“Yes, it’s true that you have the right to scoff at me for that.”
Erlend moaned loudly.
“You know yourself that I didn’t mean it like that. But you lived all that time at J?rundgaard and listened to Lavrans—so splendid and manly he is, but he often talks as if he were a monk and not a grown man.”
“Have you ever heard of any monk who has had six children?” she said, offended.
“I’ve heard of that man, Skurda-Grim, and he had seven,” said Erlend in despair. “The former abbot at Holm . . . No, Kristin, Kristin, don’t cry like that. In God’s name, I think you’ve lost your senses.”
Munan was quite subdued the next morning. “I didn’t think you would take my ale-babble so much to heart, young Kristin,” he said somberly, stroking her cheek. “Or I would have kept better watch on my tongue.”
He said to Erlend that it must be strange for Kristin with the boy being there. It would be best to send Orm away for the time being. Munan offered to take him in for a while. Erlend approved, and Orm wanted to go with Munan. But Kristin missed the child deeply; she had grown fond of her stepson.
Now she once again sat alone with Erlend in the evenings, and there was not much companionship in him. He would sit over by the hearth, say a few words now and then, take a drink from the ale bowl, and play with his dogs. He would go over to the bench and stretch out—and then he would go to bed, asking a couple of times whether she was coming soon, and then he’d fall asleep.
Kristin sat and sewed. Her breathing was audible, shallow and heavy. But it wouldn’t be long now. She couldn’t even remember how it felt to be light and slim in the waist—or how to tie her shoes without strain and effort.
Now that Erlend was asleep she no longer tried to hold back her tears. There was not a sound in the hall except the firewood collapsing in the hearth and the dogs stirring. Sometimes she wondered what they had talked about before, she and Erlend. But then they hadn’t talked much—they had had other things to do in those brief, stolen hours together.
At this time of year her mother and the maids used to sit in the weaving room in the evenings. Then her father and the men would come to join them and sit down with their work—they would repair leather goods and farm tools and make carvings out of wood. The little room would be crowded with people; conversation flowed quietly and easily among them. Whenever somebody went over to drink from the ale keg, before he hung up the ladle he would always ask whether anyone else would like some—that was the custom.
Then someone would recite a short saga—perhaps about giants in the past who had fought with grave-barrow ghosts and giantesses. Or her father, as he whittled, would recount those tales of knights that he had heard read aloud in Duke Haakon’s hall when he was a page in his youth. Strange and beautiful names: King Os antrix, Titurel the knight; Sisibe, Guinevere, Gloriana, and Isolde were the names of the queens. But on other evenings they told bawdy tales and ribald sagas until the men were roaring with laughter and her mother and the maids would shake their heads and giggle.
Ulvhild and Astrid would sing. Ragnfrid had the loveliest voice of all, but they had to plead before they could get her to sing. Lavrans didn’t need such persuasion—and he could play his harp so beautifully.
Then Ulvhild would put down her distaff and spindle and press her hands behind her hips.
“Is your back tired now, little Ulvhild?” asked her father, taking her onto his lap. Someone would bring a board game and Ulvhild and her father would move the markers around until it was time for bed. Kristin remembered her little sister’s golden locks flowing over her father’s brownish-green homespun sleeve. He held the weak little back so tenderly.
Her father’s big, slender hands with a heavy gold ring on each little finger . . . They had both belonged to his mother. He had said that the one with the red stone, her wedding ring, Kristin would inherit from him. But the one that he wore on his right hand, with a stone that was half blue and half white, like the emblem on his shield—that one Sir Bj?rgulf had ordered made for his wife when she was with child, and it was to be given to her when she had borne him a son. For three nights Kristin Sigurdsdatter had worn the ring; then she tied it around the boy’s neck, and Lavrans said that he would wear it to his grave.
Oh, what would her father say when he heard the news about her? When it spread throughout the villages back home, and he had to realize that wherever he went, to church or to the ting1 or to a meeting, every man would be laughing behind his back because he had allowed himself to be fooled? At J?rundgaard they had adorned a wanton woman with the Sundbu crown on her flowing hair.