“It has grieved me every single day,” replied Simon softly. “Thank you for coming, Gyrd.”
They continued walking along the fence—Gyrd first, with Simon plodding behind. Finally they sank down on the edge of a little yellow-scorched stony embankment. A strong, sweet fragrance came from the small mounds of hay that were scattered about, where the scythe had scraped together short stalks of hay mixed with flowers between the piles of stones. Gyrd spoke of the reconciliation between King Magnus and the Haftorssøns and their followers.
After a moment Simon asked, “Do you think it’s out of the question that any of these kinsmen of Erlend Nikulaussøn would be willing to attempt to win full reconciliation for him and clemency from the king?”
“There is not much I can do,” said Gyrd Darre. “And they have few kind words to say of him, Simon, those who might be able to do something. Oh, I have little desire to talk of this matter now. I thought he was a bold and splendid fellow, but the others think he brought his plans to such a bad end. But I’d rather not talk of this now; I know you’re so fond of that brother-in-law of yours.”
Simon sat gazing out across the silvery white brilliance of the crowns of the trees on the hillside and the sparkling gleam of the river. Surprised, he thought that yes, in a way it was true, what Gyrd had said.
“Except that right now we are foes, Erlend and I,” he said. “It’s been a long time since we last spoke.”
“It seems to me that you’ve grown quite quarrelsome over the years, Simon,” said Gyrd with a laugh.
After a moment he continued, “Haven’t you ever thought of moving away from these valleys? We kinsmen could support each other more if we lived closer to each other.”
“How can you even think of such a thing? Formo is my ancestral estate . . .”
“Aasmund of Eiken owns part of the manor through inherited rights. And I know that he would not be unwilling to exchange one ancestral property for another. He hasn’t yet given up the idea that if he could win your Arngjerd for his Grunde on the terms that he mentioned . . .”
Simon shook his head. “The lineage of our father’s mother has resided on this estate ever since Norway was a heathen land. And it is here that I intend for Andres to live when I’m gone. I don’t think you have your wits about you, brother. How could I give up Formo!”
“No, that’s understandable.” Gyrd blushed a little. “I merely thought that perhaps . . . Most of your kinsmen are at Raumarike, along with the friends from your youth; perhaps you might find that you’d thrive better there.”
“I’m thriving here.” Simon had also turned red. “This is the place where I can give the boy a secure seat.” He looked at Gyrd, and his brother’s fine, furrowed face took on an embarrassed expression. Gyrd’s hair was now almost white, but his body was still just as slender and lithe as ever. He shifted rather uneasily; several stones rolled out from the pile of rocks and tumbled down the slope and into the grain.
“Are you going to send the whole scree down into my field?” asked Simon in a stern voice as he laughed. Gyrd leaped to his feet, light and agile, reaching out a hand to his brother, who moved more slowly.
Simon gripped his brother’s hand for a moment after he got to his feet. Then he placed his arm around his brother’s shoulder. Gyrd did the same, and with their arms loosely resting around each other’s shoulders, the brothers slowly walked over the hills toward the manor.
They sat together in the Saemund house that night; Simon would share a bed with his brother. They had said their evening prayers, but they wanted to empty the ale keg before they went to bed.
“Benedictus tu in muliebris . . . mulieribus . . . Do you remember that?” Simon laughed suddenly.
“Yes. It cost me a few blows across the back before Sira Magnus wrung our grandmother’s misteachings out of my head.” Gyrd smiled at the memory. “And he had a devilishly hard hand too. Do you remember, brother, that time when he sat and scratched the calves of his legs, and he had lifted up the hem of his robe? You whispered to me that if you had had such misshapen calves as Magnus Ketilssøn, you would have become a priest too and always worn full-length surcoats.”
Simon smiled. Suddenly he seemed to see the boyish face of his brother, about to burst with stifled laughter, his eyes pitifully miserable. They weren’t very old back then, and Sira Magnus was cruelly hard-handed whenever he had to reprimand them.
