The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [354]
Sira Andres did not think much more about this ceremony after that, and he stayed another two nights, and he found the Thorkelssons very pleasant company, and agreed to return on clerical business sometime during Lent, and his journey to the southern parishes. But it happened that when he got back to Gardar, he was sitting at his evening meat with his father and Larus the Prophet, and it occurred to him to relate, for their entertainment, what the old woman had said to him, and what he had done with the earth and the stone and the water. And Sira Eindridi said little, only went on with his meat, but Larus the Prophet looked up suddenly, and then looked away, and after a few moments, he asked Sira Andres to repeat what he had said, word for word, and Sira Andres did so. After that Larus fell silent, and said no more for the rest of the evening.
Sometime after this, in the course of the spring, another thing happened in the southern part of Vatna Hverfi district that came to Larus’ attention, and that was this. A cow that had been bred at Hestur Stead, to the Hestur Stead bull, and then had been returned to her owner, gave birth to a calf with five legs and three eyes, and indeed, part of a second head growing out of the first head. And this calf lived as a normal calf might, for some days, until the farmer decided that it would bring him ill luck, and so he slaughtered it. But the birth of this weird beast was indeed unlucky to the cow, for she sickened and died not long after the calf was slaughtered, and the farmer was not a little annoyed to lose both, since the cow had been one of his best milkers, and now folk began to talk idly of whether their own cows might suffer the same fate if they were bred to the Hestur Stead bull, who was a fine bull, but had just come into maturity, and had not produced many calves other than this one. One might go to the Ketils Stead bull, or one of the other bulls in Vatna Hverfi, or indeed, one might take one’s cows in a boat to Gardar, and breed to the Gardar bulls, which were the finest in Greenland. The talk went about, and the breeding season came on, and men could not decide what to do. The Thorkelssons made a number of jokes about the bull, saying that in his first year he had produced one and a half calves per cow, so surely in the second season every cow would twin, and every farmer would be that much richer, and then the talk subsided, and all the farmers made their own decisions about which bulls to breed to.
About this time, Larus was found insensible again, this time on the greensward outside the cathedral, and when he was revived, he spoke at last, privily, to Sira Eindridi, of this saint, Lazarus, who came to him and spoke to him and filled him, he said, with the darkness of the sin that was to be found among the Greenlanders, and because of this calf business in Vatna Hverfi district, Sira Eindridi and Larus spoke at length, long into the night, of what these portents might mean, and in the morning, they called Sira Andres to them again, and asked him about the words that the old woman had said to him, and what he had done with the earth and the stone and the water and the corpus of Ofeig Thorkelsson. And between them, Sira Eindridi and Larus the Prophet decided that they were being guided by the saint, Lazarus, to see that this woman, Borghild Finnkelsdottir, was a witch, for she was said to have been the nurse of Ofeig Thorkelsson, she had known this old ceremony without hesitation, the Hestur Stead folk were cousins to the Gunnars Stead folk, who had produced the known witch, Kollgrim Gunnarsson, and now the Hestur Stead bull was itself cursed.
What happened in their conversation was this, that Larus set the evidence before Sira Eindridi in his usual mild way, just as he had often related the substance of his visions in the past. And Sira Eindridi looked at him, and at length he said, “Men of God must