Kristin Lavransdatter

by Sigrid Undset

  After a moment the old woman lifted her face. Kristin looked up. Fru Gunna’s face was heavy, yellowish, and stout, with three deep creases across her forehead, as if shaped out of wax; she had pale freckles, sharp and kind blue eyes, and a sunken, toothless mouth shadowed by long gray whiskers. Kristin had had that face above her so many times. Fru Gunna had been at her side each time she gave birth, except when Lavrans was born and she was at home to attend her father’s deathbed.

  “Yes, yes, my daughter,” said the woman, putting her hands at Kristin’s temples. “I’ve given you help a few times when you had to sink to your knees, yes, I have. But in this trouble, my Kristin, you must kneel down before the Mother of God and ask her to help you through.”

  Oh, she had already done that too, thought Kristin. She had said her prayers and read some of the Gospels every Saturday; she had observed the fast days as Archbishop Eiliv had enjoined her to do when he granted her absolution; she gave alms and personally served every wanderer who asked for shelter, no matter how he might look. But now she no longer felt any light inside her when she did so. She knew that the light outside did exist, but it felt as if shutters had closed her off inside. That must be what Gunnulf had spoken of: spiritual drought. Sira Eiliv said that was why no soul should lose courage; remain faithful to your prayers and good deeds, the way the farmer plows and spreads manure and sows. God would send the good weather for growing when it was time. But Sira Eiliv had never managed a farm himself.

  She had not seen Gunnulf during that time. He was living north in Helgeland, preaching and collecting gifts for the monastery. Well, yes, that was one of the knight’s sons from Husaby, while the other . . .

  But Margret Erlendsdatter came to visit Kristin several times at the town residence. Two maids accompanied the merchant’s wife. She was beautifully dressed and glittering with jewelry. Her father-in-law was a goldsmith, so they had plenty of jewelry at home. She seemed happy and content, although she had no children. She had received her inheritance from her father just in time. God only knew if she ever gave any thought to that poor cripple Haakon, out at Gimsar. He could barely manage to drag himself around the courtyard on two crutches, Kristin had heard.

  And yet she thought that even back then she had not had bitter feelings toward Erlend. She seemed to realize that for Erlend, the worst was still ahead when he became a free man. Then he had taken refuge with Abbot Olav. Tend to the moving or show himself in Nidaros now—that was more than Erlend Nikulaussøn could bear.

  Then came the day when they sailed across Trondheim Fjord, on the Laurentius boat, the same ship on which Erlend had transported all the belongings she had wanted to bring north with her after they had won permission to marry.

  A still day in late autumn; a pale, leaden gleam on the fjord; the whole world cold, restless, white-ribbed. The first snow blown into streaks along the frozen acres, the chill blue mountains white-striped with snow. Even the clouds high overhead, where the sky was blue, seemed to be scattered thin like flour by a wind high up in the heavens. Heavy and sluggish, the ship pulled away from the land, the town promontory. Kristin stood and watched the white spray beneath the cliffs, wondering if she was going to be seasick when they were farther out in the fjord.

  Erlend stood at the railing close to the bow with his two eldest sons beside him. The wind fluttered their hair and capes.

  Then they looked across Kors Fjord, toward Gaularos and the skerries of Birgsi. A ray of sunlight lit up the brown and white slope along the shore.

  Erlend said something to the boys. Then Bjørgulf abruptly turned on his heel, left the railing, and walked toward the stern of the ship. He fumbled along, using the spear that he always carried and used as a staff, as he made his way between the empty rowing benches and past his mother. His dark, curly head was bent low over his breast, his eyes squinting so hard they were nearly closed, his lips pressed tight. He walked under the afterdeck.

  Kristin glanced forward at the other two, Erlend and his eldest son. Then Nikulaus knelt, the way a page does to greet his lord; he took his father’s hand and kissed it.

  Erlend tore his hand away. Kristin caught a glimpse of his face, pale as death and trembling, as he turned his back to the boy and walked away, disappearing behind the sail.

  They put in at a port down by Møre for the night. The sea swells were more turbulent; the ship tugged at its ropes, rising and pitching. Kristin was below in the cabin where she was to sleep with Erlend and the two youngest children. She felt sick to her stomach and couldn’t find a proper foothold on the deck, which rose and fell beneath her feet. The skin-covered lantern swung above her head, its tiny light flickering. And she stood there struggling with Munan, trying to get him to pee in between the planks. Whenever he woke up, groggy with sleep, he would both pee and soil their bed, raging and screaming and refusing to allow this strange woman, his mother, to help him by holding him over the floor. Then Erlend came below.

  She couldn’t see his face when he asked in a low voice, “Did you see Naakkve? His eyes were just like yours, Kristin.” Erlend drew in a breath, quick and harsh. “That’s the way your eyes looked on that morning out by the fence in the nuns’ garden—after you had heard the worst about me—and you pledged me your trust.”

