“It’s their father’s temperament in them,” said Gunnulf bitterly. “Nothing else could have been expected but that my brother’s sons would have a difficult time learning obedience and would show inconstancy in a godly endeavor.”
“It could just as well be their mother’s inheritance,” replied Kristin sorrowfully. “Disobedience is my gravest sin, Gunnulf, and I was inconstant too. All my days I have longed equally to travel the right road and to take my own errant path.”
“Erlend’s errant paths, you mean,” said the monk gloomily. “It was not just once that my brother led you astray, Kristin; I think he led you astray every day you lived with him. He made you forgetful, so you wouldn’t notice when you had thoughts that should have made you blush, because from God the Almighty you could not hide what you were thinking.”
Kristin stared straight ahead.
“I don’t know whether you’re right, Gunnulf. I don’t know whether I’ve ever forgotten that God could see into my heart, and so my sin may be even greater. And yet it was not, as you might think, that I needed to blush the most over my shameful boldness or my weakness, but rather over my thoughts that my husband was many times more poisonous than the venom of snakes. But surely the latter has to follow the former. You were the one who once told me that those who have loved each other with the most ardent desire are the ones who will end up like two snakes, biting each other’s tails.
“But it has been my consolation over these past few years, Gunnulf, that as often as I thought about Erlend meeting God’s judgment, unconfessed and without receiving the sacraments, struck down with anger in his heart and blood on his hands, he never became what you said or what I myself became. He never held on to anger or injustice any more than he held on to anything else. Gunnulf, he was so handsome, and he looked at peace when I laid out his body. I’m certain that God the Almighty knows that Erlend never harbored rancor toward any man, for any reason.”
Erlend’s brother looked at her, his eyes wide. Then he nodded.
After a moment the monk asked, “Did you know that Eiliv Serkssøn is the priest and adviser for the nuns at Rein?”
“No!” exclaimed Kristin jubilantly.
“I thought that was why you had chosen to go there yourself,” said Gunnulf. Soon afterward he said that he would have to go back to his cloister.
The first nocturn had begun as Kristin entered the church. In the nave and around all the altars there were great throngs of people. But a verger noticed that she was carrying a pitiful child in her arms, and he began pushing a path for her through the crowds so that she could make her way up to the front among the groups of those most crippled and ill, who occupied the middle of the church beneath the vault of the main tower, with a good view of the choir.
Many hundreds of candles were burning inside the church. Vergers accepted the tapers of pilgrims and placed them on the small mound-shaped towers bedecked with spikes that had been set up throughout the church. As the daylight faded behind the colored panes of glass, the church grew warm with the smell of burning wax, but gradually it also filled with a sour stench from the rags worn by the sick and the poor.
When the choral voices surged beneath the vaults, the organ swelled, and the flutes, drums, and stringed instruments resounded, Kristin understood why the church might be called a ship. In the mighty stone building all these people seemed to be on board a vessel, and the song was the roar of the sea on which it sailed. Now and then calm would settle over the ship, as if the waves had subsided, and the voice of a solitary man would carry the lessons out over the masses.
Face after face, and they all grew paler and more weary as the vigil night wore on. Almost no one left between the services, at least none of those who had found places in the center of the church. In the pauses between nocturns they would doze or pray. The child slept nearly all night long; a couple of times Kristin had to rock her or give her milk from the wooden flask Gunnulf had brought her from the cloister.
The encounter with Erlend’s brother had oddly distressed her, coming as it did after each step on the road north had led her closer and closer to the memory of her dead husband. She had given little thought to him over the past few years, as the toil for her growing sons had left her scant time to dwell on her own fate, and yet the thought of him had always seemed to be right behind her, but she simply never had a moment to turn around. Now she seemed to be looking back at her soul during those years: It had lived the way people live on farms during the busy summer half of the year, when everyone moves out of the main house and into the lofts over the storerooms. But they walk and run past the winter house all day long, never thinking of going inside, even though all it would take was a lift of the latch and a push on the door. Then one day, when someone finally has a reason to go inside, the house has turned strange and almost solemn because it has acquired the smell of solitude and silence.
But as she talked to the man who was the last remaining witness to the interplay of sowing and harvesting in her life together with her dead husband, then it seemed to her that she had come to view her life in a new way: like a person who clambers up to a ridge overlooking his home parish, to a place where he has never been before, and gazes down on his own valley. Each farm and fence, each thicket and creek bed are familiar to him, but he seems to see for the first time how everything is laid out on the surface of the earth that bears the lands. And with this new view she suddenly found words to release both her bitterness toward Erlend and her anguish for his soul, which had departed life so abruptly. He had never known rancor; she saw that now, and God had seen it always.
