Baard leaped up and threw his goblet into the other man’s face. The two fell upon each other so the table plank tipped onto its side, and food and vessels slid into the laps of those sitting on the outer bench.
Kristin sat there white-faced, with her mouth agape. Once she stole a glance at Ulf—the man was laughing openly, crudely and maliciously. Then he tipped the table plank back into place and shoved it against the two combatants.
Erlend leaped up onto the table. Kneeling in the middle of the mess, he seized hold of Munan’s arms, then grabbed him under the armpits and hauled him up next to him; he turned bright red in the face from the effort. Munan managed to give Baard a kick so that the old man began to bleed from the mouth—then Erlend flung Munan over the table and out onto the floor. He jumped down after him, and stood there huffing like a bellows.
The other man got to his feet and rushed at Erlend, who slipped under his arms a couple of times. Then he fell on Munan and held him entangled in the grip of his long, supple limbs. Erlend was as agile as a cat, but Munan held his ground; strong and bulky, he refused to be forced to the floor. They whirled around and around the room while the serving women shrieked and screamed, and none of the men made a move to separate them.
Then Fru Katrin stood up, heavy and fat and slow; she stepped onto the table as calmly as if she were walking up the storehouse stairs.
“Stop that now,” she said in her husky, sated voice. “Let go of him, Erlend! It was wrong, husband—to speak that way to an old man and close kinsman.”
The men obeyed her. Munan stood meekly and let his wife wipe his bloody nose with her wimple. She told him to go to bed, and he followed docilely when she led him away to the bed on the south wall. His wife and one of his servants pulled the clothes off him, toppled him into the bed, and closed the door.
Erlend had walked over to the table. He leaned past Ulf, who was still sitting as he had before.
“Foster father,” said Erlend unhappily. He seemed to have completely forgotten his wife. Sir Baard sat and rocked his head back and forth, and the tears were dripping down his cheeks.
“He didn’t have to become a servant, Ulf didn’t,” were the words that came out, but his sobs lodged, gasping, in his chest. “You could have taken the farm after Haldor, you know that’s what I intended. . . .”
“It wasn’t a very good farm that you gave Haldor; you bought a cheap husband for your wife’s serving maid,” said Ulf. “He fixed it up and managed it well, and it seemed to me reasonable that my brothers should take it over after their father. That’s one thing. But I had no desire to end up as a farmer, either—and least of all up on the slope, staring down at the Hestnes courtyard. It seemed to me that I heard every day that Paal and Vilborg were going around saying vicious things about how you gave much too grand a gift to your bastard son.”
“I offered to help you, Ulf,” said Baard, weeping. “When you wanted to go out traveling with Erlend. I told you everything as soon as you were old enough to understand. I begged you to return to your father.”
“I call the man my father who looked after me when I was small. That man was Haldor. He was good to Mother and to me. He taught me to ride a horse and to fight with a sword—the way a farmer wields his club, I remember Paal once said.”
Ulf flung the knife he was holding so that it clattered across the table. Then he got to his feet, picked up the knife, wiped it on the back of his thigh, and stuck it in its sheath. He turned to Erlend. “Put an end to this feast now and send the servants to bed! Can’t you see that your wife is still not used to the banquet customs we have in our family?”
And with that he left the hall.
Sir Baard stared after him. He seemed so pitifully old and frail as he sat slumped among the velvet cushions. His daughter, Vilborg, and one of his servants helped Baard to his feet and escorted him out.
Kristin sat alone in the high seat, weeping and weeping. When Erlend touched her, she angrily struck his hand aside. She swayed a few times as she walked across the floor, but she replied with a curt “no” when her husband asked if she was ill.
She detested these closed beds. Back home they simply had tapestries hung up facing the room, and thus it was never hot or stuffy. But now it was worse than ever . . . it was so hard for her to breathe. She thought that the hard lump pressing on her all the way up under her ribcage must be the child’s head; she imagined him lying with his little black head burrowed in amongst the roots of her heart. He was suffocating her, as Erlend had done before when he pressed his dark-haired head to her breast. But tonight there was no sweetness in the thought.
“Will you never stop your crying?” asked her husband, trying to ease his arm under her shoulder.
