The Greenlanders (96 page)

And so for most of the Greenlanders in the year after the great battle at the Brattahlid Thing, a sort of peace descended, for the hunts were prosperous enough, the winter snowy and cold enough for easy travel, the summer warm and moist enough for a good crop of hay in almost every homefield. The sheep went from upper pasture to lower pasture, and the cows from field to byre, and the folk from table to bedcloset to field, from steading to storehouse, from loom to dairy, from snaring ptarmigan to slaughtering sheep, and things had not changed with the burning of Kollgrim Gunnarsson or the killing of Bjorn Bollason.

Only it seemed to Larus the Prophet that they had changed, and changed for the better, if one seeks a way to rid the world of evil, and prepare folk for their imminent meeting with the Lord. It happened that on the feast day of St. Nikolaus, Larus was standing in the cathedral, thinking of little except that his feet were beginning to grow cold on the stone floor. And just as this feeling came to him, he felt the cold of the stones rise through his feet and calves and thighs and trunk, and he knew that behind him there was such a presence as only he was capable of welcoming among the Greenlanders, and he fell to shivering where he stood, but still he could not turn around until he was commanded to do so. Now the cold ran all through him, and he looked up at the riven crucifix and said with his lips, “Lord, let me not run away from Thee,” as he always said in such moments, and then he fell upon the stones of the floor, which was also his habit.

Now a humble man approached him closely, whose robe was of a dark, roughly woven wadmal, and whose face was shaded, so that Larus could not make out his countenance, and the man said, “It is I, Lazarus, who was raised from the dead, who comes before you in this spot, and I come to bring you not light, but darkness, for indeed, Larus, such darkness spreads over this land as no man has ever known in the deepest winter night, even among the cows in the walled-up byre. That darkness is as a blinding light to the darkness I bring to you.” And this Lazarus put his finger upon Larus’ forehead, and a stream of blackness seemed to flow into him, filling every corner of his being.

It was just after the morning meat that these things came to Larus, and after them he lay on the floor of the cathedral, insensible, for most of the day, until two servingmen, who were looking for him, found him there and came near to see what had struck him down. As they approached, he roused himself, and sat up. He put his hands to his face, and his flesh felt doughy and bloodless. He said to the men, “Indeed, my children, I have been lost today,” but he smiled upon them, as he always did, for his demeanor was always mild and welcoming, and for this folk liked him, in spite of his peculiar talk. Now he got to his knees, and said, “We must pray,” and the servingmen knelt, as well, and all three now prayed in the usual way for a short while, then the men went off, and Larus went to find Sira Eindridi, for that had been the message of the men, that Sira Eindridi was in the horse pasture, and needed Larus to come to him there.

It happened, of course, that before he became a prophet, Larus had been a cowman in Brattahlid district, and had been somewhat well known for his knowledge of livestock, and it was this knowledge that enabled him to leave serving other men after the hunger and claim his own steading. Upon becoming a prophet, he had not lost this knowledge, and so Sira Eindridi considered him a useful fellow to have about the place, for he himself had no skill in this. In fact, Sira Eindridi considered that he had done well all around with Larus. Without making the fellow a priest he had made him an ally of the Church, and such tirades as the one he had delivered at Sira Pall Hallvardsson’s famous service were in the past now. Sira Eindridi had no fear of being interrupted. In addition to this, those services about his steading table that Larus had fallen into conducting for some years were also ended. Folk sought him out, but they came to Gardar to do it, and when they were there, whatever they spoke to him of privily, the cathedral, and the face of the Lord, and the relics of St. Olaf looked down upon them, and their thoughts could not stray far into dangerous channels. Sira Eindridi was certain of that. Wasn’t it the case that holy places gave off an invisible radiance that recalled the minds of men from such idiosyncrasies as they were prone to, back to the true faith as the consensus of souls dictated it? Someone had told him of this power, perhaps Sira Pall Hallvardsson, perhaps not. At any rate, to have a horse go badly lame, and then to call upon Larus to look at the beast, and to have Larus come out at once and see that the horse had been kicked in a pasture fight, but that no bones were broken, was reassuring in any number of ways. Neither then nor later that day did Larus mention how Lazarus had come to him, or what conclusions were to be drawn from that vision. It seemed to him that this Lazarus would come to him as often as he could bear it, and that he would be a hard master, indeed.

