“Never be naked with a man,” Pastor Pringsheim had said, “never be naked with a man before you pronounce holy vows at the altar in the church of our forefathers. Loving with the body prior to the saying of vows will taint your relationship forever, and only disaster will come of it.”
“You are a beautiful girl,” Arne Vendahl had said to his daughter, “and you are my delight. But beauty is both a blessing and a burden. The men will come to you like bees to honey. It is their nature, as it is meant to be. But remember, we are poor. It should be easier for you to love a rich man than a poor one. Do you understand? Help your family even as you help yourself.”
Kristin’s schoolfriends had whispered about other aspects of romantic possibility. “You know my sister Lisa?” asked saucy little Loni Haakonsdatter, tying and untying the ends of her long, honey-colored braids. “The one that got married last year to Harald Fardahl from Glittertinden? Well, she told me a little bit about it. She said it hurts a little at first, but after a couple of times it feels so delicious you never want it to end.”
But Kristin’s mother, who lay ill now with what the doctors called “a wasting of the blood,” had been quite prosaic in her advice. “Look at me, girl,” she sighed one day, lying in the bed she seldom left anymore. “This is the bed in which I conceived nine children. In which they were born and in which two of them died. The ones who are still alive have barely enough to eat, even in the years of good harvest. And now I am dying in this very same bed. Remember me when your body asks you to satisfy its craving.”
“What craving?” Kristin had asked, turning away to hide her blush. She already had a very good idea what it was: that feeling of being tender yet empty, which she experienced late at night, trying to sleep, thinking of men.
“You will certainly know it when it comes,” sighed her mother, “you will certainly know.”
And now, lying with Eric on the grassy cliffs above Sonnendahl Fjord, lost in his kiss this bright and blazing day, Kristin knew. Eric had ridden to the Vendahl farmhouse just after breakfast, looking like a blond Nordic cavalier, even though he had only a brown plowhorse for a steed. Dismounting, he had waved to Kristin, who was busy scrubbing the younger children’s clothes by the stream behind the house, and sought out Arne. Kristin’s father looked up from the blasting forge, at which he was reshaping battered horseshoes. Nodding at the young man in the wry, resigned manner assumed by fathers of beautiful girls, he plunged the red hot metal in a bucket of water, waited until the hiss and steam subsided, then greeted Eric. Kristin stopped scrubbing and strained to hear.
“Sir,” Eric said, “about that matter of which we spoke. I should like to see Kristin today.”
Kristin saw her father lift his hand, a small wave, a gesture of assent. “Here is no place for talk,” he said.
“We will not go far, I assure you.”
Again, her father made the small wave with his hand, and returned to his forge. Kristin’s mind was racing. That matter of which we spoke? We will not go far? But Eric was already walking toward her. She stood and brushed her skirts, hating the water and mud that sullied her appearance.
But he seemed not to, notice at all, thank God. “Kristin,” he said, “I have your father’s permission to speak with you. Not here. Let’s go for a ride, to someplace quiet.”
Quickly she had raced to the house and slipped into her best blouse, soft and white, with mountain flowers embroidered in colored thread at collar and cuff, and she also put on her Sunday skirt of deep blue. She had spent much time sewing it herself, and was always pleased to wear it, knowing how well it showed the trimness of her waist and enhanced the fullness of her breasts.
“What are you doing?” called her mother weakly from the bedroom.
“Dressing. Eric Starbane is here. He…” She hesitated, feeling that something significant and important was about to happen. “He has come to speak to me,” Kristin pronounced, feeling quite significant herself. “Father has given his permission.”
But, in the bedroom, Kristin’s mother had only sighed.
She would do more than sigh if she were here now, thought Kristin, lying with Eric in the grass. They had ridden without many words through the pass west of Lesja, and up into the hills overlooking the fjord. Sheer walls of rock dropped down and down to the great gorgelike inlet, where the cold blue water lay still and lovely and deep as a jewel, as sapphire. The lighter, diamond blue of the Atlantic shimmered under the golden sun, and the warm grass upon which Kristin and Eric lay was green as jade.
