When Naakkve came downstairs and he and Gaute sat down to the porridge bowl, Kristin quickly told Frida that she would take food to Bj?rgulf up in the loft herself. It occurred to her that she might be able to talk about things with the taciturn boy, who she knew was much more mature in spirit than his brothers.
He was lying in bed, holding a linen cloth over his eyes. His mother hung a kettle of water on the hook over the hearth, and while Bj?rgulf propped himself up on his elbow to eat, she boiled a concoction of eyebright and celandine.
Kristin took away the empty food bowl, washed his red and swollen eyes with the concoction, and placed moist linen cloths over them. Then she finally gathered her courage to ask, “Didn’t your father say anything about when he intends to come back home to us?”
“No.”
“You always say so little, Bj?rgulf,” replied his mother after a moment.
“That seems to run in the family, Mother.” After a pause he continued, “We met Simon and his men north of Rost Gorge. They were headed north with supplies.”
“Did you speak to them?” she asked.
“No,” he said with a laugh. “There seems to be some kind of sickness between us and our kinsmen that makes it impossible for friendship to thrive.”
“Are you blaming me for that?” fumed his mother. “One minute you complain that we talk too little, and the next you say that we can’t keep our friends.”
Bj?rgulf merely laughed again. Then he lifted himself up on his elbow, as if he were listening to his mother’s breathing.
“In God’s name, Mother, you mustn’t cry now. I’m tired and dejected, unaccustomed as I am to traveling on skis. Pay no mind to whatever I say. Of course I know that you’re not a woman who’s fond of quarrels.”
Kristin then left the loft at once. But she no longer dared, for any price, to ask this son what her children thought of these matters.
She would lie in bed, night after night, when the boys had gone up to the loft, listening and keeping watch. She wondered whether they talked to each other when they were alone up there. She could hear the thump of their boots as they dropped them to the floor, the clatter of their knife belts falling. She heard their voices but couldn’t make out their words. They talked all at the same time, growing boisterous; it seemed to be half quarrel, half banter. One of the twins shouted loudly; then something was dragged across the floor, making dust sprinkle down from the ceiling into the main room. The gallery door crashed open with a bang, there was a stomping from outside on the gallery, and Ivar and Skule threatened and carried on as they pounded on the door. She heard Gaute’s voice, loud and full of laughter. She could tell that he was standing just inside the door; he and the twins had been fighting again, and Gaute had ended up throwing the twins out. Finally she heard Naakkve’s grown-up man’s voice. He intervened, and the twins came back inside. For a little while longer their chatter and laughter reached her, and then the beds creaked overhead. Gradually silence fell. Then a steady drone interrupted by pauses could be heard—a drone like the sound of thunder deep inside the mountains.
Kristin smiled in the dark. Gaute snored whenever he was especially tired. Her father had done the same. Such similarities pleased her; the sons who took after Erlend in appearance were also like him in that they slept as soundlessly as birds. As she lay in bed, thinking about all the small likenesses that could be recognized in offspring, generation after generation, she had to smile to herself. The painful anguish in her heart loosened its grip for a moment, and the trance of sleep descended, tangling up all the threads of her thoughts as she sank down, first into well-being and then into oblivion.
They were young, she consoled herself. They probably didn’t take it so hard.
But one day, shortly after New Year’s, the curate Sira Solmund came to see Kristin at J?rundgaard. It was the first time he arrived uninvited, and Kristin welcomed him courteously, even though she had her suspicions at once. And it turned out just as she had thought: He felt it was his duty to inquire whether she and her husband had arbitrarily, and without Church consent, ended their marriage and, if so, which of the spouses was responsible for this unlawful act.
Kristin felt as if her eyes flitted restlessly, and she spoke too swiftly, using far too many words, as she explained to the priest that Erlend thought he should tend to his property up north in Dovre. It had been sorely neglected over the past few years, and the buildings were apparently in ruins. Considering that they had so many children, they needed to look after their welfare—and many other such matters. She gave much too detailed an account of the situation, so that even Sira Solmund, as dull-witted as he was, had to notice that she was feeling uncertain. She talked on and on about what an eager hunter Erlend was; surely the priest must know that. She showed him the marten pelts she had received from her husband, and in her confusion, before she realized it or could reconsider, she gave them to the priest.