The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [59]
Now the bishop stood and made his blessing over the feast, and his voice, though unusually low, was still penetrating, and his eyes, when he looked out over the assembled guests, blazed forth with their usual light. “Lord,” he breathed, “bless especially the bread and wine the safe arrival of Kollbein Sigurdsson has brought us. And bless Kollbein himself, who is the honored representative of the great King Hakon, his wife Queen Margarethe, and the old King Magnus, who sometimes seem to forget their loyal subjects in Greenland, but this year have remembered them so fittingly. And we beg, oh Lord, thy special blessing also for the meat of the reindeer from the great hunt on Hreiney, which reminds us all of your abundance everywhere in creation. For the other, more usual fare, we also ask thy blessing, for this is the meat that thy souls live by, from day to day, sometimes plentiful and sometimes spare, but always sufficient unto our needs.” And at this point the bishop seemed to fall back into his high seat, and the voice of Sira Jon rang out, “For this and all our blessings, O Lord, we thank thee.” Here Margret craned her neck for a look at the bishop, as did everyone around her. But the bishop weakly motioned all to begin, and soon the hall was resounding with the clamor of the feast.
Soon it seemed to Margret, with the passing of the basins and the bread that the hall had grown very hot and smoky, and that the voices of Gunnar and Birgitta beside her were at once too loud to bear and too soft to be understood, for truly she was like her uncle Hauk in this, that she did not care for feasting and large groups of folk. She stood up and found her way outside.
The great Gardar homefield, hard and glistening with frost, spread down to the strand and the pale, luminous ice, and Margret took some deep breaths of the fresh air. And now she turned and discovered Skuli approaching, and he was dressed in his blue and red court dress and his hair was neatly done up in blue and red bands. He seemed to Margret very fair, as fair as he had seemed to her many years before, when he had stayed at Gunnars Stead and carved for her a spindle in the shape of a grinning face, which she shrank from using, but kept with her in her pocket for many years. As he approached her, he seemed to her much fairer than Olaf Finnbogason, and that distant time much closer to the present than all of the intervening years.
Now Skuli came up to her and stood near her, and said, “Margret Asgeirsdottir, it seemed to me that you grew pale in the hall, and left the feast suddenly. Are you ill? Have you been made ill by the bread? Indeed, it is ill enough bread.”
“Nay.” Now she turned away from him and looked out over the Gardar homefield, toward the giant cowbyre, where many Gardar cows were cozily walled up, waiting for spring. At this, Skuli stepped back and said in a more usual voice, “Gardar has prospered in the years since the coming of the bishop, though others have not, I know.”
“It is true that others have not, and folk lay the blame here and there. But it seems to me that the bishop is like a storm or an act of God, whose coming might be for good or ill, and I have no bitterness against him, though my Gunnar may. It is something not often talked about.”
Now, as they looked, servants came out of the storehouses, carrying hay to the cowbyre on large hides, dragging them over the frozen ground. Skuli remarked that the Greenlanders’ way of transporting feed still amused him, but Margret interrupted him. “Know you the tale of Olaf’s return to Gunnars Stead?”
“Nay.”
“It happened one day that this Audun, who is now a priest, came from Gardar to get Olaf, who was to continue his studies for the priesthood and be made a priest by the bishop, and Olaf had to go away after many years at Gunnars Stead. On the first day of Olaf’s departure, our folk milled about like sheep, not only Gunnar and Birgitta, who was but a child then; I myself barely remembered how to serve the meals and stir the whey,