The Lenten fast was upon them. People were slaughtering the small animals they had hoped to save before the livestock perished on its own. And people were falling ill from living on fish and the scant and wretched portions of grain. Sira Eirik released the entire village from the ban against consuming milk. But no one had even a drop of milk.
Ulvhild was confined to bed. She slept alone in the sisters’ bed, and someone watched over her every night. Sometimes Kristin and her father would both sit with her. On one such night Lavrans said to his daughter, “Do you remember what Brother Edvin said about Ulvhild’s fate? I thought at the time that maybe this was what he meant. But I put it out of my mind.”
During those nights he would occasionally talk about one thing or another from the time when the children were small. Kristin would sit there, pale and miserable, understanding that behind his words, her father was pleading with her.
One day Lavrans had gone out with Kolbein to seek out a bear’s lair in the mountain forest to the north. They returned home with a female bear on a sled, and Lavrans was carrying a little bear cub, still alive, inside his tunic. Ulvhild smiled a little when he showed it to her. But Ragnfrid said that this was no time to take in that kind of animal, and what was he going to do with it now?
“I’m going to fatten it up and then tie it to the bedchamber of my maidens,” said Lavrans, laughing harshly.
But they couldn’t find the kind of rich milk that the bear cub needed, and so several days later Lavrans killed it.
The sun had grown so strong that occasionally, in the middle of the day, the eaves would begin to drip. The titmice clung to the timbered walls and hopped around on the sunny side; the pecking of their beaks resounded as they looked for flies asleep in the gaps between the wood. Out across the meadows the snow gleamed, hard and shiny like silver.
Finally one evening clouds began to gather in front of the moon. In the morning they woke up at J?rundgaard to a whirl of snow that blocked their view in all directions.
On that day it became clear that Ulvhild was going to die.
The entire household had gathered inside, and Sira Eirik had come. Many candles were burning in the room. Early that evening, Ulvhild passed on, calmly and peacefully, in her mother’s arms.
Ragnfrid bore it better than anyone could have expected. The parents sat together, both of them weeping softly. Everyone in the room was crying. When Kristin went over to her father, he put his arm around her shoulders. He noticed how she was trembling and shaking, and then he pulled her close. But it seemed to her that he must have felt as if she had been snatched farther away from him than her dead little sister in the bed.
She didn’t know how she had managed to endure. She hardly remembered why she was enduring, but, lethargic and mute with pain, she managed to stay on her feet and did not collapse.
Then a couple of planks were pulled up in the floor in front of the altar of Saint Thomas, and a grave was dug in the rock-hard earth underneath for Ulvhild Lavransdatter.
It snowed heavily and silently for all those days the child lay on the straw bier; it was snowing as she was laid in the earth; and it continued to snow, almost without stop, for an entire month.
For those who were waiting for the redemption of spring, it seemed as if it would never come. The days grew long and bright, and the valley lay in a haze of thawing snow while the sun shone. But frost was still in the air, and the heat had no power. At night it froze hard; great cracking sounds came from the ice, a rumbling issued from the mountains, and the wolves howled and the foxes yipped all the way down in the village, as if it were midwinter. People scraped off bark for the livestock, but they were perishing by the dozens in their stalls. No one knew when it would end.
Kristin went out on such a day, when the water was trickling in the furrows of the road and the snow glistened like silver across the fields. Facing the sun, the snowdrifts had become hollowed out so that the delicate ice lattice of the crusted snow broke with the gentle ring of silver when she pressed her foot against it. But wherever there was the slightest shadow, the air was sharp with frost and the snow was hard.
She walked up toward the church. She didn’t know why she was going there, but she felt drawn to it. Her father was there. Several farmers—guild brothers—were holding a meeting in the gallery, that much she knew.
Up on the hill she met the group of farmers as they were leaving. Sira Eirik was with them. The men were all on foot, walking in a dark, fur-wrapped cluster, nodding and talking to each other; they returned her greeting in a surly manner as she passed.
Kristin thought to herself that it had been a long time since everyone in the village had been her friend. Everyone no doubt knew that she was a bad daughter. Perhaps they knew even more about her. Now they probably all thought that there must have been some truth to the old gossip about her and Arne and Bentein. Perhaps she was in terrible disrepute. She lifted her chin and walked on toward the church.
The door stood ajar. It was cold inside the church, and yet a certain warmth streamed toward her from this dim brown room, with the tall columns soaring upward, lifting the darkness up toward the crossbeams of the roof. There were no lit candles on the altars, but a little sunshine came in through the open door, casting a faint light on the paintings and vessels.
Up near the Saint Thomas altar she saw her father on his knees with his head resting on his folded hands, which were clutching his cap against his chest.
Shy and dispirited, Kristin tiptoed out and stood on the gallery. Framed by the arch of two small pillars, which she held on to, she saw J?rundgaard lying below, and beyond her home the pale blue haze over the valley. In the sun the river glinted white with water and ice all through the village. But the alder thicket along its bank was golden brown with blossoms, the spruce forest was spring-green even up by the church, and tiny birds chittered and chirped and trilled in the grove nearby. Oh yes, she had heard birdsong like that every evening after the sun set.
And now she felt the longing that she thought had been wrung out of her, the longing in her body and in her blood; it began to stir now, feeble and faint, as if it were waking up from a winter’s hibernation.
Lavrans Bj?rgulfs?n came outside and closed the church door behind him. He went over and stood near his daughter, looking out from the next arch. She noticed how the winter had ravaged her father. She didn’t think that she could bring this up now, but it tumbled out of her all the same.
“Is it true what Mother said the other day, that you told her . . . if it had been Arne Gyrds?n, then you would have relented?”
“Yes,” said Lavrans without looking at her.
“You never said that while Arne was alive,” replied Kristin.
“It was never discussed. I could see that the boy was fond of you, but he said nothing . . . and he was young . . . and I never noticed that you thought of him in that way. You couldn’t expect me to offer my daughter to a man who owned no property.” He smiled fleetingly. “But I was fond of the boy,” he said softly. “And if I had seen that you were pining with love for him . . .”
They remained standing there, staring straight ahead. Kristin sensed her father looking at her. She struggled to keep her expression calm, but she could feel how pale she was. Then her father came over to her, put both arms around her, and hugged her tight. He tilted her head back, looked into his daughter’s face, and then hid it against his shoulder.
“Jesus Christus, little Kristin, are you so unhappy?”