Kristin Lavransdatter Read online

  Kristin was on her knees, huddled next to the hearth. She scraped away the hot ashes with her bare hands and blew on the embers. When she had lit a torch and lifted it up with trembling hands, she saw Erlend in the darkness above. He leaped down from the loft, not bothering with the ladder, holding his drawn sword in his hand, and then dashed out the main door.

  The boys were peering out from the dark on all sides of the room. Kristin went over to the enclosed bed on the north wall where the three eldest slept and told them to lie down and shut the door. Ivar and Skule were sitting on the bench, blinking at the light, frightened and bewildered. She told them to climb up into her bed, and then she shut them inside too. Then she lit a candle and went out into the courtyard.

  It was raining. For a moment, as the light of her candle was reflected in the glistening, ice-covered ground, she saw a crowd standing outside the door to the next building: the servants’ hall where Erlend’s men slept. Then the flame of her candle was blown out, and for a moment the night was pitch-dark, but then a lantern emerged from the servants’ hall, and Ulf Haldorssøn was carrying it.

  He bent down over a dark body curled up on the wet patches of ice. Kristin knelt down and touched the man. It was young Haakon of Gimsar, and he was either senseless or dead. Her hands were at once covered with blood. With Ulf’s help she straightened out his body and turned him over. The blood was gushing out of his right arm, where his hand had been lopped off.

  Involuntarily Kristin glanced at the window hatch of Margret’s chamber as it slammed shut in the wind. She couldn’t discern any face up there, but it was quite dark.

  As she knelt in the rain puddles, clamping her hand as tight as she could around Haakon’s wrist to stop the spurting blood, she was aware of Erlend’s men standing half-dressed all around her. Then she noticed Erlend’s gray, contorted face. With a corner of his tunic he wiped off his bloody sword. He was naked underneath and his feet were bare.

  “One of you . . . find me something to bind this with. And you, Bjørn, go and wake up Sira Eiliv. We’ll carry him over to the parsonage.” She took the leather strap that they gave her and wrapped it around the stump of the man’s arm.

  Suddenly Erlend said, his voice harsh and wild, “Nobody touch him! Let the man lie where he fell!”

  “You must realize, husband, we can’t do that,” said Kristin calmly, although her heart was pounding so loud that she thought she would suffocate.

  Erlend rammed the tip of his sword hard against the ground.

  “Yes—she’s not your flesh and blood—you’ve made that quite clear to me every single day, for all these years.”

  Kristin stood up and whispered quietly to him, “And yet for her sake I want this to be concealed—if it can be done. You men . . .” she turned to the servants who were standing around them. “If you’re loyal to your master, you won’t speak of this until he has told you how this quarrel with Haakon arose.”

  All the men agreed. One of them dared step forward and explained: They had been awakened by the sound of a woman screaming, as if she were being taken by force. And then someone ran along their roof, but he must have slipped on the icy surface. They heard a scrambling noise and then a thud on the ground. But Kristin told the man to be silent. At that moment Sira Eiliv came running.

  When Erlend turned on his heel and went inside, his wife ran after him and tried to force her way past him. When he headed for the ladder to the loft, she sprang in front of him and grabbed him by the arm.

  “Erlend—what will you do to the child?” she gasped, looking up into his wild, gray face.

  Without replying, he tried to fling her aside, but she held on tight.

  “Wait, Erlend, wait—your child! You don’t know . . . The man was fully clothed,” she cried urgently.

  He gave a loud wail before he answered. She turned as pale as a corpse with horror—his words were so raw and his voice unrecognizable with desperate anguish.

  Then she wrestled mutely with the raging man. He snarled and gnashed his teeth, until she managed to catch his eye in the dim light.

  “Erlend—let me go to her first. I haven’t forgotten the day when I was no better than Margret. . . .”

  Then he released her and staggered backwards against the wall to the next room; he stood there, shaking like a dying beast. Kristin went to light a candle, then came back and went past him up to Margret in her bedchamber.

