Erlend remembered the morning following his own mother’s death. They were anchored in Mold?y 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 Bj?rgulf 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 Varg?y.
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