were father and son, the father thin with sunken eyes, the son tall with a stutter. The father had a gold ring in one ear – perhaps he had been a seafarer who believed that the ring would save him from drowning, or at least pay for his funeral. Sara Fredrika had seen them before. They would call in now and then every winter, asking for nothing more than to know if she had seen any seabirds. They had decoys in baskets which they carried on their backs, and Tobiasson-Svartman noticed that the father smelled of strong drink.
They eyed him curiously and made no attempt to conceal the fact that they were wondering what on earth a naval officer was doing out here on the skerry. He told them about his depth-sounding mission in the late autumn, and that he was now checking a number of measurements.
'I remember people sounding the depths here when I was a young lad,' said the father, whose name was Helge Wallén. 'It must have been about 1869 or 1870. There were boats anchored at Barösund, measuring. My dad sold them groceries, eggs, milk, he even slaughtered a pig cos they paid him well. Us kids were half starved, but Dad knew what he was doing. He was able to buy our farm the year after, with all the dosh he raked in. They were here for ages, measuring. Can there really be so much going on down there that you have to go through it all again?'
'It's because of the boats,' Tobiasson-Svartman said. 'Bigger ships, bigger draughts, the need for wider navigable channels'
They were standing outside the cottage. The son had stammered when he introduced himself as Olle.
'So you're still here, then?' the father said to Sara Fredrika.
'I'm still here.'
'We saw that you weren't on your own as we were passing Händelsöarna. I says to Olle, Sara Fredrika's got herself a husband.'
'I'm still here,' Sara Fredrika said, 'but my husband is still my husband, even if he's lying at the bottom of the sea out here.'
They stood a while outside the cottage. The father was chewing over Sara Fredrika's answer. Then he spat and lifted his bags.
'We'd best be off,' he said. 'Have you seen any birds?'
'At the edge of the ice. But further south, on the way to Häradskär. That's the place to put your decoys.'
The men wandered off towards the inlet. Tobiasson-Svartman and Sara Fredrika clambered up a high rock and watched them leave, saw how they turned southwards when they reached the edge of the ice.
'I'm related to them somehow or other,' she said. 'I can't quite work out how. But the link is there somewhere in the past.'
'I thought everybody in the skerries was related to everybody else?'
'We get quite a few incomers,' she said. 'The types who like to hide away, the ones that aren't tempted by the towns. I was in Norrköping once. I can't have been more than sixteen. My uncle was going to sell a couple of cows and he wanted me with him. The town has some kind of smell that made it hard for me to breathe.'
'But even so, you want me to take you away from here?'
'I reckon you can learn. Like swimming. Or rowing. You can learn how to breathe even in a town.'
'I'll take you away from here,' he said. 'But not now. First I have to help this man.'
She looked at him doubtfully.
'Do you really mean what you say?'
'I always mean what I say.'
Sara Fredrika went back to the cottage. He watched her jumping from rock to rock, as if she knew them, every one.
He waited until she had gone inside. Then he fetched the deserter, who was shivering in his crevice.
CHAPTER 101
At some point he was woken by a movement during the night.
The man lying by his side got quietly to his knees. The embers in the hearth had almost gone out, and the chill had already started to take over the room. He heard the man groping his way to the bunk, a few faint whispers, then silence, only their breathing.
He stayed awake until the man made his way quietly back to his place on the floor. His jealousy started rising from out of the depths and reached the point where he knew it was ready to burst to the surface.
CHAPTER 102
There was a change in the weather. It was warmer during the day and the snow started to melt, but the nights were still cold. Every morning