Gyrd had not been terribly clever when they were children. And it wasn’t because Gyrd was a particularly wise man that Simon loved him now. But he felt warm with gratitude and tenderness toward his brother as he sat there: for every day of their kinship during almost forty years and for Gyrd, just the way he was—the most loyal and forthright of men.
It seemed to Simon that winning back his brother Gyrd was like gaining a firm foundation for at least one foot. And for such a long time his life had been so unreasonably disjointed and complicated.
He felt a warmth inside every time he thought about Gyrd, who had come to him to make amends for something that Simon himself had provoked when he rode to his brother’s estate in anger and with curses. His heart overflowed with gratitude; he had to thank more than Gyrd.
A man such as Lavrans . . . He knew quite well how he would have handled such an event. He could follow his father-in-law as far as he was able, by giving out alms and the like. But he wasn’t capable of such things as true contrition or contemplation of the wounds of the Lord, unless he stared zealously at the crucifix—and that was not what Lavrans had intended. Simon couldn’t bring forth tears of remorse; he hadn’t wept more than two or three times since he was a child, and never when he needed to most, those times when he had committed the worst of sins: with Arngjerd’s mother while he was a married man and that killing the previous year. And yet he had felt great regret; he thought that he always sincerely regretted his sins, taking pains to confess and to atone as the priest commanded. He was always diligent in saying his prayers and saw to it that he gave the proper tithes and abundant alms—with particular generosity in honor of the apostle Saint Simon, Saint Olav, Saint Michael, and the Virgin Mary. Otherwise he was content with what Sira Eirik had said: that salvation was to be found in the cross alone and how a man faced or fought with the Fiend was something for God to decide and not the man himself.
But now he felt an urge to show his gratitude to the holy ones with greater fervor. His mother had told him that he was supposedly born on the birthday of the Virgin Mary. He decided that he wanted to show the Lord’s Mother his veneration with a prayer he was not usually accustomed to saying. He had once had a beautiful prayer copied out, back when he was at the royal court, and he took out the small piece of parchment.
Now, much later, he feared that it was probably intended more as an appeal to King Haakon than for the sake of God or Mary that he had acquired these small epistles with prayers and learned them while he was among the king’s retainers. All the young men did so, for the king was in the habit of quizzing the pages about what they knew of such useful knowledge when he lay in bed at night, unable to sleep.
Oh yes . . . that was so long ago. The king’s bedchamber in the stone hall of the Oslo palace. On the little table next to his bed burned a single candle; the light fell across the finely etched, faded, and aging face of the man, resting above the red silken quilts. When the priest had finished reading aloud and taken his leave, the king often picked up the book himself and lay in bed, reading with the heavy volume resting against his propped-up knees. On two footstools over by the brick fireplace sat the pages; Simon nearly always had the watch with Gunstein Ingasøn. It was pleasant in the chamber. The fire burned brightly, giving heat without smoke, and the room seemed so snug with the cross-beamed ceiling and the walls always covered with tapestries. But they would grow sleepy from sitting there in that fashion, first listening to the priest read and then waiting for the king to fall asleep, as he rarely did until close to midnight. When he was sleeping, they were allowed to take turns keeping guard and napping
on the bench between the fireplace and the door to the royal Council hall.
Occasionally the king would converse with them; this didn’t happen often, but when it did, he was inexpressibly kind and charming. Or he would read aloud from the book a sentence or a few stanzas of a verse that he thought the young men might find useful or beneficial to hear.
One night Simon was awakened by King Haakon calling for him in pitch-darkness. The candle had burned out. Feeling wretched with shame, Simon blew some life into the embers and lit a new candle. The king lay in bed, smiling secretively.
“Does that Gunstein always snore so terribly?”
“Yes, my Lord.”
“You share a bed with him in the dormitory, don’t you? It might be deemed reasonable if you asked for another bedfellow for a while who makes less noise when he sleeps.”
“Thank you, my Lord, but it doesn’t bother me, Your Majesty!”
“Surely you must wake up, Simon, when that thunder explodes right next to your ear—don’t you?”
