The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [261]
“My Kollgrim, I am little used to such cruelties as these from you.”
“But you think of leaving me.”
“For ten summers, my father has thought of taking me to the Thing and finding me a husband. A woman must always think of leaving her home.”
“I see that you try to deflect me with quibbling, but if you are my friend, then you will say what has been in your mind.”
“Nay, Kollgrim, I will not say anything more to you.” And after this, for six days, Helga would have no conversation with her brother. On the seventh day it happened that a storm came up and blew some meat drying racks down, and all the folk of the steading went out and began to work at setting them up again, and during this work, Helga and Kollgrim exchanged some words, so that Helga was sorry for her hardheartedness, and said, “Every day that I have no talk with you, my brother, is a sorry day for me.”
“Say what you have been thinking, then, and admit what encouragement you have given the master of Ketils Stead.” And Helga saw that his anger at her was undiminished, and she closed her lips tight. A day or so later, Kollgrim went off again, as the time was at hand for the autumn seal hunt. And now, while she was busy cleaning and preparing the storerooms for the meat and blubber Kollgrim would bring home, thoughts of Jon Andres Erlendsson did come to her, so thick that she could not keep them off. She could remember his looks exactly, although it was the case that she had seen him only a few times, and for the most recent of those times, she had been afraid to look at him, but she must have seen him somehow, because she remembered his long red cloak, and the pattern that ran up the side of his boots. She remembered his face, which was thinner and more pointed than the faces in her family, and broadened at the top to a wide, smooth forehead topped by luxuriant curly dark hair. When he was serious, his face had one shape, and was all forehead, but when he smiled suddenly, his face changed to a balanced whole, for his smile was wide and white. That she remembered these particulars so clearly magnified the sting of Kollgrim’s wrath, and made her ashamed. She was greatly unhappy for the entire duration of the seal hunt, and for the first time in her life found her work so taxing that she was tempted to slight it. Elisabet Thorolfsdottir, too, seemed cast down, for Kollgrim had treated her angrily two or three times before his departure. The days were very long.
The seal hunt was successful, but uncomfortable, for heavy rains fell every day, and as a result of this, men grew angry with one another. A second annoyance was the presence of Larus the Prophet. It seemed that nothing would stop his mouth now, and the hostility of men only goaded him onward, for, he said, it was the case with our Lord Jesus Christ that His very goodness drove men to injure Him, and the extent of His injuries was a sign of the extent of His goodness. Though Bjorn Bollason was present on the hunt, he stayed far from Larus and Larus stayed far from him, although the lawspeaker’s name and his destiny as the king of Greenland was always in the man’s mouth. These were some of his prophecies: That folk on the ship bearing the bishop and the thirty Icelanders would seek out and destroy a devil who lived among the Greenlanders, who looked like one of them, but perverted them into evil ways. This man would die through burning at the stake, a punishment that had not been carried out in Greenland since the days of King Sverri. That the women on the ship would be of supernatural beauty and holiness, and they would themselves lead the Greenlanders into holiness. That letters carried by the bishop from the pope of Jerusalem would be written in gold upon scrolls of scarlet parchment, and they would be written so that every man could read them, not only those few who had had the teaching of reading and the practice of it. These tidings, Larus said, had been brought to him by a certain saint, Saint Catherine of Xanderberg, who appeared to him spinning