The rider was coming toward her; now he was fording the river beneath the slope. She saw the glint of a spearpoint above the willow thickets. Then she scrambled down from the boulder and was about to run back to the hut. The rider leaped from his horse, tied it to the gatepost, and threw his cape over its back. He came walking up the slope; he was a tall, broad man. Now she recognized him: it was Simon.
When he saw her coming to meet him in the moonlight, he seemed to be just as frightened as she had been before.
“Jesus, Kristin, is that you? Or . . . How is it that you’re out at this time of night? Were you waiting for me?” he asked abruptly, as if in great dread. “Did you have a premonition of my journey?”
Kristin shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep. Brother-in-law, what is it?”
“Andres is so ill, Kristin. We fear for his life. So we thought . . . We know you are the most practiced woman in such matters. You must remember that he’s the son of your own sister. Will you agree to come home with me to tend to him? You know that I wouldn’t come to you in this manner if I didn’t think the boy’s life was in peril,” he implored her.
He repeated these words inside the hut to Erlend, who sat up in bed, groggy with sleep and quietly surprised. He tried to comfort Simon, speaking from experience. Such young children grew easily feverish and jabbered deliriously if they caught the least cold; perhaps it was not as dangerous as it looked.
“You know full well, Erlend, that I would not have come to get Kristin at such an hour of the night if I hadn’t clearly seen that the child is lying there, struggling with death.”
Kristin had blown on the embers and put on more wood. Simon sat and stared into the fire, greedily drinking the milk she offered him but refusing to eat any food. He wanted to head back down as soon as the others arrived. “If you are willing, Kristin.” One of his men was following behind with a widow who was a servant at Formo, an able woman who could take over the work up here while she was away. Aasbj?rg was most capable, he said again.
After Simon had lifted Kristin up into the saddle, he said, “I’d prefer to take the shortcut to the south if you’re not averse to it.”
Kristin had never been on that part of the mountain, but she knew there was supposed to be a path down to the valley, cutting steeply across the slope opposite Formo. She agreed, but then his servant would have to take the other road and ride past J?rundgaard to get her chest and the pouches of herbs and bulbs. He should wake up Gaute; the boy knew best about these things.
At the edge of a large marsh they were able to ride side by side, and Kristin asked Simon to tell her again about the boy’s illness. The children of Formo had had sore throats around Saint Olav’s Day, but they had quickly recovered. The illness had come over Andres suddenly, while he seemed in the best of health—in the middle of the day, three days before. Simon had taken him along, and he was going to ride on the grain sledge down to the fields. But then Andres complained that he was cold, and when Simon looked at the boy, he was shivering so hard that his teeth were rattling in his mouth. Then came the burning fever and the coughing; he vomited up such quantities of loathsome brown matter and had such pain in his chest. But he couldn’t tell them much about where it hurt most, the poor little boy.
Kristin tried to reassure Simon as best she could, and then she had to ride behind him for a while. Once he turned around to ask whether she was cold; he wanted her to take his cape over her cloak.
Then he spoke again of his son. He had noticed that the boy wasn’t strong. But Andres had grown much more robust during the summer and fall; his foster mother thought so too. The last few days before he fell ill he had acted a little strange and skittish. “Scared,” he had said when the dogs leaped at him, wanting to play. On the day when the fever seized him, Simon had come home in the first rays of dawn with several wild ducks. Usually the boy liked to borrow the birds his father brought home and play with them, but this time Andres screamed loudly when his father swung the bundle toward him. Later he crept over to touch the birds, but when he got blood on his hands, he grew quite wild with terror. And now, this evening, he lay whimpering so terribly, unable to sleep or rest, and then he screamed something about a hawk that was after him.
“Do you remember that day in Oslo when the messenger arrived? You said, ‘It will be your descendant who will live on at Formo after you’re gone.’ ”
“Don’t talk like that, Simon. As if you think you will die without a son. Surely God and His gentle Mother will help. It’s unlike you to be so disheartened, brother-in-law.”