The Pesta in the Boreal Wood

The Northman sat on his stump with a wood-axe and whetstone in hand while the winds of the Yule month bit at his skin. He could sense it in the air; an ice storm of gross proportions, not more than a few days away. His wife could sense it too for she, a solid woman with keen eyes and keener sensibility, had warned her husband of the threat days prior. They had since barricaded their windows with oaken timbers and nails of iron, in preparation for the winter tempest. 

Within the week, the gale of Niflheim had come upon them. The blaze in their hearth was strong and fended off the piercing gelidity. Yet, while their fire was warm and their furs soft, the incessant din of the weather outside unwound their minds. 

On the squall’s fifth day, there came a hurried succession of knocks at their door. “An impossibility!” thought the Northman, standing up from his nest of hide and linen to head over toward the noise. He peered through a small crack in the wood, but saw nothing other than the blizzard. Abruptly, the door shuddered with another four heavy thuds. 

With numbed fingers, the Northman unlatched the wrought-iron fastener and swung the door wide. Before him, wrapped in a sanguine cloak, was the silhouette of an old woman with a broom and a rake strapped to her back. Crooked was her spine, gnarled were her legs, and twisted were her arms. “I am but an old woman, weary from her travels and frozen from this boreal wood. Would you be so merciful as to welcome this elden soul into your home so that I may live another day?” the old woman pleaded to the Northman.

“I should never, on my honor, refuse the cries of the misfortunate. Come in. Come in I say! Find solace in my hall and rest in my bed. I shall bring you a warm meal and an even warmer drink”. 

And so, the old woman stepped inside the Northman’s home, disrobed her crimson mantle, and shut the door behind her with a leaden thud.

“If I may inquire, how comes it that a woman in your stage of life finds herself caught in a blizzard that rivals that of the Fimbulvetr?” asked the curious Northman, unsure of how an old woman had already survived five days of ceaseless windstorm. The old woman thought on this, and replied just as the Northman’s wife handed her some barley porridge and a tankard of water.

“I have travelled here on a pilgrimage of my own design, and have braved many such obstacles due to the concern of families not unlike your own. The people from where I hail call me Pesta, so you may call me such.” 

In the following days, the winter storm only grew stronger, and Pesta took to helping around the home. Sweeping was her chore. All day, Pesta wielded her fine-bristled stick and swept up all the dust and dirt and dross in the Northman’s hall. The Northman’s wife was a heedful woman, and suspicious of those she did not know. “My love,” she would often say to her husband in a hushed voice. “I trust not that Pesta! She sweeps all day and eats our food and drinks our drink!”

“My love,” the Northman would respond. “She is but an old woman, in the twilight of her life, and still she chooses to help us! You are still strong and able and can work hard tasks. Her limited thew allows her to sweep, and sweep she will!”

At first the source of the choking sickness in the household was blamed on the ceaseless sweeping–the ailment loose and circulating in the musty cottage air. Yet, in the coming days, the Northman’s wife became bedridden. Boils and sores sprouted on her flesh with a weakness unusual for her that accompanied pain in her abdomen. A fever that seemed to radiate heat into the frigid cabin bedeviled that poor woman. 

The Northman, in fear of his wife’s demise, bellowed at Pesta. “You sweep and you sweep while my wife lays and dies! Do you know not of soothing salves that may ease her anguish o’ Pesta? Do you know not the healing words of Eir that may quell her cries? O’ Pesta why do you lead us to an early grave?” Still, Pesta swept, unabated.

It was not until the Northman himself lay beside his wife with identical blackened boils and a fever akin to the flames of Muspelheim that Pesta ceased her sweeping and spoke.

“You lay beside your loving wife in your marriage bed in a clean house shielded from the frozen tempest out-of-doors. A pleasant fire keeps you warm and your fur blankets keep you comfortable. What more could good folk ask for before they die?”

“Why do you do this?” pleaded the Northman fervently. “We opened our home to you; gave you food and drink and a place to stay shielded from the icewind in this boreal wood!” 

“And for that I thank you, for I would surely have perished had you not let me in. I have come to learn, in my many years on Midgard, that there is rarely a good deed that goes unpunished.”

The Northman, faint and pale, asked, “If your intent was to kill us all along, why bother cleaning our home? Why bother with any of this madness?”

At this, Pesta looked intently at the Northman and then at her broom and then at her rake. 

“I am given only two options in life. I can rake and I can sweep and with both someone loses their life. When I rake, the plague I bear can slip through the cracks and spare scarcely a life, but a life nonetheless. When I sweep, my illness escapes no man, woman, or child. All are swept away. Alas, the blizzard that hinders us alike keeps me from raking, so I am left with the latter.”

With that, Pesta gathered her things; the sanguine cloak cast over her feeble shoulders with the rake and the broom fastened to it by a small leather sheath. She hobbled over to the heavy door, opened it, and gently closed it shut behind her. 

The days that followed were much like the days that had come before it. Frigid and fraught with unending snow. It was not until many moons after Pesta had left the Northman’s home that a silhouette was visible through the hailstorm. A fur trapper had lost his way in the blizzard days prior while searching for food. He believed the end was upon him; ice pierced his skin leaving gaping wounds in his flesh as he trudged along through the violent white haze. Long had he prayed for a sign from the Gods to lead him to shelter from the glacial galewinds. It was now visible through the snowfield; a home of broad timber with oaken barricades secured with nails of wrought-iron. 

The fur trapper ascended the wooden steps to the front door and found it to be unlocked. Pushing his way inside, he found a cozy home; swept clean with barrels of food and drink, and old bones, frozen in time, in their bed.