The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [293]
This service was given by Sira Andres, who was but seventeen winters of age, and although his ways were more congenial than those of his father, he knew even less of the mass, and mumbled a great deal more. He, too, liked to make his sermons on the subject of the wages of sin, but the wages he predicted were less dire than those of Sira Eindridi, and sometimes he got lost in his text, which afforded folk a small degree of relief. This service was shorter than the earlier one, and after it, folk went to their booths and their chambers to sleep.
Now it was the case that Sira Pall Hallvardsson was to say both masses on the second day of the feast, and folk were pleased with this, because he knew all the prayers in the right order, and never mumbled, and the communion he gave was considered to be holier than the communion given by the other two, and so all of the second day there was a great deal of shriving going on, and many folk were in and out of the cathedral all day long. The first of these, who came into the darkened church long before dawn, discovered Larus the Prophet before the Crucifix, and he stayed there all day, prayers on his lips, but he was not shriven.
On this day there was a morning service, followed by a daylight feast, to be followed by an early evening service, and then folk who lived nearby would go off, and in the morning the rest of the folk would go off. It happened before the morning service that the Icelandic woman Steinunn Hrafnsdottir went out of Gardar hall and began wandering about below the buildings, not far from where the boats were drawn up on the strand, and her husband, Thorgrim Solvason, went out after her, and when he caught up with her, they fell into conversation. Thorgrim said, “My Steinunn, your sister requires your presence, for indeed, she needs you to arrange her headdress for her.”
“She has arranged her headdress for many mornings before this one without my help.”
“Even so, she asks after you. And this is true, as well, that it is not seemly for you to walk about like this, for there are many folk at this feast who are unknown to us.”
“You and Thorunn think too ill of these Greenlanders.”
“They are rough folk.”
“Nay, they are ill-looking, and dress oddly, in furs and such, but they are no rougher than any other folk we might know, in Norway or in Iceland.”
“How have you knowledge of this?”
Now she cocked her head and looked him in the eye. “My Thorgrim, I, too, have lived in Greenland for a year, and I, too, have spoken with Bjorn Bollason and his sons and other such folk as are about Solar Fell. May I not make up my own mind on this score?”
“It seems to me that a woman must be guided by her husband and her sister in such things.”
“Thorunn is three winters younger than I am.”
“But she is of a different and more cautious nature. She saw that you slipped out of the service last night and how long you absented yourself.”
“Indeed, the place was very close.”
“If you had found me, I would have taken you out, and we could have strolled about together, as a husband and wife should do.”
“We may do that now, my Thorgrim.” And so they did so, down the hill and back up it, and soon enough it was time for the service, and they went into the cathedral and found places to sit.
Now Sira Pall Hallvardsson began to pray, and then he gave a sermon of thanksgiving for the bounty of the Lord in all things, and these were some of the things he spoke of: the children of the Greenlanders, whose faces shine about every farmstead like purple stonebreak at the feast of St. Jon the Baptist, the houses of the Greenlanders, so thickly turfed that two or three seal oil lamps keep them warm in the winter; the reindeer, who