Kristin Lavransdatter (6 page)

She bent over the water and saw her own dark image rise up from the depths and become clearer as it came closer. Then she saw in the mirror of the stream that someone was standing among the birches on the other side and leaning toward her. Abruptly she straightened up into a kneeling position and looked across the water. At first she thought she saw only the rock face and the trees clustered at its base. But suddenly she discerned a face among the leaves—there was a woman over there, with a pale face and flowing, flaxen hair. Her big light-gray eyes and her flaring, pale-pink nostrils reminded Kristin of Guldsvein’s. She was wearing something shiny and leaf-green, and branches and twigs hid her figure up to her full breasts, which were covered with brooches and gleaming necklaces.

Kristin stared at the vision. Then the woman raised her hand and showed her a wreath of golden flowers and beckoned to her with it.

Behind her, Kristin heard Guldsvein whinny loudly with fear. She turned her head. The stallion reared up, gave a resounding shriek, and then whirled around and set off up the hillside, making the ground thunder. The other horses followed. They rushed straight up the scree, so that rocks plummeted down with a crash, and branches and roots snapped and cracked.

Then Kristin screamed as loud as she could. “Father!” she shrieked. “Father!” She sprang to her feet and ran up the slope after the horses, not daring to look back over her shoulder. She clambered up the scree, tripped on the hem of her dress, and slid down, then climbed up again, scrabbling onward with bleeding hands, crawling on scraped and bruised knees, calling to Guldsvein in between her shouts to her father—while the sweat poured out of her whole body, running like water into her eyes, and her heart pounded as if it would hammer a hole through her chest; sobs of terror rose in her throat.

“Oh, Father, Father!”

Then she heard his voice somewhere above her. She saw him coming in great leaps down the slope of the scree—the bright, sun-white scree. Alpine birches and aspens stood motionless along the slope, their leaves glittering with little glints of silver. The mountain meadow was so quiet and so bright, but her father came bounding toward her, calling her name, and Kristin sank down, realizing that now she was saved.

“Sancta Maria!” Lavrans knelt down next to his daughter and pulled her to him. He was pale and there was a strange look to his mouth that frightened Kristin even more; not until she saw his face did she realize the extent of her peril.

“Child, child . . .” He lifted up her bloody hands, looked at them, noticed the wreath on her bare head, and touched it. “What’s this? How did you get here, little Kristin?”

“I followed Guldsvein,” she sobbed against his chest. “I was so afraid because you were all asleep, but then Guldsvein came. And then there was someone who waved to me from down by the stream. . . .”

“Who waved? Was it a man?”

“No, it was a woman. She beckoned to me with a wreath of gold—I think it was a dwarf maiden, Father.”

“Jesus Christus,” said Lavrans softly, making the sign of the cross over the child and himself.

He helped her up the slope until they came to the grassy hillside; then he lifted her up and carried her. She clung to his neck and sobbed; she couldn’t stop, no matter how much he hushed her.

Soon they reached the men and Isrid, who clasped her hands together when she heard what had happened.

“Oh, that must have been the elf maiden—I tell you, she must have wanted to lure this pretty child into the mountain.”

“Be quiet,” said Lavrans harshly. “We shouldn’t have talked about such things the way we did here in the forest. You never know who’s under the stones, listening to every word.”

He pulled out the golden chain with the reliquary cross from inside his shirt and hung it around Kristin’s neck, placing it against her bare skin.

“All of you must guard your tongues well,” he told them. “For Ragnfrid must never hear that the child was exposed to such danger.”

Then they caught the horses that had run into the woods and walked briskly down to the pasture enclosure where the other horses had been left. Everyone mounted their horses, and they rode over to the Jørundgaard pasture; it was not far off.

The sun was about to go down when they arrived. The cattle were in the pen, and Tordis and the herdsmen were doing the milking. Inside the hut, porridge had been prepared for them, for the pasture folk had seen them up at the beacon earlier in the day and they were expected.

Not until then did Kristin stop her weeping. She sat on her father’s lap and ate porridge and thick cream from his spoon.

The next day Lavrans was to ride out to a lake farther up the mountain; that’s where some of his herdsmen had taken the oxen. Kristin was supposed to have gone with him, but now he told her to stay at the hut. “And you, Tordis and Isrid, must see to it that the door is kept locked and the smoke vent closed until we come back, both for Kristin’s sake and for the sake of the little unbaptized child in the cradle.”

Tordis was so frightened that she didn’t dare stay up there any longer with the baby; she had not yet been to church herself since giving birth. She wanted to leave at once and stay down in the village. Lavrans said he thought this reasonable; she could travel with them down the mountain the next evening. He thought he could get an older widow who was a servant at Jørundgaard to come up here in her place.

Tordis had spread sweet, fresh meadow grass under the hides on the bench; it smelled so strong and good, and Kristin was almost asleep as her father said the Lord’s Prayer and
Ave Maria
over her.

“It’s going to be a long time before I take you with me to the mountains again,” said Lavrans, patting her cheek.

Kristin woke up with a start.

“Father, won’t you let me go with you to the south in the fall, as you promised?”

“We’ll have to see about that,” said Lavrans, and then Kristin fell at once into a sweet sleep between the sheepskins.

EVERY SUMMER Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn would ride off to the south to see to his estate at Follo. These journeys of her father were like yearly mileposts in Kristin’s life: those long weeks of his absence and then the great joy when he returned home with wonderful gifts—cloth from abroad for her bridal chest, figs, raisins, and gingerbread from Oslo—and many strange things to tell her.