  The first thing the candlelight fell on was a sword lying on the floor not far from the bed, and the severed hand beside it. Kristin tore off the wimple which she, without thinking, had wrapped loosely over her flowing hair before she went out to the men in the courtyard. Now she dropped it over the hand lying on the floor.

  Margret was huddled up on the pillows at the headboard, staring at Kristin’s candle, wide-eyed and terrified. She was clutching the bedclothes around her, but her white shoulders shone naked under her golden curls. There was blood all over the room.

  The strain in Kristin’s body erupted into violent sobs; it was such a terrible sight to see that fair young child amidst such horror.

  Then Margret screamed loudly, “Mother—what will Father do to me?”

  Kristin couldn’t help it: In spite of her deep sympathy for the girl, her heart seemed to shrink and harden in her breast. Margret didn’t ask what her father had done to Haakon. For an instant she saw Erlend lying on the ground and her own father standing over him with the bloody sword, and she herself . . . But Margret hadn’t budged. Kristin couldn’t stem her old feeling of scornful displeasure toward Eline’s daughter as Margret threw herself against her, trembling and almost senseless with fear. She sat down on the bed and tried to soothe the child.

  That was how Erlend found them when he appeared on the ladder. He was now fully dressed. Margret began screaming again and hid her face in her stepmother’s arms. Kristin glanced up at her husband for a moment; he was calm now, but his face was pale and strange. For the first time he looked his age.

  But she obeyed him when he said calmly, “You must go downstairs now, Kristin. I want to speak to my daughter alone.” Gently she laid the girl down on the bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and went down the ladder.

  She did as Erlend had done and got properly dressed—there would be no more sleep at Husaby that night—and then she set about reassuring the frightened children and servants.

  The next morning, in a snowstorm, Margret’s maid left the manor in tears, carrying her possessions in a sack on her back. The master had chased her out with the harshest words, threatening to flay her bloody because she had sold her mistress in such a fashion.

  Then Erlend interrogated the other servants. Hadn’t any of the maids suspected anything when all autumn and winter Ingeleiv kept coming to sleep with them instead of with Margret in her chamber? And the dogs had been locked up with them too. But all of them denied it, which was only to be expected.

  Finally, he took his wife aside to speak to her alone. Sick at heart and deathly tired, Kristin listened to him and tried to counter his injustice with meek replies. She didn’t deny that she had been worried; but she didn’t tell him that she had never spoken to him of her fears because she received nothing but ingratitude every time she attempted to counsel him or Margret about the maiden’s best interests. And she swore by God and the Virgin Mary that she had never realized or even imagined that this man might come to Margret up in the loft at night.

  “You!” said Erlend scornfully. “You said yourself that you remember the time when you were no better than Margret. And the Lord God in Heaven knows that every day, in all these years we’ve lived together, you’ve made certain I would see how you remember the injustice I did to you—even though your desire was as keen as mine. And it was your father, not I, who caused much of the unhappiness when he refused to give you to me as my wife. I was willing enough to rectify the sin from the very outset. When you saw the Gimsar gold . . .” He grabbed his wife’s hand and held it up; the two rings glittered which
Erlend had given her while they were together at Gerdarud. “Didn’t you know what it meant? When all these years you’ve worn the rings I gave you after you let me take your honor?”

  Kristin was faint with weariness and sorrow; she whispered, “I wonder, Erlend, whether you even remember that time when you won my honor. . . .”

  Then he covered his face with his hands and flung himself down on the bench, his body writhing and convulsing. Kristin sat down some distance away; she wished she could help her husband. She realized that this misfortune was even harder for him to bear because he himself had sinned against others in the same way as they had now sinned against him. And he, who had never wanted to take the blame for any trouble he might have caused, couldn’t possibly bear the blame for this unhappiness—and there was no one else but her for him to fault. But she wasn’t angry as much as she was sad and afraid of what might happen next.

