Kristin Lavransdatter Read online

  But he could not console her. Then he took his daughter in his arms and lifted her onto his lap so he was holding her as he had when she was small. Her arms were clasped around his neck, and her face was pressed to his shoulder.

  “There is one thing I have never told another mother’s child except for my priest, but now I’ll tell it to you. During the time of my youth—back home at Skog and in the early years when I was one of the king’s retainers—I thought of entering a monastery as soon as I was old enough, although I hadn’t made any kind of promise, not even in my own heart, and many things pulled me in the opposite direction. But whenever I was out fishing on Botn Fjord and heard the bells ringing from the brothers’ cloister on Hovedø, then I would think that I was drawn most strongly there.

  “When I was sixteen winters old, Father had a coat of mail made for me from Spanish steel plates covered in silver. Rikard, the Englishman in Oslo, made it. And I was given my sword—the one I’ve always used—and the armor for my horse. It wasn’t as peaceful back then as it was during your childhood; we were at war with the Danes, so I knew I would soon have use for my splendid weapons. And I didn’t want to lay them aside. I consoled myself with the thought that my father wouldn’t want his eldest son to become a monk, and I had no wish to defy my parents.

  “But I chose this world myself, and whenever things went against me, I tried to tell myself that it would be unmanly to complain about the fate I had chosen. For I’ve realized more and more with each year that I’ve lived: There is no worthier work for the person who has been graced with the ability to see even a small part of God’s mercy than to serve Him and to keep vigil and to pray for those people whose sight is still clouded by the shadow of worldly matters. And yet I must tell you, my Kristin, that it would be hard for me to sacrifice, for the sake of God, that life which I have lived on my estates, with its care of temporal things and its worldly joys, with your mother at my side and with all of you children. So a man must learn to accept, when he produces offspring from his own body, that his heart will burn if he loses them or if the world goes against them. God, who gave them souls, is the one who owns them—not I.”

  Sobs shook Kristin’s body; her father began rocking her in his arms as if she were a small child.

  “There were many things I didn’t understand when I was young. Father was fond of my brother Aasmund too, but not in the same way as he loved me. It was because of my mother, you see—he never forgot her, but he married Inga because that was what his father wanted. Now I wish I could still go to my stepmother here on earth and beg her to forgive me for not respecting her goodness.”

  “But you’ve often said, Father, that your stepmother never did much for you, either good or bad,” said Kristin in between sobs.

  “Yes, God help me, I didn’t know any better. Now it seems to me a great thing that she didn’t hate me and never spoke an unkind word to me. How would you like it, Kristin, to see your stepson favored above your own son, constantly and in everything?”

  Kristin was somewhat calmer now. She lay with her face turned so that she could look out at the mountain meadow. It grew dark from an enormous gray-blue cloud passing in front of the sun; several yellow rays pierced through, and the water of the creek glinted sharply.

  Then she broke into tears again.

  “Oh, no—Father, my father. Will I never see you again in this life?”

  “May God protect you, Kristin, my child, so that we might meet again on that day, all of us who were friends in this life . . . and every human soul. Christ and the Virgin Mary and Saint Olav and Saint Thomas will keep you safe all your days.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her on the lips. “May God have mercy on you. May God grant you light in the light of this world and in the great light beyond.”

  Several hours later, as Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn rode away from Hjerdkinn, his daughter walked alongside his horse. His servant was already a good distance ahead, but Lavrans continued on slowly, step by step. It hurt him to see her tear-stained and despairing face. This was also the way she had sat the whole time inside the guesthouse, as he ate and talked with her children, bantering with them and taking them onto his lap, one after the other.

  Lavrans said softly, “Do not grieve any more for whatever you might regret toward me, Kristin. But remember it when your children are grown and you don’t think they behave toward you or their father in a way you consider reasonable. And remember too what I told you about my youth. You’re loyal in your love for them, that I know, but you’re most stubborn when you love most, and there is obstinacy in those boys of yours—that much I’ve seen,” he said with a little smile.

