Kristin shuddered as she glanced around at the room in the fading light. Shadows now filled every cranny, and the glow from the flames danced.
“I don’t understand,” she said, on the verge of collapse, “how you can bear this house. You have nothing to occupy your time, and you’re all alone. I think you could at least take on a workman.”
“You mean that I should run the farm myself?” Erlend laughed. “Oh no, Kristin, you know I’m ill suited to be a farmer. I can never sit still.”
“Sit still . . . But surely you’re sitting still here . . . during the long winter.”
Erlend smiled to himself; his eyes had an odd, remote look to them.
“Yes, in some sense you’re right. When I don’t have to think about anything but whatever happens to cross my mind and can come and go as I like. And you know that I’ve always been the kind of person who can fall asleep if there’s nothing to keep watch over; I sleep like a hibernating bear whenever the weather isn’t good enough to go into the mountains.”
“Aren’t you ever afraid to be here alone?” whispered Kristin.
At first he gave her a look of incomprehension. Then he laughed. “Because people say this place is haunted? I’ve never noticed anything. Sometimes I’ve wished that my kinsman Bj?rn would pay me a visit. Do you remember that he once said he didn’t think I’d be able to stand to feel the edge of a blade at my throat? I’d like to tell him now that I wasn’t particularly frightened when I had the rope around my neck.”
A long shiver rippled through Kristin’s body. She sat without saying a word.
Erlend stood up. “It must be time for us to go to bed now, Kristin.”
Stiff and cold, she watched Erlend remove the coverlet from his armor, spread it over the bed, and tuck it around the dirty pillows. “This is the best I have,” he said.
“Erlend!” She clasped her hands under her breast. She searched for something to say, to win a little more time; she was so frightened. Then she remembered the promise she had made.
“Erlend, I have a message to give you. Simon asked me, when he was near the end, to bring you his greetings. Every single day he regretted the words he spoke to you when you last parted. ‘Un manly’ he called them, and he asked you to forgive him.”
“Simon.” Erlend was standing with one hand on the bedpost; he lowered his eyes. “He’s the one man I would least like to be reminded of.”
“I don’t know what came between the two of you,” said Kristin. She thought Erlend’s words remarkably heartless. “But it would be strange, and unlike Simon, if things were as he said, that he did not treat you justly. Surely he wasn’t entirely to blame if this is true.”
Erlend shook his head. “He stood by me like a brother when I was in need,” he said in a low voice. “And I accepted his help and his friendship, and I never realized that it had always been difficult for him to tolerate me.
“It seems to me that it would have been easier to live in the old days, when two fellows like us could have fought a duel, meeting out on the islet to let the test of weapons decide who would win the fair maiden.”
He picked up an old cape from the bench and slung it over his arm.
“Perhaps you’d like to keep the dogs inside with you tonight?”
Kristin had stood up.
“Where are you going, Erlend?”
“Out to the barn to sleep.”
“No!”
Erlend stopped, standing there slender and straight-backed and young in the red glow from the dying embers in the fireplace.
“I don’t dare sleep alone in this room. I don’t dare.”
“Do you dare sleep in my arms then?” She caught a glimpse of his smile in the darkness, and she grew faint. “Aren’t you afraid that I might crush you to death, Kristin?”
“If only you would.” She fell into his arms.
When she woke up, she could see from the windowpane that it was daylight outdoors. Something was weighing down her breast; Erlend was sleeping with his head on her shoulder. He had placed his arm across her body and was gripping her left arm with his hand.
She looked at her husband’s iron-gray hair. She looked at her own small, withered breasts. Above and below them she could see the high, curved arch of her ribs under the thin covering of skin. A kind of terror seized hold of her as one memory after another from the night before rose up. In this room . . . the two of them, at their age . . . Horror and shame overwhelmed her as she saw the patches of red on her worn mother arms, on her shriveled bosom. Abruptly she grabbed the blanket to cover herself.