“As long as you don’t suffer the same fate as the martyred Selje men,” said Erlend, and Gunnulf again gave him a little smile.
“You call me restless, Gunnulf,” Erlend continued. “Then what should we call you? First you wander around in the southern lands for all those years, and then you’ve barely returned home before you give up your benefice and prebends3 to go off to preach to the Devil and his offspring up north in Velliaa. You don’t know their language and they don’t know yours. It seems to me that you’re even more inconstant than I am.”
“I own neither manors nor kinsmen to answer for,” said the monk. “I have now freed myself from all bonds, but you have bound yourself, brother.”
“Yes, well . . . I suppose the man who owns nothing is free.”
Gunnulf replied, “A man’s possessions own him more than he owns them.”
“Hmm. No, by God, I might concede that Kristin owns me. But I won’t agree that the manor and the children own me too.”
“Don’t think that way, brother,” said Gunnulf softly. “For then you might easily lose them.”
“No, I refuse to be like those other old men, up to their chins in the muck of their land,” said Erlend, laughing, and his brother smiled with him.
“I’ve never seen fairer children than Ivar and Skule,” he said. “I think you must have looked like them at that age—it’s no wonder our mother loved you so much.”
Both brothers rested a hand on the writing board, which lay between them. Even in the faint light of the oil lamp it was possible to see how unlike the hands of these two men were. The monk’s fingers bore no rings; they were white and sinewy, shorter and stubbier than the other man’s fingers, and yet they looked much stronger—even though the palm of Erlend’s fist was now as hard as horn and a blue-white scar from an arrow wound furrowed the dark skin from his wrist all the way up his sleeve. But the fingers of Erlend’s slender, tanned hand were dry and knotty-jointed like tree branches, and they were completely covered with rings of gold and precious stones.
Erlend had an urge to take his brother’s hand, but he was too embarrassed to do so; instead, he drank a toast to him, grimacing at the bad ale.
“And you think that Kristin has now regained her full health?” Erlend continued.
“Yes, she had blossomed like a rose when I was at Husaby in the summer,” said the monk with a smile. He paused for a moment and then said somberly, “I ask this of you, brother—think more about the welfare of Kristin and your children than you have done in the past. Abide by her advice and agree to the decisions she and Eiliv have made; they’re only waiting for your consent to conclude them.”
“I’m not greatly in favor of these plans you speak of,” said Erlend with some reluctance. “And now my position will be quite different.”
“Your lands will gain in value if you consolidate your property more,” replied the monk. “Kristin’s plans seemed sensible when she explained them to me.”
“And there isn’t another woman in all of Norway who offers advice more freely than she does,” said Erlend.
“But in the end you’re the one who commands. And you now command Kristin too, and can do as you please,” Gunnulf said, his voice strangely weak.
Erlend laughed softly from deep in his throat, then stretched and yawned. Suddenly somber, he said, “You have also counseled her, my brother. And at times your advice may well have come between our friendship.”
“Do you mean the friendship between you and your wife, or the friendship between the two of us?” the monk asked hesitantly.
“Both,” replied Erlend, as if the thought had just now occurred to him.
“It isn’t usually necessary for a laywoman to be so pious,” he continued in a lighter tone of voice.
“I have counseled her as I thought best. As it was best,” Gunnulf corrected himself.
Erlend looked at the monk dressed in the rough, grayish-white friar’s robes, with the black cowl thrown back so that it lay in thick folds around his neck and over his shoulders. The crown of his head was shaved so that only a narrow fringe of hair now remained, encircling his round, gaunt, pallid face; but his hair was no longer thick and black as it had been in Gunnulf’s younger days.
“Well, you aren’t as much my brother anymore as you are the brother of all men,” said Erlend, surprising himself by the great bitterness in his own voice.