Kristin went over there that night with a potion she had prepared in the pantry, and Sister Agata asked if she would stay and tend the fire.
She thought she would have been hardened, familiar as she was with birth and death; she had seen worse sights than this. She tried to recall the very worst she had ever witnessed. The plague patient sat bolt upright, for he was about to choke on the bloody vomit he coughed up with every spasm. Sister Agata had strapped him up with a harness across his gaunt, sallow red-haired chest; his head hung limply, and his face was a leaden grayish blue. All of a sudden he would start shaking with cold. But Sister Agata sat calmly, saying her prayers. When the fits of coughing seized hold of him, she would stand up, put one arm around his head, and hold a cup under his mouth. The ill man bellowed with pain, rolling his eyes terribly, and finally thrust a blackened tongue all the way out of his mouth as his terrible cries ended in a pitiful groan. The nun emptied the cup into the fire. As Kristin added more juniper and the wet branches first filled the room with a sharp yellow smoke and then made the flames crackle, she watched Sister Agata straighten the pillows and comforters behind the sick man’s back and shoulders, swab his face and crusted brown lips with vinegar water, and pull the soiled coverlet up around his body. It would soon be over, she told Kristin. He was already cold; in the beginning he had been as hot as an ember. But Sira Eiliv had prepared him for his leave-taking. Then she sat down beside his bed, pushed the calamus root back into her cheek with her tongue, and continued praying.
Kristin tried to conquer the ghastly horror she felt. She had seen people die a more difficult death. But it was all in vain. This was the plague—God’s punishment for the secret hardheartedness of every human being, which only God the Almighty could see. She felt dizzy, as if she were rocking on a sea where all the bitter and angry thoughts she had ever had in this world rose up like a single wave among thousands and broke into desperate anguish and lamenting. Lord, help us, we are perishing. . . .
Sira Eiliv came in later that night. He reprimanded Sister Agata sharply for not following his advice to tie a linen cloth, dipped in vinegar, around her mouth and nose. She murmured crossly that it would do no good, but now both she and Kristin had to do as he ordered.
The calm and steadfast manner of the priest gave Kristin courage, or perhaps it aroused a sense of shame; she ventured out of the juniper smoke to lend Sister Agata a helping hand. There was a suffocating stench surrounding the sick man which the smoke could not mask: excrement, blood, sour sweat, and a rotten odor coming from his throat. She thought of Skule’s words about the swarms of lemmings; she still had a dreadful urge to flee, even though she knew there was nowhere to flee from this. But after she had finally persuaded herself to touch the dying man, the worst was over, and she helped as much as she could until he breathed his last. By then his face had turned completely black.
The nuns walked in procession carrying reliquaries, crosses, and burning tapers around the church and convent hill, and everyone in the parish who could crawl or walk went with them. But a few days later a woman died over by Str?mmen, and then the pestilence broke out in earnest in every hamlet throughout the countryside.
Death and horror and suffering seemed to push people into a world without time. No more than a few weeks had passed, if the days were to be counted, and yet it already seemed as if the world that had existed before the plague and death began wandering naked through the land had disappeared from everyone’s memory—the way the coastline sinks away when a ship heads out to sea on a rushing wind. It was as if no living soul dared hold on to the memory that life and the progression of workdays had once seemed close, while death was far away; nor was anyone capable of imagining that things might be that way again, if all human beings did not perish. But “we are all going to die,” said the men who brought their motherless children to the convent. Some of them spoke with dull or harsh voices; some of them wept and moaned. They said the same thing when they came to get the priest for the dying; they said it again when they carried the bodies to the parish church at the foot of the hill and to the cemetery at the convent church. Often they had to dig the graves themselves. Sira Eiliv had sent the men who were left among the lay servants out to the convent fields to bring in the grain, and wherever he went in the parish, he urged everyone to harvest the crops and help each other tend to the livestock so that those who remained wouldn’t suffer from hunger after the scourge had spent its fury.
The nuns at the convent met the first trials with a sense of desperate composure. They moved into the convent hall for good, kept a fire going day and night in the big brick fireplace, and ate and slept in there. Sira Eiliv advised everyone to keep great fires burning in the courtyards and in all the houses, but the sisters were afraid of fire. The oldest sisters had told them so often about the blaze thirty years before. Mealtimes and work regimens were no longer adhered to, and the duties of the various sisters were no longer kept separate as children began to arrive, asking for food and help. The sick were brought inside; they were mostly wealthy people who could pay for gravesites and masses for their souls in the convent, as well as those who were destitute and alone, who had no help at home. Those whose circumstances were somewhere in between stayed in their own beds and died at home. On some farms every single person perished. But in spite of everything, the nuns had still managed to keep to the schedule of prayers.
The first of the nuns to fall ill was Sister Inga, a woman Kristin’s age, almost fifty, and yet she was so terrified of death that it was a horror to see and hear. The chills came over her in church during mass; shaking, her teeth chattering, she crawled on her hands and knees as she begged and implored God and the Virgin Mary to spare her life. A moment later she lay prostrate with a burning fever, in agony, with blood seeping out of her skin. Kristin’s heart was filled with dread; no doubt she would be just as pitifully frightened when her turn came. It was not just the fact that death was certain, but it was the horrifying fear that accompanied death from the plague.