He was quite sober. He could tolerate a great deal of liquor, but he usually drank very little. Kristin thought that never in all eternity would this have happened back at her home—never had she heard people fling slanderous words at each other or rip open something that would be better left unsaid. As many times as she had seen her father reeling from intoxication and the hall full of drunken guests, there was
never
a time when he couldn’t keep order in his own house. Peace and good will reigned right up until everyone tumbled off the benches and fell asleep in joy and harmony.
“My dearest wife, don’t take this so hard,” implored Erlend.
“And Sir Baard!” she burst into tears. “Shame on such behavior—this man who spoke to my father as if he were bearing God’s message. Yes, Munan told me about it at our betrothal banquet.”
Erlend said softly, “I know, Kristin, that I have reason to cast down my eyes before your father. He’s a fine man—but my foster father is no worse. Inga, the mother of Paal and Vilborg, lay paralyzed and ill for six years before she died. That was before I came to Hestnes, but I’ve heard about it. Never has a husband tended to an ailing wife in a more faithful or loving manner. But it was during that time that Ulf was born.”
“Then it was an even greater sin—with his sick wife’s maid.”
“You often act so childish that it’s impossible to talk to you,” said Erlend in resignation. “God help me, Kristin, you’re going to be twenty this spring—and several winters have passed since you had to be considered a grown-up woman.”
“Yes, it’s true that
you
have the right to scoff at me for that.”
Erlend moaned loudly.
“You know yourself that I didn’t mean it like that. But you lived all that time at Jørundgaard and listened to Lavrans—so splendid and manly he is, but he often talks as if he were a monk and not a grown man.”
“Have you ever heard of any monk who has had six children?” she said, offended.
“I’ve heard of that man, Skurda-Grim, and he had seven,” said Erlend in despair. “The former abbot at Holm . . . No, Kristin, Kristin, don’t cry like that. In God’s name, I think you’ve lost your senses.”
Munan was quite subdued the next morning. “I didn’t think you would take my ale-babble so much to heart, young Kristin,” he said somberly, stroking her cheek. “Or I would have kept better watch on my tongue.”
He said to Erlend that it must be strange for Kristin with the boy being there. It would be best to send Orm away for the time being. Munan offered to take him in for a while. Erlend approved, and Orm wanted to go with Munan. But Kristin missed the child deeply; she had grown fond of her stepson.
Now she once again sat alone with Erlend in the evenings, and there was not much companionship in him. He would sit over by the hearth, say a few words now and then, take a drink from the ale bowl, and play with his dogs. He would go over to the bench and stretch out—and then he would go to bed, asking a couple of times whether she was coming soon, and then he’d fall asleep.
Kristin sat and sewed. Her breathing was audible, shallow and heavy. But it wouldn’t be long now. She couldn’t even remember how it felt to be light and slim in the waist—or how to tie her shoes without strain and effort.
Now that Erlend was asleep she no longer tried to hold back her tears. There was not a sound in the hall except the firewood collapsing in the hearth and the dogs stirring. Sometimes she wondered what they had talked about before, she and Erlend. But then they hadn’t talked much—they had had other things to do in those brief, stolen hours together.
At this time of year her mother and the maids used to sit in the weaving room in the evenings. Then her father and the men would come to join them and sit down with their work—they would repair leather goods and farm tools and make carvings out of wood. The little room would be crowded with people; conversation flowed quietly and easily among them. Whenever somebody went over to drink from the ale keg, before he hung up the ladle he would always ask whether anyone else would like some—that was the custom.
Then someone would recite a short saga—perhaps about giants in the past who had fought with grave-barrow ghosts and giantesses. Or her father, as he whittled, would recount those tales of knights that he had heard read aloud in Duke Haakon’s hall when he was a page in his youth. Strange and beautiful names: King Os antrix, Titurel the knight; Sisibe, Guinevere, Gloriana, and Isolde were the names of the queens. But on other evenings they told bawdy tales and ribald sagas until the men were roaring with laughter and her mother and the maids would shake their heads and giggle.
Ulvhild and Astrid would sing. Ragnfrid had the loveliest voice of all, but they had to plead before they could get her to sing. Lavrans didn’t need such persuasion—and he could play his harp so beautifully.
