One day in this summer, Gunnar was sitting on the pleasant hillside outside the steading at Gunnars Stead, and Margret was walking back and forth in front of him, spinning. He watched her spindle twirl and drop as she walked in one direction, and then he watched her wind the yarn upon it as she walked in the other direction and it seemed to him that the spindle and the lengthening thread cast a spell over him, and that this spell led him to speak in a way that he had never spoken before. He said, “How do men journey back from passion?” He looked up at her face, and it was as if he were a child again, and she his older sister, and he had just asked her how butter is made, or how the Lord knows who is good and who is not—such was the innocence that he felt behind his question, after a long and sinful life. Margret paused in her pacing and looked down upon him, and she said, “It seems to me that most do not.” And Gunnar saw at once that this was the case, but he said, “What will happen next?” And Margret stopped again in her progress and looked down upon him again, and said, “Certainly we will die, though perhaps it will not be us who die of this very passion.”
Now Gunnar said, “Did you ever think of our father Asgeir’s travels to Norway and Iceland? Men elsewhere must live differently than Greenlanders do.”
“When I was living among the Icelanders, Snorri Torfason always used to say that the Greenlanders sin with the pride of thinking themselves the worst off until they hear news of other folk, then they sin with the pride of thinking themselves the best.”
“When I dealt Bjorn Bollason his death blow, it seemed to me that I had done a little thing, for it passed in a moment. My passion ran on beyond it, and was unfulfilled. Now it still seems to me a little thing, but a little thing like a snag, upon which my robe has caught. But instead of disentangling myself from this little snag, every thought and every movement nets me more and more tightly to it, so that sooner or later I will be strangled upon it.”
“The lawspeaker’s supporters will be glad to hear this, since that will relieve them of the burden of retaliation.” And Margret began pacing back and forth again, as deliberately as before, and so she went on for a while, with the spindle twirling and the thread lengthening, and Gunnar watched as he had before, and the sun shone brightly on the homefield, as it had for nearly half a millennium, since the time of Erik the Red, and the first Gunnar who had farmed this steading, and first fenced the homefield and fertilized it with the manure of his cows and sheep and horses. Then he said, “My sister, what is it that you seek in the world?” And Margret said, “It has always seemed to me that I seek to be as a stone, and when I was a young woman, it seemed to me that such was the progress toward death—a hardening that would come over the flesh bit by bit, until the corpus lay there in the bedcloset, or was thrown out into the snow to await burial in the spring. Now it seems to me that the flesh quivers with still more life in every year, and that I will never achieve what I seek. I fear, indeed, that death is not death, but life everlasting after all.” And she resumed her pacing and her spinning, and some time later, Johanna came to them and said that the evening meat was upon the table.
During the autumn seal hunt and through the fall, there were many discussions and arguments among the Greenlanders about who would be the new lawspeaker, or whether there would be any new lawspeaker at all, and it was the case that Bjorn Bollason had not sought to teach the body of the law to anyone, except perhaps, to Sigurd Bjornsson, who had died with his father at Brattahlid, and this was accountable to folk only through the speculation that Bjorn Bollason had considered himself such a lucky fellow that he would never die, as other men do. Or, perhaps, folk said, he had not as yet gotten around to it, for there were many things that Bjorn Bollason was more interested in than sitting down and going over the laws. Such entertainments as had been the rule at Solar Fell, especially in the years when the Icelanders lived there, must have filled a great deal of the lawspeaker’s time, after all. It was also the case that Bjorn Bollason could be said not to have learned the laws especially well himself, since the telling of them had shrunk in his time from a three-day cycle to less than a one-day cycle.
And to this, some folk said, what did it matter, after all? Such cases as had been going to the Thing were better decided in the districts, or among the folk who were principals in the cases, and if they were decided with blows, once in a while, was that so different from what had happened to Bjorn Bollason himself? The case had been decided in his favor, and yet he was dead with no one to avenge his death, since the foster brothers in Dyrnes had spoken not a word about it all summer, even though Signy had gone to live with them. To go to the Thing, especially as it was at Brattahlid, was a considerable inconvenience these days, when there were so few men about every steading to keep up with the work. There had been a time when the Thing lasted seven days, or more, with all the laws and all the cases, but now it seemed as though as soon as a man had put up his booth, it was time to take it down again, and so folk talked about this all fall and all winter, and no move was made, by Sira Eindridi or anyone else, to replace the lawspeaker. Though no one knew all of the laws, did not everyone know, in a general way, what was to be expected of one another? And if they did not, then Sira Eindridi might be consulted, since folk had to go to Gardar anyway. And now some of the older folk remembered the time of the bishop and of Sira Jon, when hardly anyone had gone to the Thing at all. Such times come and go, they said. Men will always find a way to govern themselves. And so the winter passed, and the spring came on, and with it the spring seal hunt, and nothing was decided, except that when the Thing should be held again, it should not be held at Brattahlid, but at Gardar, as it had been, but no Thing was held in this year, though a few men showed up at Gardar during the regular Thing time, and spoke to Sira Eindridi Andresson about their concerns, and he advised them, and also consulted with Larus the Prophet, who had cast off Ashild and little Tota, and lived celibately at Gardar in the chamber that Sira Audun had once had for himself.
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, f
illing 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 thin
k 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.