The roar of the river drew her. She walked all the way over to the edge and looked down. Far below, the water shimmered white as it seethed and thundered over the rocks from one pool to the next.
The monotonous drone of the waterfalls resonated through her overwrought body and soul. It kept reminding her of something, of a time that was an eternity ago; even back then she realized that she would not have the strength to bear the fate she had chosen for herself. She had laid bare her protected, gentle girl’s life to a ravaging, fleshly love; she had lived in anguish, anguish, anguish ever since—an unfree woman from the first moment she became a mother. She had given herself up to the world in her youth, and the more she squirmed and struggled against the bonds of the world, the more fiercely she felt herself imprisoned and fettered by them. She struggled to protect her sons with wings that were bound by the constraints of earthly care. She had striven to conceal her anguish and her inexpressible weakness from everyone, walking forward with her back erect and her face calm, holding her tongue, and fighting to ensure the welfare of her children in any way she could.
But always with that secret, breathless anguish: If things go badly for them, I won’t be able to bear it. And deep in her heart she wailed at the memory of her father and mother. They had borne anguish and sorrow over their children, day after day, until their deaths; they had been able to carry this burden, and it was not because they loved their children any less but because they loved with a better kind of love.
Was this how she would see her struggle end? Had she conceived in her womb a flock of restless fledgling hawks that simply lay in her nest, waiting impatiently for the hour when their wings were strong enough to carry them beyond the most distant blue peaks? And their father would clap his hands and laugh: Fly, fly, my young birds.
They would take with them bloody threads from the roots of her heart when they flew off, and they wouldn’t even know it. She would be left behind alone, and all the heartstrings, which had once bound her to this old home of hers, she had already sundered. That was how it would end, and she would be neither alive nor dead.
She turned on her heel, stumbling hastily across the pale, parched carpet of reindeer moss, with her cloak pulled tight around her because it was so unpleasant when it caught on the branches. At last she emerged onto the sparse meadow plains that lay slightly north of the farmers’ banquet hall and the church. As she cut across the field, she caught sight of someone in the road. He called out: “Is that you, Kristin?” and she recognized her husband.
“You were gone a long time,” said Erlend. “It’s almost night, Kristin. I was starting to grow frightened.”
“Were you frightened for me?” Her voice sounded more harsh and haughty than she had intended.
“Well, not exactly frightened . . . But I thought I would come out to meet you.”
They barely spoke as they walked southward. All was quiet when they entered the courtyard. Some of the horses they kept on the manor were slowly moving along the walls of the main house, grazing, but all the servants had gone to bed.
Erlend headed straight for the storeroom loft, but Kristin turned toward the cookhouse. “I have to see to something,” she replied to his query.
He stood leaning over the gallery railing, waiting for his wife, when he saw her come out of the cookhouse with a pine torch in her hand and go over to the hearth house. Erlend waited a moment and then ran down and followed her inside.
She had lit a candle and placed it on the table. Erlend felt an odd, cold shiver of fear pass through him when he saw her standing there with the lone candle in the empty house. Only the built-in furniture remained in the room, and the glow of the flame shimmered over the worn wood, unadorned and bare. The hearth was cold and swept clean, except for the torch, which had been tossed into it, still smoldering. They never used this building, Erlend and Kristin, and it must have been almost half a year since a fire had been lit inside. The air was strangely oppressive; missing was the vital blend of smells from people living there and coming and going; the smoke vent and doors had not been opened in all that time. The place also smelled of wool and hides; several rolled-up skins and sacks, which Kristin had taken from among the goods in the storeroom, were piled up on the empty bed that had belonged to Lavrans and Ragnfrid.
On the table lay a heap of small skeins of thread and yarn—linen and wool to be used for mending—which Kristin had set aside when she did the dyeing. She was going through them now, setting them in order.
Erlend sat down in the high seat at the end of the table. It seemed oddly spacious for the slender man, now that it had been stripped of its cushions and coverings. The two Olav warriors, with their helmets and shields bearing the sign of the cross, that Lavrans had carved into the armrests of the high seat scowled glumly and morosely under Erlend’s slim tan hands. No man could carve foliage and animals more beautifully than Lavrans, but he had never been very skilled at capturing human likenesses.
The silence between them was so complete that not a sound was heard except for the hollow thudding out on the green, where the horses were plodding around in the summer night.
“Aren’t you going to bed soon, Kristin?” he finally asked.
“Aren’t you?”
“I thought I would wait for you,” said her husband.
“I don’t want to go yet. . . . I can’t sleep.”
After a moment he asked, “What is weighing so heavily on your heart, Kristin, that you don’t think you’ll be able to sleep?”
Kristin straightened up. She stood holding a skein of heather-green wool in her hands, tugging and pulling on it with her fingers.
“What was it you said to Naakkve today?” She swallowed a couple of times; her throat felt so parched. “Some piece of advice . . . He didn’t think it was much good for him . . . but the two of you talked about Ivar and Skule. . . .”
“Oh . . . that!” Erlend gave a little smile. “I just told the boy . . . I do have a son-in-law, now that I think of it. Although Gerlak wouldn’t be as eager to kiss my hands or carry my cape and sword as he used to be. But he has a ship on the sea and wealthy kin both in Bremen and in Lynn. Surely the man must realize that he’s obliged to help his wife’s brothers. I didn’t stint on my gifts when I was a rich man and married my daughter to Gerlak Tiedekenss?n.”
Kristin did not reply.
At last Erlend exclaimed vehemently, “Jesus, Kristin, don’t just stand there staring like that, as if you had turned to stone.”
“I never thought, when we were first married, that our children would have to roam the world, begging food from the manors of strangers.”
“No, and the Devil take me, I don’t mean for them to beg! But if all seven of them have to grow their own food here on your estates, then it will be a peasant’s diet, my Kristin. And I don’t think my sons are suited to that. Ivar and Skule look like they’ll turn out to be daredevils, and out in the world there is both wheat bread and cake for the man willing to slice his food with a sword.”
“You intend your sons to become hired soldiers and mercenaries?”
“I hired on myself when I was young and served Earl Jacob. May God bless him, I say. I learned a few things back then that a man can never learn at home in this country, whether he’s sitting in splendor in his high seat with a silver belt around his belly and swilling down ale or he’s walking behind a plow and breathing in the farts of the farm horse. I lived a robust life in the earl’s service; I say that even though I ended up with that stump chained to my foot when I was no older than Naakkve. But I was allowed to enjoy some of my youth.”
“Silence!” Kristin’s eyes grew dark. “Wouldn’t you think it the most unbearable sorrow if your sons should be lured into such sin and misfortune?”