finally figured out how it should be done. That was more than a year and a day ago now. At night when the new moon had set, she was to go to the marble sphinx by the desert, brush away the sand from the door in its foot, and go through the long hallway that led to the middle of one of the big pyramids. One of antiquity’s great kings lay there as a mummy, surrounded by splendor and magnificence. She was to lean her head next to the king, and it would be revealed to her how she could revive and save her father.
She had done all of that, and learned in a dream that she had to bring home a lotus flower from the deep bog in Denmark, the first flower to touch her breast in the deep water. The place was described precisely, and this flower would save her father.
And that is why she flew in the swan-skin from Egypt to the wild bog. Stork father and stork mother knew all this, and now we know it more clearly than we did before. We know that the bog king pulled her down to himself and know that she is dead and gone for those at home. Only the wisest of all of them still said, like stork mother, “She will take care of herself,” and they waited for that because they didn’t know what else to do.
“I think I’ll filch the swan-skins from those two wretched princesses!” stork father said. “Then they can’t get back to the bog and do any more harm. I’ll hide them up there until there’s a use for them.”
“Where will you hide them there?” asked stork mother.
“In our nest by the bog,” he said. “I can carry them with our youngest children, and if they get too heavy for us, then there are enough places on the way where we can hide them until the next trip. One swan-skin was enough for her, but two are even better. It’s a good thing to have lots of traveling clothes in the northern countries.”
“No one will thank you for it,” said stork mother, “but you’re the boss. Nobody listens to me except in brooding season!”
In the Viking house by the wild bog, where the storks flew towards spring, the little girl had been named. They had called her Helga, but that name was much too sensitive for a nature such as the one the lovely girl had. That became clearer month after month, and as the years passed, and the storks made the same journey—in the fall towards the Nile, in spring toward the bog—the little girl became a big girl, and before you knew it, she was a lovely maiden of sixteen. She had a beautiful shell, but she was hard and rough to the core, and wilder than most in that hard, dark time.
It was a pleasure for her to spatter the steaming blood of the butchered sacrificial horse with her white hands, and with savagery she bit the head off the black hen that the priest was going to butcher. She told her foster father in complete seriousness:
“If your enemies came here and threw a rope over the beams of the roof and tore it off your bedroom while you slept, I wouldn’t wake you if I could. I wouldn’t hear it, that’s how the blood is still rushing in that ear that you boxed years ago! I remember!”
But the Viking didn’t believe her. He was, like the others, fooled by her beauty. He didn’t know how Helga’s soul and skin changed. She sat on her horse as if grown to it, without a saddle, as it galloped at full speed. She wouldn’t jump off even if it started fighting with other angry horses. She often jumped out from the face of the cliff into the fjord with all her clothes on and swam in the swift currents out to meet the Viking as his ship sailed towards land. She cut the longest lock from her lovely, long hair and braided herself a bowstring. “Self made is well made,” she said.
The Viking woman was strong in both will and spirit as women of those times and custom were, but she acted like a gentle, anxious woman towards her daughter. Of course she knew that it was black magic that swayed the dreadful child.
It was as if Helga, out of pure sadistic pleasure, would often sit on the edge of the well when her mother stood on the balcony or walked out in the yard. She would flail her arms and legs around and let herself fall into the narrow, deep hole. There, with her frog nature, she would plop under the water and crawl out again as if she were a cat. Then she would walk into the hall dripping water so that the green leaves that were spread on the floor turned over in the stream of water.
But there was one thing that held little Helga: the twilight. Then she became quiet and a little thoughtful. She would listen and obey. A kind of inner feeling drew her to her mother then, and when the sun sank and the transformation, outer and inner, followed, she sat there still and sad, crumpled together in her frog shape. The body was now much bigger than a normal frog, and just for that reason the more gruesome. She looked like a pitiful dwarf with a frog head and webbing between her fingers. There was something so sad about the eyes that looked out. She had no voice, just a hollow croak like a child who sobs in its dreams. Then the Viking woman would take her in her lap. She forgot the ugly appearance and only looked at the sad eyes and said more than once: “I could almost wish that you were always my mute frog child. You are more awful to look at when the beauty turns outward.”
And she wrote runes against sorcery and sickness and cast them over the miserable child, but there was no improvement.
“You wouldn’t think that she was once so small that she lay in a lily pad,” said stork father. “Now she’s a grown person and looks just like her Egyptian mother whom we never saw again! She didn’t take care of herself, as you and the learned thought she would. I have flown for years now hither and yon across the bog, and there was never a sign of her. Well, I can tell you that in those years when I came up here a few days before you, to repair the nest and mend this and that, I have flown continually across the open water the whole night, as if I were an owl or a bat, but to no use. And we didn’t have any use for the two swan-skins either. The children and I dragged them up here from the land of the Nile, and that was hard enough. It took us three trips. Now they have lain for many years in the bottom of the nest, and if there’s ever a fire here, if the house burns, then they are lost!”
“And our good nest would be gone!” said stork mother. “You think less about that than you do about that feather-suit and your bog princess! You should just go down to her and stay in the mud! You are a poor father for your own children, as I’ve said from the first time I laid eggs. Just so we or the children don’t get an arrow in our wings from that crazy Viking girl! She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She should realize that we have lived here longer than she has. We never forget our duty. We pay our rent every year: a feather, an egg and a young one, as is only right. Do you think I dare to go down there when she’s outside, like I did in the old days, and like I do in Egypt, where I’m like a friend to them—without forgetting who I am—and even peek in the pots and pans? No, I sit up here and am irritated with her, that hussy—and I’m irritated with you too! You should have left her lying in the lily pad. Then she would be gone!”
“You are much more worthy of respect than one would think from your talk,” said stork father. “I know you better than you know yourself.”
And he made a jump, two heavy flaps of his wings, stretched his legs out behind him and flew, sailing away,