“Yes, Your Grace, but then I give him a shove and turn him over a bit.”
The king laughed. “I wonder whether you young men realize that being able to sleep so soundly is one of God’s great gifts. When you reach my age, Simon my friend, perhaps you will remember my words.”
That seemed endlessly far away—still clear, but not as if he were the same man, sitting here now, who had once been that young page.
One day at the beginning of Advent, when Kristin was almost alone on the estate—her sons were bringing home firewood and moss—she was surprised to see Simon Darre come riding into the courtyard. He had come to invite her and her sons to be their guests during Christmas.
“You know quite well, Simon, that we can’t do that,” she said somberly. “We can still be friends in our hearts, you and Ramborg and I, but as you know, it’s not always possible for us to determine what we must do.”
“Surely you don’t mean that you’re going to take this so far that you won’t come to your only sister when she has to lie down to give birth.”
Kristin prayed that all would go well and bring both of them joy. “But I can’t tell you with certainty that I will come.”
“Everyone will think it remarkably strange,” admonished Simon. “You have a reputation for being the best midwife, and she’s your sister, and the two of you are the mistresses of the largest estates in the northern part of the region.”
“Quite a few children have been brought into the world on the great manors around here over the past few years, but I’ve never been asked to come. It’s no longer the custom, Simon, for a birth to be considered improperly attended if the mistress of Jørund gaard is not in the room.” She saw that he was greatly distressed by her words, and so she continued, “Give my greetings to Ramborg, and tell her that I will come to help her when it’s time; but I cannot come to your Christmas feast, Simon.”
But on the eighth day of the Christmas season she met Simon as he came to mass without Ramborg. No, she was feeling fine, he said, but she needed to rest and gather her strength, for the next day he was taking her and the children south to Dyfrin. The weather was so good for traveling by sleigh, and since Gyrd had invited them, and Ramborg was so keen on going, well . . .
CHAPTER 4
ON THE DAY after Saint Paal’s Day, Simon Darre rode north across Lake Mjøsa, accompanied by two men. A bitter frost had set in, but he didn’t think he could stay away from home any longer; the sleighs would have to follow later, as soon as the cold had let up a bit.
At Hamar he met a friend, Vigleik Paalssøn of Fagaberg, and they continued on together. When they reached Lillehammer, they rested for a while at a farm where ale was served. As they sat and drank, several drunken fur peddlers began brawling in the room. Finally Simon stood up, stepped into the thick of things and separated them, but in doing so, he received a knife wound in his right forearm. It was little more than a scratch, so he paid it no mind, although the proprietress of the alehouse insisted on being allowed to bind a cloth around it.
He rode home with Vigleik and stayed the night at his manor. The men shared a bed, and toward morning Simon was awakened because the other man was thrashing in his sleep. Several times Vigleik called out his name, and so Simon woke him up to ask what was wrong.
Vigleik couldn’t remember his dream properly. “But it was loathsome, and you were in it. One thing I do remember: Simon Reidarssøn stood in this room and asked you to leave with him. I saw him so clearly that I could have counted every single freckle on his face.”
“I wish you could sell me that dream,” said Simon, half in jest and half seriously. Simon Reidarssøn was his uncle’s son, and they had been good friends when they were growing up, but the other Simon had died at the age of thirteen.
In the morning when the men sat down to eat, Vigleik noticed that Simon hadn’t buttoned the sleeve of his tunic around his right wrist. The flesh was red and swollen all the way down to the back of his hand. He mentioned it, but Simon merely laughed.
A little later, when his friend begged him to stay on a few more days and to wait there for his wife—Vigleik couldn’t forget his dream—Simon Andressøn replied, almost indignantly, “Surely you haven’t had such a bad dream about me that I should keep to my bed because of a mere louse bite?”
