Bj?rn Gunnarss?n had possessed a type of courage that Erlend knew he himself would never have. His hand had been steady when he stabbed his wife—right through the heart, said Munan.
It would be two years this winter since Bj?rn and Fru Aashild died. People had not seen smoke coming from the buildings at Haugen for nearly a week; finally several men gathered their courage and went over there. Herr Bj?rn was lying in bed with his throat cut; he was holding his wife’s body in his arms. On the floor next to the bed lay his bloody dagger.
Everyone knew what had happened, and yet Munan Baards?n and his brother managed to have the two buried in consecrated ground. Perhaps they had fallen victim to robbers, people said, although the chest containing Bj?rn’s and Aashild’s valuables had not been touched. And the bodies were untouched by mice or rats—in fact, those kinds of vermin never came to Haugen, and people took this as a sign of the woman’s sorcery skills.
Munan Baards?n had been terribly distressed by his mother’s death. He had set off on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela2 at once.
Erlend remembered the morning following his own mother’s death. They were anchored in Mold?y Sound, but the fog was so white and thick that only occasionally could they catch a glimpse of the mountain ridge towering above them. But there was a muffled echo from the hollow sound of the boat being rowed to shore with the priest. Erlend stood in the bow and watched them rowing away from the ship. Everything he came near was wet with fog; beads of moisture covered his hair and clothing. And the priest and his acolyte, who were strangers to Erlend, sat in the bow of the boat, their shoulders hunched as they bent over the holy vessels they held on their laps. They looked like hawks in the rain. The slap of the oars and the scrape of the oarlocks and the echo from the mountain continued to resound long after the boat had been spirited away by the fog.
On that day Erlend had also vowed to make a pilgrimage. He had only had one thought back then: that he be allowed to see his mother’s lovely, sweet face again, the way it had been before, with ts soft, smooth, light tan complexion. Now she lay dead be lowdecks, with her face ravaged by the terrible sores that ruptured and seeped little drops of clear fluid whenever she had tried to smile at him.
He was not to blame for the way his father had received him. Nor for the fact that he had turned to someone who was outcast, like himself. But then Erlend had pushed the pilgrimage from his mind, and he had refused to think any more about his mother. As painful as her life had been here on earth, she must now be in that place of peace—and there was not much peace for him, after he took up with Eline again.
Peace—he had known it only once in his life; on that night when he sat behind the stone wall near the woods of Hofvin and held Kristin as she slept on his lap—the safe, tender, undisturbed sleep of a child. He hadn’t been able to hold out for long before he shattered her tranquillity. And it wasn’t peace that he found with her later on, and he had no peace with her now. And yet he saw that everyone else in his home did find peace in the presence of his young wife.
Now he longed only to go away to that strife-torn place. He yearned madly and wildly for that remote promontory and for the thundering sea surrounding the forelands of the north, for the endless coastline and the enormous fjords which could conceal all manner of traps and deceptions, for the people whose language he understood only slightly, for their sorcery and inconstancy and cunning, for war and the sea, and for the singing of weapons, both his own and his men’s.
At last Erlend fell asleep, and then woke up again—what was it he had dreamed? Oh yes. That he was lying in a bed with a black-haired Finnish girl on either side of him. Something half-forgotten that had happened to him back when he was up north with Gissur. A wild night when they had all been drunk and reeling. He couldn’t recall much more of the whole night than the rank, wild-beast smell of the women.
And now here he lay with his sick little son in his arms and dreamed of such things. He was so shocked at himself that he didn’t dare try to sleep anymore. And he couldn’t bear to lie awake in bed. He must truly be fated to unhappiness. Rigid with anguish he lay motionless and felt the clench of his heart in his breast, while he longed for the redemption of dawn.
He persuaded Kristin to stay in bed the next day. He didn’t think he could stand to see her so miserable, dragging herself around the house. He sat with her and played with her hand. She had had the loveliest arms—slim and yet so plump that the small, delicate bones were hardly visible in the slender joints. Now they stood out like knots on her gaunt forearm, and the skin underneath was bluish-white.