quarry, and the blood flowed that day. The ground was stained with red.’
He points towards the rock over in the east. ‘The blood is still there … Come and see.’
He leads Vendela down into the quarry and across to the vertical rock face. He bends down and points to a reddish layer running through the pale stone, just above the ground.
She looks more closely and sees that the layer is full of dark-red clumps.
‘The place of blood,’ says Henry, straightening up. ‘That’s all that remains of the battle between the trolls and the elves … petrified blood.’
Vendela realizes that the queen of the elves must have led the battle against the trolls, but she doesn’t want to look at the blood any more.
‘Do they still fight, Daddy?’
‘No, I think they’ve called a truce now,’ says Henry. ‘Perhaps they’ve decided that the trolls will stay underground beneath the place of blood, and the elves will stay on the alvar – that way they don’t have to meet.’
Vendela looks up at the top of the quarry and thinks they ought to build a palace up there, with tall windows and walls made of stone. She would like to live there, between the kingdoms of the trolls and the elves.
Then she looks at her father. ‘Why were they enemies, the trolls and the elves? Why did they fight?’
Henry merely shakes his head. ‘Who knows … I suppose they each thought the others were just too different.’
8
Per and Jesper had to travel several kilometres to find a shop where they could buy food on Friday evening. When they finally reached Stenvik, they drove through a village full of dark, closed-up summer cottages.
Per turned on to Ernst’s Road by the quarry, and saw that at least there were lights showing in the windows of the two newly built luxury houses. Each house had a big shiny car parked in front of it. Suddenly he recognized one of them as the Audi that had almost run Jesper over. The damage to the car was still clear to see, but all the blood had been washed away.
So the man and woman he had met in the car park had built a house here in the village. They were his new neighbours.
‘A new car,’ he said. ‘That might not be a bad idea … both for us and for the environment.’
Jesper turned his head. ‘Are you going to get a new car, Dad?’
‘In a while. Not right now.’
His own Saab had worn-out shock absorbers, and it squealed and creaked over the potholes and hollows on the gravel track. But the engine was pretty good, and Per had no intention of being ashamed of his car.
Nor of Ernst’s cottage – even though it resembled nothing so much as an abandoned builders’ hut this evening, with its low roof and small, dark windows. The cottage had stood in the sun and wind by the quarry for almost fifty years and really needed scraping down and painting, but that could wait until next summer.
Per had last visited the island to check on the cottage at the beginning of March, and the alvar had been covered in snow. The snow was almost gone now, but the air still wasn’t much warmer – at least not after the sun had gone down.
‘Do you remember Ernst, our relative?’ he asked Jesper as he pulled up in front of the house. ‘Do you remember coming to visit him here?’
‘Sort of,’ said Jesper.
‘So what do you remember?’
‘He worked with stone … he made sculptures.’
Per nodded and pointed in the darkness towards a little shed to the south of the cottage. ‘They’re still in his workshop … some of them. We can have a look.’
He missed Ernst, perhaps because he had been the complete opposite of Jerry. Ernst had got up early every morning to work with hammers and chisels down in the quarry. He had worked hard – the resounding clang of steel on stone was one of Per’s childhood memories – but when Per and his mother had come to stay, Ernst had always had time for him.
His old doormat bore the word WELCOME.
When they opened the door of the summer cottage they were met by