Kristin Lavransdatter

  CHAPTER 3

  THE DAYS PASSED, and Andres remained ill in bed; there were no great changes, either for the worse or for the better. The worst thing was that he got almost no sleep. The boy would lie with his eyes half open, seeming not to recognize anyone, his thin little body racked by coughs, gasping for breath, the fever rising and falling. One evening Kristin had given him a soothing drink, and then calm descended on him, but after a while she saw that the child had turned pale blue and his skin felt cold and clammy. Quickly she poured warm milk down his throat and placed heated stones at the soles of his feet. Then she didn’t dare give him any more sleeping potions; she realized that he was too young to tolerate them.

  Sira Solmund came and brought the sacred vessels from the church to him. Simon and Ramborg promised prayers, fasts, and alms if God would hear them and grant their son his life.

  Erlend stopped by one day; he declined to get down from his horse and go inside, but Kristin and Simon came out to the courtyard to talk to him. He gave them a look of great distress. And yet that expression of his had always annoyed Kristin in an oddly vague and unclear way. No doubt Erlend felt aggrieved whenever he saw anyone either sad or ill, but he seemed mostly perplexed or embarrassed; he looked genuinely bewildered when he felt sad for someone.

  After that, either Naakkve or the twins would come to Formo each day to ask about Andres.

  The sixth night brought no change, but later the following day the boy seemed a little better; he was not quite as feverish. Simon and Kristin were sitting alone with him around midday.

  The father pulled out a gilded amulet he wore on a string around his neck under his clothing. He bent down over the boy, dangling the amulet before his eyes and then putting it in the child’s hand, closing the small fingers around it. But Andres didn’t seem to take any notice.

  Simon had been given this amulet when he himself was a child, and he had worn it ever since; his father had brought it back from France. It had been blessed at a cloister called Mont Saint Michel, and it bore a picture of Saint Michael with great wings. Andres liked to look at it, Simon explained softly. But the little boy thought it was a rooster; he called the greatest of all the angels a rooster. At long last Simon had managed to teach the boy to say “angel.” But one day when they were out in the courtyard, Andres saw the rooster screeching at one of the hens, and he said, “The angel’s mad now, Father.”

  Kristin looked up at the man with pleading eyes; it cut her to the heart to listen to him, even though Simon was speaking in such a calm and even voice. And she was so worn out after keeping vigil all these nights; she realized that it would not be good for her to begin weeping now.

  Simon stuck the amulet back inside his shirt. “Ah, well. I will give a three-year-old ox to the church on the eve of Saint Michael’s Day every autumn for as long as I live if he will wait a little longer to come for this soul. He’d be no more than a bony chicken on the balance scale, Andres, as small as he is—” But when Simon tried to laugh, his voice broke.

  “Simon, Simon!” she implored.

  “Yes, things will happen as they must, Kristin. And God Himself will decide; surely He knows best.” The father said no more as he stood gazing down at his son.

  On the eighth night Simon and one of the maids kept watch as Kristin dozed on a bench some distance away. When she woke up, the girl was asleep. Simon sat on the bench with the high back, as he had on most nights. He was sitting with his face bent over the bed and the child.

  “Is he sleeping?” whispered Kristin as she came forward.

  Simon raised his head. He ran his hand over his face. She saw that his cheeks were wet, but he replied in a calm, quiet voice, “I don’t think that Andres will have any sleep, Kristin, until he lies under the turf in consecrated ground.”

  Kristin stood there as if paralyzed. Slowly her face turned pale beneath the tan until it was white all the way to her lips.

  Then she went back to her corner and picked up her outer garments.

  “You must arrange things so that you are alone in here when I come back.” She spoke as if her throat and mouth were parched. “Sit with him, and when you see me enter, don’t say a word. And never speak of this again—not to me or to anyone else. Not even to your priest.”

  Simon got to his feet and slowly walked over to her. He too had grown pale.

  “No, Kristin!” His voice was almost inaudible. “I don’t dare . . . for you to do this thing. . . .”

  She put on her cloak, then took a linen cloth from the chest in the corner, folded it up, and hid it in her bodice.

  “But I dare. You understand that no one must come near us afterward until I call; no one must come near us or speak to us until he wakes up and speaks himself.”

  “What do you think your father would say of this?” he whispered in the same faint voice. “Kristin . . . don’t do it.”

  “In the past I have done things that my father thought were wrong; back then it was merely to further my own desire. Andres is his flesh and blood too—my own flesh, Simon—my only sister’s son.”

  Simon took in a heavy, trembling breath; he stood with his eyes downcast.

  “But if you don’t want me to make this last attempt . . .”

  He stood as before, with his head bowed, and did not reply. Then Kristin repeated her question, unaware that an odd little smile, almost scornful, had appeared on her white lips. “Do you not want me to go?”

  He turned his head away. And so she walked past him, stepped soundlessly out the door, and closed it silently behind her.

  It was pitch dark outside, with small gusts of wind from the south making all the stars blink and flicker uneasily. She had reached no farther than the road up between the fences when she felt as if she had stepped into eternity itself. An endless path both behind her and up ahead. As if she would never emerge from what she had entered into when she walked out into this night.

