Kristin Lavransdatter (74 page)

And he longed for home. It had been more peaceful in Finnmark than he had expected. Even the first winter took its toll on him; he sat idle in the castle and could do nothing about repairing the fortress. It had been well restored seventeen years before, but now it had fallen into terrible disrepair.

Then came spring and summer with great activity and commotion—meetings at various places along the fjords with the Norwegian and half-Norwegian tax collectors and with spokesmen for the peoples of the inland plains. Erlend sailed here and there with his two ships and enjoyed himself immensely. On the island the buildings were repaired and the castle fortified. But the following year, peace still prevailed.

Haftor would no doubt see to it that troubles commenced soon enough. Erlend laughed. They had sailed together almost as far as Trjanema, and there Haftor had found himself a Sami woman from Kola
¹
whom he had taken with him. Erlend had spoken to him sternly. He had to remember that it was important for the heathens to realize that the Norwegians were the masters. And he would have to conduct himself so as not to provoke anyone unnecessarily, considering the small group of men he had with him. He shouldn’t intervene if the Finns fought and killed each other; they were to be granted that pleasure without interference. But act like a hawk over the Russians and the Kola people, or whatever that rabble was called. And leave the women alone—for one thing, they were all witches; and for another, there were plenty who would offer themselves willingly. But the Godøy youth would just have to take care of himself, until he learned.

Haftor wanted to get away from his estates and his wife. Erlend now wanted to go back home to his. He felt a blissful longing for Kristin and Husaby and his home district and all his children—for everything that was back home with Kristin.

At Lyngsfjord he got word of a ship with several monks on board; they were supposedly Dominican friars from Nidaros who were heading north to try to plant the true faith among heathens and heretics in the border territories.

Erlend felt certain that Gunnulf was among them. And three nights later he was indeed sitting alone with his brother in a sod hut that belonged to a little Norwegian farm near the shore where they had found each other.

 

Erlend felt strangely moved. He had attended mass and had taken communion with his crew for the first time since he had come north, except when he was at Bjarkøy. The church at Vargøy was without a priest; a deacon lived at the castle, and he had made an effort to observe the holy days for them, but otherwise the Norwegians in the north had found little help for their souls. They had to console themselves with the thought that they were part of a kind of crusade, and surely their sins would not be judged so severely.

Erlend sat talking to Gunnulf about this, and his brother listened with an odd, remote smile on his thin, compressed lips. It looked as if he were constantly sucking on his lower lip, the way a person often does when he is thinking hard about something and is on the verge of understanding but has not yet achieved full clarity in his mind.

It was late at night. All the other people on the farm were asleep in the shed; the brothers knew that they were now the only ones awake. And they were both struck by the strange circumstance that the two of them should be sitting there alone.

The muffled and muted sound of the storm and the roaring sea reached them through the sod walls. Now and then gusts of wind would blow in, breathe on the embers of the hearth, and make the flame of the oil lamp flicker. There was no furniture in the hut; the brothers were sitting on the low earthen bench which ran along three sides of the room, and between them lay Gunnulf’s writing board with ink horn, his quill pen, and a rolled-up parchment. Gunnulf had been writing down a few notes as his brother told him about meetings and Norwegian settlements, about navigation markers and weather indications and words in the Sami language—everything Erlend happened to think of. Gunnulf was piloting the ship himself; it was named
Sunnivasuden,
for the friars had chosen Saint Sunniva
²
as the patron saint for their endeavor.

“As long as you don’t suffer the same fate as the martyred Selje men,” said Erlend, and Gunnulf again gave him a little smile.

“You call me restless, Gunnulf,” Erlend continued. “Then what should we call you? First you wander around in the southern lands for all those years, and then you’ve barely returned home before you give up your benefice and prebends
³
to go off to preach to the Devil and his offspring up north in Velliaa. You don’t know their language and they don’t know yours. It seems to me that you’re even more inconstant than I am.”

