Kristin Lavransdatter (94 page)

“Yes, Father. I understand everything you said.” Gaute lifted his small, fair face with a somber expression as he stood on the stairs.

“If Ulf isn’t home, tell Isak that he has to set off at once for Hevne and ride all night—he must tell them, and he knows who I mean, that I think a headwind has sprung up here, and that I fear my journey has now been cursed. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Father. I remember everything you’ve told me.”

“Go then. May God protect you, my son.”

Erlend dashed up to the weapons loft and was about to close the hatchway, but Kristin was already halfway through the opening. He waited until she had climbed up, then shut the hatch and ran over to a chest and took out several boxes of letters. He tore off the seals and stomped them to bits on the floor; he ripped the parchments into shreds and wrapped them around a key and tossed the whole thing out the window to the ground, where it landed in the tall nettles growing behind the building. With his hands on the windowsill, Erlend stood and watched the small boy who was walking along the edge of the grain field toward the meadow where the rows of harvest workers were toiling with scythes and rakes. When Gaute disappeared into the little grove of trees between the field and the meadow, Erlend pulled the window closed. The sound of hoofbeats was now loud and close to the manor.

Erlend turned to face his wife.

“If you can retrieve what I threw outside just now . . . let Skule do it, he’s a clever boy. Tell him to fling it into the ravine behind the cowshed. They’ll probably be watching you, and maybe the older boys as well. But I don’t think they would search you. . . .” He tucked the broken pieces of seal inside her bodice. “They can’t be recognized anymore, but even so . . .”

“Are you in some kind of danger, Erlend?” Kristin asked. As he looked down at her face, he threw himself into her open arms. For a moment he held her tight.

“I don’t know, Kristin. We’ll find out soon enough. Tore Ein dridessøn is riding in the lead, and I saw that Sir Baard is with them. I don’t expect that Tore is coming here for any good purpose.”

Now the horsemen had entered the courtyard. Erlend hesitated for a moment. Then he kissed his wife fervently, opened the hatchway, and ran downstairs. When Kristin came out onto the gallery, Erlend was standing in the courtyard below, helping the royal treasurer, an elderly and ponderous man, down from his saddle. There were at least thirty armed men with Sir Baard and the sheriff of Gauldøla county.

As Kristin walked across the courtyard, she heard the latter man say, “I bring you greetings from your cousins, Erlend. Borgar and Guttorm are enjoying the king’s hospitality in Veøy, and I think that Haftor Toressøn has already paid a visit to Ivar and the young boy at home at Sundbu by this time. Sir Baard seized Graut yesterday morning in town.”

“And now you’ve come here to invite me to the same meeting of the royal retainers, I can see,” said Erlend with a smile.

“That is true, Erlend.”

“And no doubt you’ll want to search the manor? Oh, I’ve taken part in this kind of thing so many times that I should know how it goes. . . .”

“But you’ve never had such great matters as high treason on your hands before,” said Tore.

“No, not until now,” said Erlend. “And it looks as if I’m playing with the black chess pieces, Tore, and you have me check-mated—isn’t that so, kinsman?”

“We’re looking for the letters that you’ve received from Lady Ingebjørg Haakonsdatter,” said Tore Eindridessøn.

“They’re in the chest covered with red leather, up in the weapons loft. But they contain little except such greetings as loving kinsmen usually send to each other; and all of them are old. Stein here can show you the way. . . .”

The strangers had dismounted, and the servants of the estate had now come swarming into the courtyard.

“There was much more than that in the one we took from Borgar Trondssøn,” said Tore.

Erlend began whistling softly. “I suppose we might as well go into the house,” he said. “It’s getting crowded out here.”

Kristin followed the men into the hall. At a sign from Tore, a couple of the armed guards came along.

“You’ll have to surrender your sword, Erlend,” said Tore of Gimsar when they came inside. “As a sign that you’re our prisoner.”

Erlend slapped his flanks to show that he carried no other weapon than the dagger at his belt.

