He tried to walk from the sleigh to the house, with his good arm around Jon’s shoulder and Sigurd walking behind to support him. Simon sensed that the faces of the men were gray and grimy with weariness; they had spent two nights in a row in the saddle. He wanted to say something to them about it, but his tongue refused to obey him. He stumbled over the threshold and fell full length into the room—with a roar of pain as his swollen and misshapen arm struck against something. The sweat poured off him as he choked back the moans that rose up as he was undressed and helped into bed.
Not long afterward he noticed that Kristin Lavransdatter was standing next to the fireplace, grinding something with a pestle in a wooden bowl. The sound kept thudding right through his head. She poured something from a small pot into a goblet and added several drops from a glass vial that she took out of a chest. Then she emptied the crushed substance from the bowl into the pot and set it next to the fire. Such a quiet and competent manner she had.
She came over to the bed with the goblet in her hand. She walked with such ease. She was just as straight-backed and lovely as she had been as a maiden—this slender woman with the thin, somber face beneath the linen wimple. The back of his neck was also swollen, and it hurt when she slipped one arm under his shoulders to lift him up. She supported his head against her breast as she held the goblet to his lips with her left hand.
Simon smiled a little, and as she cautiously let his head slip back down to the pillow, he seized hold of her hand with his good one. Her fine, slim woman’s hand was no longer soft or white.
“I suppose you can’t sew silk with these fingers of yours anymore,” said Simon. “But they’re good and light—and how pleasantly cool your hand is, Kristin.” He placed it on his forehead. Kristin remained standing there until she felt her palm grow warm; then she removed it and gently pressed her other hand against his burning brow, up along the hairline.
“Your arm has a nasty wound, Simon,” she said, “but with God’s help it will mend.”
“I’m afraid that you won’t be able to heal me, Kristin, no matter how skilled you are with medicines,” said Simon. But his expression was almost cheerful. The potion began to take effect; he felt the pain much less. But his eyes felt so strange, as if he had no control over them. He thought he must be lying there with each eye squinting in opposite directions.
“No doubt things will go with me as they must,” he said in the same tone of voice.
Kristin went back to her pots; she spread a paste on some linen cloths and then came over and wrapped the hot bandages around his arm, from the tips of his fingers all the way around his back and across his chest, where the swelling splayed out in red stripes from his armpit. It hurt at first, but soon the discomfort eased. She spread a woolen blanket on top and placed soft down pillows under his arm. Simon asked her what she had put on the bandages.
“Oh, various things—mostly comfrey and swallowwort,” said Kristin. “If only it was summer, I could have picked them fresh from my herb garden. But I had a plentiful supply; thanks be to God I haven’t needed them earlier this winter.”
“What was it you once told me about swallowwort? You heard it from the abbess when you were at the convent . . . something about the name.”
“Do you mean that in all languages it has a name that means ‘swallow,’ all the way from the Greek sea up to the northern lands?”
“Yes, because it blossoms everywhere when the swallows awake from their winter slumber.” Simon pressed his lips together more firmly. By then he would have been in the ground for a long time.
“I want my resting place to be here, at the church, if I should die, Kristin,” he said. “I’m such a rich man by now that someday Andres will most likely possess considerable power here at Formo. I wonder if Ramborg will have a son after I’m gone, in the spring. I would have liked to live long enough to see two sons on my estate.”
Kristin told him she had sent word south to Dyfrin that he was gravely ill—with Gaute, who had ridden off that morning.
“You didn’t send that child off alone, did you?” asked Simon with alarm.
There was no one at hand whom she thought could manage to keep up with Gaute riding Rauden, she told him. Simon said it would surely be a difficult journey for Ramborg; if only she wouldn’t travel any faster than she could bear. “But I would like to see my children . . .”
Sometime later he began talking about his children again. He mentioned Arngjerd, wondering whether he might have been wrong not to accept the offer from the people of Eiken. But the man seemed too old to him, and he had been afraid that Grunde could turn out to be violent when he was drunk. He had always wanted to place Arngjerd in the most secure of circumstances. Now it would be Gyrd and Gudmund who would decide on her marriage. “Tell my brothers, Kristin, that I sent them my greetings and that they should tend to this matter with care. If you would take her back to J?rundgaard for a while, I would be most grateful, as I lie in my grave. And if Ramborg should remarry before Arngjerd’s place is assured, then you must take her in, Kristin. You mustn’t think that Ramborg has been anything but kind toward her, but if she should end up with both a stepmother and a stepfather, I’m afraid she would be regarded more as a servant girl than a . . . You remember that I was married to Halfrid when I became her father.”