She was trying to hold out a little longer, before she gave in and screamed.
Audfinna sat next to the hearth and tended the pots of water. Kristin wished that she dared ask her to come over and hold her hand. There was nothing she wouldn’t give to hold on to a familiar and kind hand right now. But she was ashamed to ask for it.
The next morning a bewildered silence hovered over Husaby. It was the day before the Feast of the Annunciation and the farm work was supposed to be finished by mid-afternoon prayers, but the men were distracted and somber, and the frightened maids were careless with their chores. The servants had grown fond of their young mistress, and it was said that things were not going well for her.
Erlend stood outside in the courtyard, talking to his smith. He tried to keep his thoughts on what the man was saying. Then Fru Gunna came rushing over to him.
“There’s no progress with your wife, Erlend—we’ve tried everything we know. You must come. It might help if she sits on your lap. Go in and change into a short tunic. But be quick; she’s suffering greatly, your poor young wife!”
Erlend had turned blood-red. He remembered he had heard that if a woman was having trouble delivering a child she had conceived in secrecy, then it might help if she were placed on her husband’s knee.
Kristin was lying on the floor under several blankets; two women were sitting with her. The moment that Erlend came in, he saw her body convulse and she buried her head in the lap of one of the women, rocking it from side to side. But she didn’t utter a single whimper.
When the pain had passed, she looked up with wild, frightened eyes, her cracked, brown lips gasping. All trace of youth and beauty had vanished from the swollen, flushed red face. Even her hair was matted together with bits of straw and wool from the fur of a filthy hide. She looked at Erlend as if she didn’t immediately recognize him. But when she realized why the women had sent for him, she shook her head vigorously.
“It’s not the custom where I come from . . . for men to be present when a woman is giving birth.”
“It’s sometimes done here in the north,” said Erlend quietly. “If it can lessen the pain a little for you, my Kristin, then you must—”
“Oh!” When he knelt beside her she threw her arms around his waist and pressed herself to him. Hunched over and shaking, she fought her way through the pain without a murmur.
“May I have a few words with my husband alone?” she said when it was over, her breathing rapid and harsh. The women withdrew.
“Was it when she was suffering the agony of childbirth that you promised her what she told me—that you would marry her when she was widowed . . . that night when Orm was born?” whispered Kristin.
Erlend gasped for air, as if he had been struck deep in the heart. Then he vehemently shook his head.
“I was at the castle that night; my men and I had guard duty. It was when I came back to our hostel in the morning and they put the boy in my arms. . . . Have you been lying here thinking about this, Kristin?”
“Yes.” Again she clung to him as the waves of pain washed over her. Erlend wiped away the sweat that poured down her face.
“Now you know,” he said, when she lay quiet once more. “Don’t you want me to stay with you, as Fru Gunna says?”
But Kristin shook her head. And finally the women had to let Erlend go.
But then it seemed as if her power to endure was broken. She screamed in wild terror of the pain that she could feel approaching, and begged pitifully for help. And yet when the women talked of bringing her husband back, she screamed “No!” She would rather be tortured to death.
Gunnulf and the cleric who was with him walked over to the church to attend evensong. Everyone on the estate went along who was not tending to the woman giving birth. But Erlend slipped out of the church before the service was over and walked south toward the buildings.
In the west, above the ridges on the other side of the valley, the sky was a yellowish-red. The twilight of the spring evening was about to descend, clear and bright and mild. A few stars appeared, white in the light sky. A little wisp of fog drifted over the bare woods down by the lake, and there were brown patches where the fields lay open to the sun. The smell of earth and thawing snow filled the air.
The little house was at the westernmost edge of the courtyard, facing the hollow of the valley. Erlend went over and stood for a moment behind the wall. The timbers were still warm from the sun as he leaned against them. Oh, how she screamed. . . . He had once heard a heifer shrieking in the grip of a bear —that was up at their mountain pasture, and he was only a half-grown boy. He and Arnbj?rn, the shepherd boy, were running south through the forest. He remembered the shaggy creature that stood up and became a bear with a red, fiery maw. The bear broke Arnbj?rn’s spear in half with its paw. Then the servant threw Erlend’s spear, as he stood there paralyzed with terror. The heifer lay there still alive, but its udder and thigh had been gnawed away.