Kristin Lavransdatter (167 page)

She saw a flame flare up inside the hovel. A moment later Ulf Haldorssøn called to her. “You must come here and light the way for me, Kristin.” He stood in the doorway and handed her a torch of charred wood.

The stench of the corpse nearly suffocated her, even though the hut was so drafty and the door was gone. Wide-eyed, with her lips parted—and her jaw and lips felt as rigid as wood—she looked for the dead woman. But she saw only a long bundle lying in the corner on the earthen floor. Wrapped around it was Ulf’s cape.

He had pulled loose several long boards from somewhere and placed the door on top. As he cursed the clumsy tools, he made notches and holes with his axe and dagger and struggled to bind the door to the boards. Several times he cast a quick glance up at her, and each time his dark gray-bearded face grew stonier.

“I wonder how you thought you would manage to do this all alone,” he said, bending over his work. He looked up, but the rigid, lifeless face in the red glow of the tarred torch remained unchanged—the face of a dead woman or a mad creature. “Can you tell me that, Kristin?” He laughed harshly, but it did no good. “I think it’s about time for you to say a few prayers.”

In the same stiff and listless tone she began to pray:
“Pater noster qui es in celis. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua sicut in celo et in terra.”
Then she came to a halt.

Ulf looked at her. Then he took up the prayer,
“Panum nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie . . .”
Swiftly and firmly he said the words of the
Pater noster
to the end, then went over and made the sign of the cross over the bundle; swiftly and firmly he picked it up and carried it over to the litter that he had made.

“You take the front,” he said. “It may be a little heavier, but you won’t notice the stench as much. Throw the torch away; we’ll see better without it. And don’t stumble, Kristin; I would rather not have to touch this poor corpse again.”

The raging pain in her breast seemed to rise up in protest when she lifted the poles of the litter over her shoulders; her chest
refused
to bear the weight. But she clenched her teeth. As long as they walked along the shore, where the wind blew, she hardly noticed the smell of the body.

“I’d better climb up first and pull the litter up after me,” said Ulf when they reached the slope where they had come down.

“We can go a little farther,” said Kristin. “Over to the place where they bring down the seaweed sledges; it’s not as steep.”

The man could hear that her voice sounded calm and composed. And now that it was over, he started sweating and shivering; he had thought she was going to lose her wits that night.

They struggled onward over the sandy path that led across the clearing to the pine forest. The wind blew freely but not as strongly as it had on the shore, and as they walked farther and farther away from the roar of the tide flats, she felt as if it was a journey home from the uttermost terrors of darkness. The land was pale on both sides of the path—a field of grain, but there had been no one to harvest it. The smell of the grain and the sight of the withering straw welcomed her back home, and her eyes filled with the tears of sisterly compassion. Out of her own desperate terror and need she had come home to the community of the living and the dead.

From time to time the dreadful stink of decay would wash over her if the wind blew at her back, but it wasn’t as foul as when she was standing inside the hut. Here the air was full of the fresh, wet, and cold purity of the breeze.

And stronger than the feeling that she was carrying something gruesome on the litter behind her was the sense that Ulf Hal dorssøn was walking along, protecting her back against the living and black horror they had left behind; its crashing sound became fainter and fainter.

When they reached the outskirts of the pine forest, they noticed lights. “They’re coming to meet us,” said Ulf.

A moment later they were met by an entire throng of men carrying torches, a couple of lanterns, and a bier covered with a shroud. Sira Eiliv was with them, and Kristin was surprised to see that the group included several men who had been in the cemetery earlier that night; many of them were weeping. When they lifted the burden from her shoulders, she nearly collapsed. Sira Eiliv was about to catch her when she said quickly, “Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me. I can feel that I have the plague myself.”

But Sira Eiliv put his hand under her arm all the same.

“Then it should be of comfort for you to remember, woman, what Our Lord has said: That which you have done unto one of my poorest brothers or sisters, you have also done unto me.”

