Kristin Lavransdatter (43 page)

Fru Aashild was standing behind her chair, brushing out Kristin’s thick, golden-brown hair.

“Tomorrow you will wear it loose for the last time,” she said with a smile, winding around Kristin’s head the red and green silk cords that would support the crown. Then the women gathered around the bride.

Ragnfrid and Gyrid of Skog brought over from the table the great bridal crown of the Gjesling family. It was completely gilded; the tips alternated between crosses and cloverleaves, and the circlet was set with rock crystals.

They pressed it down onto the bride’s head. Ragnfrid was pale, and her hands shook as she did this.

Kristin slowly rose to her feet. Jesus, how heavy it was to bear all that silver and gold. Then Fru Aashild took her by the hand and led her forward to a large water basin, while the bridesmaids threw open the door to let in the sun and brighten up the loft.

“Look at yourself now, Kristin,” said Fru Aashild, and Kristin bent over the basin. She saw her own face rise up, white, from the water; it came so close that she could see the golden crown above. So many light and dark shadows played all around her reflection—there was something she was just about to remember—and suddenly she felt as if she would faint away. She gripped the edge of the basin. Then Fru Aashild placed her hand on top of hers and dug in her nails so hard that Kristin came to her senses.

The sound of
lur
horns
²
came from the bridge. People shouted from the courtyard that now the bridegroom had arrived with his entourage. The women led Kristin out onto the gallery.

The courtyard was swarming with horses, magnificently bridled, and people in festive dress; everything glittered and gleamed in the sun. Kristin stared past everything, out toward the valley. Her village lay bright and still beneath a thin, hazy-blue mist, and out of the mist towered the mountains, gray with scree and black with forests, and the sun poured its light down into the basin of the valley from a cloudless sky.

She hadn’t noticed it before, but all the leaves had fallen from the trees, and the groves shone silver-gray and naked. Only the alder thicket along the river still had a little faded green in the crowns of the trees, and a few birches held on to some pale yellow leaves at the very tips of their branches. But the trees were almost bare, except the mountain ash, which was still shining with brownish-red foliage surrounding the blood-red berries. In the still, warm day the acrid smell of autumn rose up from the ash-colored blanket of fallen leaves spread all around.

If not for the mountain ash trees, it might have been springtime—except for the silence, because it was autumn-quiet, so quiet. Every time the
lur
horns ceased, no sound was heard from the village but the clinking of bells from the fallow and harvested fields where the cattle were grazing.

The river was small and low, and it flowed so quietly; it was nothing more than tiny currents trickling between the sandbars and the heavy shoals of white stones worn smooth. No streams rushed down the slopes; it had been such a dry autumn. There were glints of moisture all over the fields, but it was only the dampness that always seeped up from the earth in the fall, no matter how hot the day or how clear the sky.

 

The throng of people down in the courtyard parted to make way for the bridegroom’s entourage. The young groomsmen rode forward. There was a ripple of excitement among the women on the gallery.

Fru Aashild was standing next to the bride.

“Be strong now, Kristin,” she said. “It won’t be long before you are safely under the wimple of a married woman.”

Kristin nodded helplessly. She could feel how terribly pale her face was.

“I’m much too pale a bride,” she murmured.

“You are the loveliest bride,” replied Aashild. “And there’s Erlend—it would be hard to find a more handsome pair than the two of you.”

 

Erlend rode forward beneath the gallery. He leaped from his horse, agile and unhampered by the heavy drapery of his clothing. Kristin thought he was so handsome that her whole body ached.

He was dressed in dark attire: a silk surcoat, pale brown interwoven with a black-and-white pattern, ankle-length and slit at the sides. Around his waist he wore a gold-studded belt and on his left hip a sword with gold on the hilt and scabbard. Over his shoulders hung a heavy, dark-blue velvet cape, and on his black hair he wore a black French silk cap which was shirred like wings at the sides and ended in two long streamers, one of which was draped across his chest from his left shoulder and then thrown back over the other.

