Northern Fiction - The Saga of Freydis Eiriksdattir
Chapter 2
“The little bitch takes advantage of your foolishness. You are too fond of her and therefore way to indulgent and generous. You therefore think you will receive fair measure for fair treatment. Ha! Never expect gratitude from a menial or love from a slave. If you want to be loved get a dog. You still have to feed it breakfast, but it is much less annoying at night. And, there feet are warmer. Ask me, I should know!” Bringing the horn greedily to her lips she gulped down the cool liquid thirstily. With a sigh of satisfaction, she observed to herself: “Ale is much more than just a break-fast drink. How it calms the spirit and eases the joints.” Looking at the scattered impliments once more, she said: “Tend to this yourself and let it be a lesson, you foolish old bitch. Let the girls screams wake me, for now I would rest.” She had been fasting, eating barely enough to keep alive for several weeks, in anticipation of this eve.
She leaned back against a pile of embroidered woolen cushions, filled with masses of soft eider down. A young girl came running to draw off her calfskin boots, another bondswoman laid a heavy polar bear robe over her mistress’ knees and tucked it about her mistress’ legs. Freydis ranked long curving fingernails slowly through the thick white pelt. Sighing: “Leave me now. This business of Agdi’s has been a tiring night’s work,” she was asleep with the closing of her eyes.
Norembega was a town with many small narrow lots crowded with abutting houses and shops built of sod or wood and topped with looming roofs of thatch. At the roof-peaks the planked gable-ends, all carved into serpents, dragons, and horses heads, stood fronting the streets. After his leave-taking from Freydis, Father Hrolf hurried along the wooden walk-way, sensing rather than actually seeing, the eyes of the many town’s folk peering out from between their shuttered entry’s. The young priest slogged across the heavily muddied and deeply rutted broad-street. Then he took a short-cut down a long narrow alley pathway roughly paved with woven-wattles. He started to walk faster as he neared the church that towered above the village buildings and began muttering to himself, “Whatever shall I do? Freydis so powerful that a reprimand does me great danger and her no good. What else could I say to her? How could I demand a penance from a non-believer? It is not the first time she has baited me, this daughter of Eirik the Red. She might have been outcast and damned for all eternity by her brother Leif, but even he had treated her outrageous sins and crimes with circumspection and discretion. Who could disciple her?”
It was just Underne, the morning hours of Terce: 9-12 A.M., by the time he reached Hundagata. At Dog Street corner he could see clearly see the gateway to the palisaded yard within which stood the tall stone church named after the great sainted King Olaf. In life the king had been a figure of contention, but after death he had become a symbol, perpetuus rex Norvegiae, and his memory kept alive the conception of a united Christian Norway for the ages. Though he was never officially canonized Olaf had been declared a saint on August 3, 1031 and his body placed in a casket on the high altar of St. Clement in Nidaros.
The walled compound stood in marked contrast to the homely dwellings of man and beast at Norumbega and within the walls were lined with a row of sheds and workshops that formed a village of there own. The earliest Christian missionaries to the Norse had arrived with both Christian doctrine and stone edifices that reflected the influence of Anglo-Saxon England and clearly enunciated the distinction between the transitory things of this world and the eternal realm of God. The stolid structure of Saint Olaf’s Church loomed over the surrounding buildings. Following the fashion set by many of the earliest churches of Norway the church was built in the architectural style known as Romanesque. The chancel was rectangular, the few small arching windows were place irregularly in the walls of unhewn stone, and like the corners of the building framed with courses of square-cut soapstone from Greenland. Dwellings for the priests and acolytes were to the south side of the church. The range of buildings formed a cloistered courtyard and the overhanging eaves served as a covered ambulatory. A round tower, resembling the structure on the seal of the city of Kongheel, stood to the north of the church. A low porch surrounded the foot of the tower and the structure rose level by level seeming to soar heavenwards from its octagonal base of arches firmly supported by stout columns of masonry. High up the wall was pierced by windows oriented toward the harbor and the sea beyond. A steeply pitched wood shingled roof terminated in gables decorated with dragon head figures and over them a gilded cross proclaimed the triumph of Christ to the closely built town below.
