The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [306]
“Indeed, there is a matter that I might consult Gunnar upon.”
Birgitta looked at him sharply. “This is not so small a matter as you are making it out to be.”
“I know not what to make of it, myself.” And now Jon Andres sat silently, for he knew not how to speak of Kollgrim to his mother, and he hoped that Gunnar would take her off. But it did not appear to occur to Gunnar to do such a thing, for Gunnar was staring off toward the ice in the fjord. Birgitta followed his gaze for a moment, down the slope to the strand and the foggy blankness of the ice sheet, and then she said, “My boy, I have seen all of these things long before this. When Johanna was within me, I looked across the strand, just at the place where we are looking now, and I saw all of my five children vanish before my eyes, and now I see from your coming that the fate I thought to avert will come to pass.”
Still Gunnar was silent, and so Birgitta said, “My boy, you must speak what you know. No man reports that his wife is well when she isn’t, and so the trouble must be from Kollgrim.”
“He has been with this Icelandic woman, Steinunn Hrafnsdottir, when she was staying apart from her husband at the cathedral, and they have been discovered. Now these folk are preparing a case against him, but I have been unable to learn the nature of the case. It does not seem to me that they will settle for lesser outlawry, or anything less than death, if they can get it.”
Now Gunnar spoke. “Is Bjorn Bollason the lawspeaker in on this case?”
“The husband and the shipmaster were staying at Solar Fell, and now some other Icelanders are there as well. The woman and her sister are there, too.”
“Bjorn Bollason is my sworn friend. It seems to me that we may rely upon him.”
“If we may get him apart from the Icelanders long enough to confer with him, this may be the case. But the tale is that he clings to them even more tightly than before.”
“That may be appearance. A Greenlander must know where he is living, mustn’t he? And what of Kollgrim? Does he attend to the gravity of this pinch?”
“Helga says that he thinks only of the woman, and cares not what happens to him.”
Now Gunnar looked at the other man, and said, “But it seems to me that little can happen to him, for folk do not think so much of this sin as they once did, and if the Icelanders have not killed him before this, they will not get at him now. Even if he is outlawed and must go into the waste districts for a while, what of it? His real home lies there, anyway.”
“Even so, and knowing all of this, Helga is much cast down about him. The case does not fit the facts, it seems to me. We must go about to our friends and neighbors, and prepare them for this case, for it seems to me that the Icelanders have a plan. Perhaps there will be a fight at the Thing, for they are well armed, with iron weapons, and Icelanders always resort to fighting if they can, especially if they have some advantage, like these weapons.”
“That is their reputation. When you were a child, some Icelanders were in Greenland with a damaged ship, and they fought with the Greenlanders for two winters about driftage rights, and in the end they burnt the ship to the waterline rather than leave it to the Greenlanders without sufficient payment. They are a hard folk.”
“Then we must meet their hardness with our own.” But the fact was that neither man knew just how this might be done.
Now Bjorn Bollason and Bolli Bjornsson began going about on skis every day to farms in Brattahlid district, where Bjorn had many friends, but Gunnar Asgeirsson and Jon Andres Erlendsson were not so well known, and at every farmstead, Bjorn