  At last Lavrans said that she had to turn around and go back. “I don’t want you to walk alone any farther away from the buildings.” They had reached a hollow between small hills, with birch trees at the bottom and heaps of stones on the slopes.

  Kristin threw herself against her father’s foot in the stirrup. She ran her fingers over his clothing and his hand and his saddle, and along the neck and flank of his horse; she pressed her head here and there, weeping and uttering such deep, pitiful moans that her father thought his heart would break to see her in such terrible sorrow.

  He jumped down from his horse and took his daughter in his arms, holding her tight for the last time. Again and again he made the sign of the cross over her and gave her into the care of God and the saints. Finally he said that now she would have to let him go.

  And so they parted. But after he had gone some distance, Kristin saw that her father reined in his horse, and she realized that he was weeping as he rode away from her.

  She ran into the birch grove, raced through it, and began scrambling up the lichen-gold scree on the nearest hillside. But it was rocky and difficult to climb, and the little hill was higher than she thought. At last she reached the top, but by that time he had disappeared among the hills. She lay down on the moss and bearberries growing on the ridge, and there she stayed, sobbing, with her face buried in her arms.

  Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn arrived home at Jørundgaard late in the evening. A feeling of warmth passed through him when he saw that someone was still awake in the hearth room—there was a faint flicker of firelight behind the tiny glass window facing the gallery. It was in this building that he always felt most at home.

  Ragnfrid was alone inside, sitting at the table with clothes to be mended in front of her. A tallow candle in a brass candlestick stood nearby. She got up at once, greeted him, put more wood on the hearth, and then went to get food and drink. No, she had sent the maids off to bed long ago; they had had a hard day, but now enough barley bread had been baked to last until Christmas. Paal and Gunstein had gone off into the mountains to gather moss. While they were talking about moss . . . Would Lavrans like to have for his winter surcoat the cloth that was dyed with moss or the one that was heather green? Orm of Moar had come to Jørundgaard that morning, wanting to buy some leather rope. She had taken the ropes hanging in the front of the shed and said he could have them as a gift. Yes, Orm’s daughter was a little better now; the injury to her leg had knit together nicely.

  Lavrans answered her questions and nodded while he and his servant ate and drank. But he was quickly done with eating. He stood up, wiped his knife on the back of his thigh, and picked up a spool of thread that lay at Ragnfrid’s place. The thread had been wound around a stick with a bird carved into both ends—one of them had a slightly broken tail. Lavrans smoothed out the rough part and whittled it down so the bird had a stump of a tail. Once, long ago, he had made many of these thread spools for his wife.

  “Are you going to mend them yourself?” he asked, looking down at her sewing. It was a pair of his leather hose; Ragnfrid was patching the inner side of the thighs, where they were worn from the saddle. “That’s hard work for your fingers, Ragnfrid.”

  “Hmm.” His wife placed the pieces of the leather edge to edge and poked holes in them with an awl.

  The servant bade them good night and
left. The husband and wife were alone. Lavrans stood near the hearth, warming himself, with one foot up on the edge and his hand on the smoke-vent pole. Ragnfrid glanced over at him. Then she noticed that he wasn’t wearing the little ring with the rubies—his mother’s bridal ring. He saw that she had noticed.

  “Yes, I gave it to Kristin,” he said. “I always meant it to be hers, and I thought she might as well have it now.”

  Then one of them said to the other that they ought to go to bed. But Lavrans stayed where he was, and Ragnfrid sat and sewed. They exchanged a few words about Kristin’s journey, about the work that had to be done on the farm, about Ramborg and about Simon. Then they mentioned again that they should probably go to bed, but neither of them moved.

  Finally Lavrans took off the gold ring with the blue-and-white stone from his right hand and went over to his wife. Shy and embarrassed, he took her hand and put on the ring; he had to try several times before he found a finger it would fit. He put it on her middle finger, in front of her wedding ring.