They had been kissing and embracing for some time now, and she felt desire hot and racing in her body. This she had felt with Eric before, in stolen moments in darkness at village dances, or in the grove of pine behind her house, to which she would steal at midnight, meeting him there. But today, for the first time, he had caressed with his strong, gentle hand, the place where her need was deepest, and she herself had for the first time touched with wonder the great length of his own desire. Now, still embracing, they broke away from another long kiss, and looked deeply into each other’s eyes. The plowhorse stomped and grazed a short distance away; a small waterfall gurgled and sang as it dropped to the fjord; the ocean wind was fine and sweet. Save for their own needful breathing, there were no other sounds.
“I love you so much, Kristin,” he said.
I know, she thought. How could I not know? “I love you as well,” she said. “No, better.”
“But that could not be.”
He looked at her in a way she had seen before, reverently, but with something left unsaid. But this time he did not keep the words to himself.
“I want you now,” he said, holding her with his eyes and his arms.
Could this have been what he wished to talk to her about today? About which he had previously spoken to her father? She doubted it, but then it made no difference. All of the old cautionary words came to her, flocking like blackbirds along the red branches of conscience, and her whole girlhood flashed past, too, like a high-speed dream, like a seamless ribbon of flowing life.
“I want you, Kristin,” he asked again. “Everything.”
She pulled her eyes from his, leaned forward, and placed her forehead at the place where his strong neck met his wonderfully muscled shoulder, and it was there that Eric Starbane felt her tender nod of acceptance and assent.
And so it began for them, their lives, their one commingled life, which they could not have foreseen, not even in dreams. Nor did they care, then, to foresee it, because the only thing that mattered was the moment of love, and another moment, and yet another, until all the separate, discrete elements of time blended as one, and time did not matter either. Kristin raised her head from his shoulder, and his lips found hers, a kiss of promise and wonder, far more powerful than any kiss they had shared before.
The fastenings of her blouse were loosened even before she was aware of the June sun warm on her bare breasts, fastenings loosened as if by his breath, or by his kiss, which now encompassed tender, throbbing nipples, moved slowly, ardently, from nipples to neck to mouth, and then to nipples again, and down along the gentle golden swell of her fine belly. Like an implacable hunter, Eric tracked her with his kiss, loosening the blue skirt at the waist, and drawing it down, inch by inch, trailed by his kiss. Never before in her life had Kristin imagined—never had she felt—the piercing sensation that was not yet pleasure but rather anticipation of the pleasure that would come. This sensation went on and on and on, as he drew the sleek blue skirt from her strong slender legs, and tossed it onto the grass, where it lay like a wild shroud, like a sacred cloth that had previously concealed a holy vessel, but which, now, became a relic of its own, sanctified no more by what it had guarded than by what it had revealed. Kristin gasped and cried out as Eric kissed down the long length of her legs, first one, then the other, inch by inch, until, when she was naked for him, he began to track upward with lips and tongue.
She closed her eyes, but the sun beat down upon her, and from be
hind eyelids the June light fashioned flickering patterns of shapes and colors unknown even to the penumbra of the gods. No more, no more, I cannot stand it, cried her mind, but her body ruled, held sway, and it demanded everything and more, and more and more of everything.
Eric ripped off his white cotton shirt as he kissed upward toward the center of Kristin’s being and, as he slowly moved on, divested himself also of the rough woven trousers he had worn. By the time he had kissed and caressed around the quivering depth of his beloved, by the time he had passed his kisses once more up over her belly and breasts, by the time he tasted her mouth again, he was naked as she.
“Marry me,” he demanded, the hardness of him throbbing upon her belly. “Marry me, now.”
“I do,” she cried. “I do. I will, I will. Whatever it is that you say, and what it is that we do, do now!”