“I own neither manors nor kinsmen to answer for,” said the monk. “I have now freed myself from all bonds, but you have bound yourself, brother.”

“Yes, well . . . I suppose the man who owns nothing is free.”

Gunnulf replied, “A man’s possessions own him more than he owns them.”

“Hmm. No, by God, I might concede that Kristin owns me. But I won’t agree that the manor and the children own me too.”

“Don’t think that way, brother,” said Gunnulf softly. “For then you might easily lose them.”

“No, I refuse to be like those other old men, up to their chins in the muck of their land,” said Erlend, laughing, and his brother smiled with him.

“I’ve never seen fairer children than Ivar and Skule,” he said. “I think you must have looked like them at that age—it’s no wonder our mother loved you so much.”

Both brothers rested a hand on the writing board, which lay between them. Even in the faint light of the oil lamp it was possible to see how unlike the hands of these two men were. The monk’s fingers bore no rings; they were white and sinewy, shorter and stubbier than the other man’s fingers, and yet they looked much stronger—even though the palm of Erlend’s fist was now as hard as horn and a blue-white scar from an arrow wound furrowed the dark skin from his wrist all the way up his sleeve. But the fingers of Erlend’s slender, tanned hand were dry and knotty-jointed like tree branches, and they were completely covered with rings of gold and precious stones.

Erlend had an urge to take his brother’s hand, but he was too embarrassed to do so; instead, he drank a toast to him, grimacing at the bad ale.

“And you think that Kristin has now regained her full health?” Erlend continued.

“Yes, she had blossomed like a rose when I was at Husaby in the summer,” said the monk with a smile. He paused for a moment and then said somberly, “I ask this of you, brother—think more about the welfare of Kristin and your children than you have done in the past. Abide by her advice and agree to the decisions she and Eiliv have made; they’re only waiting for your consent to conclude them.”

“I’m not greatly in favor of these plans you speak of,” said Erlend with some reluctance. “And now my position will be quite different.”

“Your lands will gain in value if you consolidate your property more,” replied the monk. “Kristin’s plans seemed sensible when she explained them to me.”

“And there isn’t another woman in all of Norway who offers advice more freely than she does,” said Erlend.

“But in the end you’re the one who commands. And you now command Kristin too, and can do as you please,” Gunnulf said, his voice strangely weak.

Erlend laughed softly from deep in his throat, then stretched and yawned. Suddenly somber, he said, “You have also counseled her, my brother. And at times your advice may well have come between our friendship.”

“Do you mean the friendship between you and your wife, or the friendship between the two of us?” the monk asked hesitantly.

“Both,” replied Erlend, as if the thought had just now occurred to him.

“It isn’t usually necessary for a laywoman to be so pious,” he continued in a lighter tone of voice.

“I have counseled her as I thought best. As it
was
best,” Gunnulf corrected himself.

Erlend looked at the monk dressed in the rough, grayish-white friar’s robes, with the black cowl thrown back so that it lay in thick folds around his neck and over his shoulders. The crown of his head was shaved so that only a narrow fringe of hair now remained, encircling his round, gaunt, pallid face; but his hair was no longer thick and black as it had been in Gunnulf’s younger days.

“Well, you aren’t as much my brother anymore as you are the brother of all men,” said Erlend, surprising himself by the great bitterness in his own voice.

“That’s not true—although it ought to be.”

“So help me God, I think that’s the real reason that you want to go up there to the Finns!”

Gunnulf bowed his head. His amber eyes smoldered.

“To some extent that’s true,” he said swiftly.

They spread out the furs and coverlets they had brought with them. It was too cold and raw in the room for them to undress, so they bade each other good night and lay down on the earthen bench, which was quite low to the floor to escape the smoke from the hearth.

Erlend lay there thinking about the news he had received from home. He hadn’t heard much during the past years—two letters from his wife had reached him, but they had been outdated by the time they arrived. Sira Eiliv had written them for her. Kristin could write, and she had a beautiful hand, but she was never eager to do so, because she didn’t think it quite proper for an uneducated woman.

