her progress. She would read and pore over all the books and maps at Graastensholm through and through. The same thing happened at Elistrand. The only learned person in the village, the priest, now gave Ingrid a wide berth because he told himself she asked so many stupid things. That is to say, the priest was not always sure how to answer her, which was not something he cared to admit!

      By the time Ingrid turned seventeen she was impatient and dissatisfied with her education. Were all other people equally stupid? Was there really no one who could answer all her questions? Her dissatisfaction made her irritable and temperamental, and her development was going in the wrong direction. She started experimenting with witchcraft on her own as an outlet for her great mental capacity.

      And then Alv took the drastic step of mentioning the old treasure of the Ice People. However, he did it with great trepidation because he knew of the fire that could be ignited in the heart of those who were cursed once they heard about it.

      “Ever since my father,