“Won’t you allow me to have my children with me during the time I have left?” replied his wife, her voice low and plaintive.
Erlend refused to acknowledge what she meant.
“During the time you have left, you need
rest
. Go to bed now, Kristin,” he implored her more calmly.
He took Gaute with him to bed. He hummed to him for a while, and in the dark he found his belt lying on the step of the bed. The little silver medallions adorning it clinked and clattered as the boy played with the belt.
“The dagger isn’t in it, is it?” asked Kristin anxiously from her bed, and Gaute began howling again when he heard his mother’s voice. Erlend hushed him and made the belt clink—at last the child stopped crying and grew calm.
Perhaps it would be unwise to wish for this poor little boy to grow to adulthood—it was not certain that Gaute possessed all his wits.
Oh no, oh no. Blessed Virgin Mary, he didn’t mean that. He didn’t wish death for his own little son. No, no. Erlend held the child close in his arms and pressed his face to the soft, fine hair.
Their handsome sons. But he grew so weary of listening to them all day long; of stumbling over them whenever he came home. He couldn’t understand how three small children could be everywhere at once on such a large estate. But he remembered how furious he had been with Eline because she showed no interest in their children. He must be an unreasonable man, for he was also resentful that he no longer saw Kristin without children clinging to her.
When he held his lawfully born sons in his arms he never felt the same way he had when they gave him Orm to hold for the first time. Oh Orm, Orm, my son. He had been so tired of Eline by then—sick and tired of her stubbornness and her vehemence and her uncontrollable ardor. He had seen that she was too old for him. And he had begun to realize what this madness would eventually cost him. But he hadn’t felt that he could send her away—not after she had given up everything for his sake. The boy’s birth had given him a reason to tolerate the mother, it seemed to him. He had been so young when he became Orm’s father, and he hadn’t fully understood the child’s position, since the mother was another man’s lawful wife.
Sobs overcame him once more, and he held Gaute tighter. Orm—he had never loved any of his children the way he loved that boy; he missed him terribly, and he bitterly regretted every harsh and impatient word he had ever said to him. Orm couldn’t have known how much his father loved him. Bitterness and despair had gradually seized Erlend as it became abundantly clear that Orm would never be considered his lawful son, that he would never be able to inherit his father’s coat of arms. And Erlend felt jealousy too because he saw his son draw closer to his stepmother than to him, and it seemed to him that Kristin’s calm, gentle kindness toward the boy was a form of reproach.
Then came those days and nights that Erlend could not bear to remember. Orm lay on his bier in the loft, and the women came to tell him that they didn’t think Kristin would live. They dug a grave for Orm over in the church, and they asked whether Kristin should be buried there too. Or should she be taken instead to Saint Greg or’s Church to be laid to rest beside his parents?
Oh . . . He held his breath in fear. Behind him lay an entire lifetime of memories from which he had fled, and he couldn’t bear to think of it. Now, tonight, he understood. He could forget about it to some extent from day to day. But he couldn’t protect himself from the memories turning up at some moment such as this—and then it felt as if all courage had been conjured out of him.
Those days at Haugen—he had almost succeeded in forgetting about them entirely. He hadn’t been back to Haugen since that night when he drove off, and he hadn’t seen Bjørn or Aashild again after his wedding. And now . . . He thought about what Munan had told him—it was said that their spirits had come back. Haugen was so haunted that the buildings stood deserted; no one wanted to live there, even if they were given the farm free.
Bjørn Gunnarssøn had possessed a type of courage that Erlend knew he himself would never have. His hand had been steady when he stabbed his wife—right through the heart, said Munan.
It would be two years this winter since Bjørn and Fru Aashild died. People had not seen smoke coming from the buildings at Haugen for nearly a week; finally several men gathered their courage and went over there. Herr Bjørn was lying in bed with his throat cut; he was holding his wife’s body in his arms. On the floor next to the bed lay his bloody dagger.