Kristin stared at the priest. Then she shifted her glance to the men, who were moving the body to the bier from the litter Ulf had made. Ulf’s cape fell aside; the tip of a worn shoe gleamed, dark with rain in the light of the torches.

Kristin went over, knelt down between the poles of the litter, and kissed the shoe.

“May God bless you, sister. May God bathe your soul in His light. May God have mercy on all of us here in the darkness.”

Then she thought it was life itself working its way out of her—an unthinkable, piercing pain as if something inside, firmly rooted to the utmost ends of her limbs, had been torn loose. All that was contained within her breast was ripped out; she felt it fill her throat. Her mouth filled with blood that tasted of salt and filthy copper; a moment later her entire robe was covered with glistening, dark wetness. Jesus, can there be so much blood in an old woman? she thought.

Ulf Haldorssøn lifted her up in his arms and carried her.

 

In the convent portal the nuns met the procession, carrying lighted tapers in their hands. Kristin no longer had her full wits about her, but she sensed that she was half carried, half supported through the doorway. The white-plastered vaulted room was filled with flickering light from yellow candle flames and red pinewood torches, and the stomping of feet roared like the sea—but for the dying woman it was like a mirror of her own sinking life flame, and the footsteps on the flagstones seemed to be the crash of death’s current, rising up toward her.

Then the glow of light spread outward to a larger space; she was once again under a dark, open sky—out in the courtyard. The light played over a gray stone wall with heavy pillars and tall windows: the church. Someone was carrying her—it was Ulf again—but now he became one with all those who had ever carried her. When she put her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek against his prickly bearded neck, she felt like a child again, with her father, but she also felt as if she were taking a child in her own arms. Behind his dark head there were red lights, and they seemed to be shining from the fire that nourishes all love.

Some time later she opened her eyes and her mind was clear. She was sitting propped up in a bed in the dormitory; a nun stood leaning over her, wearing a linen cloth on the lower half of her face, and she noticed the smell of vinegar. It was Sister Agnes; she could tell by the eyes and the tiny red wart on her forehead. And it was daytime. A clear gray light entered the room through the little windowpane.

She was not suffering now, but she was soaked with sweat, terribly weak and tired, and she had a sharp, stabbing pain in her breast when she breathed. Greedily she drank a soothing potion that Sister Agnes held to her lips. But she was freezing.

Kristin leaned back against the pillows, and now she remembered everything that had happened the night before. The wild shimmer of a dream had vanished completely; she realized that she must have been slightly out of her wits. But it was good that she had done what she had: rescued the little boy and prevented those poor people from being burdened with such a misdeed. She knew she should be overjoyed that
she
had been fortunate enough to do this before she died, but she didn’t have the strength to rejoice as she ought to. She had more a sense of contentment, the way she felt lying in bed back home at Jørundgaard, weary from a day’s work well done. And she had to thank Ulf. . . .

She had spoken his name, and he must have been sitting in the shadows near the door and heard her, for he crossed the room and stood before her bed. She stretched out her hand to him, and he took it, clasping it firmly and warmly in his.

Suddenly the dying woman grew uneasy; her hands fumbled under the folds of bedclothes around her neck.

“What is it, Kristin?” asked Ulf.

“The cross,” she whispered, and pulled out her father’s gilded cross. She recalled that she had promised the day before to offer a gift for the soul of poor Steinunn. But she had forgotten that she owned no more earthly possessions. She owned nothing more than this cross, which her father had given her, and her wedding ring. She still wore that on her finger.

She took it off and looked at it. It lay heavy in her hand, pure gold and set with large red stones. Erlend, she thought. And she realized that now she should give it away; she didn’t know why, but she felt that she should. She closed her eyes in pain and handed the ring to Ulf.

“Who do you want to leave it to?” he asked softly. When she didn’t reply, he said, “Should I give it to Skule?”

Kristin shook her head, keeping her eyes closed tight.

“Steinunn . . . I promised . . . masses for her. . . .”

