Then they looked across Kors Fjord, toward Gaularos and the skerries of Birgsi. A ray of sunlight lit up the brown and white slope along the shore.
Erlend said something to the boys. Then Bj?rgulf abruptly turned on his heel, left the railing, and walked toward the stern of the ship. He fumbled along, using the spear that he always carried and used as a staff, as he made his way between the empty rowing benches and past his mother. His dark, curly head was bent low over his breast, his eyes squinting so hard they were nearly closed, his lips pressed tight. He walked under the afterdeck.
Kristin glanced forward at the other two, Erlend and his eldest son. Then Nikulaus knelt, the way a page does to greet his lord; he took his father’s hand and kissed it.
Erlend tore his hand away. Kristin caught a glimpse of his face, pale as death and trembling, as he turned his back to the boy and walked away, disappearing behind the sail.
They put in at a port down by M?re for the night. The sea swells were more turbulent; the ship tugged at its ropes, rising and pitching. Kristin was below in the cabin where she was to sleep with Erlend and the two youngest children. She felt sick to her stomach and couldn’t find a proper foothold on the deck, which rose and fell beneath her feet. The skin-covered lantern swung above her head, its tiny light flickering. And she stood there struggling with Munan, trying to get him to pee in between the planks. Whenever he woke up, groggy with sleep, he would both pee and soil their bed, raging and screaming and refusing to allow this strange woman, his mother, to help him by holding him over the floor. Then Erlend came below.
She couldn’t see his face when he asked in a low voice, “Did you see Naakkve? His eyes were just like yours, Kristin.” Erlend drew in a breath, quick and harsh. “That’s the way your eyes looked on that morning out by the fence in the nuns’ garden—after you had heard the worst about me—and you pledged me your trust.”
That was the moment when she felt the first drop of bitterness rise up in her heart. God protect the boy. May he never see the day when he realizes that he has placed his trust in a hand that lets everything run through its fingers like cold water and dry sand.
A few moments ago she thought she heard distant hoofbeats somewhere on the mountain heights to the south. Now she heard them again, closer. Not horses running free, but a single horse and rider; he rode sharply over the rocky slopes beneath the hillside.
Fear seized her, icy cold. Who could be traveling about so late? Dead men rode north under a waning moon; didn’t she hear the other horsemen accompanying the first one, riding far behind? And yet she stayed sitting where she was; she didn’t know if this was because she was suddenly bewitched or because her heart was so stubborn that night.
The rider was coming toward her; now he was fording the river beneath the slope. She saw the glint of a spearpoint above the willow thickets. Then she scrambled down from the boulder and was about to run back to the hut. The rider leaped from his horse, tied it to the gatepost, and threw his cape over its back. He came walking up the slope; he was a tall, broad man. Now she recognized him: it was Simon.
When he saw her coming to meet him in the moonlight, he seemed to be just as frightened as she had been before.
“Jesus, Kristin, is that you? Or . . . How is it that you’re out at this time of night? Were you waiting for me?” he asked abruptly, as if in great dread. “Did you have a premonition of my journey?”
Kristin shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep. Brother-in-law, what is it?”
“Andres is so ill, Kristin. We fear for his life. So we thought . . . We know you are the most practiced woman in such matters. You must remember that he’s the son of your own sister. Will you agree to come home with me to tend to him? You know that I wouldn’t come to you in this manner if I didn’t think the boy’s life was in peril,” he implored her.
He repeated these words inside the hut to Erlend, who sat up in bed, groggy with sleep and quietly surprised. He tried to comfort Simon, speaking from experience. Such young children grew easily feverish and jabbered deliriously if they caught the least cold; perhaps it was not as dangerous as it looked.
“You know full well, Erlend, that I would not have come to get Kristin at such an hour of the night if I hadn’t clearly seen that the child is lying there, struggling with death.”
Kristin had blown on the embers and put on more wood. Simon sat and stared into the fire, greedily drinking the milk she offered him but refusing to eat any food. He wanted to head back down as soon as the others arrived. “If you are willing, Kristin.” One of his men was following behind with a widow who was a servant at Formo, an able woman who could take over the work up here while she was away. Aasbj?rg was most capable, he said again.
After Simon had lifted Kristin up into the saddle, he said, “I’d prefer to take the shortcut to the south if you’re not averse to it.”
Kristin had never been on that part of the mountain, but she knew there was supposed to be a path down to the valley, cutting steeply across the slope opposite Formo. She agreed, but then his servant would have to take the other road and ride past J?rundgaard to get her chest and the pouches of herbs and bulbs. He should wake up Gaute; the boy knew best about these things.
At the edge of a large marsh they were able to ride side by side, and Kristin asked Simon to tell her again about the boy’s illness. The children of Formo had had sore throats around Saint Olav’s Day, but they had quickly recovered. The illness had come over Andres suddenly, while he seemed in the best of health—in the middle of the day, three days before. Simon had taken him along, and he was going to ride on the grain sledge down to the fields. But then Andres complained that he was cold, and when Simon looked at the boy, he was shivering so hard that his teeth were rattling in his mouth. Then came the burning fever and the coughing; he vomited up such quantities of loathsome brown matter and had such pain in his chest. But he couldn’t tell them much about where it hurt most, the poor little boy.
Kristin tried to reassure Simon as best she could, and then she had to ride behind him for a while. Once he turned around to ask whether she was cold; he wanted her to take his cape over her cloak.
Then he spoke again of his son. He had noticed that the boy wasn’t strong. But Andres had grown much more robust during the summer and fall; his foster mother thought so too. The last few days before he fell ill he had acted a little strange and skittish. “Scared,” he had said when the dogs leaped at him, wanting to play. On the day when the fever seized him, Simon had come home in the first rays of dawn with several wild ducks. Usually the boy liked to borrow the birds his father brought home and play with them, but this time Andres screamed loudly when his father swung the bundle toward him. Later he crept over to touch the birds, but when he got blood on his hands, he grew quite wild with terror. And now, this evening, he lay whimpering so terribly, unable to sleep or rest, and then he screamed something about a hawk that was after him.
“Do you remember that day in Oslo when the messenger arrived? You said, ‘It will be your descendant who will live on at Formo after you’re gone.’ ”
“Don’t talk like that, Simon. As if you think you will die without a son. Surely God and His gentle Mother will help. It’s unlike you to be so disheartened, brother-in-law.”