The Klipfish Code (13 page)

Icy salt water sprayed over the bow, pelting the back of her slicker. Lars whined. "Marit! We should turn back," he called. "I'm scared."

"If we make it to the village, then the sea monsters will be afraid of us. Right now, they're stirring up the waves. They're trying to scare us away from our mission! Be brave!"

Gasping for breath, lungs and throat on fire from the effort, Marit heaved on the oars, stroke after stroke after stroke. Her shoulders pinched in painful knots. Despite sprays of freezing water, she removed her mittens to get a better grip on the oars' handles. Blisters formed and soon broke in the crook of her thumbs, and she winced
with each splash of salt water. She tried to think beyond her pain. Think of Aunt Ingeborg, she told herself, who might now be in a "reeducation" camp, or crammed with other teachers in a boat, journeying up the coast as a mine finder for the German boats that followed behind. This was one of the rumors she had heard. Think of Henrik, wounded and feverish in the hayloft, just because he was trying to help Norway. Marit clenched against the pain, against the burning of her muscles, and against the Nazi occupation—and rowed all the harder.

Abruptly, the shore rose to steep cliffs. If Marit couldn't hold them on course, the waves would seize their little rowboat and toss it against the rocks the same way seagulls drop clams to crack their shells.

Under a sky of slate drizzle, minutes turned to endless hours. Wave by wave, spray by spray over their bow, they began to take in water. Marit checked over her shoulder, uncertain that her raw and blistered hands would hold out much longer, but ahead—to her relief—two breakwaters beckoned like arms and offered protective harbor. She kept rowing.

As they drew closer, she looked again. A lighthouse towered above a slope dotted with sheep and houses of red, green, and gold and a row of boathouses perched on the shore. Through the mist, two German trucks traversed the road toward the lighthouse.

The rowboat finally rounded the breakwater. The
waves settled. A sea otter slid off a rock, floated on his back, then dived.

"See that?" Lars said.

Marit rowed past docks, where a fisherman, head bowed under his rain hat, unloaded lobster creels from his boat to the docks, but he paid them no attention.

"Lars, you need to wait here and watch the boat. Eat the cheese and bread we brought. Maybe that otter will show up again. Keep watch, Lars, and I'll be back soon. I promise."

She jumped from the boat, tied it up, and left Lars. The compass was tucked safely next to her chest, and beneath it, her heart pounded like a trawler's engine. She passed idle nets and strings of small fish drying beneath boathouse eaves. Under her breath, Marit repeated Henrik's instructions. "'Do you have any klipfish for sale?' When she asks you how many, say, 'a bucketful.'"

With haste, she headed beyond the boathouses to the first house on the edge of the village—a white house trimmed green. It was closest to the harbor, and farthest from the lighthouse that towered above the fishing village. It had to be the one.

Darting across the muddy road, Marit turned into the yard. With its stone foundation and slate-covered roof, the house was ordinary. Nothing about it hinted at Resistance activity. Had she remembered the instructions?

She swallowed hard, marched up to the door, and knocked.

Footsteps pattered inside, then paused. Finally, the door edged open.

Through the crack, a man with an unshaven face and the expression of a tombstone stared at her. One of his thick arms hung in a sling. If he was trying to discourage visitors, his manner was definitely working.

"I-I thought a woman lived here. I'm sorry." She turned to leave.

"What do you want?" he demanded.

Halfway down the steps, Marit turned. Could she trust this man? It was the right house, she was sure of it. But wasn't she to meet with a woman? Had something gone wrong? "Is Astrid here?" she finally asked.

The man didn't answer for some time. Finally, his voice softened.

"
Ja.
Do you have a message for her?"

Was she to wait for a woman to appear or carry on with her part? But the man knew the name, and maybe that was enough. She plowed ahead. "Does she have any cod—" She caught herself. "I mean, klipfish for sale?"

"I see. And what will you carry it in?"

"Oh, no! Wait, I can go back to my rowboat. I have a bailing bucket."

His face showed no expression as he waited for something more.

"I need a bucketful," she stated firmly.

He nodded. "And in return for klipfish?"

