Kristin realized that it was unreasonable to expect the monk to know anything about her: the name of her husband or his fate, even if she mentioned her family name. And so she simply asked him to write “the widow Kristin.”
Walking down through Gauldal, she took the paths on the outskirts of the villages, for she thought if she met people from the large estates, it might turn out that they recognized the former mistress of Husaby. She didn’t fully know why, but she was reluctant for this to happen. The following day she set off along the paths through the woods on the mountain ridge to the little church at Vatsfjeld, which had been consecrated to John the Baptist, although the people called it Saint Edvin’s Church.
The chapel stood in a clearing in dense forest; both the building and the mountain behind were mirrored in a pond from which a curative spring flowed. A wooden cross stood near the creek, and all around lay crutches and walking sticks, and on the bushes hung shreds of old bandages.
There was a small fence around the church, but the gate was locked. Kristin knelt down outside and thought about the time she had sat inside with Gaute on her lap. Back then she was dressed in silk, one of the group of magnificently attired noblemen and women from the surrounding parishes. Sira Eiliv stood nearby, holding Naakkve and Bjørgulf firmly by the hand; among the crowd outside were her maids and servants. Then she had prayed so fervently that if this suffering child would be given his wits and health, she would ask for nothing more, not even to be freed from the terrible pain in her back which had plagued her ever since the birth of the twins.
She thought about Gaute, so stalwart and handsome he looked on his huge blue-black horse. And about herself. Not many women her age, now close to half a century, enjoyed such good health; that was something she had noticed on her way through the mountains. Lord, if only you would give me this and this and this, then I will thank you and ask for nothing more except for this and this and this. . . .
Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she asked for—for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart—not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road’s end.
She had not come to God with her wreath or with her sins and sorrows, not as long as the world still possessed a drop of sweetness to add to her goblet. But now she had come, after she had learned that the world is like an alehouse: The person who has no more to spend is thrown outside the door.
She felt no joy at her decision, but it seemed to Kristin that she herself had not made the choice. The poor beggars who had entered her house had come to invite her away. A will that was not her own had put her among that group of impoverished and ill people and invited her to go with them, away from the home she had managed as the mistress and ruled as the mother of men. And when she had consented without much protest, she knew that she did so because she saw that Gaute would thrive better if she left the estate. She had bent fate to her will; she had obtained the circumstances she wanted. Her sons she could not shape according to her will; they were the way God had created them, and their obstinacy drove them. With them she could never win. Gaute was a good farmer, a good husband, and a faithful father, a capable man and as honorable as most people. But he did not have the makings of a chieftain, nor did he have the inclination to long for what she had desired on his behalf. Yet he loved her enough to feel tormented because he knew she expected something else of him. That was why she now intended to beg for food and shelter, even though it hurt her pride to arrive so impoverished; she had nothing to give.
But she realized that she
had
to come. The spruce forest covering the slopes stood drinking in the seeping sunlight and swayed softly; the little church sat silent and closed, sweating an odor of tar. With longing Kristin thought about the dead monk who had taken her hand and led her into the light emanating from the cloak of God’s love when she was an innocent child, who had reached out his hand to lead her home, time after time, from the paths on which she had strayed. Suddenly she remembered so clearly her dream about him the night before, up in the mountains:
She dreamed that she was standing in the sunshine in a courtyard of some grand estate, and Brother Edvin was walking toward her from the doorway to the main house. His hands were full of bread, and when he reached her, she saw that she had been forced to do as she envisioned, to ask for alms when she came to the villages. But somehow she had arrived in the company of Brother Edvin, and the two of them were traveling together and begging. But at the same time she knew that her dream had a double meaning; the estate was not merely a noble manor, but it seemed to her to signify a holy place, and Brother Edvin belonged to the servants there, and the bread which he offered her was not simply flatbread the way it looked; it signified the Host,
panis angelorum
, and she accepted the food of angels from his hand. And now she gave her promise into Brother Edvin’s hands.
CHAPTER 5
FINALLY SHE HAD arrived. Kristin Lavransdatter sat and rested in a haystack on the road beneath Sion Castle. The sun was shining, and the wind was blowing; the part of the field that had not yet been cut undulated with blossoming straw, red and shiny like silk. Only the fields of Trøndelag were ever that color red. At the bottom of the slope she could see a glimpse of the fjord, dark blue and dotted with foam; fresh white sea swells crashed against the cliffs of the shore for as far as she could see below the green-forested promontory of the town.
Kristin let out a long breath. All the same, it was good to be back here, good even though it was also strange to know that she would never leave here again. The gray-clad sisters out at Rein followed the same rules, Saint Bernard’s rules, as the brothers of Tautra. When she rose before dawn and went to church, she knew that Naakkve and Bjørgulf would also be taking their places in the monks’ choir. So she would end up living out her old age with some of her sons after all, although not in the way she might have imagined.
She took off her hose and shoes to wash her feet in the creek. She would walk to Nidaros barefoot.
Behind her on the path leading up over the castle’s summit several boys now appeared, gathering around the portal to see if they could find a way into the fortress ruins. When they caught sight of Kristin, they began shouting crude words at her while they laughed and hooted. She pretended not to hear until a small boy—he couldn’t have been more than eight—happened to roll down the steep incline and nearly rammed into her, uttering several loathsome words he had boldly learned from the older ones.
Kristin turned around and said with a little laugh, “You don’t need to scream for me to know you’re a troll child; I can see that by the tumbling pants that you’re wearing.”
When the boys noticed the woman was speaking, they came bounding down, the whole pack of them. But they fell silent and grew shamefaced when they saw she was an older woman wearing pilgrim’s garb. She didn’t scold them for their coarse words but sat there looking at them with big, clear, calm eyes and a secretive smile on her lips. She had a round, thin face with a broad forehead and a small, curving chin. She was sunburned and had many wrinkles under her eyes, yet she didn’t look particularly old.
