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By Root 2123 0

who had once sat in Vigdis’ place at the church, and thereafter was subjected to a humiliating scolding, pulled the woman from her bedcloset, so that she fell upon the floor, screaming and cursing. She slept naked, wrapped in furs for warmth, and the sight of her bare flesh was startling to Thorvald and Bengt and everyone present, for it glowed with fat. More than one man was inflamed by the contrast of this flesh with that of the wife he had just been with or the bones of the child he had recently buried, so that it was easy to land a kick upon the old woman, or slap her across her fat cheeks, or pinch her pendulous breasts until red circles stood out on the skin like burns. “Lord!” shouted Vigdis. “They bite me, they bite me to the bone. Their evil devours me!” And she screeched in pain even when no one was touching her. To stop the screeching, Ofeig kicked her hard in the jaw, and after this, she could not form words, but the screaming did not cease, and the men were stirred by it to actions they had not thought of before, and the joints of beef and reindeer meat that hung about the walls became weapons in their hands. Mar Marsson tipped over a small dish of honey, and the liquid seeped into the table, and he took the soapstone dish and brought it down on the head of one of Vigdis’ servingmen, so that his skull was cracked and blood and brains spilled forth.

Ofeig and another man pulled Vigdis out from under the table, where she had rolled, and kicked and beat her with their fists until she fell silent. Now the other man stepped back, but Ofeig, seeing Vigdis’ crescent-shaped knife upon the table, snatched it up, saying, “Let us gut this old bear and see what Christian children she has been feasting on,” and he slit her from throat to belly, and opened the stomach, as a hunter would a reindeer, and those present saw that his eyes glowed with pleasure, and were not dull and dead as usual. It was not known, in the melee, just when Vigdis gave up her last breath, whether during the beating or not until she was disemboweled, for the wind makes noises leaving the corpus that are the noises of death, not life.

Now that Vigdis and two of her servants were dead and the other servants subdued, Ofeig’s band fell to a great eating frenzy that lasted until daylight, and then, after retching, they fell about the steading and went to sleep. What greeted them when they woke up in the afternoon light was such a scene as they did not recognize or remember, and the events of the night before came back to them partially, if at all, as the fragments of dreams, or tales of other times. When Einar Marsson went out in the yard to retch again, he found Jon Andres Erlendsson and a band of some thirty men standing in a circle about the steading, and they were fully armed. Now Ofeig came out and saw the same thing, and he said, “Better we had killed all the servants, and that’s a fact.”

Ofeig turned and got inside the steading again, but Einar was dizzy from retching, and only stood looking at the band of avengers, until Jon Andres raised his hand, and another man, named Axel Josteinsson, who had a crossbow, let his arrow fly, and it lodged itself in Einar’s breast, and he fell to the snow, gasping. The men inside the steading were without weapons, while Jon Andres’ men had an assortment of weapons such as the Greenlanders could muster at this time, mainly axes and clubs and bows and arrows, including three old crossbows from the time of King Sverri, but no noble weapons such as men carried in former times, namely swords. Jon Andres shouted to the men inside the steading that they must send Ofeig forth to receive his punishment, but the only sign that these words were heard was this, that the door opened and the corpus of Vigdis’ servant, Karl, was thrown out into the snow.

The inside of the steading was a great mess of blood and grease and vomit, and some of the men there thought that they would surely die of the stench, and they saw by the light of clear day that it was the stench of Hell placed before them. Some fell to praying and others