On the Cold Coasts

He had taken Gauti from her. He fell overboard during the seal hunt, and although they managed to pull him from the icy Hvalseyjarfjord just moments later, it was already too late—the brutal frost had reached his heart and it had ceased beating.
    “Haven’t you taken enough?” Sigridur cried out to the crucified Christ on the altarpiece and lit one wax candle after another with trembling hands for each loved one that He taken from her, until the church was fully illuminated. Surely He could see in that divine light that she had been punished enough, whatever she had done to deserve it. “Take the boy, but let my Ragna live and forgive my selfishness,” she whispered and clasped her hands together so tightly that the knuckles turned white, praying unceasingly in this manner until daybreak. “I shall endure anything, anything at all, if only you let my daughter live.”
    Whether due to Sigridur’s fervent prayers or the midwife’s incantations, the Lord showed mercy and allowed both to live, Ragna and the boy. Not only that, but the girl recovered astonishingly quickly. The midwife announced, however, that the new mother would scarcely survive something like that for a second time. She was so badly maimed from giving birth to her eleven-pound son that another birth would most certainly kill her.
    The girl named the boy after his father, who had sailed away across the sea. She let them decide everything else, but on this she would not budge, surprising herself as much as those closest to her with her own stubbornness. “Michael, like the archangel,” said Sigridur, when asked where the name had come from. Yet most of the people in the district guessed the truth and chuckled to themselves with satisfaction that the uppity folks at Akrar had received due penance for their own self-importance. It served them well to be brought down a notch, what with Thorsteinn being given the post of lawman, and by Jove if he didn’t covet the office of governor of the Norwegian king as well.

    “According to the Apostle Paul, he who sins must be punished before the entire congregation to invoke fear in others,” said His Grace, Bishop Jon Tofason, sternly. He made the remark when it became clear to him that the husband and wife of Akrar would not follow his advice and place Ragna in the custody of Thorunn, prioress of the Reynistadur convent, and along with her those worldly goods that were her rightful paternal inheritance—specifically Hvalsey, a highly prosperous tract of land in the Eastern Settlement of Greenland.
    Normally only major sinners such as fornicators and criminals were made to suffer public indulgence, but the bishop would not budge from his decision. This even though Sigridur argued that her daughter had been taken by force and was moreover ignorant of her sins due to her young age and lack of maturity. She asked that her churching take place at the Akrar church. Ragna, however, dashed her mother’s hopes in that regard when the bishop asked if the seafarer had forced her into intercourse. She dared not tell a lie; her list of sins was long and severe enough as it was. And so she told the truth: that she had willingly lain with the youth, adding that it had given her pleasure, which was the final straw in the mind of His Grace Jon Tofason.
    The churching took place exactly forty days after Michael’s birth, and it fell upon the feast day of Saint Peter during Great Lent. There were many people in attendance in Holar cathedral, even more than might be expected at the freezing cold and windy beginning of Goa, the third month according to the Icelandic calendar, in late February. The ground was pale with a thin veil of snow, and there was the occasional snowdrift, though not enough to stop churchgoers from joining in the procession around the church before the service. The snow crunched beneath the feet of the congregation, an icy fog hovered around the muzzles of the horses in the cold, and massive icicles hung from the tin roof of the cathedral.
    Ragna waited near the church doors after the people had entered, as was common practice. To her relief she noted that she was not the only one to be churched that day. Alongside her waited Gudridur Aladottir from Thufnakot, who had given birth to her eighth child shortly before the Feast of Saint Paul. Her worn garments attested to her poverty, but she bore a headdress denoting her status as a married woman and in that respect was more finely dressed than