“If I’d known what you thought of me, Kristin,” said Erlend gravely, “I would have left your estate much sooner! But I now see that you’ve had to bear a great deal because of me.”
“You know quite well, Erlend . . . You say my estate, but you have the rights of a husband over all that is mine.” She herself could hear how weak her voice sounded.
“Yes,” replied Erlend. “But I know I was a poor master over what I owned myself.” He fell silent for a moment. “Naakkve . . . I remember the time before he was born, and you spoke of the child you were carrying, who would take my high seat after me. I now see, Kristin, that it was hard for you. It’s best if things stay as they are. And I’m content with my life up here.”
Kristin shuddered as she glanced around at the room in the fading light. Shadows now filled every cranny, and the glow from the flames danced.
“I don’t understand,” she said, on the verge of collapse, “how you can bear this house. You have nothing to occupy your time, and you’re all alone. I think you could at least take on a workman.”
“You mean that I should run the farm myself?” Erlend laughed. “Oh no, Kristin, you know I’m ill suited to be a farmer. I can never sit still.”
“Sit still . . . But surely you’re sitting still here . . . during the long winter.”
Erlend smiled to himself; his eyes had an odd, remote look to them.
“Yes, in some sense you’re right. When I don’t have to think about anything but whatever happens to cross my mind and can come and go as I like. And you know that I’ve always been the kind of person who can fall asleep if there’s nothing to keep watch over; I sleep like a hibernating bear whenever the weather isn’t good enough to go into the mountains.”
“Aren’t you ever afraid to be here alone?” whispered Kristin.
At first he gave her a look of incomprehension. Then he laughed. “Because people say this place is haunted? I’ve never noticed anything. Sometimes I’ve wished that my kinsman Bj?rn would pay me a visit. Do you remember that he once said he didn’t think I’d be able to stand to feel the edge of a blade at my throat? I’d like to tell him now that I wasn’t particularly frightened when I had the rope around my neck.”
A long shiver rippled through Kristin’s body. She sat without saying a word.
Erlend stood up. “It must be time for us to go to bed now, Kristin.”
Stiff and cold, she watched Erlend remove the coverlet from his armor, spread it over the bed, and tuck it around the dirty pillows. “This is the best I have,” he said.
“Erlend!” She clasped her hands under her breast. She searched for something to say, to win a little more time; she was so frightened. Then she remembered the promise she had made.
“Erlend, I have a message to give you. Simon asked me, when he was near the end, to bring you his greetings. Every single day he regretted the words he spoke to you when you last parted. ‘Un manly’ he called them, and he asked you to forgive him.”
“Simon.” Erlend was standing with one hand on the bedpost; he lowered his eyes. “He’s the one man I would least like to be reminded of.”
“I don’t know what came between the two of you,” said Kristin. She thought Erlend’s words remarkably heartless. “But it would be strange, and unlike Simon, if things were as he said, that he did not treat you justly. Surely he wasn’t entirely to blame if this is true.”
Erlend shook his head. “He stood by me like a brother when I was in need,” he said in a low voice. “And I accepted his help and his friendship, and I never realized that it had always been difficult for him to tolerate me.
“It seems to me that it would have been easier to live in the old days, when two fellows like us could have fought a duel, meeting out on the islet to let the test of weapons decide who would win the fair maiden.”
He picked up an old cape from the bench and slung it over his arm.
“Perhaps you’d like to keep the dogs inside with you tonight?”
Kristin had stood up.
“Where are you going, Erlend?”
“Out to the barn to sleep.”
“No!”
Erlend stopped, standing there slender and straight-backed and young in the red glow from the dying embers in the fireplace.
“I don’t dare sleep alone in this room. I don’t dare.”
“Do you dare sleep in my arms then?” She caught a glimpse of his smile in the darkness, and she grew faint. “Aren’t you afraid that I might crush you to death, Kristin?”
“If only you would.” She fell into his arms.
When she woke up, she could see from the windowpane that it was daylight outdoors. Something was weighing down her breast; Erlend was sleeping with his head on her shoulder. He had placed his arm across her body and was gripping her left arm with his hand.
She looked at her husband’s iron-gray hair. She looked at her own small, withered breasts. Above and below them she could see the high, curved arch of her ribs under the thin covering of skin. A kind of terror seized hold of her as one memory after another from the night before rose up. In this room . . . the two of them, at their age . . . Horror and shame overwhelmed her as she saw the patches of red on her worn mother arms, on her shriveled bosom. Abruptly she grabbed the blanket to cover herself.
Erlend awoke, raised himself up on one elbow, and stared down at her face. His eyes were coal-black after his slumber.
“I thought . . .” He threw himself down beside her again; a deep, wild tremor rushed through her at the sound of joy and anguish in his voice. “I thought I was dreaming again.”
She opened her lips to his mouth and wrapped her arms around his neck. Never, never had it felt so blessed.
Later that afternoon, when the sunshine was already golden and the shadows lay stretched out across the green courtyard, they set off to get water from the creek. Erlend was carrying the two large buckets. Kristin walked at his side, lithe, straight-backed, and slender. Her wimple had slipped back and lay around her shoulders; her uncovered hair was a gleaming brown in the sun. She could feel it herself as she closed her eyes and lifted her face to the light. Her cheeks had turned red; the features of her face had softened. Each time she glanced over at him she would lower her gaze, overwhelmed, when she saw in Erlend’s face how young she was.
Erlend decided that he wanted to bathe. As he walked farther down, Kristin sat on the thick carpet of grass, leaning her back against a rock. The murmuring and gurgling of the mountain stream lulled her into a doze; now and then, when mosquitoes or flies touched her skin, she would open her eyes briefly and swat them away with her hand. Down among the willow thickets, near the deep pool, she caught sight of Erlend’s white body. He was standing with one foot up on a rock, scrubbing himself with tufts of grass. Then she closed her eyes again and smiled, weary but happy. She was just as powerless against him as ever.
Her husband came back and threw himself down on the grass in front of her, his hair wet, his red lips cold from the water as he pressed them to her hand. He had shaved and put on a better shirt, although it was not particularly grand either. Laughing, he pointed to his armpit, where the fabric was torn.
“You could have brought me a shirt when you finally decided to come north.”
“I’ll start sewing a shirt for you as soon as I get home, Erlend,” she replied with a smile, caressing his forehead with her hand.
He grabbed hold of it. “Never will you leave here again, my Kristin.”
She merely smiled without replying. Erlend pushed himself away so that he could lie down on his stomach. Under the bushes, in a damp, shady spot, grew a cluster of small, white, star-shaped flowers. Their petals had blue veins like a woman’s breast, and in the center of each blossom sat a tiny brownish-blue bud. Erlend picked every one of them.
“You who are so clever about such things, Kristin—surely you must know what these flowers are called.”