  Even the darkness was like a force she was pressing against. She plodded through the mud; the road had been churned up by the carts carrying unthreshed grain, and now it was thawing in the south wind. With every footstep she had to pull herself free from the night and the raw chill that clung to her feet, swept upward, and weighted down the hems of her garments. Now and then a falling leaf would drift past her, as if something alive were touching her in the dark—gentle but confident of its superior power: Turn back.

  When she came out onto the main road, it was easier to walk. The road was covered with grass, and her feet did not get stuck in the mire. Her face felt as rigid as stone, her body tensed and taut. Each step carried her mercilessly toward the forest grove through which she would have to pass. A feeling rose up inside her like an inner paralysis: She couldn’t possibly walk through that patch of darkness. But she had no intention of turning around. She couldn’t feel her body because of her terror, yet all the while she kept moving forward, as if in her sleep, steadily stepping over stones and roots and puddles of water, unconsciously careful not to stumble or break her steady stride and thus allow fear to overwhelm her.

  Now the spruce trees rustled closer and closer in the night; she stepped in among them, still as calm as a sleepwalker. She sensed every sound and hardly dared blink because of the dark. The drone of the river, the heavy sighing of the firs, a creek trickling over stones as she walked toward it, passed by it, and then continued on. Once a rock slid down the scree, as if some living creature were moving about up there. Sweat poured from her body, but she did not venture either to slow or to speed her step because of it.

  Kristin’s eyes had now grown so accustomed to the dark that when she emerged from the woods, she could see much better; a glint came from the ribbon of the river and from the water on the marshes. The fields became visible in the blackness; the clusters of buildings looked like clumps of earth. The sky was also beginning to lighten overhead; she could feel it, although she didn’t dare look up at the black peaks towering above. But she knew that it would soon be time for the mo
on to rise.

  She tried to remind herself that in four hours it would be daytime; people would be setting about their daily chores on all the farms throughout the countryside. The sky would grow pale with dawn; the light would rise over the mountains. Then it wouldn’t seem far to go; in the daylight it wasn’t far from Formo to the church. And by then she would have returned home long ago. But it was clear that she would be a different person.

  She knew that if it had been one of her own children, she would not have dared make this last attempt. To turn away God’s hand when He reached out for a living soul. When she kept watch over her own ill children, back when she was young and her heart bled with tenderness, when she thought she would collapse in anguish and torment, she had tried to say: Lord, you love them better than I do, let thy will be done.

  But now on this night she was walking along, defying her own terror. This child who was not her own—she would save him, no matter what fate she was saving him for. . . .

  Because you too, Simon Darre, acquiesced when the dearest thing you possessed on earth was at stake; you agreed to more than anyone can accept with full honor.

  Do you not want me to go? He hadn’t been man enough to answer. Deep in her heart she knew that if the child died, Simon would have the strength to bear this too. But she had struck at the only moment when she ever saw him on the verge of breaking down; she had seized hold of that moment and carried it off. She would share that secret with him, the knowledge that she had also witnessed him when he once stood unsteady on his feet.

  For he had learned too much about her. She had accepted help from the man she had spurned every time it was a matter of saving the one she had chosen. This suitor whom she had cast aside—he was the man she had turned to each time she needed someone to protect her love. And never had she asked for Simon’s help in vain. Time after time he had stepped forward, covering her with his kindness and his strength.

  So she was undertaking this nighttime errand to rid herself of a little of the debt; until that hour, she hadn’t fully realized how heavy a burden it was.

  Simon had forced her to see at last that he was the strongest: stronger than she was and stronger than the man to whom she had chosen to give herself. No doubt she had realized this from the moment all three of them met, face-to-face, in that shameful place in Oslo. And yet she had refused to accept it then: that such a plump-cheeked, stout, and gaping young man could be stronger than . . .

  Now she was walking along, not daring to call on a good and holy name; she took upon herself this sin in order to . . . She didn’t know what. Was it revenge? Revenge because she had been forced to see that he was more noble-minded than the two of them?

  But now you too understand, Simon, that when the life of the one you love more than your own heart is at stake . . . Then the poor person grasps for anything, anything.

  The moon had risen over the mountain ridge as she walked up the hill to the church. Again she felt as if she had to overcome a new wave of terror. The moonlight lay like a delicate spiderweb over the tar-timbered edifice. The church itself looked terrifying and ominously dark beneath the thin veil. Out on the green she saw the cross, but for the first time she didn’t dare approach to kneel before the blessed tree. She crept over the churchyard wall at the place where she knew the sod and stone were the lowest and most easily breached.

  Here and there a gravestone glistened like water down in the tall, dewy grass. Kristin walked straight across the cemetery to the graves of the poor, which lay near the south wall.

  She went over to the burial place of a poor man who had been a stranger in the parish. One winter the man had frozen to death on the mountainside. His two motherless daughters had been taken in by one farm after another,1 until Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn had offered to keep them and bring them up, for the sake of Christ. When they were full grown and had turned out well, Kristin’s father had found honorable, hardworking husbands for them and married them off with cows and calves and sheep. Ragnfrid had given them bedding and iron pots. Now both women were well provided for, as befitted their station. One of them had been Ramborg’s maid, and Ramborg had carried the woman’s child to be baptized.

