He had been sent on a mission by Sir Bjarne to southern Norway in the spring, so he could bring her recent news from Ivar and Gaute because he had traveled back north through the countryside and over the mountains from Vaagaa, home to Vestland. Ivar was well; he and his wife had two small sons at Rognheim, Erlend and Gamal, both handsome children. “At Jørundgaard I arrived for a christening feast. And Jofrid and Gaute said that since you were now dead to the world, they would name their little maiden after you; Jofrid is so proud of the fact that you’re her mother-in-law. Yes, you may laugh, but now that the two of you don’t have to live on the same manor, you can be sure that Jofrid thinks it splendid to speak of her mother-in-law, Kristin Lavransdatter. And I gave Kristin Gautesdatter my best gold ring, for she has such lovely eyes that I think she will come to look much like you.”
Kristin smiled sadly.
“Soon you’ll have me believing, my Skule, that my sons thought I was as fine and grand as old people always become as soon as they’re in their graves.”
“Don’t talk like that, Mother,” said the man, his voice strangely vehement. Then he laughed a little. “You know quite well that my brothers and I have always thought, ever since we wore our first pair of breeches, that you were the most splendid and magnanimous woman, even though you clutched us tightly under your wings so many times that we had to flap hard before we could escape the nest.
“But you were right that Gaute was the one with the makings of a chieftain among us brothers,” he added, and he roared with laughter.
“You don’t need to mock me about that, Skule,” said Kristin, and Skule saw that his mother blushed, looking young and lovely.
Then he laughed even harder. “It’s true, my mother. Gaute Er lendssøn of Jørundgaard has become a powerful man in the northern valleys. He won quite a reputation for himself by abducting his bride.” Skule bellowed with laughter; it didn’t suit his ruined mouth. “People are singing a ballad about it; yes, they’re even singing that he took the maiden with iron and steel and that he fought with her kinsmen for three long days up on the moors. And the banquet that Sir Sigurd held at Sundbu, making peace among kin with gold and silver: Gaute is given credit for that too in the ballad. But it doesn’t seem to have caused any harm by being a lie. Gaute rules the entire parish and some distance beyond, and Jofrid rules Gaute.”
Kristin shook her head with a sad little smile. But her face looked young as she gazed at Skule. Now she thought that
he
looked most like his father; this young soldier with the ravaged face had so much of Erlend’s lively courage. And the fact that he had been forced to take his own fate into his hands early on had given him a cool and steadfast spirit, which brought an odd sense of comfort to his mother’s heart. With the words Sira Eiliv had spoken the day before still in her mind, she suddenly realized that as fearful as she had been for her reckless sons and as sternly as she had often admonished them because she was tormented with anguish for their sakes, she would have been less content with her children if they had been meek and timid.
Then she asked again and again about her grandson, little Erlend, but Skule had not seen much of him; yes, he was healthy and handsome and used to having his own way at all times.
The uncanny fog, tinged like clotted blood, had faded, and darkness began to fall. The church bells started ringing; Kristin and her son rose to their feet. Then Skule took her hand.
“Mother,” he said in a low voice, “do you remember that I once laid hands on you? I threw a wooden bat at you, and it struck you on the forehead. Do you remember? Mother, while we’re alone, tell me that you’ve fully forgiven me for that!”
Kristin let out a deep breath. Yes, she remembered. She had asked the twins to go up to the mountain pastures for her, but when she came out to the courtyard, she found their horse still there, grazing and wearing the pack saddle, and her sons were running about, batting a ball. When she reprimanded them sternly, Skule threw the bat at her in fierce anger. What she remembered most was walking around with her eyelid so swollen that it seemed to have grown shut; her other sons would look at her and then at Skule and shun the boy as if he were a leper. First Naakkve had beat him mercilessly. And Skule had wandered around, boiling with defiance and shame behind his stony, scornful expression. But that evening, as she was undressing in the dark, he came creeping into the room. Without saying a word, he took her hand and kissed it. When she touched his shoulder, he threw his arms around her neck and pressed his cheek to hers. His skin felt cool and soft and slightly rounded—still a child’s cheek, she realized. He was just a child, after all, this headstrong, quick-tempered boy.