  Every once in a while she would go up to see to Margret. The girl lay in bed, motionless and pale and staring straight ahead. She had still not asked about Haakon’s fate. Kristin didn’t know if this was because she didn’t dare or because she had grown numb from her own misery.

  That afternoon Kristin saw Erlend and Kløng the Icelander walking together through the snowdrifts over to the armory. But only a short time later Erlend returned alone. Kristin glanced up for a moment when he came into the light and walked past her—but then she didn’t dare turn her gaze toward the corner of the room where he had retreated. She had seen that he was a broken man.

  Later, when she went over to the storeroom to get something, Ivar and Skule came running to tell their mother that Kløng the Icelander was going to leave that evening. The boys were sad, because the scribe was their good friend. He was packing up his things right now; he wanted to reach Birgsi by nightfall.

  Kristin could guess what had happened. Erlend had offered his daughter to the scribe, but he didn’t want a maiden who had been seduced. What this conversation must have been like for Erlend . . . she felt dizzy and ill and refused to think any more about it.

  The following day a message came from the parsonage. Haakon Eindridessøn wanted to speak to Erlend. Erlend sent back a reply that he had nothing more to say to Haakon. Sira Eiliv told Kristin that if Haakon lived, he would be greatly crippled. In addition to losing his hand, he had also gravely injured his back and hips when he fell from the roof of the servants’ hall. But he wanted to go home, even in this condition, and the priest had promised to find a sleigh for him. Haakon now regretted his sin with all his heart. He said that the actions of Margret’s father were fully justified, no matter what the law might say; but he hoped that everyone would do their best to hush up the incident so that his guilt and Margret’s shame might be concealed as much as possible. That afternoon he was carried out to the sleigh, which Sira Eiliv had borrowed at Repstad, and the priest rode with him to Gauldal.

  The next day, which was Ash Wednesday, the people of Husaby had to go to the parish church at Vinjar. But at vespers Kristin asked the curate to let her into the church at Husaby.

  She could still feel the ashes on her head as she knelt beside her stepson’s grave and said the Pater noster for his soul.

  By now there was probably not much left of the boy but bones beneath the stone. Bones and hair and a scrap of the clothing he had been laid to rest in. She had seen the remains of her little sister when they dug up her grave to take her body to her father in Hamar. Dust and ashes. She thought about her father’s handsome features; about her mother’s big eyes in her lined face, and Ragnfrid’s figure which continued to look strangely young and delicate and light, even though her face seemed old so early. Now they lay under a stone, falling apart like buildings that collapse when the people have moved away. Images swirled before her eyes: the charred remains of the church back home, and a farm in Silsaadal which they rode past on their way to Vaage—the buildings were deserted and caving in. The people who worked the fields didn’t dare go near after the sun went down. She thought about her own beloved dead—their faces and voices, their smiles and habits and demeanor. Now that they had departed for that other land, it was painful to think about their figures; it was like remembering your home when you knew it was standing there deserted, with the rotting beams sinking into the earth.

  She sat on the bench along the wall of the empty church. The old smell of cold incense kept her thoughts fixed on images of death and the decay of temporal things. And she didn’t have the strength to lift up her soul to catch a glimpse of the land where they were, the place to which all goodness and love and faith had finally been moved and now endured. Each day, when she prayed for the peace of their souls, it seemed to her unfair that she should pray for those who had possessed more peace in their souls here on earth than she had ever known since she became a grown woman. Sira Eiliv would no doubt say that prayers for the dead were always good—good for oneself, since the other person had already found peace with God.

  But this did not help her. It seemed to her that when her weary body was finally rotting beneath a gravestone, her restless soul would still be hovering around somewhere nearby, the way a lost spirit wanders, moaning, through the ruined buildings of an abandoned farm. For in her soul sin continued to exist, like the roots of a weed intertwined in the soil. It no longer blossomed or flared up or smelled fragrant, but it was still there in the soil, pale and strong and alive. In spite of all the tenderness that welled up inside her when she saw her husband’s despair, she didn’t have the will to silence the inner voice that asked, hurt and embittered: How can you speak that way to me? Have you forgotten when I gave you my faith and my honor? Have you forgotten when I was your beloved friend? And yet she understood that as long as this voice spoke within her, she would continue to speak to him as if she had forgotten.