She opened her eyes and looked at the ring lying in the dark palm of the smith. And her tears burst forth in torrents, for she felt as if she had never before fully understood what it signified. The life to which this ring had married her, over which she had complained and grumbled, raged and rebelled. And yet she had loved it so, rejoicing over it, with both the bad and the good, so that there was not a single day she would have given back to God without lament or a single sorrow she would have relinquished without regret.

Ulf and the nun exchanged a few words that she couldn’t hear, and he left the room. Kristin tried to lift her hand to wipe her eyes but didn’t have the strength; her hand remained lying on her breast. It hurt so terribly inside, her hand seemed so heavy, and she felt as if the ring were still on her finger. Her mind was becoming confused again; she
must
see if it was true that the ring was gone, that she hadn’t merely dreamed she’d given it away. She was also becoming uncertain. Everything that had happened in the night, the child in the grave, the black sea with the small, swift glimpses of the waves, the body she had carried . . . she didn’t know whether she had dreamed it all or been awake. And she didn’t have the strength to open her eyes.

“Sister,” said the nun, “you mustn’t sleep yet. Ulf has gone to bring the priest to you.”

Kristin woke up with a start and fixed her eyes on her hand. The gold ring was gone; that was certain enough. There was a shiny, worn mark where it had sat on her middle finger. On the brown, rough flesh it was quite clear—like a scar of thin white skin. She thought she could even make out two round circles from the rubies on either side and a tiny scratch, an
M
from the center of the ring where the holy symbol of the Virgin Mary had been etched into the gold.

The last clear thought that took shape in her mind was that she was going to die before the mark had time to fade, and it made her happy. It seemed to her a mystery that she could not comprehend, but she was certain that God had held her firmly in a pact which had been made for her, without her knowing it, from a love that had been poured over her—and in spite of her willfulness, in spite of her melancholy, earthbound heart, some of that love had
stayed
inside her, had worked on her like sun on the earth, had driven forth a crop that neither the fiercest fire of passion nor its stormi est anger could completely destroy. She had been a servant of God—a stubborn, defiant maid, most often an eye-servant in her prayers and unfaithful in her heart, indolent and neglectful, impatient toward admonishments, inconstant in her deeds. And yet He had held her firmly in His service, and under the glittering gold ring a mark had been secretly impressed upon her, showing that she was His servant, owned by the Lord and King who would now come, borne on the consecrated hands of the priest, to give her release and salvation.

 

As soon as Sira Eiliv had anointed her with the last oil and viaticum, Kristin Lavransdatter again lost consciousness. She lay there, violently vomiting blood, with a blazing fever, and the priest who was sitting with her told the nuns that the end would come quickly.

Several times the dying woman’s mind cleared enough that she could recognize one face or another: Sira Eiliv or the sisters. Fru Ragnhild herself was there once, and she saw Ulf. She struggled to show that she knew them and that it was good they were with her and wished her well. But for those who stood at her bedside, it merely looked as if she were flailing her hands in the throes of death.

Once she saw Munan’s face; her little son was peeking at her through a crack in the door. Then he pulled back his head, and his mother lay there, staring at the door to see if the boy would look through it again. Instead Fru Ragnhild appeared and wiped her face with a damp cloth, and that too felt good. Then everything disappeared in a dark red haze and a roar, which at first grew fearfully loud, but then the din gradually died away, and the red fog became thinner and lighter, and at last it was like a fine morning mist before the sun breaks through, and there was not a sound, and she knew that now she was dying.

 

Sira Eiliv and Ulf Haldorssøn left the deathbed together. In the doorway leading out to the convent courtyard, they stopped.

Snow had fallen. None of them had noticed this as they sat with her and she struggled with death. The white sheen was strangely dazzling on the steep slant of the church roof opposite them; the tower was pale against the murky gray sky. The snow lay so fine and white on all the window frames and all the jutting gray stones of the church walls. And the two men seemed to hesitate, not wanting to mar the new snow in the courtyard with their footprints.