Kristin said, “Go home in peace, dear brothers. Have faith that the worthy Mother and these good sisters will be as merciful as God and the honor of His Church will allow them to be. But move aside now so that we might take away this child, and then each of you should return to your own home.”
The men stood there, irresolute. Then one of them shouted in the greatest agitation, “Isn’t it better to sacrifice one than for all of us to perish? This boy here, who belongs to no one—”
“He belongs to Christ. Better for all of us to perish than for us to harm one of his children.”
But the man who had spoken first began yelling again. “Stop saying words like that or I’ll stuff them back into your mouth with this.” He waved his knife in the air. “Go home, go to bed, and ask your priest to comfort you, and keep silent about this—or I swear by the name of Satan that you’ll find out it was the worst thing you’ve ever done, trying to meddle in our affairs.”
“You don’t have to shout so loudly for the one you mentioned to hear you, Arntor. Be assured that he isn’t far away,” said Kristin calmly. Several of the men seemed to grow fearful and involuntarily crept closer to the abbess holding the lantern. “The worst thing, for both us and for you, would have been if we had stayed home while you went about building your home in the hottest Hell.”
But the man, Arntor, cursed and raged. Kristin knew that he hated the nuns because his father had mortgaged his farm to them in order to pay penalties for murder and blood guilt with his wife’s niece. Now he continued slinging out the Fiend’s most hateful lies about the sisters, accusing them of sins so black and unnatural that only the Devil himself could have put such thoughts into a man’s mind.
The poor nuns, terrified and weeping, bowed under the vicious words, but they stood stalwartly around the old abbess, and she held the lantern in the air, shining it at the man and gazing calmly at his face as he raged.
But anger flared up inside Kristin like the flames of a newly lit fire.
“Silence! Have you lost your senses? Or has God struck you blind? Should we dare breathe a word under His admonishment? We who have seen His wedded brides stand up to the sword that was drawn for the sake of the world’s sins? They kept vigil and prayed while we sinned and forgot our Creator every single day; they shut themselves inside the fortress of prayer while we roamed through the world, urged on by avarice for treasures, both great and small, for our own pleasure and our own anger. But they came out to us when the angel of death was sent among us; they gathered up the ill, the defenseless, and the poor. Twelve of our sisters have died from this sickness; all of you know this. Not one of them turned away, not one of them refused to pray for us all with sisterly love, until their tongues dried up in their mouths and their life blood ebbed out.”
“How beautifully you speak about yourself and those like you—”
“I am like you,” she screamed, beside herself. “I’m not one of the holy sisters. I am one of you.”
“How submissive you’ve become, woman,” said Arntor derisively. “I see that you’re afraid. When the end comes, you’ll be saying you’re like her, the mother of that boy.”
“God must be the judge of that; he died for her as well as for me, and he knows us both. Where is she? Where is Steinunn?”
“Go out to her hovel, and I’m sure you’ll find her there,” replied Arntor.
“Yes, someone should send word to the poor woman that we have her boy here,” said Kristin to the nuns. “We can go out to see her tomorrow.”
Arntor snickered, but another man shouted reluctantly, “No, no . . . She’s dead.” He told Kristin, “Fourteen days ago Bjarne went out to her place and bolted the door shut. She was lying there, close to death.”
“She was lying there?” Kristin gave the men a look of horror. “Didn’t anyone bring a priest to her? Is . . . the body . . . still lying there? And no one has had enough mercy to put her into consecrated ground? And her child you were going to . . .”
Seeing her horror seemed to make the men lose their wits from fear and shame; they began shouting all at once.
Above all the other voices, one man cried out, “Go and get her yourself, sister!”
“Yes! Which of you will go with me?”
No one answered.
Arntor shouted, “You’ll have to go alone.”
“Tomorrow, as soon as it’s light, we will go to get her, Arntor. I myself will pay for her resting place and a mass for her soul.”