Around sunset Simon and his men rode down to Lake Losna. It had been the most beautiful day; now the towering blue and white peaks turned gold and crimson in the twilight, while along the river the groves, heavy with rime, stood furry gray in the shadows. The men had excellent horses and a brisk ride ahead of them across the long lake; tiny bits of ice sprayed up, ringing and clinking beneath the hooves of the horses. A biting wind blew hard against them. Simon was freezing, but in spite of the cold, strange nauseating waves of heat kept washing over him, followed by icy spells that seemed to seep all the way into the marrow of his spine. Now and then he noticed that his tongue was swollen and felt oddly thick at the back of his throat. Even before they had crossed the lake he had to stop and ask one of his men to help him fasten his cape so it would support his right arm.
The servants had heard Vigleik Paalssøn recounting his dream; now they wanted their master to show them his wound. But Simon said it was nothing; it merely stung a bit. “I may have to get used to being left-handed for a few days.”
But later that night, when the moon had risen and they were riding high along the ridge north of the lake, Simon realized that his arm might turn out to be rather troublesome after all. It ached all the way up to his armpit, the jolting of the horse caused him great pain, and the blood was hammering in his wounded limb. His head was pounding too, and spasms were shooting up from the back of his neck. He was hot and then cold by turn.
The winter road passed high up along the slope, partway through forest and partway across white fields. Simon gazed at everything: The full moon was sailing brightly in the pale blue sky, having driven all the stars far away; only a few larger ones still dared wander in the distant heavens. The white fields glittered and sparkled; the shadows fell short and jagged across the snow; inside the woods the uncertain light lay in splotches and stripes among the firs, heavy with snow. Simon saw all this.
But at the same time he saw quite clearly a meadow with tufts of ash-brown grass in the sunlight of early spring. Several small spruce trees had sprung up here and there at the edge of the field; they glowed green like velvet in the sun. He recognized this place; it was the pasture near his home at Dyfrin. The alder woods stood beyond the field with its tree trunks a springtime shiny gray and the tops brown with blossoms. Behind stretched the long, low Raumarike ridges, shimmering blue but still speckled white with snow. They were walking down toward the alder thicket, he and Simon Reidarssøn, carrying fishing gear and pike spears. They were on their way to the lake, which lay dark gray with patches of thawing ice, to fish at the open end. His dead cousin walked at his side; he saw his playmate’s curly hair sticking out from his cap, reddish in th
e spring sunlight; he could see every freckle on the boy’s face. The other Simon stuck out his lower lip and blew—phew, phew—whenever he thought his namesake was speaking gibberish. They jumped over meandering rivulets and leaped from mound to mound across the trickling snow water in the grassy meadow. The bottom was covered with moss; under the water it churned and frothed a lively green.
He was fully aware of everything around him; the whole time he saw the road passing up one hill and down another, through the woods and over white fields in the glittering moonlight. He saw the slumbering clusters of houses beneath snow-laden roofs casting shadows across the fields; he saw the band of fog hovering over the river in the bottom of the valley. He knew that it was Jon who was riding right behind him and who moved up alongside him whenever they entered open clearings, and yet he happened to call the man Simon several times. He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t help himself, even though he noticed that his servants grew alarmed.
“We must manage to reach the monks at Roaldstad tonight, men,” he said once when his mind had cleared.
The men tried to dissuade him; instead they should see about finding lodgings as soon as possible, and they mentioned the nearest parsonage. But their master clung to his plan.
“It will be hard on the horses, Simon.” The two men exchanged a glance.
But Simon merely laughed. They would have to manage it for once. He thought about the arduous miles. Pain shot through his whole body as he jolted in the saddle. But he wanted to go home because now he knew that he was fated to die.
Even though his heart was alternately freezing and burning in the winter night, at the same time he felt the mild spring sunshine of the pasture back home, while he and the dead boy kept walking and walking toward the alder thicket.
For brief moments the image would vanish and his head would clear, except that it ached so dreadfully. He asked one of his men to cut open the sleeve on his wounded arm. His face turned white and the sweat poured down when Jon Daalk cautiously slit open his vest and shirt from his wrist up to his shoulder, but he managed to support the swollen limb himself with his left hand. After a while the pain began to ease.
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