Then Ulvhild would put down her distaff and spindle and press her hands behind her hips.
“Is your back tired now, little Ulvhild?” asked her father, taking her onto his lap. Someone would bring a board game and Ulvhild and her father would move the markers around until it was time for bed. Kristin remembered her little sister’s golden locks flowing over her father’s brownish-green homespun sleeve. He held the weak little back so tenderly.
Her father’s big, slender hands with a heavy gold ring on each little finger . . . They had both belonged to his mother. He had said that the one with the red stone, her wedding ring, Kristin would inherit from him. But the one that he wore on his right hand, with a stone that was half blue and half white, like the emblem on his shield—that one Sir Bjørgulf had ordered made for his wife when she was with child, and it was to be given to her when she had borne him a son. For three nights Kristin Sigurdsdatter had worn the ring; then she tied it around the boy’s neck, and Lavrans said that he would wear it to his grave.
Oh, what would her father say when he heard the news about her? When it spread throughout the villages back home, and he had to realize that wherever he went, to church or to the
ting
1
or to a meeting, every man would be laughing behind his back because he had allowed himself to be fooled? At Jørundgaard they had adorned a wanton woman with the Sundbu crown on her flowing hair.
“People are no doubt saying of me that I can’t keep my children in check.” She remembered her father’s face whenever he said that; he meant to be stern and somber, but his eyes were merry. She had misbehaved in some small way—spoken to him uninvited while guests were present or some such. “And you, Kristin, you don’t have much fear of your father, do you?” Then he would laugh, and she laughed along with him. “Yes, but that’s not right, Kristin.” And neither of them knew
what
was not right—that she didn’t have the proper terror of her father, or that it was impossible for him to remain serious when he had to scold her.
It was as if the unbearable fear that something would be wrong with her child diminished and faded away the more trouble and torment Kristin had from her body. She tried to think ahead—to a month from now; by then her son would have already been born. But it didn’t seem real to her. She simply yearned more and more for home.
Once Erlend asked Kristin if she wanted him to send for her mother. But she told him no—she didn’t think her mother could stand to travel so far in the winter. Now she regretted this. And she regretted that she had said no to Tordis of Laugarbru, who had been so willing to accompany her north and lend a hand during the first winter she was to be mistress. But she felt ashamed before Tordis. Tordis had been Ragnfrid’s maid at home at Sundbu and had accompanied her to Skog and then back to the valley. When Tordis married, Lavrans had made her husband a foreman at Jørundgaard because Ragnfrid couldn’t bear to be without her beloved maid. Kristin had not wanted to bring along any of the maids from home.
Now it seemed to her terrible that she would have no familiar face above her when her time came to kneel on the floor.
2
She was frightened—she knew so little about what went on at childbirth. Her mother had never spoken to her of it and had never wanted young maidens to be present when she helped a woman give birth. It would only frighten the young, she said. It could certainly be dreadful; Kristin remembered when her mother had Ulvhild. But Ragnfrid said it was because she had inadvertently crawled under a fence—she had given birth to her other children with ease. But Kristin remembered that she herself had been thoughtless and had walked under a rope on board ship.
But that didn’t always cause harm—she had heard her mother and other women speak of such things. Ragnfrid had a reputation back home in the village for being the best midwife, and she never refused to go and help, no matter if it was a beggar or the poorest man’s seduced daughter, or if the weather was such that three men had to accompany her on skis and take turns carrying her on their backs.
But it was completely unthinkable that an experienced woman like her mother hadn’t realized what was wrong with her this past summer, when she was feeling so wretched. It suddenly occurred to Kristin: but then . . . then it was certain that her mother would come, even though they hadn’t sent for her! Ragnfrid would never stand for a stranger helping her daughter through the struggle. Her mother was coming—she was probably on her way north right now. Oh, then she could ask for her mother’s forgiveness for all the pain she had caused her. Her own mother would support her, she would kneel at her own mother’s knees when she gave birth to her child. Mother is coming, Mother is coming. Kristin sobbed with relief, covering her face with her hands. Yes, Mother; forgive me, Mother.