She had finally come so far that she seemed to be seeing her own life from the uppermost summit of a mountain pass. Now her path led down into the darkening valley, but first she had been allowed to see that in the solitude of the cloister and in the doorway of death someone was waiting for her who had always seen the lives of people the way villages look from a mountain crest. He had seen sin and sorrow, love and hatred in their hearts, the way the wealthy estates and poor hovels, the bountiful acres and the abandoned wastelands are all borne by the same earth. And he had come down among them, his feet had wandered among the lands, stood in castles and in huts, gathering the sorrows and sins of the rich and the poor, and lifting them high up with him on the cross. Not my happiness or my pride, but my sin and my sorrow, oh sweet Lord of mine. She looked up at the crucifix, where it hung high overhead, above the triumphal arch.
The morning sun lit the tall, colored panes of glass deep within the forest of pillars in the choir and a glow, as if from red and brown, green and blue gemstones, dimmed the candlelight from the altar and the gold shrine behind it. Kristin listened to the last vigil mass, matins. She knew that the lessons of this service were about God’s miraculous healing powers as invested in His faithful knight, King Olav Haraldssøn. She lifted the ill child toward the choir and prayed for her.
But she was so cold that her teeth were chattering after the long hours spent in the chill of the church, and she felt weak from fasting. The stench of the crowds and the sickening breath of the ill and the poor blended with the reek of candle wax and settled, thick and damp and heavy, upon those kneeling on the floor, cold in the cold morning. A stout, kind, and cheerful peasant woman had been sitting and dozing at the foot of a pillar right behind them, with a bearskin under her and another one over her lame legs. Now she woke up and drew Kristin’s weary head onto her spacious lap. “Rest for a little while, sister. I think you must need to rest.”
Kristin fell asleep in the woman’s lap and dreamed:
She was stepping over the threshold into the old hearth room back home. She was young and unmarried, because she could see her own thick brown braids, which hung down in front of her shoulders. She was with Erlend, for he had just straightened up after ducking through the doorway ahead of her.
Near the hearth sat her father, whittling arrows; his lap was covered with bundles of sinews, and on the bench on either side of him lay
heaps of arrowpoints and pointed shafts. At the very moment they stepped inside, he was bending forward over the embers, about to pick up the little three-legged metal cup in which he always used to melt resin. Suddenly he pulled his hand back, shook it in the air, and then stuck his burned fingertips in his mouth, sucking on them as he turned his head toward her and Erlend and looked at them with a furrowed brow and a smile on his lips.
Then she woke up, her face wet with tears.
She knelt during the high mass, when the archbishop himself performed the service before the main altar. Clouds of frankincense billowed through the intoning church, where the radiance of colored sunlight mingled with the glow of candles; the fresh, pungent scent of incense seeped over everyone, blunting the smell of poverty and illness. Her heart burst with a feeling of oneness with these destitute and suffering people, among whom God had placed her; she prayed in a surge of sisterly tenderness for all those who were poor as she was and who suffered as she herself had suffered.
“I will rise up and go home to my Father.”
CHAPTER 6
THE CONVENT STOOD on a low ridge near the fjord, so that when the wind blew, the crash of the waves on the shore would usually drown out the rustling of the pine forest that covered the slopes to the north and west and hid any view of the sea.
Kristin had seen the church tower above the trees when she sailed past with Erlend, and he had said several times they ought to pay a visit to this convent, which his ancestor had founded, but nothing had ever come of it. She had never set foot in Rein Convent until she came there to stay.
She had imagined that life here would be similar to what she knew of life in the convents in Oslo or at Bakke, but things were quite different and much more quiet. Here the sisters were truly dead to the world. Fru Ragnhild, the abbess, was proud of the fact that it had been five years since she had been to Nidaros and just as long since any of her nuns had set foot outside the cloister walls.
No children were being raised there, and at the time Kristin came to Rein, there were no novices at the convent either. It had been so many years since any young maiden had sought admittance to the order that it was already six winters ago that the newest member, Sister Borghild Marcellina, had taken her vows. The youngest in years was Sister Turid, but she had been sent to Rein at the age of six by her grandfather, who was a priest at Saint Clement’s Church and a very stern and somber man. The child’s hands had been crippled from birth, and she was misshapen in other ways too, so she had taken the veil as soon as she reached the proper age. Now she was thirty years old and quite sickly, but she had a lovely face. From the first day Kristin arrived at the convent, she made a special attempt to serve Sister Turid, for the nun reminded her of her own little sister Ulvhild, who had died so young.
Sira Eiliv said that low birth should not be a hindrance for any maiden who came to serve God. And yet ever since the convent at Rein had been founded, it was usually only the daughters or widows of powerful and highborn men from Trøndelag who had sought refuge there. But during the wicked and turbulent times that had descended upon the realm after the death of blessed King Haakon Haalegg, piety seemed to have diminished greatly among the nobility. Now it was mostly the daughters of merchants and prosperous farmers who considered the life of a nun. And they were more likely to go to Bakke, where many of them had spent time learning their devotions and womanly skills and where more of the sisters came from families of lower standing. There the rule prohibiting venturing outside the convent was less strict, and the cloister was not as isolated.