“Yes, I have, Skule—so completely, that God alone can understand, for I can’t tell you how completely I’ve forgiven you, my son!”
For a moment she stood with her hand on his shoulder. Then he seized her wrists and squeezed them so tight that she cried out; the next instant he put his arms around her, as tender and frightened and ashamed as he had been back then.
“My son . . . what is it?” whispered his mother in alarm.
In the dark she could feel the man shaking his head. Then he let her go, and they walked back up to the church.
During the mass Kristin happened to remember that she had once again forgotten about the cloak for the blind Fru Aasa when they were sitting on the bench outside the priest’s door that morning. After the service she went around the church to get it.
In the archway stood Skule and Sira Eiliv, holding a lantern in his hand. “He died when we put in at the wharf,” she heard Skule say, his voice full of a peculiar, wild despair.
“Who?”
Both men started violently when they saw her.
“One of my seamen,” said Skule softly.
Kristin looked from one man to the other. In the glow of the lantern she caught sight of their faces, incomprehensibly strained, and she uttered a little involuntary cry of fear. The priest bit his lip; she saw that his chin was trembling faintly.
“It’s just as well that you tell your mother, my son. It’s better if we all prepare ourselves to bear it if it should be God’s will for our people to be stricken with such a harsh—” But Skule merely moaned and refused to speak. Then the priest said, “A sickness has come to Bjørgvin, Kristin. The terrible pestilence we’ve heard rumors about, which is ravaging countries abroad.”
“The black plague?” whispered Kristin.
“It would do no good if I tried to tell you how things were in Bjørgvin when I left there,” said Skule. “No one could imagine it who hasn’t seen it for himself. Sir Bjarne took stern measures at first to put out the fire where it broke out in the buildings around Saint Jon’s Monastery. He wanted to cut off all of Nordnes with guardsmen from the castle, even though the monks at Saint Michael’s Monastery threatened him with excommunication. An English ship had arrived with sick men on board, and he refused to allow them to unload their cargo or leave the ship. Every single man on that vessel perished, and then he had it scuttled. But some of the goods had already been brought ashore, and some of the townsmen smuggled more off the ship one night, and the brothers of Saint Jon’s Church demanded that the dying be given the last rites. When people started dying all over town, we realized it was hopeless. Now there’s no one left in Bjørgvin except for the men carrying the corpses. Everyone has fled the town who could, but the sickness follows them.”
“Oh, Jesus Christus!”
“Mother . . . Do you remember the last time there was a lemming year back home in Sil? The hordes that tumbled along all the roads and pathways . . . Do you remember how they lay dying in every bush, rotting and tainting every waterway with their stench and poison?” He clenched his fists. His mother shuddered.
“Lord, have mercy on us all. Praise be to God and the Virgin Mary that you were sent up here, my Skule.”
The man gnashed his teeth in the dark.
“That’s what we said too, my men and I, the morning we hoisted sail and set off for Vaag. When we came north to Moldø sund, the first one fell ill. We tied stones to his feet and put a cross on his breast when he died, promising him a mass for his soul when we reached Nidaros; then we threw his body into the sea. May God forgive us. With the next two, we put into shore and gave them the last rites and burial in a proper grave. It’s not possible to flee from fate after all. The fourth one died as we rowed into the river, and the fifth one died last night.”
“Do you have to go back to town?” asked his mother a moment later. “Can’t you stay here?”
Skule shook his head and laughed without mirth. “Oh, I think soon it won’t matter where I am. It’s useless to be frightened; fearful men are half dead already. But if only I was as old as you are, Mother!”
“No one knows what he has been spared by dying in his youth,” said his mother quietly.
“Silence, Mother! Think about the time when you yourself were twenty-three years old. Would you have wanted to lose all the years you’ve lived since then?”
Fourteen days later Kristin saw for the first time someone who was ill with the plague. Rumors had reached Rissa that the scourge was laying waste to Nidaros and had spread to the countryside; how this had happened was difficult to say, for everyone was staying inside, and anyone who saw an unknown wayfarer on the road would flee into the woods or thickets. No one opened the door to strangers.