Shortly after this, near to Yule, news came from Vatna Hverfi district that the corpus of Ofeig Thorkelsson had been found on an abandoned farmstead in Alptafjord. To all appearances, the devil had been dead for some time, and perhaps had died of starvation, for the flesh on him was wasted and meager, and hardly like the flesh of a man, being leathery and dry and stretched over the bones. Perhaps, folk said, remembering his great size, Satan had sucked the life out of him, leaving but this shell of a man. He was dead, and there was nothing to fear from him anymore, or there wouldn’t be, when precautions were taken. Skeggi Thorkelsson, who sent the message, respectfully requested Sira Eindridi Andresson or Sira Andres Eindridason to journey to Hestur Stead and perform such rites as were necessary to assure the ghost, and his potential victims about the steading and the district, of peace. And after the feast of the Epiphany, Sira Andres went out with some servingmen, on skis, and came to Hestur Stead.

Sira Andres was a good-looking youth, tall and fair, with a lively countenance, and he was not unaware of his effect on maidens, who always preferred to make their confessions to him, or to converse with him, or to walk along a little ways with him, or even to touch him on the sleeve. Some folk laughed and said that he was a priest in the old style, the style of Sira Nikolaus, whose “wife” had lived with him at Undir Hofdi church for sixty or a hundred winters, and to whom he had not been uniformly faithful over the years. But such priests have their uses, too, and so folk did not consider that Sira Andres was doing especial damage with his unorthodox ways.

Although Thorkel Gellison was a very old man, much bent with the joint ill and entirely deaf and confined for the most part to his bedcloset, Hestur Stead was still a great steading, large enough for Skeggi, Ingolf, and Ogmund, Thorkel’s sons, all to live upon it with their wives and children, and among these children were a number of daughters, so Sira Andres was happy in where he found himself at the end of his journey. On the morning after his arrival, which was welcoming and festive, with a great deal of food and talk, Skeggi Thorkelsson got up, and aroused Sira Andres, and said, “Now, priest, you must perform your office, and bury this man, but, indeed, you must bury him so that he does not get up again, for if any man were ever to walk after death, our brother Ofeig is such a one.”

The shrunken corpus of Ofeig was wrapped in lengths of wadmal and stored in an empty storehouse, and since the ground was frozen, it had been decided to put it in a cairn, rather than saving it for spring burial, and this cairn had been built for the most part. All it needed was for Sira Andres to pronounce the proper formulas, and then the corpus would be put in place, and the cairn would be completed with such heavy stones that even Ofeig should not be able to push them aside. Now Sira Andres put on his robes, his cope and his chasuble, and the other garments, and he went out, and somberly pronounced the customary burial services. When he was finished, he looked about, expecting folk to commence with the completion of the cairn, but all those gathered about looked back at him. Skeggi nodded, as if to encourage him to say something more, and Sira Andres realized that something special was expected of him, but indeed, he did not know what this should be. He smiled in his lively way, and Skeggi frowned at him, and after a moment, said, “Are you not going to lay the evil spirit, as well? We have great fear of this, that the soul of our brother Ofeig will not depart the earth, and will torment the folk about the steading. You must say the phrases that will prevent this.” Sira Andres continued to smile, for indeed, he did not know what else to do. Now Skeggi turned to Ingolf and said, in rather a low voice, “It seems to me that the boy does not know what to say, and that this visit is in vain.” And Ingolf leaned toward him, and whispered something, and then went off to the steading.

Now the folk stood about the cairn and waited, and Sira Andres began to feel a little discomfited. After a little while, Ingolf returned with an old woman by the arm, and he was leading her, for she was blind and bent, and when he brought her into the circle, he said to Sira Andres, “This is our cousin, our mother’s cousin, whose name is Borghild, and though her voice is old and cracking, if you listen closely, she will tell you the words to say, and if you say them after her, the deed will be done.” And this Borghild came very close to Sira Andres, and his nose turned, for indeed, she was very old and incontinent. She spoke in a wheeze, and Sira Andres listened as well as he could, and spoke after her, “Lord hear our plea in this matter. We commend to Thy charge our son, Ofeig, who has sinned often in his life. His crimes are legion, and he has given himself as a home to the minions of the Devil. We ask You to take him from us now and forever, and to forbid that he walk among us, for we are Thy faithful servants. And this is what we ask of You: that over him You put the earth, and the stones of the earth, and the waters of the earth, and all of these in such quantities that only You in Your infinite wisdom can find him.” And so Sira Andres said all of these things. Now Skeggi handed the priest a handful of earth, and Sira Andres threw it upon the corpus, then Skeggi handed him a stone, and Sira Andres threw this upon the corpus, and now Skeggi handed him a dipperful of water, and Sira Andres threw this upon the corpus, and then all made the sign of the cross and the Thorkelssons began to pile the stones upon the corpus, and the others turned away and went back to the steading.