Her fingers trembled as she reached inside the top of her sweater and found the compass and its chain. She removed it from around her neck and handed it to the man.

He glanced at its cover. "
Ja,
" he said. "This will do.
Tusen takk,
" he added, then turned away and closed the door behind him.

Marit stood there, alone on the doorstep, bewildered. Was there more she was expected to do? Had she completed her part of a code? Should she have something in exchange to take back to Henrik—klipfish or something to prove that she'd done as he'd asked? But the door remained closed.

The man's message to her became clear:
Leave. And leave quickly.

A truck rolled past Marit, splattering her with puddles of freezing mud. In the back of the truck, German soldiers huddled under a canvas top, heads down, shoulders hunched in the cold. Beneath her raincoat, she shook violently. Eyes lowered, she kicked at a clump of melting ice that lingered at the edge of the road and waited till the truck bumped away before she moved.

In the rain, she sprinted across the road and along the breakwater, hoping Lars had stayed put as she'd asked.

"I saw the otter again," he said, his voice wobbly, his face ashen. Was he chilled to the bone?

"Good," she replied. She fumbled with the lines, and finally untied them. Then she jumped in and took up the
oars. The faster she could get them back to the farmhouse, the better.

The wind had kicked up small whitecaps in the sheltered harbor. It would be much easier returning with the wind at their backs on this side of the island. Her shoulders tensed as she eased past a couple of fishing trawlers. Two fishermen watched her with curiosity. She didn't have klipfish to show them. And no good excuse for being there, either. She hadn't thought that far ahead.

Pulling against the oars, she nudged the bow past the breakwater walls and into open water. As soon as they passed the sheltering cement arms, a wave slammed up against their stern and pushed them forward. They rode swiftly up the crest of a frothy wave, slipped down to its base, then rushed ahead to the top of the next swell.

Wind hissed in Marit's ears and stung her face. Her vision blurred with sheets of raindrops and salt water. Still, with her oars in the water, she held the rowboat steady and kept its bow pointed straight into the waves. A slight twist or turn, left or right, could tempt a wave to reach out and swamp them. She couldn't risk that. She also couldn't leave guiding the boat to Lars's judgment, so she kept glancing over her shoulder to make sure the bow was cutting straight through the powerful waves. In no time at all, they approached the farthest edge of Godøy. Somehow, she'd have to cut quickly to the island's eastern point, but the waves had grown wild.

"I'm getting sick," Lars moaned above the wind. "I can't stand going up and down!"

"Put your head between your knees," she offered, without turning to look at him. "Maybe that will help."

"Nooo," he wailed. "That makes it worse."

"Try looking out and breathing lots of fresh air! If you get sick, use this." She skipped a beat with her oars, grabbed the metal pail at her feet, and tossed it over her shoulder to Lars behind her at the bow. Rowing again, she shouted, "Don't lean over the side! I don't want to lose you!"

Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, Marit saw him. He was on his feet, wobbling, and he tottered toward the edge of the boat.

"Lars, no! Sit down!"

She let go of the oars, jumped forward, and pulled Lars back to his seat. He held the bucket between his knees. Head down, he retched.

Marit slid back on her seat and glanced around. One moment, that's all it took. They'd gone too far past the calmer lee of the island. They'd lost their only chance to cut south. Instead of heading home, they had been pushed by large, deep rollers northeastward—straight for Giske Island.

"
Nei! Nei! Nei!
" Marit protested against the power of the wind and current. She had no choice but to row with the cresting waves, to do what she could to prevent them
from turning sideways. They were in open water, rushing headlong to the nearest island. She let the waves push them toward Giske. When the winds died down, she'd row them back to Godøy.

Lars finished using the bucket and looked around. "Marit!" he screamed, his eyes wide with fear. "Floating mines, remember?! What are you doing out this far?"

"This wasn't planned!" she shouted. "I didn't
try
to get us out here. If you hadn't gotten sick—" And then she stopped herself. That wasn't fair. He didn't need her yelling. It wasn't his fault—or hers—that they were adrift.

"I'm sorry," she said, looking over her shoulder to Lars. "I'm sorry you don't feel well. Are you better?"