  That was the moment when she felt the first drop of bitterness rise up in her heart. God protect the boy. May he never see the day when he realizes that he has placed his trust in a hand that lets everything run through its fingers like cold water and dry sand.

  A few moments ago she thought she heard distant hoofbeats somewhere on the mountain heights to the south. Now she heard them again, closer. Not horses running free, but a single horse and rider; he rode sharply over the rocky slopes beneath the hillside.

  Fear seized her, icy cold. Who could be traveling about so late? Dead men rode north under a waning moon; didn’t she hear the other horsemen accompanying the first one, riding far behind? And yet she stayed sitting where she was; she didn’t know if this was because she was suddenly bewitched or because her heart was so stubborn that night.

  The rider was coming toward her; now he was fording the river beneath the slope. She saw the glint of a spearpoint above the willow thickets. Then she scrambled down from the boulder and was about to run back to the hut. The rider leaped from his horse, tied it to the gatepost, and threw his cape over its back. He came walking up the slope; he was a tall, broad man. Now she recognized him: it was Simon.

  When he saw her coming to meet him in the moonlight, he seemed to be just as frightened as she had been before.

  “Jesus, Kristin, is that you? Or . . . How is it that you’re out at this time of night? Were you waiting for me?” he asked abruptly, as if in great dread. “Did you have a premonition of my journey?”

  Kristin shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep. Brother-in-law, what is it?”

  “Andres is so ill, Kristin. We fear for his life. So we thought . . . We know you are the most practiced woman in such matters. You must remember that he’s the son of your own sister. Will you agree to come home with me to tend to him? You know that I wouldn’t come to you in this manner if I didn’t think the boy’s life was in peril,” he implored her.

  He repeated these words inside the hut to Erlend, who sat up in bed, groggy with sleep and quietly surprised. He tried to comfort Simon, speaking from experience. Such young children grew easily feverish and jabbered deliriously if they caught the least cold; perhaps it was not as dangerous as it looked.

  “You know full well, Erlend, that I would not have come to get Kristin at such an hour of the night if I hadn’t clearly seen that the child is lying there, struggling with death.”

  Kristin had blown on the embers and put on more wood. Simon sat and stared into the fire, greedily drinking the milk she offered him but refusing to eat any food. He wanted to head back down as soon as the others arrived. “If you are willing, Kristin.” One of his men was following behind with a widow who was a servant at Formo, an able woman
who could take over the work up here while she was away. Aasbjørg was most capable, he said again.

  After Simon had lifted Kristin up into the saddle, he said, “I’d prefer to take the shortcut to the south if you’re not averse to it.”

  Kristin had never been on that part of the mountain, but she knew there was supposed to be a path down to the valley, cutting steeply across the slope opposite Formo. She agreed, but then his servant would have to take the other road and ride past Jørundgaard to get her chest and the pouches of herbs and bulbs. He should wake up Gaute; the boy knew best about these things.

  At the edge of a large marsh they were able to ride side by side, and Kristin asked Simon to tell her again about the boy’s illness. The children of Formo had had sore throats around Saint Olav’s Day, but they had quickly recovered. The illness had come over Andres suddenly, while he seemed in the best of health—in the middle of the day, three days before. Simon had taken him along, and he was going to ride on the grain sledge down to the fields. But then Andres complained that he was cold, and when Simon looked at the boy, he was shivering so hard that his teeth were rattling in his mouth. Then came the burning fever and the coughing; he vomited up such quantities of loathsome brown matter and had such pain in his chest. But he couldn’t tell them much about where it hurt most, the poor little boy.

  Kristin tried to reassure Simon as best she could, and then she had to ride behind him for a while. Once he turned around to ask whether she was cold; he wanted her to take his cape over her cloak.

  Then he spoke again of his son. He had noticed that the boy wasn’t strong. But Andres had grown much more robust during the summer and fall; his foster mother thought so too. The last few days before he fell ill he had acted a little strange and skittish. “Scared,” he had said when the dogs leaped at him, wanting to play. On the day when the fever seized him, Simon had come home in the first rays of dawn with several wild ducks. Usually the boy liked to borrow the birds his father brought home and play with them, but this time Andres screamed loudly when his father swung the bundle toward him. Later he crept over to touch the birds, but when he got blood on his hands, he grew quite wild with terror. And now, this evening, he lay whimpering so terribly, unable to sleep or rest, and then he screamed something about a hawk that was after him.

  “Do you remember that day in Oslo when the messenger arrived? You said, ‘It will be your descendant who will live on at Formo after you’re gone.’ ”

  “Don’t talk like that, Simon. As if you think you will die without a son. Surely God and His gentle Mother will help. It’s unlike you to be so disheartened, brother-in-law.”

  “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 Jørundgaard 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 whe
n 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 Andressøn. 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.