  “I want you to have this now,” he said in a low voice, without looking at her.

  Ragnfrid sat motionless, her cheeks blood red.

  “Why are you doing this?” she whispered at last. “Do you think I begrudge our daughter her ring?”

  Lavrans shook his head and gave a little smile. “I think you know why I’m doing this.”

  “You’ve said in the past that you wanted to have this ring in the grave with you,” she said in the same tone of voice. “And no one but you was to wear it.”

  “And that’s why you must never take it off, Ragnfrid. Promise me that. After you, I want no one else to wear it.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she repeated, holding her breath.

  Her husband looked down into her face.

  “This spring it was thirty-four years ago that we were married. I was an under-aged boy; during all of my manhood you have been at my side, whenever I suffered grief and whenever things went well. May God help me, I had such little understanding of how many troubles you had to bear in our life together. But now it seems to me that all of my days I felt it was good that you were here.

  I don’t know whether you believed that I had more love for Kristin than for you. It’s true that she was my greatest joy, and she caused me the greatest sorrow. But you were mother to them all. Now I think leaving you behind will hurt me the most, when I go.

  “And that’s why you must never give my ring to anyone else—not even to one of our daughters; tell them they must not take it from you.

  “Perhaps you may think, wife, that you’ve had more sorrow than joy with me; things did go wrong for us in some ways. And yet I think we have been faithful friends. And this is what I have thought: that afterwards we will meet again in such a manner that all the wrongs will no longer separate us; and the friendship that we had, God will build even stronger.”

  Ragnfrid lifted her pale, furrowed face. Her big, sunken eyes burned as she looked up at her husband. He was still holding her hand; she looked at it, lying in his, slightly raised. The three rings gleamed next to each other: on the bottom her betrothal ring, next her wedding ring, and on top his ring.

  It seemed so strange to her. She remembered when he put the first one on her finger; they were standing in front of the smoke-vent pole in the hall back home at Sundbu, their fathers with them. He was pink and white, his cheeks were round, hardly more than a child—a little bashful as he took a step forward from Sir Bjørgulf’s side.

  The second ring he had put on her finger in front of the church door in Gerdarud, in the name of the Trinity, under the hand of the priest.

  With this last ring, she felt as if he were marrying her again. Now that she would soon sit beside his lifeless body, he wanted her to know that with this ring he was committing to her the strong and vital force that had lived in this dust and ashes.

  Her heart felt as if it were breaking in her breast, bleeding and bleeding, young and fierce. From grief over the warm and ardent love which she had lost and still secretly mourned; from anguished joy over the pale, luminous love which drew her to the farthest boundaries of life on this earth. Through the great darkness that would come, she saw the gleam of another, gentler sun, and she sensed the fragrance of the herbs in the garden at world’s end.

  Lavrans set his wife’s hand back in her lap and sat down on the bench a short distance away, with his back against the table and one arm resting along the top. He did not look at her, but stared into the hearth fire.

  And yet her voice was quiet and calm when she once again spoke.

  “I did not know, my husband, that you had such affection for me.”

  “I do,” he replied, his voice equally calm.

  They sat in silence for a while. Ragnfrid moved her sewing from her lap onto the bench beside her. After a time she said softly, “What I told you that night—have you forgotten that?”

  “I doubt that any man on this earth could forget such words. And it’s true that I myself have felt that things were no better between us after I heard them. But God knows, Ragnfrid, I tried so hard to conceal from you that I gave that matter so much thought.”

  “I didn’t realize you thought so much about it.”

  He turned toward her abruptly and stared at his wife.

  Then Ragnfrid said, “I am to blame that things grew worse between us, Lavrans. I thought that if you could be toward me exactly the same as before that night—then you must have cared even less for me than I thought. If you had been a stern husband toward me afterwards, if you had struck me even once when you were drunk—then I would have been better able to bear my sorrow and my remorse. But when you took it so lightly . . .”