Otherwise Kristin seldom had the chance to speak with Sira Eiliv, but she soon realized that the priest’s position at the convent was both a wearisome and troubled one. Although Rein was a wealthy cloister and the order included only half as many members as it could have supported, the nuns’ money matters were in great disarray, and they had difficulty managing their expenses. The last three abbesses had been more pious than worldly women. Even so, they and their convent had vowed tooth and nail not to submit to the authority of the archbishop; their conviction was so strong that they also refused to accept any advice offered out of fatherly goodwill. And the brothers of their order from Tautra and Munkabu, who had been priests at their church, had all been old men so that no slanderous gossip might arise, but they had been only moderately successful at managing the convent’s material welfare. When King Skule built the beautiful stone church and gave his ancestral estate to the cloister, the houses were first built of wood; they all had burned down thirty years ago. Fru Audhild, who was abbess at the time, began rebuilding with stone; in her day many improvements had been made to the church and the lovely convent hall. She had also made a journey to the general chapter at the mother cloister of the order, Tart in Burgundy. From that journey she had brought back the magnificent tower of ivory that stood in the choir near the high altar, a fitting receptacle for the body of the Lord, the most splendid adornment of the church, and the pride and cherished treasure of the nuns. Fru Audhild had died with the fairest of reputations for piety and virtue, but her ignorance in dealing with the builders and her imprudent property ventures had damaged the convent’s well-being. And the abbesses who succeeded her had not been able to repair that damage.
How Sira Eiliv happened to come to Rein as priest and adviser, Kristin never knew, but this much she did know: From the very beginning the abbess and the sisters had received a secular priest with reluctance and suspicion. Sira Eiliv’s position at Rein was such that he was the nuns’ priest and spiritual adviser; he was also supposed to see about putting the estate back on its feet and restoring order to the convent’s finances. All the while he was to acknowledge the supremacy of the abbess, the independence of the sisters, and the supervisory right of Tautra. He was also supposed to maintain a friendship with the other priest at the church, a monk from Tautra. Sira Eiliv’s age and renown for unblemished moral conduct, humble devotion to God, and insight into both canonical laws and the laws of the land had certainly served him well, but he had to be constantly vigilant about everything he did. Along with the other priest and the vergers, he lived on a small manor that lay northeast of the convent. This also served as the lodgings for the monks who came from Tautra from time to time on various errands. When Nikulaus was eventually ordained as a priest, Kristin knew that if she lived long enough, she would also one day hear her eldest son say mass in the cloister church.
Kristin Lavransdatter was first accepted as a corrodian. Later she had promised Fru Ragnhild and the sisters, in the presence of Sira Eiliv and two monks from Tautra, to live a chaste life and obey the abbess and nuns. As a sign that she had renounced all command over earthly goods she had placed in Sira Eiliv’s hands her seal, which he had broken in half. Then she was allowed to wear the same attire as the sisters: a grayish white woolen robe—but without the scapular—a white wimple, and a black veil. After some time had passed, the intention was for her to seek admittance into the order and to take the vows of a nun.
But it still was difficult for her to think too much about things of the past. For reading aloud during meals in the refectory, Sira Eiliv had translated into the Norwegian language a book about the life of Christ, which the learned and pious Doctor Bonaventura had written. While Kristin listened, her eyes would fill with tears whenever she thought about how blessed a person must be who could love Christ and his Mother, the cross and its torment, poverty and humility, in the way the book described. And then she couldn’t help thinking about that day at Husaby when Gunnulf and Sira Eiliv had shown her the book in Latin from which this one had been copied. It was a thick little book written on such thin and dazzling white parchment that she never would have believed calfskin could be prepared so finely, and it had the most beautiful pictures and capital letters; the colors glowed like gemstones against gold. All the while Gunnulf had talked merrily—and Sira Eiliv had nodded in agreement with his quiet smile—about how the purchase of this book had made them penniless, so they had been forced to se
ll their clothes and take their meals with those receiving alms at a cloister until they received word of some Norwegian clerics who had come to Paris; from them they could borrow funds.
After matins, when the sisters went back to the dormitory, Kristin always stayed behind in the church. On summer mornings it seemed to her sweet and lovely inside, but during the winter it was terribly cold, and she was afraid of the darkness among all the gravestones, even though she steadily fixed her eyes on the little lamp which always burned in front of the ivory tower containing the Host. But winter or summer, as she lingered in her corner of the nuns’ choir, she always thought that now Naakkve and Bjørg ulf must also be praying for their father’s soul; it was Nikulaus who had asked her to say these prayers and psalms of penance as they did every morning after matins.
Always, always she would then picture the two of them as she had seen them on that gray, rainy day when she went out to the monastery. Nikulaus had suddenly appeared before her in the parlatory, looking oddly tall and unfamiliar in the grayish white monk’s robes, with his hands hidden under his scapular—her son—and yet he had changed so little. It was mostly his resemblance to his father that seized her so strongly; it was like seeing Erlend in a monk’s cowl.
As they sat and talked and she told him everything that had happened on the estate since he left home, she kept waiting and waiting. Finally she asked anxiously if Bjørgulf would be coming soon.