She would no doubt become even more pious now that they had acquired a holy relic in the neighboring village, and it was from a man whom she had known while he was alive. And Gaute had now won release from his illness there, and Kristin herself had recovered her full health after having been weak ever since giving birth to the twins. Gunnulf said that the friars of Hamar had finally been forced to give Edvin Rikardssøn’s body back to his brothers in Oslo, and they had now written down everything about Brother Edvin’s life and about the miracles he was said to have performed, both during his lifetime and after death. It was their intention to send these writings to the Pope in an attempt to have the monk proclaimed a saint. Several brothers from Gauldal and Medaldal had journeyed south to bear witness to the wonders that Brother Edvin had achieved with his prayers of intercession in the parishes and with a crucifix he had carved; it was now at Medalhus. They had vowed to build a small church on Vatsfjeld, the mountain where he had spent several summers, living a hermit’s existence, and where a mountain spring had become endowed with healing powers. And the brothers were given a hand from his body to enshrine in the church.

Kristin had contributed two silver bowls and the large cloak clasp with blue stones which she had inherited from her grandmother, Ulvhild Haavardsdatter, so that Tiedeken Paus in Nidaros could fashion a silver hand for Brother Edvin’s bones. And she had been to Vatsfjeld with Sira Eiliv and her children and a great entourage when the archbishop consecrated the church at Midsummer the year after Erlend had departed for the north.

Afterwards, Gaute’s health quickly improved; he had learned to walk and talk, and he was now like any other child his age. Erlend stretched out his limbs. That was the greatest joy they had been granted—that Gaute was now well. He would donate some land to the church. Gunnulf had told him that Gaute was blond, with a fair complexion, like his mother. If only he had been a little maiden, then he would have been named Magnhild. Yes, he was also longing for his handsome sons now.

Gunnulf Nikulaussøn lay there thinking about the spring day three years ago when he rode toward Husaby. On the way he met a man from the manor. The mistress was not at home, he had said; she was tending to a woman who was ill.

He was riding along a narrow, grass-covered road between old split-rail fences. Young, leafy trees covered the slopes, from the top all the way down to the swollen river rushing through the ravine below. He rode into the sun, and the tender green leaves glittered like golden flames on the branches, but inside the forest the shadows were already spreading, cool and deep, across the grassy floor.

Gunnulf reached a place where he could catch a glimpse of the lake, with a reflection of the dark opposite shore and the blue of the sky, and an image of the great summer clouds constantly merging and dispersed by the ripples. Far below the road was a small farm on green, flower-strewn slopes. A group of women wearing white wimples stood outside in the courtyard, but Kristin was not among them.

A little farther away he saw her horse; it was walking around in the pasture with several others. The road dipped down into a hollow of green shadows ahead of him, and where it curved up over the next rise in the hills, he saw her standing next to the fence beneath the foliage, listening to the birds singing. He looked at her slim, dark figure, leaning over the fence, facing the woods; there was a gleam of white from her wimple and her arm. He reined in his horse and rode toward her slowly, step by step. But when he drew closer, he saw that it was the slender stump of an old birch tree standing there.

The next evening, when his servants sailed his ship into Nidaros, the priest himself was at the helm. He felt his heart beating in his chest, steadfast and newborn. Now nothing could deter his purpose.

He now knew that what had held him back in life was the unquenchable longing he had carried with him ever since childhood. He wanted to win the love of others. To do so he had been kind-hearted, gentle, and good-natured toward the poor; he had let his wisdom shine, but with moderation and humility, among the priests of the town so that they would like him; he had been submissive toward Lord Eiliv Kortin because the archbishop was friends with his father, and he knew how Lord Eiliv wanted people to behave. He had been loving and gentle toward Orm, in order to win the boy’s affection away from his moody father. And Gunnulf had been stern and demanding toward Kristin because he saw what she needed: to encounter something that would not give way when she reached for help, something that would not lead her astray when she came, ready to follow.