But one morning two fishermen came up to the convent, carrying between them a man in a sail. When they had gone down to their boats at dawn, they found an unfamiliar fishing vessel at the dock, and in the bottom lay this man, unconscious. He had managed to tie up his boat but could not climb out of it. The man had been born in a house belonging to the convent, but his family had since moved away from the region.
The dying man lay in the wet sail in the middle of the courtyard green; the fishermen stood at a distance, talking to Sira Eiliv. The lay sisters and servingwomen all had fled into the buildings, but the nuns—a flock of trembling, terrified, and bewildered old women—were clustered near the door to the convent hall.
Then Fru Ragnhild stepped forward. She was a short, thin old woman with a wide, flat face and a little, round red nose that looked like a button. Her big light brown eyes were red-rimmed and always slightly teary.
“In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,”
she said clearly, and then swallowed hard. “Bring him to the guesthouse.”
Sister Agata, the oldest of the nuns, elbowed her way through the others and, unbidden, followed the abbess and the fishermen who carried the sick man.
Kristin went over there that night with a potion she had prepared in the pantry, and Sister Agata asked if she would stay and tend the fire.
She thought she would have been hardened, familiar as she was with birth and death; she had seen worse sights than this. She tried to recall the very worst she had ever witnessed. The plague patient sat bolt upright, for he was about to choke on the bloody vomit he coughed up with every spasm. Sister Agata had strapped him up with a harness across his gaunt, sallow red-haired chest; his head hung limply, and his face was a leaden grayish blue. All of a sudden he would start shaking with cold. But Sister Agata sat calmly, saying her prayers. When the fits of coughing seized hold of him, she would stand up, put one arm around his head, and hold a cup under his mouth. The ill man bellowed with pain, rolling his eyes terribly, and finally thrust a blackened tongue all the way out of his mouth as his terrible cries ended in a pitiful groan. The nun emptied the cup into the fire. As Kristin added more juniper and the wet branches first filled the room with a sharp yellow smoke and then made the flames crackle, she watched Sister Agata straighten the pillows and comforters behind the sick man’s back and shoulders, swab his face and crusted brown lips with vinegar water, and pull the soiled coverlet up around his body. It would soon be over, she told Kristin. He was already cold; in the beginning he had been as hot as an ember. But Sira Eiliv had prepared him for his leave-taking. Then she sat down beside his bed, pushed the calamus root back into her cheek with her tongue, and continued praying.
Kristin tried to conquer the ghastly horror she felt. She had seen people die a more difficult death. But it was all in vain. This was the plague—God’s punishment for the secret hardheartedness of every human being, which only God the Almighty could see. She felt dizzy, as if she were rocking on a sea where all the bitter and angry thoughts she had ever had in this world rose up like a single wave among thousands and broke into desperate anguish and lamenting. Lord, help us, we are perishing. . . .
Sira Eiliv came in later that night. He reprimanded Sister Agata sharply for not following his advice to tie a linen cloth, dipped in vinegar, around her mouth and nose. She murmured crossly that it would do no good, but now both she and Kristin had to do as he ordered.
The calm and steadfast manner of the priest gave Kristin courage, or perhaps it aroused a sense of shame; she ventured out of the juniper smoke to lend Sister Agata a helping hand. There was a suffocating stench surrounding the sick man which the smoke could not mask: excrement, blood, sour sweat, and a rotten odor coming from his throat. She thought of Skule’s words about the swarms of lemmings; she still had a dreadful urge to flee, even though she knew there was nowhere to flee from this. But after she had finally persuaded herself to touch the dying man, the worst was over, and she helped as much as she could until he breathed his last. By then his face had turned completely black.
The nuns walked in procession carrying reliquaries, crosses, and burning tapers around the church and convent hill, and everyone in the parish who could crawl or walk went with them. But a few days later a woman died over by Strømmen, and then the pestilence broke out in earnest in every hamlet throughout the countryside.