And they did. There was no pain, none at all, but rather a form of completion, a slipping into herself of something that must always have been meant for her, must even have been a lost part of herself. As Kristin felt Eric moving into her, she felt only rapture and promise. The time that had previously been stilled by their long kisses now shuddered in captured tumult, too entranced by what it must witness and bear even to quiver and beat. The feeling of Eric inside her was magnificent beyond thought and when he seemed to withdraw she sobbed, only to cry out in ecstasy as he moved all the way into her again.
She wrapped her strong legs around him which were golden from the sun and taut and powerful from climbing in the mountain pastures. She wrapped her arms about the hard, rippling width of his powerful shoulders, pressed down his golden head to her own, so that he might kiss her with his lips even as he rode her with his body, even as he kissed and retreated and kissed and retreated and kissed and retreated with the essence of himself. Without knowing when or how it had begun, she felt herself moving with him, completely with him, matching with her own twists and thrusts everything that he did. It was as if they were cavorting in dance upon the village green on the feast of Summer Solstice, so perfectly did their bodies mesh. Yet it was not only their bodies that were totally commingled. Souls, hearts, minds, too, everything together began to mount a height Kristin had never scaled, as if she were climbing in a glorious dream. Far back within the caverns of her mind she felt a blood-red pounding, as if something enchanting but unknown were knocking upon the door of her very being, asking, no, demanding entrance to her very self, to all that she was or would be. Eric was kissing her with his mouth, his body pounding hers and the wild red pounding at the door of her soul could not be refused. “Yes!” she cried, and then gasped, “Yes!” and “yes!” and “yes!”
Time, held in abeyance so long while Kristin and Eric had made their love, now lurched forward, so that by the time they regained breath—or, more accurately, forced themselves to breathe evenly again—hours seemed to have flown by. Now, truly, did Kristin remember all the words that had seemed so insignificant and meaningless before. Pastor Pringsheim’s admonitions seemed not all that absurd, and the image of her own mother, nine children, the bed of life and death, would have been difficult to dismiss, had it not been for Eric’s constant, prolonged caresses of tender gratitude, even after his own pleasure was fulfilled.
“How do you feel?” he asked, kissing her neck.
Kristin had to think a moment, to sort it out. “Like a woman,” she said. “Just as I thought a woman ought to feel, after taking her man. I feel as if I were your wife.”
“You are,” he said, kissing her again. “That is what I wished to ask you today.”
“You have asked. I have certainly accepted.”
They laughed, delighted with their closeness and with each other.
Kristin’s face tightened suddenly with another kind of bodily knowledge.
“What is it?”
“I’m hungry!” she realized. “I’m famished!” The keenness of the pangs, in fact, startled even her, who was often hungry in a house of too many mouths and too little food.
“Does this happen to you every time?” asked Eric, with an expression amused and worried at the same time.
She kissed him for answer. “Every time!” she teased. “Of course, every time! What is it that you think? Do you not already know you are my first? And only,” she added.
“And only,” Eric said.
Kristin did not ask him, but she knew he must have had many women before her, else how could he so skillfully have given her such great pleasure? But she did not ask. She was jealous, but she did not want to know. He seemed to sense the nature of her thoughts, and said, “Let’s go over and bathe in the stream. It will feel splendid.”
The grazing plowhorse seemed slightly startled by their sudden emergence from the grass, or perhaps by the movement of animals in the pine forest above the cliff, but settled to a desultory chomping of grass as his master and his master’s mistress walked naked, arm and arm, toward the cold, translucent, rocky stream that ran from the mountains to the lip of the stony gorge, where it became a tumbling funnel of waterfall down into Sonnendahl Fjord.