  “Did you think I took it lightly?”

  The faint quaver in his voice made her wild with longing. She wanted to bury herself inside him, down in the depths of the emotions that could make his voice ripple with tension and strain.

  She exclaimed in fury, “If only you had taken me in your arms even once, not because I was the lawful, Christian wife they had placed at your side, but as the wife you had yearned for and fought to win. Then you couldn’t have behaved toward me as if those words had not been said.”

  Lavrans thought about what she had said. “No . . . then . . . I don’t think I could have. No.”

  “If you had been as fond of your betrothed as Simon was of our Kristin . . .”

  Lavrans didn’t reply. After a moment, as if against his will, he said softly and fearfully, “Why did you mention Simon?”

  “I suppose because I couldn’t compare you to that other man,” Ragnfrid said, confused and frightened herself although she tried to smile. “You and Erlend are too unlike each other.”

  Lavrans stood up, took a few steps, feeling uneasy. Then he said in an even quieter voice, “God will not forsake Simon.”

  “Have you never thought that God had forsaken you?” asked his wife.

  “No.”

  “What did you think that night as we sat in the barn, when you found out at the very same moment that Kristin and I—the two people you held dearest and loved the most faithfully—we had both betrayed you as much as we possibly could?”

  “I don’t think I thought much about it,” replied her husband.

  “But later on,” continued his wife, “when you kept thinking about it, as you say you did . . .”

  Lavrans turned away from her. She saw a blush flood his sunburned neck.

  “I thought about all the times I had betrayed Christ,” he said in a low voice.

  Ragnfrid stood up, hesitating a moment before she dared go over and place her hands on her husband’s shoulders. When he put his arms around her, she pressed her forehead against his chest. He could feel her crying. Lavrans pulled her closer and rested his face against her hair.

  “Now, Ragnfrid, we will go to bed,” he said after a moment.

  Together they walked over to the crucifix, knelt, and made the sign of the cross. Lavrans said the evening
prayers, speaking the language of the Church in a low, clear voice, and his wife repeated the words after him.

  Then they undressed. Ragnfrid lay down on the inner side of the bed; the headboard was now much lower because lately her husband had been plagued with dizziness. Lavrans shoved the bolt on the door closed, scraped ashes over the fire in the hearth, blew out the candle, and climbed in beside her. In the darkness they lay with their arms touching each other. After a moment they laced their fingers together.

  Ragnfrid Ivarsdatter thought it seemed like a new wedding night, and a strange one. Happiness and sorrow flowed into each other, carrying her along on waves so powerful that she felt her soul beginning to loosen its roots in her body. Now the hand of death had touched her too—for the first time.

  This was how it had to end—when it had begun as it did. She remembered the first time she saw her betrothed. At that time Lavrans was pleased with her—a little shy, but willing enough to have affection for his bride. Even the fact that the boy was so radiantly handsome had irritated her. His hair hung so thick and glossy and fair around his pink-and-white, downy face. Her heart burned with anguish at the thought of another man, who was not handsome nor young nor gentle like milk and blood; she was dying with longing to sink into his embrace and drive her knife into his throat. And the first time her betrothed tried to caress her . . . They were sitting together on the steps of a loft back home, and he reached out to take one of her braids. She leaped to her feet, turned her back on him, white with anger, and left.

  Oh, she remembered that nighttime journey, when she rode with Trond and Tordis through Jerndal to Dovre, to the woman who was skilled in sorcery. She had fallen to her knees, pulling off rings and bracelets and putting them on the floor in front of Fru Aashild; in vain she had begged for a remedy so her bridegroom might not have his will with her. She remembered the long journey with her father and kinsmen and bridesmaids and the entourage from home, down through the valley, out across the flat countryside, to the wedding at Skog. And she remembered the first night—and all the nights afterwards—when she received the clumsy caresses of the newly married boy and acted cold as stone, never concealing how little they pleased her.