Everyone knew what had happened, and yet Munan Baardsøn and his brother managed to have the two buried in consecrated ground. Perhaps they had fallen victim to robbers, people said, although the chest containing Bjørn’s and Aashild’s valuables had not been touched. And the bodies were untouched by mice or rats—in fact, those kinds of vermin never came to Haugen, and people took this as a sign of the woman’s sorcery skills.
Munan Baardsøn had been terribly distressed by his mother’s death. He had set off on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela
2
at once.
Erlend remembered the morning following his own mother’s death. They were anchored in Moldøy Sound, but the fog was so white and thick that only occasionally could they catch a glimpse of the mountain ridge towering above them. But there was a muffled echo from the hollow sound of the boat being rowed to shore with the priest. Erlend stood in the bow and watched them rowing away from the ship. Everything he came near was wet with fog; beads of moisture covered his hair and clothing. And the priest and his acolyte, who were strangers to Erlend, sat in the bow of the boat, their shoulders hunched as they bent over the holy vessels they held on their laps. They looked like hawks in the rain. The slap of the oars and the scrape of the oarlocks and the echo from the mountain continued to resound long after the boat had been spirited away by the fog.
On that day Erlend had also vowed to make a pilgrimage. He had only had one thought back then: that he be allowed to see his mother’s lovely, sweet face again, the way it had been before, with ts soft, smooth, light tan complexion. Now she lay dead be lowdecks, with her face ravaged by the terrible sores that ruptured and seeped little drops of clear fluid whenever she had tried to smile at him.
He was not to blame for the way his father had received him. Nor for the fact that he had turned to someone who was outcast, like himself. But then Erlend had pushed the pilgrimage from his mind, and he had refused to think any more about his mother. As painful as her life had been here on earth, she must now be in that place of peace—and there was not much peace for him, after he took up with Eline again.
Peace—he had known it only once in his life; on that night when he sat behind the stone wall near the woods of Hofvin and held Kristin as she slept on his lap—the safe, tender, undisturbed sleep of a child. He hadn’t been able to hold out for long before he shattered her tranquillity. And it wasn’t peace that he found with her later on, and he had no peace with her now. And yet he saw that everyone else in his home did find peace in the presence of his young wife.
Now he longed only to go away to that strife-torn place. He yearned madly and wildly for that remote promontory and for the thundering sea surrounding the forelands of the north, for the endless coastline and the enormous fjords which could conceal all manner of traps and deceptions, for the people whose language he understood only slightly, for their sorcery and inconstancy and cunning, for war and the sea, and for the singing of weapons, both his own and his men’s.
At last Erlend fell asleep, and then woke up again—what was it he had dreamed? Oh yes. That he was lying in a bed with a black-haired Finnish girl on either side of him. Something half-forgotten that had happened to him back when he was up north with Gissur. A wild night when they had all been drunk and reeling. He couldn’t recall much more of the whole night than the rank, wild-beast smell of the women.
And now here he lay with his sick little son in his arms and dreamed of such things. He was so shocked at himself that he didn’t dare try to sleep anymore. And he couldn’t bear to lie awake in bed. He must truly be fated to unhappiness. Rigid with anguish he lay motionless and felt the clench of his heart in his breast, while he longed for the redemption of dawn.
He persuaded Kristin to stay in bed the next day. He didn’t think he could stand to see her so miserable, dragging herself around the house. He sat with her and played with her hand. She had had the loveliest arms—slim and yet so plump that the small, delicate bones were hardly visible in the slender joints. Now they stood out like knots on her gaunt forearm, and the skin underneath was bluish-white.
Outside it stormed and rained so hard that water gushed down the slopes. Erlend came out of the armory later in the day and heard Gaute screaming and crying from somewhere in the courtyard. He found his small sons in the narrow passageway between two of the buildings, sitting directly under the dripping eaves. Naakkve was clutching the youngest boy while Bjørgulf was trying to force-feed him a worm—he had a whole fistful of pink worms, twisting and squirming.
The boys looked crestfallen as their father scolded them. It was Old Aan, they said, who had mentioned that Gaute’s teeth would come in with no trouble if they could get him to take a bite of a live worm.
