She thought about Gaute, so stalwart and handsome he looked on his huge blue-black horse. And about herself. Not many women her age, now close to half a century, enjoyed such good health; that was something she had noticed on her way through the mountains. Lord, if only you would give me this and this and this, then I will thank you and ask for nothing more except for this and this and this. . . .
Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she asked for—for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart—not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road’s end.
She had not come to God with her wreath or with her sins and sorrows, not as long as the world still possessed a drop of sweetness to add to her goblet. But now she had come, after she had learned that the world is like an alehouse: The person who has no more to spend is thrown outside the door.
She felt no joy at her decision, but it seemed to Kristin that she herself had not made the choice. The poor beggars who had entered her house had come to invite her away. A will that was not her own had put her among that group of impoverished and ill people and invited her to go with them, away from the home she had managed as the mistress and ruled as the mother of men. And when she had consented without much protest, she knew that she did so because she saw that Gaute would thrive better if she left the estate. She had bent fate to her will; she had obtained the circumstances she wanted. Her sons she could not shape according to her will; they were the way God had created them, and their obstinacy drove them. With them she could never win. Gaute was a good farmer, a good husband, and a faithful father, a capable man and as honorable as most people. But he did not have the makings of a chieftain, nor did he have the inclination to long for what she had desired on his behalf. Yet he loved her enough to feel tormented because he knew she expected something else of him. That was why she now intended to beg for food and shelter, even though it hurt her pride to arrive so impoverished; she had nothing to give.
But she realized that she had to come. The spruce forest covering the slopes stood drinking in the seeping sunlight and swayed softly; the little church sat silent and closed, sweating an odor of tar. With longing Kristin thought about the dead monk who had taken her hand and led her into the light emanating from the cloak of God’s love when she was an innocent child, who had reached out his hand to lead her home, time after time, from the paths on which she had strayed. Suddenly she remembered so clearly her dream about him the night before, up in the mountains:
She dreamed that she was standing in the sunshine in a courtyard of some grand estate, and Brother Edvin was walking toward her from the doorway to the main house. His hands were full of bread, and when he reached her, she saw that she had been forced to do as she envisioned, to ask for alms when she came to the villages. But somehow she had arrived in the company of Brother Edvin, and the two of them were traveling together and begging. But at the same time she knew that her dream had a double meaning; the estate was not merely a noble manor, but it seemed to her to signify a holy place, and Brother Edvin belonged to the servants there, and the bread which he offered her was not simply flatbread the way it looked; it signified the Host, panis angelorum, and she accepted the food of angels from his hand. And now she gave her promise into Brother Edvin’s hands.
CHAPTER 5
FINALLY SHE HAD arrived. Kristin Lavransdatter sat and rested in a haystack on the road beneath Sion Castle. The sun was shining, and the wind was blowing; the part of the field that had not yet been cut undulated with blossoming straw, red and shiny like silk. Only the fields of Tr?ndelag were ever that color red. At the bottom of the slope she could see a glimpse of the fjord, dark blue and dotted with foam; fresh white sea swells crashed against the cliffs of the shore for as far as she could see below the green-forested promontory of the town.
Kristin let out a long breath. All the same, it was good to be back here, good even though it was also strange to know that she would never leave here again. The gray-clad sisters out at Rein followed the same rules, Saint Bernard’s rules, as the brothers of Tautra. When she rose before dawn and went to church, she knew that Naakkve and Bj?rgulf would also be taking their places in the monks’ choir. So she would end up living out her old age with some of her sons after all, although not in the way she might have imagined.
She took off her hose and shoes to wash her feet in the creek. She would walk to Nidaros barefoot.