Sira Andres did not think much more about this ceremony after that, and he stayed another two nights, and he found the Thorkelssons very pleasant company, and agreed to return on clerical business sometime during Lent, and his journey to the southern parishes. But it happened that when he got back to Gardar, he was sitting at his evening meat with his father and Larus the Prophet, and it occurred to him to relate, for their entertainment, what the old woman had said to him, and what he had done with the earth and the stone and the water. And Sira Eindridi said little, only went on with his meat, but Larus the Prophet looked up suddenly, and then looked away, and after a few moments, he asked Sira Andres to repeat what he had said, word for word, and Sira Andres did so. After that Larus fell silent, and said no more for the rest of the evening.

Sometime after this, in the course of the spring, another thing happened in the southern part of Vatna Hverfi district that came to Larus’ attention, and that was this. A cow that had been bred at Hestur Stead, to the Hestur Stead bull, and then had been returned to her owner, gave birth to a calf with five legs and three eyes, and indeed, part of a second head growing out of the first head. And this calf lived as a normal calf might, for some days, until the farmer decided that it would bring him ill luck, and so he slaughtered it. But the birth of this weird beast was indeed unlucky to the cow, for she sickened and died not long after the calf was slaughtered, and the farmer was not a little annoyed to lose both, since the cow had been one of his best milkers, and now folk began to talk idly of whether their own cows might suffer the same fate if they were bred to the Hestur Stead bull, who was a fine bull, but had just come into maturity, and had not produced many calves other than this one. One might go to the Ketils Stead bull, or one of the other bulls in Vatna Hverfi, or indeed, one might take one’s cows in a boat to Gardar, and breed to the Gardar bulls, which were the finest in Greenland. The talk went about, and the breeding season came on, and men could not decide what to do. The Thorkelssons made a number of jokes about the bull, saying that in his first year he had produced one and a half calves per cow, so surely in the second season every cow would twin, and every farmer would be that much richer, and then the talk subsided, and all the farmers made their own decisions about which bulls to breed to.

About this time, Larus was found insensible again, this time on the greensward outside the cathedral, and when he was revived, he spoke at last, privily, to Sira Eindridi, of this saint, Lazarus, who came to him and spoke to him and filled him, he said, with the darkness of the sin that was to be found among the Greenlanders, and because of this calf business in Vatna Hverfi district, Sira Eindridi and Larus spoke at length, long into the night, of what these portents might mean, and in the morning, they called Sira Andres to them again, and asked him about the words that the old woman had said to him, and what he had done with the earth and the stone and the water and the corpus of Ofeig Thorkelsson. And between them, Sira Eindridi and Larus the Prophet decided that they were being guided by the saint, Lazarus, to see that this woman, Borghild Finnkelsdottir, was a witch, for she was said to have been the nurse of Ofeig Thorkelsson, she had known this old ceremony without hesitation, the Hestur Stead folk were cousins to the Gunnars Stead folk, who had produced the known witch, Kollgrim Gunnarsson, and now the Hestur Stead bull was itself cursed.

What happened in their conversation was this, that Larus set the evidence before Sira Eindridi in his usual mild way, just as he had often related the substance of his visions in the past. And Sira Eindridi looked at him, and at length he said, “Men of God must act without hesitation in such things, and I am well known as a hard and direct person. It is always better to act, for the Lord will take care of the judgments.” And so they sent a messenger to Hestur Stead, asking for the woman Borghild Finnkelsdottir, to present herself at Gardar, and to this message Skeggi Thorkelsson replied with disbelief that such a thing would be demanded at this time of the year, when the fjords were just freezing over, and as treacherous as possible. And after that, the woman would be unable to come, for she was too old to ski, and Skeggi and his brothers saw no reason to bring her on a sledge. Skeggi finished by saying that he would bring the woman himself in the Hestur Stead boat after the breakup of the ice in the spring.