The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [28]
And indeed, the bishop seemed well pleased with Erlend’s feast, for Erlend and Vigdis made much of him and his party, seating the bishop in the high seat, and giving him the choicest bits of meat. Every time the bishop spoke, Erlend looked out over the company, and they fell silent, even though many were too far from the bishop to hear what he said. The two children, Vigdis’ Thordis and Ketil, and a third, Geir, were dressed up in white gowns with their hair tied back in red and white woven bands, and they had been instructed to serve the bishop his meat. Every time he took something, they knelt and thanked him for taking it. The bishop seemed well pleased by this obeisance, and the other Greenlanders tried to suppress their smiles. Erlend sat to one side of the bishop and Vigdis sat to the other, and beside each of them sat people Asgeir didn’t recognize, but Osmund whispered to him that they were friends of Erlend’s from Petursvik, far to the south, and had taken to spending a great deal of time at Ketils Stead. Osmund said that Asgeir should certainly know them, for the woman was Hjordis, the niece of Thorunn, the old witch, the girl was her daughter, Oddny, and the man was Hjordis’ husband, Sigmund. Asgeir laughed through his teeth and declared that this was a bad sign indeed, and afterward said nothing more about it.
In the winter, for the first time in years, a Yuletide mass was held at the Cathedral of St. Nikolaus, and the Greenlanders could see that it had been newly and beautifully fitted out, with new tapestries and a new altar cloth and chalice. The bishop had brought magnificent robes with him, and he had taught some of the Gardar boys beautiful melodies for the mass. People said that this had gone on with the old bishop as well, but the notes for the songs had been lost in the time of Ivar Bardarson. Other masses were held at the New Year and the feast of the Circumcision, and the bishop wore still other robes and preached a great loud sermon on heresy and sin and lapses from proper practice. Now, he shouted, had the souls of the Greenlanders fallen into sin? Indeed they had, and for this the Church was greatly to blame, but that Holy Mother had at last heard the loud crying out of these souls, and now in the person of himself, she cried back to them to turn away from old ways, and to return to obedience and vigilance against evil. This was considered a good topic for a New Year sermon.
In subsequent services, during Lent, the bishop spoke eloquently of the visitations of the plague in Norway and Germany, and the terrible sinfulness of the people that offended God so that He punished them, and how this could befall any sinful people at any time, through the will of God. God was so merciful, the bishop said, that He had seen the plight of His people in Greenland, and the way that they were bereft of guidance, and He had held His hand, but now their shepherd, the bishop himself, had come, and God would hold them to the true path with rod and scourge, just as He did the rest of the world. As a result of these sermons, a number of men and women went to the monastery at Arosvik and the nunnery near Vagar Church, and the buildings had to be put in order to house them. It was this half year that Sigmund Sigmundsson of Petursvik with the help of Erlend Ketilsson brought suit in front of the bishop against Asgeir Gunnarsson for the killing fourteen years earlier of Thorunn Jorundsdottir, who had lived at Undir Hofdi for many years.
At this time the Greenlanders had three types of law, the Thing law, the