Erlend greeted his bride, went over to her horse, and stood there with his hand on the saddlebow as Lavrans climbed the stairs. Kristin felt so odd and dizzy faced with all this splendor; her father seemed a stranger in the formal green velvet surcoat that reached to his ankles. But her mother’s face was ashen white beneath the wimple she wore with her red silk dress. Ragnfrid came over and placed the cloak around her daughter.

Then Lavrans took the bride’s hand and led her down to Erlend, who lifted her up onto her horse and then mounted his own. They sat there, side by side, in front of the bridal loft as the procession began to pass through the farm gates: first the priests, Sira Eirik and Sira Tormod from Ulvsvold, and a Brother of the Cross from Hamar who was a friend of Lavrans. Next came the groomsmen and the maidens, two by two. And then it was time for Erlend and Kristin to ride forward. After them followed the bride’s parents, kinsmen, friends, and guests in long lines, riding between the fences out to the village road. A long stretch of the road was strewn with clusters of mountain ash berries, spruce boughs, and the last white chamomile blossoms of the autumn. People stood along the road as the procession passed, greeting it with cheers.

 

On Sunday just after sundown the mounted procession returned to Jørundgaard. Through the first patches of twilight the bonfires shone red from the courtyard of the bridal farm. Musicians and fiddlers sang and played their drums and fiddles as the group rode toward the warm red glow.

Kristin was about to collapse when Erlend lifted her down from her horse in front of the gallery to the high loft.

“I was so cold crossing the mountain,” she whispered. “I’m so tired.” She stood still for a moment; when she climbed the stairway to the loft, she swayed on every step.

Up in the high loft the frozen wedding guests soon had the warmth restored to their bodies. It was hot from all the candles burning in the room, steaming hot food was served, and wine and mead and strong ale were passed around. The din of voices and the sounds of people eating droned in Kristin’s ears.

She sat there, unable to get warm. Her cheeks began to burn after a while, but her feet refused to thaw out and shivers of cold ran down her spine. All the heavy gold forced her to lean forward as she sat in the high seat at Erlend’s side.

Every time the bridegroom drank a toast to her, she had to look at the red blotches and patches that were so evident on his face now that he was warming up after the ride in the cold air. They were the marks of the burns from that summer.

A terrible fear had come over her the evening before, while they were at dinner at Sundbu, when she felt the vacant stare of Bjørn Gunnarsøn on her and Erlend—eyes that did not blink and did not waver. They had dressed Herr Bjørn in knight’s clothing; he looked like a dead man who had been conjured back to life.

That night she shared a bed with Fru Aashild, who was the bridegroom’s closest kinswoman.

“What’s the matter with you, Kristin?” asked Fru Aashild a little impatiently. “You must be strong now and not so despondent.”

“I’m thinking about all the people we have hurt so that we could live to see this day,” said Kristin, shivering.

“It wasn’t easy for you two either,” said Fru Aashild. “Not for Erlend. And I imagine it’s been even harder for you.”

“I’m thinking about those helpless children of his,” said the bride in the same tone as before. “I wonder whether they know that their father is celebrating his wedding today. . . .”

“Think about your own child,” said Fru Aashild. “Be glad that you’re celebrating your wedding with the one who is the father.”

Kristin lay still for a while, helplessly dizzy. It was so pleasant to hear it mentioned—what had occupied her mind every single day for three months or more, though she hadn’t been able to breathe a word about it to a living soul. But this helped her for only a moment.

“I’m thinking about the woman who had to pay with her life because she loved Erlend,” she whispered, trembling.

“You may have to pay with your own life before you’re half a year older,” said Fru Aashild harshly. “Be happy while you can.

“What should I say to you, Kristin?” the old woman continued, in despair. “Have you lost all your courage? The time will come soon enough when the two of you will have to pay for everything that you’ve taken—have no fear of that.”

But Kristin felt as if one landslide after another were ravaging her soul; everything was being torn down that she had built up since that terrifying day at Haugen. During those first days she had simply thought, wildly and blindly, that she had to hold out, she had to hold out one day at a time. And she
had
held out until things became easier—quite easy, in the end, when she had cast off all thoughts except one: that now their wedding would take place at last, Erlend’s wedding at last.

