Many hundreds of candles were burning inside the church. Vergers accepted the tapers of pilgrims and placed them on the small mound-shaped towers bedecked with spikes that had been set up throughout the church. As the daylight faded behind the colored panes of glass, the church grew warm with the smell of burning wax, but gradually it also filled with a sour stench from the rags worn by the sick and the poor.
When the choral voices surged beneath the vaults, the organ swelled, and the flutes, drums, and stringed instruments resounded, Kristin understood why the church might be called a ship. In the mighty stone building all these people seemed to be on board a vessel, and the song was the roar of the sea on which it sailed. Now and then calm would settle over the ship, as if the waves had subsided, and the voice of a solitary man would carry the lessons out over the masses.
Face after face, and they all grew paler and more weary as the vigil night wore on. Almost no one left between the services, at least none of those who had found places in the center of the church. In the pauses between nocturns they would doze or pray. The child slept nearly all night long; a couple of times Kristin had to rock her or give her milk from the wooden flask Gunnulf had brought her from the cloister.
The encounter with Erlend’s brother had oddly distressed her, coming as it did after each step on the road north had led her closer and closer to the memory of her dead husband. She had given little thought to him over the past few years, as the toil for her growing sons had left her scant time to dwell on her own fate, and yet the thought of him had always seemed to be right behind her, but she simply never had a moment to turn around. Now she seemed to be looking back at her soul during those years: It had lived the way people live on farms during the busy summer half of the year, when everyone moves out of the main house and into the lofts over the storerooms. But they walk and run past the winter house all day long, never thinking of going inside, even though all it would take was a lift of the latch and a push on the door. Then one day, when someone finally has a reason to go inside, the house has turned strange and almost solemn because it has acquired the smell of solitude and silence.
But as she talked to the man who was the last remaining witness to the interplay of sowing and harvesting in her life together with her dead husband, then it seemed to her that she had come to view her life in a new way: like a person who clambers up to a ridge overlooking his home parish, to a place where he has never been before, and gazes down on his own valley. Each farm and fence, each thicket and creek bed are familiar to him, but he seems to see for the first time how everything is laid out on the surface of the earth that bears the lands. And with this new view she suddenly found words to release both her bitterness toward Erlend and her anguish for his soul, which had departed life so abruptly. He had never known rancor; she saw that now, and God had seen it always.
She had finally come so far that she seemed to be seeing her own life from the uppermost summit of a mountain pass. Now her path led down into the darkening valley, but first she had been allowed to see that in the solitude of the cloister and in the doorway of death someone was waiting for her who had always seen the lives of people the way villages look from a mountain crest. He had seen sin and sorrow, love and hatred in their hearts, the way the wealthy estates and poor hovels, the bountiful acres and the abandoned wastelands are all borne by the same earth. And he had come down among them, his feet had wandered among the lands, stood in castles and in huts, gathering the sorrows and sins of the rich and the poor, and lifting them high up with him on the cross. Not my happiness or my pride, but my sin and my sorrow, oh sweet Lord of mine. She looked up at the crucifix, where it hung high overhead, above the triumphal arch.
The morning sun lit the tall, colored panes of glass deep within the forest of pillars in the choir and a glow, as if from red and brown, green and blue gemstones, dimmed the candlelight from the altar and the gold shrine behind it. Kristin listened to the last vigil mass, matins. She knew that the lessons of this service were about God’s miraculous healing powers as invested in His faithful knight, King Olav Haraldss?n. She lifted the ill child toward the choir and prayed for her.
But she was so cold that her teeth were chattering after the long hours spent in the chill of the church, and she felt weak from fasting. The stench of the crowds and the sickening breath of the ill and the poor blended with the reek of candle wax and settled, thick and damp and heavy, upon those kneeling on the floor, cold in the cold morning. A stout, kind, and cheerful peasant woman had been sitting and dozing at the foot of a pillar right behind them, with a bearskin under her and another one over her lame legs. Now she woke up and drew Kristin’s weary head onto her spacious lap. “Rest for a little while, sister. I think you must need to rest.”