They went down the ladder and up into the choir. There stood the altar table, naked and bare, and on the stone slab were set many small boxes and cups of metal and wood and earthenware; strange little knives and irons, pens and brushes lay about. Brother Edwin said these were his gear; he plied the crafts of painting pictures and carving altar-tabernacles, and the fine panels which stood yonder by the choir-stalls were his work. They were for the altarpieces here in the Preaching Friars’ church.
Kristin watched how he mixed up coloured powders and stirred them into little cups of stoneware, and he let her help him bear the things away to a bench by the wall. While the monk went from one panel to another and painted fine red lines in the bright hair of the holy men and women so that one could see it curl and crinkle, Kristin kept close at his heels and gazed and questioned, and he explained to her what it was that he had limned.
On the one panel sat Christ in a chair of gold, and St. Nicholas and St. Clement stood beneath a roof by his side. And at the sides was painted St. Nicholas’ life and works. In one place he sat as a suckling child upon his mother’s knee; he turned away from the breast she reached him, for he was so holy that from the very cradle he would not suck more than once on Fridays. Alongside of that was a picture of him as he laid the money-purses before the door of the house where dwelt the three maids who were so poor they could not find husbands. She saw how he healed the Roman knight’s child, and saw the knight sailing in a boat with the false chalice in his hands. He had vowed the holy bishop a chalice of gold which had been in his house a thousand years, as guerdon for bringing his son back to health again. But he was minded to trick St. Nicholas and give him a false chalice instead; therefore the boy fell into the sea with the true beaker in his hands. But St. Nicholas led the child unhurt underneath the water and up on to the shore just as his father stood in St. Nicholas’ church and offered the false vessel. It all stood painted upon the panels in gold and the fairest colours.
On another panel sat the Virgin Mary with the Christ-child on her knee; he pressed his mother’s chin with the one hand and held an apple in the other. Beside them stood St. Sunniva and St. Christina. They bowed in lovely wise from their waists, their faces were the fairest red and white and they had golden hair and golden crowns.
Brother Edwin steadied himself with the left hand on the right wrist, and painted leaves and roses on the crowns.
“The dragon is all too small, methinks,” said Kristin, looking at her holy namesake’s picture. “It looks not as though it could swallow up the maiden.”
“And that it could not either,” said Brother Edwin. “It was not bigger. Dragons and all such-like that serve the devil, seem great only so long as fear is in ourselves. But if a man seek God fervently and with all his soul so that his longing wins into his strength, then does the devil’s power suffer at once such great downfall that his tools become small and powerless—dragons and evil spirits sink down and become no bigger than sprites and cats and crows. You see that the whole mountain St. Sunniva was in is no larger than that she can wrap it within the skirt of her gown.”
“But were they not in the caves then,” asked Kristin, “St. Sunniva and the Selje-men? Is not that true?”
The monk twinkled at her and smiled again:
“’Tis both true and untrue. It seemed so to the folk who found the holy bodies. And true it is that it seemed so to Sunniva and the Selje-men, for they were humble and thought only that the world is stronger than all sinful mankind, and they thought not that they themselves were stronger than the world, because they loved it not. But had they but known it, they could have taken all the hills and slung them forth into the sea like so many pebbles. No one, nor anything, can harm us child, save what we fear or love.”