She and Erlend knelt together during the wedding mass, but it was all like a hallucination: the candles, the paintings, the shining vessels, the priests dressed in linen albs and long chasubles. All those people who had known her in the past seemed like dream images as they stood there filling the church in their unfamiliar festive garb. But Herr Bjørn was leaning against a pillar and looking at them with his dead eyes, and she thought that the other dead one must have come back with him, in his arms.

She tried to look up at the painting of Saint Olav—he stood there, pink and white and handsome, leaning on his axe, treading his own sinful human form underfoot—but Herr Bjørn drew her eyes. And next to him she saw Eline Ormsdatter’s dead countenance; she was looking at them with indifference. They had trampled over her in order to get here, and she did not begrudge them that.

She had risen up and cast off all the stones that Kristin had striven so hard to place over the dead. Erlend’s squandered youth, his honor and well-being, the good graces of his friends, the health of his soul—the dead woman shook them all off. “He wanted me and I wanted him, you wanted him and he wanted you,” said Eline. “I had to pay, and he must pay, and you must pay when your time comes. When the sin is consummated it will give birth to death.”

Kristin felt that she was kneeling with Erlend on a cold stone. He knelt with the red, singed patches on his pale face. She knelt beneath the heavy bridal crown and felt the crushing, oppressive weight in her womb—the burden of sin she was carrying. She had played and romped with her sin, measuring it out as if in a child’s game. Holy Virgin—soon it would be time for it to lie fully formed before her, looking at her with living eyes, revealing to her the brands of her sin, the hideous deformity of sin, striking hatefully with misshapen hands at his mother’s breast. After she had borne her child, after she had seen the marks of sin on him and loved him the way she had loved her sin, then the game would be played to the end.

Kristin thought: What if she screamed now so that her voice pierced through the song and the deep, droning male voices and reverberated out over the crowd? Would she then be rid of Eline’s face? Would life appear in the dead man’s eyes? But she clenched her teeth together.

Holy King Olav, I call to you. Among all those in Heaven, I beg you for help, for I know that you loved God’s righteousness above all else. I beseech you to protect the innocent one who is in my womb. Turn God’s anger away from the innocent, turn it toward me. Amen, in the precious name of the Lord.

“My children are innocent,” said Eline, “yet there is no room for them in a land where Christian people live. Your child was conceived out of wedlock just as my children were. You can no more demand justice for your child in the land you have strayed from than I could demand it for mine.”

Holy Olav, I beg for mercy nevertheless, I beg for compassion for my son. Take him under your protection, then I will carry him to your church in my bare feet. I will bring my golden crown to you and place it on your altar, if you will help me. Amen.

Her face was as rigid as stone, she was trying so hard to keep herself calm, but her body trembled and shuddered as she knelt there and was married to Erlend.

 

And now Kristin sat beside him in the high seat at home and sensed everything around her as a mere illusion in the delirium of fever.

There were musicians playing on harps and fiddles in the high loft; singing and music came from the room below and from out in the courtyard. A reddish glow from the fire outside was visible whenever servants came through the door, carrying things back and forth.

Everyone stood up around the table; she stood between her father and Erlend. Her father announced in a loud voice that now he had given his daughter Kristin to Erlend Nikulaussøn as his wife. Erlend thanked his father-in-law and all the good people who had gathered to honor him and his wife.

Then they told Kristin to sit down, and Erlend placed his wedding gifts in her lap. Sira Eirik and Sir Munan Baardsøn unrolled documents and read off a list of their property. The groomsmen stood by with spears in hand, pounding the shafts on the floor now and then during the reading and whenever gifts or moneybags were placed on the table.

The tabletops and trestles were removed. Erlend led her out onto the floor and they danced. Kristin thought: Our bridesmaids and groomsmen are much too young for us. Everyone who grew up with us has moved away from this region; how can it be that we have come back here?