The church of Saint Olaf was richly decorated with fabulously carved posts and doorways in the Celtic-Norse style of interwoven vines, fantastic beasts, and an eclectic mixture of pagan and Christian imagery. The depths of the building were illuminated by the flickering flames of a hundred candles that touched the walls in thousands of points of glittering light and were reflected by the tiny hammered bits of pure gold foil that accented the mural decorated walls from the stone paved floor to the high arched ceiling. The light that penetrated the dark recesses painted, after the eastern Byzantine fashion, a deep earthy red ochre symbolizing the blood of Christ. The somber bloody red formed a background for polychrome Byzantine style murals rendered in startling greens, gloriously blues, dazzling white.
The artwork placed less emphasis upon the crucifixion and suffering of Christ, found in the western Latin tradition, and a greater importance upon the message of Christ’s love that reflected the strong visual influence of the Eastern church on Norse imagery. Over the center of the church was rendered Christ Pantokrator, the Ruler of the World, and the apse held the image of the Virgin and Child. The side vaults displayed the invisable host: Archangels and angels. The smaller arches and wall spaces along each side of the church were filled with pictures of the church fathers and scenes from the life of Christ unfolding the entire Christian message for the illiterate congregation. Above the main altar at the east end of the church a picture in brilliant hues and sparkling gold of the Risen Lord filled the entire wall in in awesome splendor. Upon the west wall was rendered the Last Judgement with the damned and suffering depicted in the ghastly realism more typical of the western artistic tradition of the Catholic church.
Flanking the altar a sculptured stone baptismal font and a carved oak lectern for the priest were embellished with a bas-relief of tendrils, vines, and martyrs in symbolic poses relating how each had attained sainthood. The high altar held a great Bible with a gem studded and gold fitted green leather binding. Standing on the altar war a large crucifix of oak and the skrud above the altar was a hanging made from a piece of brownish-purple silk that had come all the way from the Byzantine east. A niche below the altar held a small footed gold reliquary that reputedly contained sawdust from the carpentry shop of the blessed Saint Joseph the foster-father of the Lord’s
A side chapel was dedicated to Saint Blaise and its walls were decorated with paintings of the martyred Armenian Bishop of Sebastia who had died in 316 AD. The saint gained fame by miraculously saving the life of a boy who was choking on a fish bone. Blaise thereby became the patron saint of throat ailment sufferers and therefore to Hrolf this blessed man of God seemed especially important to a preacher who occasionally was afflicted with tonsillitis. The young priest devoutly believed that the saint’s fishbone story held a special relevance for people in a seaboard settlement. Hrolf particularly admired the illustration of the key event in the saint’s life which showed Saint Blaise tenderly holding the rather frail looking youth in his arms while engaged in extracting the offending fish bone from his throat. Hrolf viewed the lad depicted as having swooned away quite decorously as combining just the right balance of passive spirituality and latent carnal lust. It was an image that he personally found most inspiring. Another scene in the mural showed the sainted Blaise being tortured to death by the Romans and depicted Blaise’s agonies with an almost Iberia realism. The martyr had his skin shredded with the iron combs used for brushing burrs out of sheep’s wool, an ordeal which had earned him designation as the patron of wool combers. Several of the Hrolf’s parishioners seemed inordinately attracted by the depiction of the saint’s martyrdom and expressed in rather specific terms their curiosity regarding Blaise’s demise. Several of the hard working mariners and crusty old seamen seemed to possess an amazingly intimate familiarity with the technical aspects related to the saint’s fate, others had expressed a surprisingly sincere appreciation for the artist’s uncanny ability to capture the saint’s expressions of dire anguish under the graphically depicted ministrations of his tormentors.
On the western side of the church was a long stone building that opened onto the walled garden. Hrolf was both a priest and a monk, like most Benedictines since the year 800 AD. and he lived in one simple room that was really little more than a hermit’s cell. A crucifix adorned one of the walls and the furnishings consisted of no more than a narrow pine framed bed with a straw pallet one small table and two oak stools. One shelf held Hrolf’s entire library of three books: A Holy Bible; a Lives of the Saints; and, a book on the writings of the Saint Augustine and Saint Benedict. Though barely in his twenties, his responsibilities encompassed far more than that of parish priest, and he managed all the properties of the church at Norembega. Even at the western most outpost of the Holy Catholic Church there were numerous workshops and several outlying farms that comprised the churches demesne. Therefore, Hrolf was also called upon to be the overseer for the community of bondsmen and peasants who toiled in the fields of the Lord. Hrolf was also the one link that held the Norembega church to a remote mission deep inland where the good Father Sven had dedicated himself to bringing Christ’s message to the skraelings. Two other priests, Father Toke and Father Jon, who tended to the daily affairs of the parish, shared the monastic quarters at St. Olaf’s with Hrolf, and four boys lived there as well who helped in various capacities and assisted when the priests served the Mass.
