The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [143]
Margret returned with the sheep and folded them, and Sigurd went to her and was pleased to see her and carried to her some stones of peculiar shapes and made a gift of them to her. In return she presented him with an ancient ram’s horn she had found near the old steading farther up the fjord, and when she came into the steading she could see that Koll had not yet come, and of this she was somewhat glad, for it seemed to her when he did come that it fell upon her as mistress to put a stop to these visits, and yet she could not bring herself to do it, and made many excuses and so he came like this every half year, drawing mistress and servant deeper and deeper into sin.
And after Sigurd went to the bedcloset, the two women sat spinning just outside the door of the steading, by the light of the late sun, and though they did this almost every night of the year, even at Brattahlid, these recent nights they did something else, also, and that was wait. And this new thing that they did made the customary spinning seem especially tedious and difficult. Margret saw that this is how it is that folk are made to desire what they know they should not have, they are made to wait for it, so that when it comes, no matter how dark and full of sin and repellent it is, they are glad enough to welcome it.
It happened that Bjorn Einarsson Jorsalfari stayed among the Greenlanders year after year, and he performed his office as the king’s revenue officer just as they wished he might, for he took little revenue from them, and none that he did not pay for with some goods as the Greenlanders wished to have. He traded from time to time with the skraelings and got from them good wares. In addition to this, he saw to the punishment of two men who killed a third man, in the southern part of Vatna Hverfi district, and also of a man who killed his wife out of anger, a man who lived behind Brattahlid where the river came down to Isafjord. There were some boys who smashed up the boat of a neighbor, who were required by Bjorn to put the boat in good order, and there was other business that he did in the southern region, at Herjolfsnes, having to do with a dispute over a stranded whale (for Herjolfsnes sits at the outer reaches of Herjolfs Fjord, and the folk there often have such disputes) and at Arosvik he settled a dispute between the farmers and the church concerning services owed to the church, although the church building itself was in great disrepair and Sira Audun had refused to preach there, insisting instead that the Arosvik folk, of which there were about forty, journey to Petursvik for services. Bjorn Einarsson reprimanded both the folk of Arosvik and Sira Audun and made peace between them, and he decided other cases as well, in as judicious a manner as could be wished for. When he didn’t sail away by the end of the second summer, folk ceased speculating when he would leave Greenland. He was much liked by all.
It happened that during Lent of Bjorn’s third winter in Greenland there was a hunger similar to the hunger of twelve winters before, only it struck differently, so that the folk in Vatna Hverfi and to the south were greatly affected but the folk at Brattahlid and at Gardar and at Hvalsey Fjord, where the summer weather had been drier and brighter, were not so affected. And the first person to die in this famine was Erlend Ketilsson. This is how it came about. It was still the case that Erlend and Vigdis were living apart, the one at Ketils Stead and the other at Gunnars Stead, and some of the servants were living with one and some were living with the other, except that Erlend’s servants had a habit of leaving him and going off to Gunnars Stead, for matters were better ordered there, and Vigdis, for all her niggardly ways, treated all fairly. There was much intercourse between the servants of both places, and