But Tore repeated, “You must hand over your sword, as a sign—”

“Well, if you want to do this formally . . .” said Erlend, laughing a bit. He went over and took down his sword from the peg, holding it by the sheath and offering the hilt to Tore Eindridessøn with a slight bow.

The old man from Gimsar loosened the fastenings, pulled the sword all the way out, and stroked the blade with a fingertip.

“Was it this sword, Erlend, that you used . . . ?”

Erlend’s blue eyes glittered like steel; he pressed his lips together into a narrow line.

“Yes. It was with this sword that I punished your grandson when I found him with my daughter.”

Tore stood holding the sword; he looked down at it and said in a threatening tone, “You who were supposed to uphold the law, Erlend—you should have known then that you were going farther than the law would follow you.”

Erlend threw back his head, his eyes blazing and fierce. “There is a law, Tore, that cannot be subverted by sovereigns or
tings,
which says that a man must protect the honor of his women with the sword.”

“You’ve been fortunate, Erlend Nikulaussøn, that no man has ever used that law against you,” replied Tore of Gimsar, his voice full of malice. “Or you might have needed as many lives as a cat.”

Erlend’s response was infuriatingly slow.

“Isn’t the present undertaking serious enough that you would think it inopportune to bring up those old charges from my youth?”

“I don’t know whether Baard of Lensvik would consider them old charges.” Rage surged up inside Erlend and he was about to reply, but Tore shouted, “You ought to find out first, Erlend, whether your paramours are so clever that they can read, before you run around on your nightly adventures with secret letters in your belt. Just ask Baard who it was that warned us you were planning treachery against your king, to whom you’ve sworn loyalty and who granted you the position of sheriff.”

Involuntarily Erlend pressed a hand to his breast—for a moment he glanced at his wife, and the blood rushed to his face. Then Kristin ran forward and threw her arms around his neck. Erlend looked down into her face—he saw nothing but love in her eyes.

“Erlend—husband!”

The royal treasurer had remained largely silent. Now he went over to the two of them and said softly, “My dear mistress, perhaps it would be best if you took the children and the serving women with you into the women’s house and stayed there as long as we’re here at the manor.”

Erlend let go of his wife with one last squeeze of his arm around her shoulder.

“It would be best, my dear Kristin. Do as Sir Baard advises.”

Kristin stood on her toes and offered Erlend her lips. Then she went out into the courtyard and collected her children and serving women from among the crowd, taking them with her into the little house. There was no other women’s house at Husaby.

They sat there for several hours; the composure of their mistress kept the frightened group more or less calm. Then Erlend entered, bearing no weapons and dressed for travel. Two strangers stood guard at the door.

He shook hands with his eldest sons and then lifted the smallest ones into his arms, while he asked where Gaute was. “Well, you must give him my greetings, Naakkve. He must have gone off into the woods with his bow the way he usually does. Tell him he can have my English longbow after all—the one I refused to give him last Sunday.”

Kristin pulled him to her without speaking a word.

Then she whispered urgently, “When are you coming back, Erlend, my friend?”

“When God wills it, my wife.”

She stepped back, struggling not to break down. Normally he never addressed her in any other way except by using her given name; his last words had shaken her to the heart. Only now did she fully understand what had happened.

 

At sunset Kristin was sitting up on the hill north of the manor.

She had never before seen the sky so red and gold. Above the opposite ridge stretched an enormous cloud; it was shaped like a bird’s wing, glowing from within like iron in the forge, and gleaming brightly like amber. Small golden shreds like feathers tore away and floated into the air. And far below, on the lake at the bottom of the valley, spread a mirror image of the sky and the cloud and the ridge. Down in the depths the radiant blaze was flaring upward, covering everything in sight.

The grass in the meadows had grown tall, and the silky tassels of the straw shone dark red beneath the crimson light from the sky; the barley had sprouted spikes and caught the light on the young, silky-smooth awn. The sod-covered rooftops of the farm buildings were thick with sorrel and buttercups, and the sun lay across them in wide bands. The blackened shingles of the church roof gleamed darkly, and its light-colored stone walls were becoming softly gilded.