Entering the dwelling Hrolf discovered his favorite acolyte, a slender youth with flaxen hair and cornflower blue eyes, lounging before the hearth in the fire-hall. The seventeen year old was really a man in an age when a boy who had attained the age of twelve was practically considered an adult, a youth of fourteen could keep his own slave girl, and at the latest by fifteen was off on his first long voyage for trading or to war. Bjarni Herjofsson was twenty years old at the time he became the first recorded European to sight North America and he was already retiring from a successful career of sea voyaging. “Aran. Here Freydis sends you this!” Hrolf said as he gently cupped the young man’s face, then tenderly kissed him full on the lips which the youth accepted, and returned.
Responding to the affection offered, with a firm hug about the shoulders of the priest, he then sharply queried his mentor: “I thought you went to condemn her to Hell for that funeral of Agdi’s. Now you carry kisses from her to me!” Then, laughingly, “I must confess, Father, I much prefer your kisses to the thought of any directly from the lips of that evil witch direct! God knows, I cringe at the sight of her. She’s even scary from across the town square.”
“It was quite an experience swapping spittle with her,” Hrolf conceded. Then still holding Aran about the waist, he said: “I spoke with her. She is a most dangerous quirt-tongued harridan. I could not shame her with accusations of heresy: She revels in her righteous pagan heritage. Then she gibed at my love for you before I was dismissed. After being put into my lowly place by the great lady I was treated more like a tiresome child or unneeded servant.”
Aran, casually: “She knows of us then?”
Hrolf simply observed: “Its a small place Norumbega. Still, she knows everything that happens. It must be her ravens! She treated our love lightly enough. It was not throw up to me in anger nor used as a threat. After all, how could she say too much, this is a sailor’s town. It is common practice at sea to have a boon-companion to share and sleep with and men’s shipboard sealskin sleeping bags are made for two. They may not speak of it, but making an issue on that score would put half the young warriors in Scandinavia to the blush!” He walked to the table and sat on the stool. “I must write to Father Gnupson at Gardar and also to the bishops in Iceland. They alone can deal with this situation. Would that the Holy Father appoint a bishop in Greenland soon.” (Greenland was still part of the diocese of Iceland. Not until 1124 did King Sigurd Jorsalfare [Jerusalem Farer: the Crusader] established a bishop in Gardar with both a palace and a cathedral near Eirik’s original farm and the seat of secular power at Brattahlid. The king acted then in consequence of receiving a live polar bear as a gift from the settlers. In 1153 the Church in Greenland was placed under the Archbishop of Nidaros [Trondheim] in Norway.)
The youth asked: “Who will carry such a letter from here to Greenland, Hrolf?”
A nod and a slow shake of the head: “A point well taken Aran. There are but few seagoing vessels at Norumbega, one less than usual now that Agdi’s Sea Mew is no more, perhaps twenty knorr in all. The seamen here are mostly Freydis’ people, or they sail with Thorir or one of his henchmen. The ship, Serpent, that arrived a few days ago with the skald Snorri on board is probably the last outlander’s vessel for this sailing season, but I for some reason I am unsure of the captain and the crew. Something is unusual about them, though it is hard to say what. And now, with summer gone, it’s unlikely that any other vessel will be here until next Spring. Then of course there might be sixty or seventy ships come to Norumbega for the market fair and there will be little difficulty getting a secret message away undetected.”
Aran leaned close to Hrolf and in a conspiratorial tone said: “Then, we must bide our time until the Spring. Things move slowly. Freydis is very old is she not?. Perhaps the Lord will attend to her, then a letter will not be necessary. Ahh, say . . how old is she anyway?”
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