He nodded, though his skin matched the greenish gray of the sky.

"Keep a lookout for anything floating that could be a mine."

She expected him to whine, but he didn't. He perched on the bow seat like a carved figurehead on a Viking ship's prow. They drifted on.

"There, on the right!" he said, and Marit veered the oars and shifted the boat to the left slightly. "No it's not—it's a killer whale!"

Marit shot a glance over her shoulder. "Oh, my!"

The head of a black and white killer whale floated several meters from their boat, its huge eye watching them.
It dived and then came arcing up out of the water before going under again, this time sinking like a submarine. They'd seen killer whales in the fjords before, but never so close up.

"Marit—right! Go right!"

"Whose right?" Uncertain, she pulled to her right and Lars screamed.

"No, not that way!"

She pulled hard on her left oar.

In the next second, on her left, a bobbing round metal object paralleled them, floating beyond the tip of Marit's oar.

A mine.

She eased both oars out of the water and brought them in closer to the gunwales. Bestefar had said that if you so much as brushed into a mine, it could explode. She froze, waiting as the distance grew between the floating mine and their little boat, centimeter by slow centimeter.

When they were clear of the mine, Marit rowed again, leaving it farther and farther in their wake. She felt sick about what might have happened. She glanced over her shoulder to Lars, perched on the bow. "You saved us," she called, her voice tremulous. "
Takk.
"

He nodded but didn't turn from his duty.

Waves pushed them closer toward Giske Island. Ahead, a church steeple pierced the heavy sky. "See that church?" She tried to sound calmer than she felt.

Ja.

"Mama and Papa told me it's a few hundred years old, but the smaller chapel is even older. It was built by a powerful Viking family a thousand years ago."

"Really?"

"I'd swear on the Bible." This time, she was telling the truth. She tried to imagine people living on these remote islands so many years ago. Somehow thinking about them gave her hope. The Nazis seemed to have taken over her whole world, but even they couldn't stay in power forever.

Sooner than expected, their boat slammed forward, jolting them off their seats. She fell backward onto the wet floor of the boat, banging her shoulder. When she scrambled to her feet to look around, Lars had disappeared.

Marit scrambled over the bow of the rowboat. On the sandy shore, face down, lay her brother.

"Lars! Are you all right?"

He sat up slowly and brushed wet sand off his skinned nose. His lower lip quivered. "I'm cold."

"Then we'll find someplace to get warm." The white beach merged with gray pastures. Clusters of sheep stared at them, round and fat in their dirty white coats. "Let's try the church."

They pulled the rowboat onto the sandy shore. There
was nowhere to tie it, so they left it there. Then they ran across the pasture to the red-roofed stone church beyond. Unlike Norway's many octagonal churches, this one was rectangular, with a two-sided pitched roof; it was surrounded by a thick stone fence, which ended in two stone pillars. They passed through, hand in hand.

Ahead, a red and black Nazi flag hung above the door. Marit stopped, reluctant to move any closer.

But they needed shelter. Gusts of wind turned to torrents of rain. Her teeth chattered with cold. Lars's skin had gone from greenish gray to gray-blue. He needed to get out of the foul weather, to be dry and warm. Maybe they'd be lucky. Maybe the church was empty. They would stop for a short time, then hope for the winds to change so they could row back.

"Come on." She darted to the heavy wooden door, knocked, waited a full ten seconds ... and then stepped in. Straight, ornately carved pews waited beneath the carved pulpit, off to the left.

Marit motioned to Lars to sit down beside her in the back of the church. She pulled off her slicker and hung it on the back of the pew. It was cold in the church, but warm compared to the wet, howling winds beyond its walls.

Her arms were heavy anchors. If she curled up in a ball and let her clothes dry out, and slept ... just a short
nap ... She closed her eyes. She'd never felt so tired before. Rain pounded on the roof, pelted the paned windows, and created a sense of coziness, even though the building was cool.

Lars stirred in the pew beside her, but she gave in to exhaustion and slept.

Marit awoke to the deep voices of men. She was in a church, she remembered quickly, but why?