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By Root 2041 0

up his belongings, and I said that Birgitta Lavransdottir was my only friend in the whole world and I wished to have her for my wife. Now another man such as Asgeir or even myself as I am now, with five handsome daughters, might have knocked me down for such a speech, but Lavrans has never acted as other men do. He only smiled and looked at me with a gaze that was somehow like Birgitta’s and somehow different, and less, perhaps, since Birgitta has second sight and Lavrans doesn’t, and he said that such a thing was not as he had desired when the child was born, for then King Hakon had been an unmarried man, and available, but now, alas, the news was that King Hakon had taken Queen Margarethe to his wife, and so Birgitta Lavransdottir would have to look elsewhere, and in short, he gave her to me, and she did as I thought she would, though she was but a child, and I even more of a child, though five winters older.”

Now Kollgrim yawned and declared that this was a nice tale for Gunnar to tell, but not as nice as the tale of the Sandnes polar bear, who used to speak to folk at a big farm in the western settlement just as they were falling asleep or waking from sleep, and tell them what the animals said about them. Kollgrim fell asleep against him, and Gunnar slipped him among the reindeer hides. Then he carried two or three hides away from the boy and settled himself down. The rooms at Gardar were so well turfed that the tiny lamp and their breath were enough to keep them warm all night.

There was much activity at Gardar, of animals and men and farm business and church business and other business. The news of Sira Jon’s dream seemed to imbue everyone with a fresh sense of haste, and folk ran here and there, straightening, polishing, shining, and arranging, as if the new bishop’s ship had already been sighted in the fjord. Even so, Gunnar felt a great longing for Lavrans Stead come upon him, so that every conversation seemed tedious to him, and all the news he gathered stale and dubious. Kollgrim was especially tiresome, for he refused to stay among the other children, and was always going among the cattle or wetting himself in the water below the landing spot. The day stretched out in length, and Gunnar spent much of it down by the water, admiring Einar’s ship. Even among Bjorn’s larger ones, this one attracted the eye by its trim lines.

For Sira Pall Hallvardsson, the day seemed to pass with painful quickness, for there was much to talk about, and not only to Sira Jon, with whom Pall Hallvardsson, of course, had business, but also with Sira Audun and the other boys and with folk from other districts who were visiting for various reasons. In fact, for the first time ever, Sira Pall Hallvardsson could not help conceiving something of a horror against returning to Hvalsey Fjord and the loneliness there. As a young man new in Greenland he had gone from district to district, filling in for absent priests and visiting many farmsteads, but now Sira Audun and an assistant, Gizur, did this, and they complained bitterly about it. It was hard to find boats, and hard to persuade folk to lend servants as rowers, and harder still to come to the churches, most of which had fallen into bad repair, especially in the southern part of the settlement, so that Sira Audun had written a verse, as follows:

Men who come to cut turf with the priest

Men who come to lift stones with the priest

Women who come to sweep sand out of the church

Women who change broken lamps for whole ones

All these are as blessed as the kneelers;

Our Lord hears loudly their voiceless prayers.

But Sira Pall Hallvardsson expected that the younger man merely longed to be among the comforts of Gardar, and it was true, that being himself a Greenlander, Sira Audun would hardly be received with the sort of curiosity that had opened doors to himself. Sira Audun’s father was a man well known in the south for parsimonious dealings with his neighbors, and perhaps Sira Audun was something like his father, or seen to be, which amounted to the same thing. Nonetheless, his hymns