The next day was the Vigil of Saint Olav. Early in the morning Kristin went down to the skerries to watch the bustle along the wharves. Her heart began pounding when she saw the lord abbot of Tautra come ashore, but the monks who accompanied him were all older men.
Just before midafternoon prayers the crowds began heading toward Christ Church, carrying and supporting the ill and the lame, to find room for them in the nave so they would be close to the shrine when it was carried past in procession the following day after high mass.
When Kristin made her way up to the stalls that had been put up near the cemetery wall—they were mostly selling food and drink, wax candles, and cushions woven from reeds or birch twigs to kneel on inside the church—she happened to meet the people from Andabu again. Kristin held the child while the young mother went to get a drink of local ale. At that moment a procession of English pilgrims appeared, singing and carrying banners and lighted tapers. In the confusion that ensued as they passed through the great crowds around the stalls, Kristin lost sight of the people from Andabu, and afterward she couldn’t find them.
For a long time she wandered back and forth on the outskirts of the throngs, hushing the screaming child. When she pressed the girl’s face against her throat, caressing and consoling her, the child would put her lips to Kristin’s skin and try to suckle. She could tell the child was thirsty, but she didn’t know what to do. It would be futile to search for the mother; she would have to go into the streets and see if she could find some milk. But when she reached Upper Langstr?te and tried to turn north, there was again a great crush of people. An entourage of horsemen was coming from the south, and at the same time a procession of guardsmen from the king’s palace had entered the square between the church and the residence of the Brothers of the Cross. Kristin was pressed back into the nearest alleyway, but there too people on horseback and on foot were streaming toward the church, and the crowds grew so fierce that she finally had to save herself by climbing up onto a stone wall.
The air above her was filled with the clanging of bells; from the cathedral the nona hora2 was rung. At the sound the child stopped screaming; she looked up at the sky, and a glimmer of understanding appeared in her dull eyes; she smiled a bit. Touched, the old mother bent down and kissed the poor little thing. Then she noticed that she was sitting on the stone wall surrounding the hops garden of Nikulaus Manor, their old town estate.
She should have recognized the brick chimney rising up from the sod roof, which was at the back of their house. Closest to her stood the buildings of the hospital, which had vexed Erlend so much because it had shared the rights to their garden.
She hugged the stranger’s child to her breast, kissing her over and over. Then someone touched her knee.
A monk wearing the white robes and black cowl of a friar. She looked down into the sallow, lined visage of an old man, with a thin, sunken mouth and two big amber eyes set deep in his face.
“Could it be . . . is that you, Kristin Lavransdatter?” The monk placed his crossed arms atop the stone wall and buried his face in them. “Are you here?”
“Gunnulf!”
Then he moved his head so that he touched her knee as she sat there. “Do you think it so strange that I should be here?”
She remembered that she was sitting on the wall of the manor that had been his first home and later her own house, and she had to agree that it was rather odd after all.
“But what child is this you’re holding on your knee? Surely this couldn’t be Gaute’s son?”
“No . . .” At the thought of little Erlend’s healthy, sweet face and strong, well-formed body, she pressed the tiny child close, overcome with pity. “This is the daughter of a woman who traveled with me over the mountains.”
But then she suddenly recalled what Andres Simonss?n had said in his childish wisdom. Filled with reverence, she looked down at the pitiful creature who lay in her arms.
Now the child was crying again, and the first thing Kristin had to do was ask the monk if he could tell her where she might find some milk. Gunnulf led her east, around the church to the friars’ residence and brought her some milk in a bowl. While Kristin fed her foster child, they talked, but the conversation seemed to halt along rather strangely.
“So much time has passed and so much has happened since we last met,” she said sadly. “And no doubt the news was hard to bear when you heard about your brother.”
“May God have mercy on his poor soul,” whispered Brother Gunnulf, sounding shaken.