Then the most fearless of the boys started talking and asking questions in order to conceal the confusion of the others. Kristin felt so merry. These boys seemed to her much like her own daredevils, the twins, when they were small, although she hoped to God that
her
sons had never had such filthy mouths. These boys seemed to be the children of smallholders from town.
When the moment came that she had longed for during the whole journey, when she stood beneath the cross on Feginsbrekka and looked down at Nidaros, she wasn’t able to muster her soul for prayers and devotion. All the bells of the town began pealing at once, summoning everyone to vespers, and the boys all started talking at once, eager to point out to her everything in sight.
She couldn’t see Tautra because a squall was blowing across the fjord toward Frosta, bringing fog and torrents of rain.
Surrounded by the group of boys, she made her way down the steep paths through the Steinberg cliffs, as cowbells began ringing and herders shouted from all sides. The cows were heading home from the town pastures. At the gate in the town ramparts near Nidareid, Kristin and her young companions had to wait while the livestock was driven through. The herders hooted and yelled and scolded, the oxen butted, the cows jostled each other, and the boys told her who owned each and every bull. When they finally went through the gate and walked toward the fenced lanes, Kristin had more than enough to do watching where she set her bare feet between the cow dung in the churned-up track.
Without asking, a few of the boys followed her all the way to Christ Church. And when she stood amid the dim forest of pillars and looked toward the candles and gold of the choir, the boys kept tugging at Kristin to show her things: from the colored patches of light that the sun on the rose window cast through the arches, to the gravestones on the floor, to the canopies of costly cloth above the altars—all things that were most likely to catch a child’s eye. Kristin had no peace to collect her thoughts, but every word the boys uttered aroused a dull, deep longing in her heart: for her sons, above all else, but also for the manor, the houses, the outbuildings, the livestock. A mother’s toil and a mother’s domain.
She was still feeling reluctant to be recognized by people who might have been friends with Erlend or her in the past. They always used to spend the feast days at their town estate and have guests staying with them. She dreaded running into a whole entourage. She would have to seek out Ulf Haldorssøn, for he had been acting as her envoy with regard to the property shares she still owned up here in the north and that she now wanted to give to the Rein Convent in exchange for a corrody.
1
But she knew that a man who had served as one of Erlend’s guardsmen while he was sheriff was supposed to be living on a small farm out near Bratør; he fished for white-sided dolphins and porpoises in the fjord and kept a hostel for seafarers.
All the lodgings were full, she was told, but then Aamunde, the owner himself, appeared and recognized her at once. It was strange to hear him call out her old name.
“If I’m not mistaken . . . aren’t you Erlend Nikulaussøn’s wife from Husaby? Greetings, Kristin. How is it that you’ve come to my house?”
He was more than happy if she would accept such lodgings for the night as he could offer, and he promised that he himself would sail to Tautra with her on the day after the feast.
Late into the night she sat outside in the courtyard, talking with her host, and she was greatly moved when she saw that Erlend’s former subordinate still loved and esteemed the memory of his young chieftain. Aamunde used that word about him several times: young. They had heard from Ulf Haldorssøn about his unfortunate death, and Aamunde said that he never met any of his old companions from the Husaby days without drinking a toast to the memory of their intrepid master. Twice some of them had collected money and paid for a mass to be said for his soul on the anniversary of his death. Aamunde asked many questions about Erlend’s sons, and Kristin in turn asked about old acquaintances. It was midnight before she went to bed, lying down beside Aamunde’s wife. He had wanted both of them to give up their bed for her, and in the end she had to agree to take at least his half.
The next day was the Vigil of Saint Olav. Early in the morning Kristin went down to the skerries to watch the bustle along the wharves. Her heart began pounding when she saw the lord abbot of Tautra come ashore, but the monks who accompanied him were all older men.
Just before midafternoon prayers the crowds began heading toward Christ Church, carrying and supporting the ill and the lame, to find room for them in the nave so they would be close to the shrine when it was carried past in procession the following day after high mass.
When Kristin made her way up to the stalls that had been put up near the cemetery wall—they were mostly selling food and drink, wax candles, and cushions woven from reeds or birch twigs to kneel on inside the church—she happened to meet the people from Andabu again. Kristin held the child while the young mother went to get a drink of local ale. At that moment a procession of English pilgrims appeared, singing and carrying banners and lighted tapers. In the confusion that ensued as they passed through the great crowds around the stalls, Kristin lost sight of the people from Andabu, and afterward she couldn’t find them.
For a long time she wandered back and forth on the outskirts of the throngs, hushing the screaming child. When she pressed the girl’s face against her throat, caressing and consoling her, the child would put her lips to Kristin’s skin and try to suckle. She could tell the child was thirsty, but she didn’t know what to do. It would be futile to search for the mother; she would have to go into the streets and see if she could find some milk. But when she reached Upper Langstræte and tried to turn north, there was again a great crush of people. An entourage of horsemen was coming from the south, and at the same time a procession of guardsmen from the king’s palace had entered the square between the church and the residence of the Brothers of the Cross. Kristin was pressed back into the nearest alleyway, but there too people on horseback and on foot were streaming toward the church, and the crowds grew so fierce that she finally had to save herself by climbing up onto a stone wall.
The air above her was filled with the clanging of bells; from the cathedral the
nona hora
2
was rung. At the sound the child stopped screaming; she looked up at the sky, and a glimmer of understanding appeared in her dull eyes; she smiled a bit. Touched, the old mother bent down and kissed the poor little thing. Then she noticed that she was sitting on the stone wall surrounding the hops garden of Nikulaus Manor, their old town estate.