The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [284]
“I may look into my fate, though, and I see that Elisabet Thorolfsdottir and Egil Kollgrimsson are my fate, and not the chattering birds of Solar Fell, and that is fine with me.” And this is how Helga learned that the betrothal between Kollgrim Gunnarsson and Sigrid Bjornsdottir was broken off. Gossip did not tell who or what had sparked the parting, for neither Sigrid nor Kollgrim remarked on this subject to anyone. The two kept apart, as was proper, but each seemed little grieved to those about them, and one day Bjorn Bollason met Gunnar Asgeirsson at Gardar, where Sira Pall Hallvardsson was holding his Easter feast, and he said to him, “Things have turned out well for us.”
“It seems that this is the case. But with Kollgrim, nothing has ever gone so smoothly as this.”
“Nor with my Sigrid, but it may be that they see with the eyes of men and women now, instead of with the eyes of willful children. I am sanguine for now.”
“Indeed, lawspeaker, you are sanguine always.” And so Gunnar’s friendship with Bjorn remained firm and untested.
Now folk sat quietly at their steadings through the summer, and it was not such a prosperous summer as many had been recently. It was the case that folk expected the Icelanders to make much of Larus the Prophet, or at least expected him to make much of them, but in this summer, he began talking of other things besides the ship and the pope of Jerusalem. In this case, he said, his informant was the Virgin Herself, who had come to him three nights running and given him suck from Her breasts, and these were full of milk that tasted like the sweetest honey and ran like water into the fjord. And this was also the case, that it seemed to him that She had taken him onto Her belly like a newborn baby, and cradled him there. And this is what She told him, that a great devil lived among the Greenlanders, someone who walked as a man but had the parts of a woman as well, and the feet of a bear. This devil, She said, was seducing folk away from goodness and no man had any resources against him. If he gave you food, the food would poison you and turn your thoughts to evil. If he spoke to you, his words would enter your ears and buzz around your head like bees and spiders. If he gave you water, the water would be as fire, burning the Godliness out of you. If he turned his hand to your homefield or your sheep, then his touch would corrupt them until the coming of the Lord as is written. Simple clods of dirt would turn into teeming corruption, worms would crawl out of the nostrils of the sheep, meat from these animals would turn rotten in the mouth, milk would sour, but give off the odor of death, not of sourmilk. The Virgin’s eyes, Larus said, had been spinning circles of icy blue and Her embrace as tight as the clasp of a walrus, that crushes the life out of men.
Now it was the case that Larus had developed a certain following, mostly of women, it is true, and these women came to Larus Stead and sat about with Ashild and little Tota, and they listened to Larus embroider upon his tales, and at first they did nothing that might be called worship, for they were fearful of such a sin as kneeling outside church. Truly enough, they had knelt many days of their lives to say Hail Marys or Our Fathers, or such other prayers as the priests instructed them in, but now the thought of kneeling at Larus Stead, with their ears full of Larus’ visions, rather frightened them, and yet none of these women, or the few men who came with them, could make herself stay away. Ashild was a model for them, and little Tota, too, the one an innocent child who carried her trencher to her stepfather and bowed before him, the other a very figure of goodness, who served Larus, but seemed to direct him, too. “Let us have our refreshment now,” she would say, or “Larus must rest in his bedcloset for a while.” Larus said that the Lord and his saints had given her the perfect wifely temperament, for they had drained all discontent from her,