The sun broke through from beneath the cloud, perched on the mountain rim, and lit up one forested ridge after another. It was such a clear evening; the light opened up vistas to small hamlets amidst the spruce-decked slopes. She could make out mountain pastures and tiny farms in among the trees that she had never been able to see before from Husaby. The shapes of huge mountains rose up, reddish-violet, in the south toward Dovre, in places that were usually covered by haze and clouds.

The smallest bell down in the church began to ring, and the church bell at Vinjar answered. Kristin sat bowed over her folded hands until the last notes of the ninefold peal died away.

Now the sun was behind the ridge; the golden glow paled and the crimson grew softer and pinker. After the ringing of the bells had ceased, the rustling sound from the forest swelled and spread again; the tiny creek trickling through the leafy woods down in the valley sounded louder. From the pasture nearby came the familiar clinking of the livestock bells; a flying beetle buzzed halfway around her and then disappeared.

She sent a last sigh after her prayers; an appeal for forgiveness because her thoughts had been elsewhere while she prayed.

The beautiful large estate lay below her on the hillside, like a jewel on the wide bosom of the slope. She gazed out across all the land she had owned along with her husband. Thoughts about the manor and its care had filled her soul to the brim. She had worked and struggled. Not until this evening did she realize how much she had struggled to put this estate back on its feet and keep it going—how hard she had tried and how much she had accomplished.

She had accepted it as her fate, to be borne with patience and a straight back, that this had fallen to her. Just as she had striven to be patient and steadfast no matter what life presented, every time she learned she was carrying yet another child under her breast—again and again. With each son added to the flock she recognized that her responsibility had grown for ensuring the prosperity and secure position of the lineage. Tonight she realized that her ability to survey everything at once and her watchfulness had also grown with each new child entrusted to her care. Never had she seen it so clearly as on this evening—what destiny had demanded of her and what it had given her in return with her seven sons. Over and over again joy had quickened the beat of her heart; fear on their behalf had rent it in two. They were her children, these big sons with their lean, bony, boy’s bodies, just as they had been when they were small and so plump that they barely hurt themselves when they tumbled down on their way between the bench and her knee. They were hers, just as they had been back when she lifted them out of the cradle to her milk-filled breast and had to support their heads, which wobbled on their frail necks the way a bluebell nods on its stalk. Wherever they ended up in the world, wherever they journeyed, forgetting their mother—she thought that for her, their lives would be like a current in her own life; they would be one with her, just as they had been when she alone on this earth knew about the new life hidden inside, drinking from her blood and making her cheeks pale. Over and over she had endured the sinking, sweat-dripping anguish when she realized that once again her time had come; once again she would be pulled under by the groundswell of birth pains—until she was lifted up with a new child in her arms. How much richer and stronger and braver she had become with each child was something that she first realized tonight.

And yet she now saw that she was the same Kristin from Jørundgaard, who had never learned to bear an unkind word because she had been protected all her days by such a strong and gentle love. In Erlend’s hands she was still the same . . .

Yes. Yes. Yes. It was true that all this time she had remembered, year after year, every wound he had ever caused her—even though she had always known that he never wounded her the way a grown person intends harm to another, but rather the way a child strikes out playfully at his companion. Each time he offended her, she had tended to the memory the way one tends to a venomous sore. And with each humiliation he brought upon himself by acting on any impulse he might have—it struck her like the lash of a whip against her flesh, causing a suppurating wound. It wasn’t true that she willfully or deliberately harbored ill feelings toward her husband; she knew she wasn’t usually narrow-minded, but with him she was. If Erlend had a hand in it, she forgot nothing—and even the smallest scratch on her soul would continue to sting and bleed and swell and ache if he was the one to cause it.

About him she would never be wiser or stronger. She might strive to seem capable and fearless, pious and strong in her marriage with him—but in truth, she wasn’t. Always, always there was the yearning lament inside her: She wanted to be his Kristin from the woods of Gerdarud.