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smoothed the coverlet and untangled Sigrun’s gown, made sure there were no knots in her clothes. The door and the window to the steading were open, and the women walked in and out with their spinning. Sometimes Ingrid offered the laboring girl a warm drink of ground dulse mixed with some other herbs. She slipped a small knife under the straw of the bedcloset, to cut the pains. The afternoon went on, and toward suppertime, Ingrid reached into Sigrun and felt the baby’s head with the tips of three of her fingers. The servingwomen ran to get a clean sheepskin for catching the baby, and Ingrid sent for Nikolaus the Priest from Undir Hofdi. Sigrun had ceased screaming, although anyone could see the contractions under her gown. But they seemed not to be a part of the woman in the bedcloset, whose eyes were almost closed, and who let the warm hearty seaweed mixture dribble out of the corners of her mouth nearly as fast as the servingwoman could pour it in. All the women were full of sighs now. Night fell, and Nikolaus the old priest came after his evening meat and stood beside the bedcloset and prayed in a way that told everyone the outcome.
    The women held Sigrun up by the shoulders and the back to ease the passage of the baby, and she was utterly without strength. The baby was born, caught on the sheepskin, and wrapped quickly in a length of fine wadmal. It was not large at all, and it frightened Margret to look at it, with its slanting eyes and black hair growing all down its back. After it was born, Sigrun began to pour forth bright red blood, drenching her shift and the straw of the bedcloset, and then she was dead.
    The child was taken to Vigdis, one of the farm women who had given birth to a child in the late winter, and put to the breast, but Vigdis said that it didn’t know how to suck, and finally the women had to drip ewe’s milk into its little mouth through the shaft of an eagle’s quill. Nikolaus the Priest christened the baby Ketil and agreed that it would die.
    But the child did not die, as it happened, and Vigdis succeeded in feeding it full of rich ewe’s milk. Not only that, it passed two large black stools, and in all ways began to look more like any other child. Vigdis and her own baby, Thordis, who was fat and cheerful, moved into the steading with the new one. Now it was reported that for three nights running, the ghost of Sigrun walked about the farmstead and came inside to seize the baby. And so Vigdis placed her own Thordis in the cradle, and when Sigrun laid hands upon her, Thordis screamed lustily, and Vigdis leapt from her bed and wrestled the ghost to the ground, saying, “Sigrun, your child has been baptized in the name of Christ, and must live.” After this, Sigrun’s ghost departed from Ketils Stead, and Vigdis was widely praised for her resourcefulness.
    In Markland, meanwhile, the travelers were commending themselves on how well their journey had gone—fair winds, excellent hunting, and much timber to be found in those dark, dense forests, and the only signs of skraelings were at least a year old. Each night, the sailors sat about the fire they had made, and the Greenlanders sat about the fire they had made, but these fires were not so far apart that the two parties could not speak in a friendly way to one another, nor reply to observations the other party might make. Men’s trenchers were so full of roast meat that they could not eat it all, and all were content.
    One night, Thorleif asked what manner of beings these skraelings were, and Osmund Thordarson, the only man who had traveled to Markland before, replied that he had never seen skraelings in Markland, himself, but the tales of them were that they were large and fierce. Early expeditions to the Markland coast had seen much fighting. Surely Thorleif had heard of Karlsefni’s famous voyage, when men had hoped to settle in Markland and build farms there? Thorleif had not. The short of it was that Karlsefni found the land rich and