But this year Kristin noticed that there was something out of the ordinary about her father’s trip. It was postponed again and again. The old men from Loptsgaard came riding over unexpectedly and sat at the table with her father and mother, talking about inheritances and allodial property,
¹
repurchasing rights, and the difficulties of running a manor from a distance; and about the episcopal seat and the king’s castle in Oslo, which took so many of the workers away from the farms in the neighboring areas. The old men had no time to play with Kristin, and she was sent out to the cookhouse to the maids. Her uncle, Trond Ivarsøn of Sundbu, also came to visit them more often than usual—but he had never been in the habit of teasing or playing with Kristin.

Gradually she began to understand what it was all about. Ever since he had come to Sil, her father had sought to acquire land there in the village, and now Sir Andres Gudmundsøn had offered to exchange Formo, which was his mother’s ancestral estate, for Skog, which lay closer to him, since he was one of the king’s retainers and seldom came to the valley. Lavrans was loath to part with Skog, which was his ancestral farm; it had come into his family as a gift from the king. And yet the exchange would be advantageous to him in many ways. But Lavrans’s brother, Aasmund Bjørgulfsøn, was also interested in acquiring Skog—he was now living in Hadeland, where he had a manor that he had obtained through marriage—and it was uncertain whether Aasmund would relinquish his ancestral property rights.

But one day Lavrans told Ragnfrid that this year he wanted to take Kristin along with him to Skog. She should at least see the estate where she had been born and the home of his forefathers if it was going to pass out of their possession. Ragnfrid thought this a reasonable request, even though she was a little uneasy about sending so young a child on such a long journey when she was not going along herself.

During the first days after Kristin had seen the elf maiden, she was so fearful that she kept close to her mother; she was even frightened by the mere sight of any of the servants who had been up on the mountain that day and who knew what had happened to her. She was glad that her father had forbidden anyone to mention it.

But after some time had passed, she thought that she would have liked to talk about it. In her own mind she told someone about it—she wasn’t sure who—and the strange thing was that the more time that passed, the better she seemed to remember it, and the clearer her memory was of the fair woman.

But the strangest thing of all was that every time she thought about the elf maiden, she would feel such a yearning to travel to Skog, and she grew more and more afraid that her father would refuse to take her.

Finally one morning she woke up in the loft above the storeroom and saw that Old Gunhild and her mother were sitting on the doorstep looking through Lavrans’s bundle of squirrel skins. Gunhild was a widow who went from farm to farm, sewing furs into capes and other garments. Kristin gathered from their conversation that now she was the one who was to have a new cloak, lined with squirrel skins and trimmed with marten. Then she realized that she was going to accompany her father, and she jumped out of bed with a cry of joy.

Her mother came over to her and caressed her cheek.

“Are you so happy then, my daughter, to be going so far away from me?”

 

Ragnfrid said the same thing on the morning of their departure from Jørundgaard. They were up before dawn; it was dark outside, and a thick mist was drifting between the buildings when Kristin peeked out the door at the weather. It billowed like gray smoke around the lanterns and in front of the open doorways. Servants ran back and forth from the stables to the storehouses, and the women came from the cookhouse with steaming pots of porridge and trenchers of boiled meat and pork. They would have a good meal of hearty food before they set off in the cold of the morning.

Indoors the leather bags with their traveling goods were opened up again, and forgotten items were placed inside. Ragnfrid reminded her husband of all the things he was supposed to tend to for her, and she talked about kinsmen and acquaintances who lived along the way—he must give a certain person her greetings, and he must not forget to ask after someone else she mentioned.

Kristin ran in and out, saying goodbye many times to everyone in the house, unable to sit still anywhere.

“Are you so happy then, Kristin, to be going so far away from me, and for such a long time?” asked her mother. Kristin felt both sad and crestfallen, and she wished that her mother had not said such a thing. But she replied as best she could.

“No, dear Mother, but I’m happy to be going with my father.”

“Yes, I suppose you are,” said Ragnfrid with a sigh. Then she kissed the child and fussed with the maiden’s clothes a bit.

At last they sat in the saddles, everyone who was to accompany them on the journey. Kristin was riding Morvin, the horse that had once been her father’s. He was old, wise, and steady. Ragnfrid handed the silver goblet with one last fortifying drink to her husband, placed a hand on her daughter’s knee, and told her to remember everything that she had impressed upon her.

Then they rode out of the courtyard into the gray dawn. The fog hovered as white as milk over the village. But in a while it began to disperse and then the sun seeped through. Dripping with dew and green with the second crop of hay, the pastures shimmered in the white haze, along with pale stubble-fields and yellow trees and mountain ash with glittering red berries. The blue of the mountainsides was dimly visible, rising up out of the mist and steam. Then the fog broke and drifted in wisps among the grassy slopes, and they rode down through the valley in the most glorious sunshine—Kristin foremost in the group, at her father’s side.

They arrived in Hamar on a dark and rainy evening. Kristin was sitting in front on her father’s saddle, for she was so tired that everything swam before her eyes—the lake gleaming palely off to the right, the dark trees dripping moisture on them as they rode underneath, and the somber black clusters of buildings in the colorless, wet fields along the road.

She had stopped counting the days. It seemed to her that she had been on this long journey forever. They had visited family and friends who lived along the valley. She had gotten to know children on the large manors, she had played in unfamiliar houses and barns and courtyards, and she had worn her red dress with the silk sleeves many times. They had rested along the side of the road in the daytime when it was good weather. Arne had gathered nuts for her, and after their meals she had been allowed to sleep on top of the leather bags containing their clothes. At one estate they had been given silk-covered pillows in their beds. On another night they had slept in a roadside hostel, and whenever Kristin woke up she could hear a woman weeping softly and full of despair in one of the other beds. But every night she had slept snugly against her father’s broad, warm back.