“Stand here,” he whispered. “Then the light will fall on you from Christ’s own cloak.”
From the church below the faint smell of incense and the odor of cold stone drifted up toward them. It was gloomy down below, but rays of sunlight were entering diagonally through a series of windows on the south wall of the nave. Kristin began to see that the heavenly picture must be some sort of windowpane,4 for it filled that type of opening in the wall. The others were empty or closed off with panes of horn in wooden frames. A bird appeared, perched on the windowsill, chirped briefly, and then flew away. Outside the wall of the choir the sound of metal on stone could be heard. Otherwise everything was quiet; only the wind came in small gusts, sighed a little between the church walls, and then died away.
“Well, well,” said Brother Edvin with a sigh. “No one can make things like this in Norway. They may paint with glass in Nidaros, but not like this. But in the lands to the south, Kristin, in the great cathedrals, there they have picture panes as big as the portals of this church.”
Kristin thought about the pictures in the church back home. The altars of Saint Olav and Saint Thomas of Canterbury had paintings on the front panels and the tabernacles behind. But those pictures seemed dull to her and without radiance as she thought about them now.
They climbed down the ladder and went up into the choir. There stood the altar, naked and bare, and on its stone top were stacked up small boxes and cups made of metal and wood and ceramic; odd little knives, pieces of iron, and pens and brushes lay next to them. Then Brother Edvin told Kristin that these were his tools. He was skilled in the craft of painting pictures and carving tabernacles, and he had made the exquisite paintings that stood nearby on the choir chairs. They were intended for the front panels of the altars here in the friars’ church.
Kristin was allowed to watch as he mixed colored powders and stirred them in little ceramic cups, and she helped him carry the things over to a bench next to the wall. As the monk went from one painting to the next, sketching fine red lines in the fair hair of the holy men and women so curls and waves were made visible, Kristin followed close on his heels, watching him and asking questions. And the monk explained what he had painted.
In one of the paintings Christ sat on a golden chair, and Saint Nikulaus and Saint Clement stood near him under a canopy. On either side was depicted the life of Saint Nikulaus. In one place he was an infant sitting on his mother’s knee; he had turned away from the breast she offered him, for he was so holy, even in his cradle, that he refused to nurse more than once on Fridays. Next to this was a picture of him placing the money bags at the door of the house where three maidens lived who were so poor that they couldn’t find husbands. Kristin saw how he cured the child of the Roman knight, and she saw the knight sail off in a boat with the false golden chalice in his hands. The knight had promised the holy bishop a golden chalice, which had been in his family for a thousand years, as payment for returning the child to good health. But then he tried to betray Saint Nikulaus by giving him a false golden chalice instead. That’s why the boy fell into the sea with the real golden chalice in his hand. But Saint Nikulaus carried the child unharmed beneath the water, and he emerged onto shore as his father stood in Saint Nikulaus’s church, offering the false goblet. All of this was shown in the picture, painted with gold and the most beautiful of colors.
In another painting the Virgin Mary sat with the Christ child on her knee. He had put one hand up under his mother’s chin, and he was holding an apple in the other. With them stood Saint Sunniva and Saint Kristina. They were leaning gracefully from the hips, their faces a lovely pink and white, and they had golden hair and wore golden crowns.
Brother Edvin gripped his right wrist with his left hand as he painted leaves and roses in their crowns.
“It seems to me that the dragon is awfully small,” said Kristin, looking at the image of the saint who was her namesake. “It doesn’t look as if it could swallow up the maiden.”
“And it couldn’t, either,” said Brother Edvin. “It was no bigger than that. Dragons and all other creatures that serve the Devil only seem big as long as we harbor fear within ourselves. But if a person seeks God with such earnestness and desire that he enters into His power, then the power of the Devil at once suffers such a great defeat that his instruments become small and impotent. Dragons and evil spirits shrink until they are no bigger than goblins and cats and crows. As you can see, the whole mountain that Saint Sunniva was trapped inside is so small that it will fit on the skirt of her cloak.”
“But weren’t they inside the caves?” asked Kristin. “Saint Sunniva and the Selje men?5 Isn’t that true?”
The monk squinted at her and smiled again.
“It’s both true and not true. It seemed to be true for the people who found the holy bodies. And it seemed true to Sunniva and the Selje men, because they were humble and believed that the world is stronger than all sinful people. They did not imagine that they might be stronger than the world because they did not love it. But if they had only known, they could have taken all the mountains and flung them out into the sea like tiny pebbles. No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.”
“But what if a person doesn’t fear and love God?” asked Kristin in horror.
The monk put his hand on her golden hair, gently tilted her head back, and looked into her face. His eyes were blue and open wide.
“There is no one, Kristin, who does not love and fear God. But it’s because our hearts are divided between love for God and fear of the Devil, and love for this world and this flesh, that we are miserable in life and death. For if a man knew no yearning for God and God’s being, then he would thrive in Hell, and we alone would not understand that he had found his heart’s desire. Then the fire would not burn him if he did not long for coolness, and he would not feel the pain of the serpent’s bite if he did not long for peace.”
Kristin looked up into his face; she understood nothing of what he said.
Brother Edvin continued, “It was because of God’s mercy toward us that He saw how our hearts were split, and He came down to live among us, in order to taste, in fleshly form, the temptations of the Devil when he entices us with power and glory, and the menace of the world when it offers us blows and contempt and the wounds of sharp nails in our hands and feet. In this manner He showed us the way and allowed us to see His love.”
The monk looked down into the child’s strained and somber face. Then he laughed a little and said in an entirely different tone of voice, “Do you know who was the first one to realize that Our Lord had allowed Himself to be born? It was the rooster. He saw the star and then he said—and all the animals could speak Latin back then—he cried, ‘Christus natus est!’ ”
Brother Edvin crowed out the last words, sounding so much like a rooster that Kristin ended up howling with laughter. And it felt so good to laugh, because all the strange things that he had just been talking about had settled upon her like a burden of solemnity.
The monk laughed too.
“It’s true. Then when the ox heard about it, he began to bellow, ‘Ubi, ubi, ubi?’
“But the goat bleated and said, ‘Betlem, Betlem, Betlem.’
“And the sheep was so filled with longing to see Our Lady and her Son that he baa’d at once, ‘Eamus, eamus!’
“And the newborn calf lying in the straw got up and stood on his own legs. ‘Volo, volo, volo!’ he said.
“Haven’t you heard this before? No, I should have known. I realize that he’s a clever priest, that Sira Eirik who lives up there with you, and well educated, but he probably doesn’t know about this because it’s not something you learn unless you journey to Paris. . . .”