White Hunger (Chance Encounter Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

reluctant to admit them yesterday comes in through the door. He bangs his gloves together angrily, though there is no snow left on them. He gives Marja, Mataleena and Juho long looks, each in turn. His eyes exude a cold contempt. Mataleena dares not look back at him, and Marja, too, stares at the floor. Only Juho meets the man’s stare. The boy’s gaze is vacant; the gale of anger bounces back, powerless. The man is forced to surrender and his eyes travel the length of the endless-seeming planks in the ceiling of the hall. Ella returns from the kitchen and hands Marja two loaves. You can tell straight away they have no bark in them.
    *
    The road has been blocked by snow, into which the horse’s feet sink. Mataleena stretches her hand out over the side of the sledge and scoops some up. It melts in her mouth, as if it were springtime on her tongue. Her tongue is a rough field emerging from under snow, still frozen. Mataleena passes some snow to Juho. Marja, too, gathers a handful.
    ‘If you fall out, I’m not stopping for you,’ the hired hand states over his shoulder.
    Marja stops eating snow, but after a moment Mataleena reaches out over the side again – further than she needs to, defiantly. Marja grabs the hem of the girl’s coat.
    The journey is as long as the hired hand’s stare at the snowdrift that opens out in front of them. Finally they arrive at an inn. No other houses in sight. The hired hand turns round on his box seat, tears Marja’s winter coat open and snatches the loaves Viklund gave her from her breast.
    ‘There are other starving people, for whom no masters buy bread. They’ve got more of a right to these loaves than you.’
    He breaks one of the loaves in two, flings one half into Marja’s lap, jumps down from his seat and goes into the inn.
    When Marja and the children enter, the hired hand is having a chat with the landlord about a cargo of grain. He glances over his shoulder and looks at them as if he had never seen them before.
    ‘Vagabonds, not from these parts.’
    ‘Let them go to the waiting room,’ the landlord says to the hired hand.
     
    When Marja and Mataleena wake up, Viklund’s man has disappeared. Marja carries the sleeping Juho outside.
    ‘If only we had the skis with us, at least,’ Marja laments.
    There are another two sledges in the yard. The night before, a young boy brought a clergyman to the inn in one of them. The boy is still asleep in the waiting room. The inn driver is harnessing a horse to the other sledge.
    ‘Where are you going?’ Marja asks.
    The driver does not respond, does not listen; he merely looks at the copse opposite from beneath the horse’s head. Marja stares at the man’s back for a long time. When she finally gives up staring, the man turns.
    ‘North. I can’t give beggars a lift because of that clergyman. And the landlord wouldn’t approve.’
    Pity and guilt flit over the driver’s face in turn.
    ‘We’re not going north, that’s where we came from,’ Marja replies.
    ‘You should head in the other direction. I’ll go and give that boy a kick, wake him up. He can pick you up further down the road. So the landlord won’t see. You should manage to get out of sight before the boy sets off.’
    Just then the door opens and the vicar comes out into the yard, dressed in a thick fur coat and accompanied bythe landlord. Mataleena feels like laughing: the vicar’s fur hat looks like a fluffy dandelion clock, but brown instead of white. If you blew on it, bits of fluff would fly off and float over the snowdrifts, and only a stump would remain on the clergyman’s head. The fluff would fall outside the inn, and in summer, yellow, flower-headed clergymen would grow all over the yard and sway in the breeze.
    But Mataleena does not dare to blow, and the wind whistling round the corner also fails to snatch the down from the vicar’s hat.
    ‘Well!’ the landlord roars at Marja.
    That is an order to leave. Marja lowers Juho to the ground, takes