They were soaked through from head to toe, all three of them. Erlend bellowed for the nursemaids, who came rushing out—one from the workroom and the other from the stable. Their master cursed them roundly, stuffed Gaute under his arm like a piglet, and then chased the other two ahead of him into the hall.
A little while later, dry and content in their best blue tunics, the boys sat in a row on the step of their mother’s bed. Erlend had brought a stool over, and he chattered nonsense and fussed over his sons, hugging them close and laughing in order to drive out the remnants of the nighttime terror from his mind. But Kristin smiled happily because Erlend was playing with their children. Erlend told them that he had a Finnish witch; she was two hundred winters old, and so wizened that she was no bigger than this. He kept her in a leather pouch in the big chest that stood in his boathouse. Oh yes, he gave her food, all right; every Christmas he gave her the thigh of a Christian man—that was enough to last her the whole year. And if they weren’t nice and quiet and didn’t stop plaguing their mother, who was ill, then he would put them in the pouch too.
“Mother is sick because she’s carrying our sister,” said Naakkve, proud that he knew about such matters.
Erlend pulled the boy by the ears down onto his knee.
“Yes, and after she’s born, this sister of yours, I’m going to let my old Finnish woman work her magic on all three of you and turn you into polar bears so you can go padding around in the wild forest, but my daughter will inherit all that I own.”
The children shrieked and tumbled into their mother’s bed. Gaute didn’t understand, but he yelled and scrambled up there too, after his brothers. Kristin complained—Erlend shouldn’t tease them so horribly. But Naakkve toppled off the bed again; in an ecstasy of laughter and fright he rushed at his father, hung on to his belt, and bit at Erlend’s hands, while he shouted and cheered.
Erlend didn’t get the daughter he had wished for this time, either. His wife gave birth to two big, handsome sons, but they almost cost Kristin her life.
Erlend had them baptized; one of them was named after Ivar Gjesling and the other after King Skule. His name had otherwise not been continued in their family; Fru Ragnrid had said that her father was a man fated to misfortune, and no one should be named for him. But Erlend swore that none of his sons bore a prouder name than the youngest.
It was now so late in the autumn that Erlend had to journey north as soon as Kristin was out of the worst danger. And he felt in his heart that it was just as well that he left before she was out of bed again. Five sons in five years—that should be enough, and he didn’t want to have to worry that she would die in childbirth while he sat up north at Vargøy.
He could see that Kristin had thought much the same. She no longer complained that he was going to leave her behind. She had accepted each child that came as a precious gift from God, and the suffering as something to which she had to submit. But this time the experience had been so appallingly difficult that Erlend could tell that all courage seemed to have been stripped from her. She lay in bed listlessly, her face yellow as clay, staring at the two little bundles at her side; and her eyes were not as happy as they had been with the others.
Erlend sat beside her and went over the entire trip north in his mind. It would doubtless be a hard sea voyage so late in the fall—and strange to arrive there for the long nights. But he felt such an unspeakable yearning. This last bout of fear for his wife had completely broken all resistance in his soul—helplessly he surrendered to his own longing to flee from home.
CHAPTER 4
ERLEND NIKULAUSSøN SERVED as the king’s military commander and chieftain at the fortress of Vargøy for almost two years. In all that time he never ventured farther south than to Bjarkøy, when he and Sir Erling Vidkunssøn once arranged a meeting there. During the second summer Erlend was away, Heming Alfssøn finally died, and Erlend was appointed sheriff of Orkdøla county in his place. Haftor Graut traveled north to succeed him at Vargøy.
Erlend was a happy man when he sailed south in the autumn, several days after the Feast of the Birth of Mary. This was the redress he had been seeking all these years—to become sheriff of the region as his father had once been. Not that this had been a goal which he had ever worked to achieve. But it had always seemed to him that this was what he needed in order to assume the standing which he rightfully deserved—both in his own eyes and those of his peers. Now it no longer mattered that he was considered somewhat different from the men who were bench sitters—there was no longer anything awkward about his special position.