Then he started coughing. Edvin took a step back, while Alma did the opposite. She leaned towards his face and fluffed up the pillow behind his head.
Afterwards, when Alma explained to him what had happened, he realised that he had been asleep for a very long time. She held up a mirror so that he could see why his face hurt and he saw that he had big wounds on his forehead and across his nose that had not yet healed.
‘You hit an ice floe,’ said Alma. ‘It cut up your face. But you didn’t sink. For that, I have thanked God every day and every night.’
Daniel tried to recall what had happened. He wondered where all his dreams had gone. He couldn’t remember a thing. The last thing he had seen was the black water coming towards him like the open mouth of a beast of prey.
He stopped talking during the months he lay in bed. The hired hand moved out to a room that was hastily prepared in the barn. Alma set up two screens in front of the milkmaids’ beds. Even though she strictly forbade it, they used to peek at him from behind the screens. Daniel didn’t mind. He listened to his heart, which was still in flight. Even though his legs had stopped, his heart kept on running. Now and then Dr Madsen would come to visit. He felt and listened to Daniel’s chest and rubbed salves on his face. Daniel always closed his eyes when he came into the room. He didn’t want to see the doctor’s face because he hadn’t let him stay on the ship.
At the end of each visit Dr Madsen would repeat the same words.
‘The boy has a bad cold. And a cough that I don’t much like.’
The fever made Daniel tired. Most of the time he slept.
What was hardest for those around him was his silence. Even though he didn’t want to make Alma sad, he couldn’t speak. In his dreams, which slowly returned, he had reverted to his old language.
Pastor Hallén came to visit once a week. Daniel knew when he was coming because Alma always cleaned beforehand. Hallén would sit down on a chair a short distance from the bed and ask to be left alone with Daniel. Then he would fold his hands and say a prayer. Through his half-closed eyelids Daniel would try to see if he had a hammer and nails in his pocket, but the fact that he was sick and lying in bed seemed to have saved him from the boards.
Hallén prayed that Daniel would get well and regain his ability to speak. Each time he asked Daniel the same question, whether he wanted to hear about the time when Jesus walked on the water, but Daniel closed his eyes and lay motionless.
He thought he had heard enough. Only Be or Kiko could give him the words he longed for.
The only person he really wanted to see during those months he lay in bed never came. That was Sanna. Once he heard Alma whispering to Edvin that maybe they ought to ask the girl to come, since Daniel obviously liked her. But Edvin was hesitant. Dr Madsen had said she was not suitable company for him. She might make him upset because she was unpredictable.
Daniel slept during the day and lay awake at night when the house was quiet and the milkmaids were snoring behind the screens. Sometimes he would get up, especially when the moon was out, take his skipping rope and silently skip in the kitchen until he used up all his strength.
One night Alma opened the door. She saw him skipping but didn’t say a word, just closed the door again, and he knew that she would never tell anyone, not even Edvin.
Spring was already on the way when Daniel got out of bed one day and moved to the barn. He could no longer stand the snoring of the milkmaids. Alma and Edvin were standing in he yard when he came out of the door early one morning and walked straight over to the barn. He made himself a bed underneath the stairs that led up to the hayloft and lay down. After a while Alma came in. She chased out the curious milkmaids, and for the first time Daniel heard the way she yelled at them.
‘You don’t have to stare as if you’d never seen him before!’ she shouted.
When the milkmaids were gone, she squatted down beside Daniel. She had a bad back and her knees were stiff.
‘You can’t sleep here,’ she said. ‘If you do, you’ll never get rid of your cough.’
Daniel pulled the blanket he had taken with him over his head. He refused to answer. Then he heard Edvin come in.
‘Why does he have to sleep out here?’ said Edvin. ‘And how can we find out if he won’t answer, and we have no idea what he’s thinking? He isn’t lonely. He seems to be surrounded by people I can’t see.’
‘There’s nobody else here but you and me. You’re imagining things.’
‘Can’t you feel it? It’s like a fog around him.’
‘He’s dying of longing,’ said Alma. ‘Bengler has to take him back to the desert.’
‘That man is never coming back,’ Edvin said. ‘We can’t even be sure that he’s still alive.’
Daniel jerked the blanket down from his face.
‘At least he can still hear,’ Edvin said. ‘Just don’t ask me to carry him inside, or he’ll sink his teeth into my throat.’
‘The hired hand can move back into the house and the boy can take his room.’
‘If he lay down here then it’s because this is where he wants to be.’
Daniel turned his head and looked into Edvin’s eyes.
‘I feel like I’m looking at an old man,’ said Edvin. ‘And yet he’s only nine or ten years old.’
‘He’s dying of longing.’
‘But what is it he’s longing for? Parents who are dead? Sand that burns under his feet?’
‘He’s longing for home. Whatever it is, that’s where he longs to be.’
The hired hand moved back to the kitchen but his room remained empty. Daniel continued to sleep underneath the stairs to the hayloft. Alma came and gave him food, and shouted at the milkmaids when they were too inquisitive.
Daniel still slept during the day. At night when he was alone with the animals, he would get up and skip between the stalls. Edvin had hung up two lanterns in the barn, which he lit every evening. Sometimes, when it rained, Daniel would go outside and feel the raindrops striking his face. The fever was gone but he still had the cough. And a strange weariness that never went away no matter how much he slept.
The nights had gradually grown lighter and shorter. Daniel started going up to the hill when it was quiet in the house. He had a feeling that Alma was standing like an invisible shadow behind a window, watching him. But he trusted her, her and Sanna, and maybe even Edvin. All the others had betrayed him. He still hoped that Sanna would come back. He left signs for her on the hill, wrote his name in the dirt, left his shoes there, but whenever he returned there was never any trace of her. One night he ventured down to the house where she lived. He tried to look in through the low windows, find the place where she slept. But the only thing he could hear through the wall was someone snoring, and Daniel knew it was the man who had dragged her off by the hair.
He calculated that three full moons had come and gone by the time he felt able to think again. He would run away one more time. If he didn’t succeed in getting home he would die. If they caught him again he would be tied up and he would never have the strength to get loose.
He thought that death might not be so frightening. Kiko was dead, and Be too, but he could still talk to them. Even though they lay buried in the sand, they could still laugh. He also remembered how Be had given birth to him in the treetop and then changed her arms into wings. He decided that he wasn’t afraid to die, even though he was still just a child. The cough that never left him was a sign that death had already hidden away in some corner of his body. Kiko had once told him about all the caves there were inside a human being. Somewhere in a hole, death was hiding, and one day it would drive the living spirits out of his body. Daniel knew that the cough didn’t come from his lungs; it had the musty smell of a secret grotto deep inside him.