Kristin tried to reassure Simon as best she could, and then she had to ride behind him for a while. Once he turned around to ask whether she was cold; he wanted her to take his cape over her cloak.
Then he spoke again of his son. He had noticed that the boy wasn’t strong. But Andres had grown much more robust during the summer and fall; his foster mother thought so too. The last few days before he fell ill he had acted a little strange and skittish. “Scared,” he had said when the dogs leaped at him, wanting to play. On the day when the fever seized him, Simon had come home in the first rays of dawn with several wild ducks. Usually the boy liked to borrow the birds his father brought home and play with them, but this time Andres screamed loudly when his father swung the bundle toward him. Later he crept over to touch the birds, but when he got blood on his hands, he grew quite wild with terror. And now, this evening, he lay whimpering so terribly, unable to sleep or rest, and then he screamed something about a hawk that was after him.
“Do you remember that day in Oslo when the messenger arrived? You said, ‘It will be your descendant who will live on at Formo after you’re gone.’ ”
“Don’t talk like that, Simon. As if you think you will die without a son. Surely God and His gentle Mother will help. It’s unlike you to be so disheartened, brother-in-law.”
“Halfrid, my first wife, said the same thing to me after she gave birth to our son. Did you know that I had a son with her, Kristin?”
“Yes. But Andres is already in his third year. It’s during the first two years that it’s the most difficult to protect a child’s life.” But even to her these words seemed to offer little help. They rode and rode; the horses plodded up a slope, nodding and casting their heads about so the harnesses jangled. Not a sound in the frosty night except the sound of their own passage and occasionally the rush of water as they crossed a stream, and the moon shining on everything. The scree and the rocky slopes glistened as hideously as death as they rode along beneath the cliffs.
Finally they reached a place where they could look down into the countryside. The moonlight filled the whole valley; the river and marshes and lake farther south gleamed like silver; the fields and meadows were pale.
“Tonight there’s frost in the valley too,” said Simon.
He dismounted and walked along, leading Kristin’s horse down the hillside. The path was so steep in many places that she hardly dared look ahead. Simon supported her by keeping his back against her knee, and she held on by putting one hand behind on the horse’s flank. A stone would sometimes roll from under the horse’s hooves, tumbling downward, pausing for a moment, and then continuing to roll, loosening more on the way and carrying them along.
Finally they reached the bottom. They rode across the barley fields north of the manor, between the rime-covered shocks of grain. There was an eerie rustling and clattering in the aspen trees above them in the silent, bright night.
“Is it true,” asked Simon, wiping his face with his sleeve, “that you had no premonition?”
Kristin told him it was true.
He went on, “I’ve heard that it does happen; a premonition can appear if a person yearns strongly for someone. Ramborg and I talked about it several times, that if you had been home, you might have known—”
“None of you has entered my thoughts all this time,” said Kristin. “You must believe me, Simon.” But she couldn’t see it gave him much solace.
In the courtyard a couple of servants appeared at once to take their horses. “Things are just as you left them, Simon—not any worse,” one of them said quickly. He had glanced up at the master’s face. Simon nodded. He walked ahead of Kristin toward the women’s house.
Kristin could see that there was indeed grave danger. The little boy lay alone in the large, fine bed, moaning and gasping, ceaselessly tossing his head from side to side on the pillows. His face was fiery hot and dark red; he lay with his glistening eyes partially open, struggling to breathe. Simon stood holding Ramborg’s hand, and all the women of the estate who had gathered in the room crowded around Kristin as she examined the boy.
But she spoke as calmly as she could and comforted the parents as best she could. It was probably lung fever. But this night would soon be over without any turn for the worse; it was the nature of this illness that it usually turned on the third or sixth or ninth night before the rooster crowed. She told Ramborg to send all the servingwomen to bed except for two, so that she would always have rested maids to help her. When the servant returned from Jørundgaard with her healing things, she brewed a sweat-inducing potion for the boy and then lanced a vein in his foot so the fluids would be drawn away from his chest.
Ramborg’s face blanched when she saw her child’s blood. Simon put his arm around her, but she pushed her husband away and sat down on a chair at the foot of the bed. There she stayed, staring at Kristin with her big dark eyes while her sister tended to the child.
Later in the day, when the boy seemed to be a little better, Kristin persuaded Ramborg to lie down on a bench. She arranged pillows and blankets around the young woman and sat near her head, stroking her forehead gently. Ramborg took Kristin’s hand.
“You only wish us well, don’t you?” she asked with a moan.
“Why shouldn’t I wish you well, sister? The two of us, living here in our village once again, the only ones remaining of our kinsmen . . .”
Ramborg uttered several small, stifled sobs from between her tightly pressed lips. Kristin had seen her young sister cry only once, when they stood at their father’s deathbed. Now a few swift little tears rose up and trickled down her cheeks. Ramborg lifted Kristin’s hand and stared at it. It was big and slender, but reddish brown now, and rough.
“And yet it’s more beautiful than mine,” she said. Ramborg’s hands were small and white, but her fingers were short and her nails square.
“Yes, it is,” she said, almost angrily when Kristin shook her head and laughed lightly. “And you’re still more lovely than I have ever been. Our father and mother loved you more than me, all their days. You caused them sorrow and shame; I was docile and obedient and set my sights on the man they most wanted me to marry. And yet they loved you more.”
“No, sister. They were just as fond of you. Be happy, Ramborg, that you never gave them anything but joy; you cannot know how heavy the other is to bear. But they were younger back when I was young; perhaps that was why they talked to me more.”
“Yes, I think everybody was younger back when you were young,” said Ramborg, and sighed again.
A short time later she fell asleep. Kristin sat and looked at her. She had known her sister so little; Ramborg was a child when she herself was wed. It seemed to her that in some ways her sister had remained a child. As she sat beside her ill son she looked like a child, a pale, scared child who was trying stubbornly to fend off terror and misfortune.
Sometimes an animal would stop growing if it had young ones too soon. Ramborg was not even sixteen when she gave birth to her daughter, and ever since she had never seemed to grow properly again; she continued to be slender and small, lacking in vigor and fertility. She had given birth only to the one boy since then, and he was oddly weak—with a handsome face, fair and fine, but so pitifully frail and small. He had learned to walk late, and he still talked so poorly that only those who were with him every day could understand any of his chatter. He was also so shy and peevish with strangers that Kristin had hardly even touched her nephew until now. If only God and Holy Olav would grant her the joy to save this poor small boy, she would thank them for it all her days. The mother was such a child herself that she wouldn’t be able to bear losing him. And Kristin realized that for Simon Darre it would also be terribly difficult to bear if his only son were taken from him.
That she had become deeply fond of her brother-in-law became most apparent to her now as she saw how much he was suffering from fear and grief. No doubt she could understand her own father’s great love for Simon Andressøn. And yet she wondered whether he might have done wrong by Ramborg when he was in such haste to arrange this marriage. For as she gazed down at her little sister, she thought that Simon must be both too old and much too somber and steadfast to be the husband of this young child.
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?”