  In her thoughts she threw herself down before Saint Olav’s shrine, she reached for Brother Edvin’s moldering bones over in the church at Vatsfjeld, she held in her hands the reliquaries containing the tiny remnants of a dead woman’s shroud and the splinters of bone from an unknown martyr. She reached for protection to the small scraps which, through death and decay, had preserved a little of the power of the departed soul—like the magical powers residing in the rusted swords taken from the burial mounds of ancient warriors.

  On the following day Erlend rode to Nidaros with only Ulf and one servant to accompany him. He didn’t return to Husaby during all of Lent, but Ulf came to get his armed men and then left to meet him at the mid-Lenten ting in Orkedal.

  Ulf drew Kristin aside to tell her that Erlend had arranged with Tiedeken Paus, the German goldsmith in Nidaros, for Margret to marry his son Gerlak just after Easter.

  Erlend came home for the holy day. He was quite calm and composed now, but Kristin thought she could tell that he would never recover from this misfortune the way he had recovered from so much else. Perhaps this was because he was no longer young, or because nothing had ever humiliated him so deeply. Margret seemed indifferent to the arrangements her father had made on her behalf.

  One evening when Erlend and Kristin were alone, he said, “If she had been my lawful child—or her mother had been an unmarried woman—I would never have given her to a stranger, as things now stand with her. I would have granted shelter and protection to both her and any child of hers. That’s the worst of it—but because of her birth, a lawful husband can offer her the best protection.”

  As Kristin made all the preparations for the departure of her stepdaughter, Erlend said one day in a brusque voice, “I don’t suppose you’re well enough to travel to town with us?”

  “If that’s what you wish, I will certainly go with you,” said Kristin.

  “Why should I wish it? You’ve never taken a mother’s place for her before, and you don’t need to do so now. It’s not going to be a festive wedding. And Fru Gunna of Raasvold and her son’s wife have promised to come, for the sake of kinship.”

  And so Kristin stayed at Husaby while Erlend was in Nid
aros to give his daughter to Gerlak Tiedekenssøn.

  CHAPTER 3

  THAT SUMMER, JUST before Saint Jon’s Day, Gunnulf Niku laussøn returned to his monastery. Erlend was in town during the Frosta ting; he sent a message home, asking his wife whether she would care to come to Nidaros to see her brother-in-law. Kristin wasn’t feeling very well, but she went all the same. When she met Erlend, he told her that his brother’s health seemed completely broken. The friars hadn’t had much success with their endeavors up north at Munkefjord. They never managed to have the church they had built consecrated, because the archbishop couldn’t travel north during a time of such unrest. Finally they ended up with no bread or wine, candles or oil for the services, but when Brother Gunnulf and Brother Aslak sailed for Vargøy for supplies, the Finns cast their spells and the ship sank. They were stranded on a skerry for three days, and afterwards neither of them regained his full health. Brother Aslak died a short time later. They had suffered terribly from scurvy during Lent, for they had no flour or herbs to eat along with the dried fish. Then Bishop Haakon of Bjørgvin and Master Arne, who was in charge of the cathedral chapter while Lord Paal was at the Curia to be ordained as archbishop, instructed the monks who were still alive to return home; the priests at Vargøy were to tend to the flocks at Munkefjord for the time being.

  Although she was not unprepared, Kristin was still shocked when she saw Gunnulf Nikulaussøn again. She went with Erlend over to the monastery the next day, and they were escorted into the interview room. The monk came in. His body was bent over, his fringe of hair was now completely gray, and the skin under his sunken eyes was wrinkled and dark brown. But his smooth, pale complexion was flecked with leaden-colored spots, and she noticed that his hand was covered with the same spots when he thrust it out from the sleeve of his robe to take her hand. He smiled, and she saw that he had lost several teeth.