Ranni was standing by the great hearth while the boy Gilbert built up the fire. Her face was puffy and grey. She spoke to Freyga with a sneer: "Well, count, high time you're back!"

He stood breathing heavily, slack-faced, and did not speak.

"Come along, then," said the midwife. He followed her up the twisting stairs. The straw that had covered the floor was swept aside into the fireplace. Galla lay again in the wide box-like bed, the marriage bed. Her closed eyes were deep-sunken. She was snoring faintly. "Shh!" the midwife said, as he started to her. "Be quiet! Look here."

She was holding up a tightly wrapped bundle.

After some while, as he still said nothing, she whispered sharply, "A boy. Fine, big."

Freyga put out one hand towards the bundle. His fingernails were caked and checked with brown.

The midwife drew the bundle closer to herself. "You're cold," she said in the sharp, contemptuous whisper. "Here." She drew back a fold to show for a moment a very tiny, purplish human face in the bundle, then rewrapped it.

Freyga went to the foot of the bed and knelt on the floor there, bending till his head was on the stones of the floor. He murmured, "Lord Christ, be praised, be thanked. . . ."

The Bishop of Solariy never found out what had become of his envoy to the northwest. Probably, being a zealous man, he had ventured too far into the mountains where heathen folk still lived, and had suffered martyrdom.

Count Freyga's name lived long in the history of his province. During his lifetime the Benedictine monastery on the mountain above Lake Malafrena was established. Count Freyga's flocks and Count Freyga's sword fed and defended the monks in their first hard winters there. In the bad Latin of their chronicles, in black ink on the lasting vellum, he and his son after him are named with gratitude, staunch defenders of the Church of God.

1150

"SURELY," said the young doctor, "there are unpardonable crimes! Murder can't go unpunished."

The senior partner shook his head. "There are unpardonable people, perhaps; but crimes . . . they depend . . ."

"On what? To take a human life – that's absolute. Self-defense aside, of course. The sacredness of human life – "

"Is nothing the law can judge of," the older man said drily. "I have a murder in the family, as a matter of fact. Two murders." And, gazing mostly at the fire, he told his story.

My first practice was up north in the Valone. I went there with my sister in 1902. Even then it was a drab place. The old estates had sold out to the beetroot plantations, and collieries spread a murk on the hills to the south and west. It was just a big, dull plain; only at the east end of it, Valone Alte, did you get any sense of being in the mountains. On the first day I drove to Valone Alte I noticed a grove of trees; the trees in the valley had all been cut down. There were birches turning gold, and a house behind them, and behind it a stand of huge old oaks, turning dim red and brown; it was October. It was beautiful. When my sister and I drove out on Sunday I went that way, and she said in her drowsy way that it was like the castle in the fairy tale, the castle of silver in a forest of gold. I had several patients in Valone Alte, and always drove that road. In winter when the leaves were down you could see the old house; in spring you could hear the cuckoos calling, and in summer the mourning-doves. I didn't know if anyone lived there. I never asked.

The year went round; I didn't have all the practice I'd hoped for, but Poma, my sister Pomona, was good at making ends meet, for all she looked so sleepy and serene. So we got on. One evening I came in and found a call had been left from a place called He on the Valone Alte road. I asked Minna, the housekeeper, where it was.

"Why, in Ile Forest," she said, as if there was a forest the size of Siberia there. "Past the old mill."

"The castle of silver," Poma said, smiling. I set right off. I was curious. You know how it is, when you've built up your fancies about a place, and then suddenly are called to go into it. The old trees stood round, the windows of the house reflected the last red of the west. As I tied up my horse, a man came out to meet me.

He didn't come out of any fairy tale. He was about forty and had that hatchet face you see up north, hard as flint. He took me straight in. The house was unlit; he carried a kerosene lamp. What I could see of the rooms looked bare, empty. No carpets, nothing. The upstairs room we came to had no rug either; bed, table, a few chairs; but a roaring hot fire in the hearth. It helps to have a forest, when you need firewood.

The patient was the owner of the forest, Ileskar. Pneumonia. And he was a fighter. I was there on and off for seventy hours, and he never drew a breath in all that time that wasn't an act of pure willpower. The third night, I had a woman in labor in Mesoval, but I left her to the midwife. I was young, you know, and I said to myself that babies come into the world every day, but it's not every day a brave man leaves it. He fought; and I tried to help him. At dawn the fever went down abruptly, the way it does now with these new drugs, but it wasn't any drug; he'd fought, and won. I drove home in a kind of exaltation, in a white windy sunrise.

And I dropped in daily while he convalesced. He drew me, the place drew me. That last night, it had been one of those nights you have only when you're young – whole nights, from sunset to sunrise, when life and death are present with you, and outside the windows there's the forest, and the winter, and the dark.

I say "forest" just as Minna did, meaning that stand of a few hundred trees. It had been a forest once. It had covered all Valone Alte, and so had the Ileskar properties. For a century and a half it had all gone down and down; nothing left now but the grove, and the house, and a share in the Kravay plantations, enough to keep one Ileskar alive. And Martin, the hatchet-faced fellow, his servant technically, though they shared the work and ate together. Martin was a strange fellow, jealous, devoted to Ileskar. I felt that devotion as an actual force, not sexual, but possessive, defensive. It did not puzzle me too much. There was something about Galven Ileskar that made it seem quite natural. Natural to admire him, and to protect him.

I got his story from Minna, mostly, her mother had worked for his mother. The father had spent what was left to spend, and then died of the pleurisy. Galven went into the army at twenty; at thirty he married, retired as a captain, and came back to Ile. After about three years his wife deserted him, ran away with a man from Brailava. And about that I learned a little from Galven himself. He was grateful to me for my visits; I suppose it was plain that I wanted his friendship. He felt he should not withhold himself. I'd rambled on about Poma and myself, so he felt obliged to tell me about his marriage. "She was very weak," he said. He had a gentle, husky voice. "I took her weakness for sweetness. A mistake. But it wasn't her fault. A mistake. You know she left me, with another man."

I nodded, very embarrassed.

"I saw him whip a horse blind once," Galven said, in the same thoughtful, painful way. "Stand and whip its eyes till they were open sores. When I got there he'd just finished. He gave a big sigh of satisfaction, as if he'd just gotten up from dinner. It was his own horse. I didn't do anything. Told him to get off the place, clear out. Not enough. . . ."

"You and your – wife are divorced, then?"

"Yes," he said, and then he looked across the room at Martin, who was building up the fire. Martin nodded, and Galven said, "Yes," again. He was only a week or so convalescent, he looked tired; it was a bit strange, but I already knew he was a strange fellow. He said, "I'm sorry. I've forgotten how to talk to civilised people."