“Halfrid, my first wife, said the same thing to me after she gave birth to our son. Did you know that I had a son with her, Kristin?”
“Yes. But Andres is already in his third year. It’s during the first two years that it’s the most difficult to protect a child’s life.” But even to her these words seemed to offer little help. They rode and rode; the horses plodded up a slope, nodding and casting their heads about so the harnesses jangled. Not a sound in the frosty night except the sound of their own passage and occasionally the rush of water as they crossed a stream, and the moon shining on everything. The scree and the rocky slopes glistened as hideously as death as they rode along beneath the cliffs.
Finally they reached a place where they could look down into the countryside. The moonlight filled the whole valley; the river and marshes and lake farther south gleamed like silver; the fields and meadows were pale.
“Tonight there’s frost in the valley too,” said Simon.
He dismounted and walked along, leading Kristin’s horse down the hillside. The path was so steep in many places that she hardly dared look ahead. Simon supported her by keeping his back against her knee, and she held on by putting one hand behind on the horse’s flank. A stone would sometimes roll from under the horse’s hooves, tumbling downward, pausing for a moment, and then continuing to roll, loosening more on the way and carrying them along.
Finally they reached the bottom. They rode across the barley fields north of the manor, between the rime-covered shocks of grain. There was an eerie rustling and clattering in the aspen trees above them in the silent, bright night.
“Is it true,” asked Simon, wiping his face with his sleeve, “that you had no premonition?”
Kristin told him it was true.
He went on, “I’ve heard that it does happen; a premonition can appear if a person yearns strongly for someone. Ramborg and I talked about it several times, that if you had been home, you might have known—”
“None of you has entered my thoughts all this time,” said Kristin. “You must believe me, Simon.” But she couldn’t see it gave him much solace.
In the courtyard a couple of servants appeared at once to take their horses. “Things are just as you left them, Simon—not any worse,” one of them said quickly. He had glanced up at the master’s face. Simon nodded. He walked ahead of Kristin toward the women’s house.
Kristin could see that there was indeed grave danger. The little boy lay alone in the large, fine bed, moaning and gasping, ceaselessly tossing his head from side to side on the pillows. His face was fiery hot and dark red; he lay with his glistening eyes partially open, struggling to breathe. Simon stood holding Ramborg’s hand, and all the women of the estate who had gathered in the room crowded around Kristin as she examined the boy.
But she spoke as calmly as she could and comforted the parents as best she could. It was probably lung fever. But this night would soon be over without any turn for the worse; it was the nature of this illness that it usually turned on the third or sixth or ninth night before the rooster crowed. She told Ramborg to send all the servingwomen to bed except for two, so that she would always have rested maids to help her. When the servant returned from J?rundgaard with her healing things, she brewed a sweat-inducing potion for the boy and then lanced a vein in his foot so the fluids would be drawn away from his chest.
Ramborg’s face blanched when she saw her child’s blood. Simon put his arm around her, but she pushed her husband away and sat down on a chair at the foot of the bed. There she stayed, staring at Kristin with her big dark eyes while her sister tended to the child.
Later in the day, when the boy seemed to be a little better, Kristin persuaded Ramborg to lie down on a bench. She arranged pillows and blankets around the young woman and sat near her head, stroking her forehead gently. Ramborg took Kristin’s hand.
“You only wish us well, don’t you?” she asked with a moan.
“Why shouldn’t I wish you well, sister? The two of us, living here in our village once again, the only ones remaining of our kinsmen . . .”
Ramborg uttered several small, stifled sobs from between her tightly pressed lips. Kristin had seen her young sister cry only once, when they stood at their father’s deathbed. Now a few swift little tears rose up and trickled down her cheeks. Ramborg lifted Kristin’s hand and stared at it. It was big and slender, but reddish brown now, and rough.
“And yet it’s more beautiful than mine,” she said. Ramborg’s hands were small and white, but her fingers were short and her nails square.
“Yes, it is,” she said, almost angrily when Kristin shook her head and laughed lightly. “And you’re still more lovely than I have ever been. Our father and mother loved you more than me, all their days. You caused them sorrow and shame; I was docile and obedient and set my sights on the man they most wanted me to marry. And yet they loved you more.”
“No, sister. They were just as fond of you. Be happy, Ramborg, that you never gave them anything but joy; you cannot know how heavy the other is to bear. But they were younger back when I was young; perhaps that was why they talked to me more.”
“Yes, I think everybody was younger back when you were young,” said Ramborg, and sighed again.
A short time later she fell asleep. Kristin sat and looked at her. She had known her sister so little; Ramborg was a child when she herself was wed. It seemed to her that in some ways her sister had remained a child. As she sat beside her ill son she looked like a child, a pale, scared child who was trying stubbornly to fend off terror and misfortune.
Sometimes an animal would stop growing if it had young ones too soon. Ramborg was not even sixteen when she gave birth to her daughter, and ever since she had never seemed to grow properly again; she continued to be slender and small, lacking in vigor and fertility. She had given birth only to the one boy since then, and he was oddly weak—with a handsome face, fair and fine, but so pitifully frail and small. He had learned to walk late, and he still talked so poorly that only those who were with him every day could understand any of his chatter. He was also so shy and peevish with strangers that Kristin had hardly even touched her nephew until now. If only God and Holy Olav would grant her the joy to save this poor small boy, she would thank them for it all her days. The mother was such a child herself that she wouldn’t be able to bear losing him. And Kristin realized that for Simon Darre it would also be terribly difficult to bear if his only son were taken from him.
That she had become deeply fond of her brother-in-law became most apparent to her now as she saw how much he was suffering from fear and grief. No doubt she could understand her own father’s great love for Simon Andress?n. And yet she wondered whether he might have done wrong by Ramborg when he was in such haste to arrange this marriage. For as she gazed down at her little sister, she thought that Simon must be both too old and much too somber and steadfast to be the husband of this young child.
CHAPTER 3
THE DAYS PASSED, and Andres remained ill in bed; there were no great changes, either for the worse or for the better. The worst thing was that he got almost no sleep. The boy would lie with his eyes half open, seeming not to recognize anyone, his thin little body racked by coughs, gasping for breath, the fever rising and falling. One evening Kristin had given him a soothing drink, and then calm descended on him, but after a while she saw that the child had turned pale blue and his skin felt cold and clammy. Quickly she poured warm milk down his throat and placed heated stones at the soles of his feet. Then she didn’t dare give him any more sleeping potions; she realized that he was too young to tolerate them.