  So you must grant me a bit of the turf covering you, Bjarne, for Ramborg’s son. Kristin knelt down and pulled out her dagger.

  Drops of ice cold sweat prickled her brow and upper lip as she dug her fingers under the dew-drenched sod. The earth resisted . . . it was only roots. She sliced through them with the dagger.

  In return, the ghost must be given gold or silver that had been passed down through three generations. She slipped off the little gold ring with the rubies that had been her grandmother’s betrothal ring.

  The child is my father’s descendant.

  She pushed the ring as far down into the earth as she could, wrapped the piece of sod in the linen cloth, and then spread peat and leaves over the spot where she had removed it.

  When she stood up, her legs trembled under her, and she had to pause for a moment before she could turn around. If she looked under her arm right now, she would be able to see them.

  She felt a terrible tugging inside her, as if they would force her to do so. All the dead who had known her before in this world. Is that you, Kristin Lavransdatter? Are you coming here in this way?

  Arne Gyrdsøn lay buried outside the west entrance. Yes, Arne, you may well wonder—I was not like this, back when you and I knew each other.

  Then she climbed over the wall again and headed down the slope.

  The moon was now bright over the countryside. Jørundgaard lay out on the plain; the dew glittered in the grass on all the rooftops. She stared in that direction, almost listlessly. She felt as if she herself were dead to that home and all the people there; the door was closed to her, to the woman who had wandered past, up along the road on this night.

  The mountains cast their shadows over her nearly the whole way back. The wind was blowing harder now; one gust of wind after another came straight toward her. Withered leaves blew against her, trying to send her back to the place she had just left.

  Nor did she believe that she was walking along unaccompanied. She heard the steady sound of stealthy footsteps behind her. Is that you, Arne?

  Look back, Kristin, look under your arm, it urged her.

  And yet she didn’t feel truly afraid anymore. Just cold and numb, sick with desire to give up and sink down. After this night she could never be afraid of anything else in the world.

  Simon was sitting in his usual place at the head of the bed, leaning over the child, when she opened the door and stepped inside. For a brief moment he looked up; Kristin wondered if she had grown as worn out and haggard and old as he had during these days. Then Simon bowed his head and hid his face with his arm.

  He staggered a bit as he got to his feet. He turned his face away from her as he walked past and over to the door, his head bowed, his shoulders slumped.

  Kristin lit two candles and set them on the table. The boy opened his eyes slightly and looked up, his gaze strangely unseeing; he whimpered a bit and tried to turn his head toward the light. When Kristin straightened out his little body, the way a corpse is laid out, he tried to change position, but he seemed too weak to move.

  Then she covered his face and chest with the linen cloth and placed the strip of sod on top.

  At that moment the terror seized her again, like a great sea swell.

  She had to sit down on the bed. The window was right above the short bench, and she didn’t dare sit with her back to it. Better to look them in the eyes if anyone should be standing outside and looking in. She pulled the high-backed chair over to the bed and sat down facing the windowpane. The stifling black of the night pressed against it; one of the candles was reflected in the glass. Kristin fixed her eyes on it, clutching the arms of the chair so that her knuckles grew white; now and then her arms trembled. She couldn’t feel her own legs, as chilled and wet as they were. She sat there with her teeth chattering from horror and cold,
and the sweat ran like ice water down her face and back. She sat without moving, merely casting now and then a quick glance at the linen cloth, which faintly rose and fell with the child’s breath.

  Finally the pale light of dawn appeared in the windowpane. The rooster crowed shrilly. Then she heard men out in the courtyard. They were heading for the stable.

  She slumped against the back of the chair, shuddering as if with convulsions, and tried to find a position for her legs so they wouldn’t twitch and jerk around from the shaking.

  There was a strong movement under the linen cloth. Andres pushed it away from his face, whimpering crossly. He seemed partially conscious since he grunted at Kristin when she jumped to her feet and leaned over him.

  She grabbed the cloth and sod, rushed over to the fireplace, and stuffed twigs and wood inside it; then she threw the ghostly goods into the fresh, crackling fire. She had to stand still for a moment, holding on to the wall. The tears poured down Kristin’s face.

  She took a ladleful of milk from the little pot that stood near the hearth and carried it over to the child. Andres had fallen asleep again. He seemed to be slumbering peacefully now.

  Then she drank the milk herself. It tasted so good that she had to gulp down two or three more ladlefuls of the warm drink.

  Still, she didn’t dare speak; the boy hadn’t yet said a comprehensible word. But she sank to her knees next to the foot of the bed and recited mutely to herself:

  Convertere, Domine, aliquantulum; et deprecare super servos tuos. Ne ultra memineris iniquitatis nostrae: ecce respice; populus tuus omnes nos.2

  Yes, yes, yes. This was a terrible thing she had done. But he was their only son. While she herself had seven! Shouldn’t she try everything to save her sister’s only son?

  All the thoughts she had had during the night—they were merely ramblings of the night. She had done it only because she couldn’t stand to see this child die in her hands.