Eric took her hand, and they walked a short distance upstream, until he found what he wanted: a deep, clear pool of icy mountain water held by a ragged, rocky inlet off to the side of the current. “Let’s dive,” he said, and before she fully realized what was happening, he took her with him, hand-in-hand, off the ledge, through the brilliant air, and they plunged into the peerless, freezing pool. The shock, painful and exhilarating, quickly passed, and upon opening her eyes she saw Eric diving beside her, the two of them, sleek and splendid, going down, down, captured and held by this strange, silent room of water and light. He held her hand still as they descended, dreamlike, to the savage, rock-strewn floor of the watery chamber. Kristin felt as if her chest were about to explode, and at the same moment Eric pointed upward, swinging the both of them into a graceful curve. They shot upward, faster, ever faster, and burst up to the surface and into the roaring light.
“That was wonderful,” she told him, as they sunned themselves on the ledge beside the stream. “But not as wonderful as making love.”
“No. Not as wonderful.” The plowhorse nickered nervously, and Eric glanced around to make certain the beast was not too near the edge of the fjord. “When should we have the wedding?” he asked, turning back to Kristin.
“I thought we already had it,” she said, stretching like a cat on the warm rocks, giving him a slow smile. It was so wonderful to be with him this way, to know she would be with him now forever.
“I mean the vows in Pastor Pringsheim’s church,” he said. “We have to do that part, for the sake of your parents. And,” he added, with a laugh, “for the sake of everyone who will want to celebrate with us at the wedding dance.”
Kristin knew this, too, of course. The mountain life was not an easy one, and those few happy occasions—Summer Solstice, the harvest festival, Christmas, weddings—were more than sufficient cause for eager revelry. Besides which, the union of Eric Starbane, handsome son of a fine old family whose bloodlines could be traced back to fabled Viking Eric the Red, and the exquisitely beautiful Kristin, had not gone unmentioned by the women of the town. It was sad, truth to tell, that Eric’s parents were gone, and that he had no other kin in Oppland County or, as far as anyone knew, in all Norway. But that meant—the chattering women also noted—Kristin and Eric would have the fine old stone Starbane farmhouse to themselves, at least until the children came.
“We should do something, though,” Kristin decided. “To make today even more special than it already is.”
“How could that be?”
“I know. But there should be′ a…a ceremony, or something…”
And then she thought of it. “Stand up,” she commanded, and he did, smiling in puzzled, playful expectation. Kristin stood too, and their two bare, golden bodies, young blond god and goddess, were shimmering images in the gently rippling pool.
Then Kristin bent down, cupped her hands, and from the shin
ing place where Eric’s reflection gleamed up at her, she took water. “Eric Starbane,” she said, turning to him, all serious now, and touched by the meaning of what she was about to do, “I have your image in my hands. I want to have you forever. Will you give me that?”
Eric, watching her, lost his smile, knowing that his beloved was performing a ritual that, impulsive though it was, would nevertheless be something both of them could never forget.
“I grant your wish with joy and with all my heart,” he said.
Kristin raised her cupped hands to her mouth and drank the cold water in which Eric’s image had been. Then she turned again to the pool, and let her image show upon the sun-dazzled water.
Eric did not hesitate. He bent down and lifted water from her reflection, holding it in his large strong sunburned hands. He turned to her.
“Now I have your image, Kristin,” he said, not at all surprised to hear a tremor of deep emotion in his voice. “Now I have your image, and with your image, you. May I take it inside me, forever to keep?”
Kristin nodded, nodded again, almost overcome, almost unable to speak. But to say the words was important to all ceremonies, and she said, “Yes. Take me. Drink me. I am yours. Anywhere, and for all time.” And then, without knowing exactly why, almost as if a premonition, a chill wind, had blown down from the mountains and into her secret heart, Kristin added, “For all time, no matter what happens or how things appear…”
Eric’s arms went around her, and she was lost in his kiss, feeling the swell against her of his renewed desire, feeling herself flow again, and falling, falling, ready to yield, either here on the rocks, or on the grass again, or anywhere…
But the old plowhorse whinnied in sudden alarm. Eric and Kristin, startled, turned to see the usually phlegmatic beast watching the hills above the fjord. They looked up to the hills as well, to see a horse and rider burst from beneath the shelter of thick pines, and race away down the trail that led to Lesja.
Wild Wind Westward Page 2