by Caroline Lea
‘How have you . . . What of Olaf?’
There was a low laugh, and my heart clenched at Pétur’s voice. ‘We planned to give him a concoction of Katrín’s,’ he said, ‘but she couldn’t find the herbs she needed.’ He chuckled. ‘So I smacked him over the head with a rock.’
‘Is he . . .’
‘Still breathing. Leaning against the door, like a sack of dead fish. But I will not stay for when he wakes. I’d rather not share your executioner’s block, Jón.’
‘There will be no block.’ Katrín’s voice was hard and, even in the darkness, I could feel her anger. ‘By morning, you will be miles away.’
‘I . . . Where could I go?’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Pétur said. ‘If I am found, I don’t want the knowledge of your whereabouts to be cut and burned from me.’
‘You won’t travel with me?’
‘My face would be our death warrant. I will always look too much like that villain Pétur, from Stykkishólmur.’ He grinned at me, a quick flash of his teeth in the darkness. ‘Alone, with a longer beard, you may survive.’
‘But you . . .’ My stomach dropped. His face would be his own death warrant, after what he had done for me. ‘I cannot let you –’
‘It is done already. Rósa and Katrín will claim innocence and will be ready to attend to Olaf and feign concern when he wakes. It will seem I sneaked you out through the wall while they were distracted at the door. And Katrín will happily send Egill’s men hunting after me rather than you – is that not so, Katrín?’
I did not want this for him, but I could not possibly voice the despair I felt, at thinking of him being hounded across Iceland because of me.
‘Now we must part ways,’ Pétur said. It was impossible to decipher his expression in the darkness. He pulled a cloak about my shoulders and pressed a sack into my hands. ‘Some things Rósa took from the croft for you.’ Into my belt and my boot, he placed two knife blades.
‘You must have a weapon too,’ I protested.
‘I have four.’ I saw the gleam of his teeth again in the dim light. ‘Now hurry.’
I pulled Rósa into a quick, tight embrace. ‘Forgive me,’ I muttered in her ear.
Her face was damp, from tears or the rain, and she nodded silently.
‘There is coin in the loft space,’ I said. ‘Enough silver for you to return to Skálholt.’ She stiffened slightly in my arms, and I quickly added, ‘Only if you wish. The croft is yours. Egill will try to take it from you, but you can defend your right to it before the Althing. You may stay or go, as you please.’
‘I . . . Thank you, Jón.’
I forced a smile. ‘See, I am the broad-minded husband now!’
She gave a choking little laugh, then pressed a stone into my hand. I glanced down at it and, in the spill of moonlight, could just make out the trace of a runic marking. ‘For protection,’ she murmured.
I nodded and turned to Katrín: the set of her jaw betrayed her simmering rage at how I had wronged Anna, at all the many ways in which I had been unable to save her, and at the lies I had told. But she clasped me tightly and muttered, ‘You can make this right. There is a debt owed to Anna in Thingvellir.’
‘I know it.’
‘Hurry, before Olaf wakes,’ Pétur urged, tugging at my hand. We began to run up the hill, towards Helgafell, towards the open heart of the country.
The pain in my side slowed me, and Pétur slackened his pace to match mine. We said nothing. What words for such a moment?
I wished I had revealed my longing years ago. So many breaths of buried silence, painful days, filled with yearning and fear. And even now, knowing I would never set eyes upon him again, I could not lay my heart bare. Better never to speak, never to know.
I could not name my soul and watch it trampled by the sickened contempt on his face.
I once saw a winged insect – it looked like a moth, but was more delicate and of gorgeous colour, as though it had been painted by a monk who had tired of illuminating manuscripts and decided to decorate God’s other handiwork. It fluttered onto a nearby bush. I watched it for breathless moments as it trembled, then flew again. I longed to examine this marvel more closely, so I picked it up, with the gentlest of fingers, only to find that its fragile wings ripped under my touch. When the creature tried to fly, it floundered to the ground, where it lay, beating those beautiful, broken wings. Finally, I had to stamp on it – it seemed cruel to watch it suffer. But ever after, I wished I had left it alone to fly unscathed.
I would not speak my heart, only to grind it beneath my heel.
When we reached the top of Helgafell, Pétur stopped and turned to me. ‘I know you will go south. I don’t want you to tell me more.’
‘Nor I you. Although,’ I could not look at his face, ‘nothing could make me betray you. Not torture, nor death.’
He sighed, then wrapped his arms around me and held me close – close enough for me to feel the thud of his heart in my own ribcage. His solidity was like the muscular curve of land. He touched his forehead to mine; we stood still for the span of four breaths. I closed my eyes, took the clean smell of his sweat into my lungs.
My heart was a shard of glass in my chest.
‘Fare you well, Jón,’ he said.
‘Fare you well,’ I whispered.
Now, squatting in my cave, waiting for my executioner to arrive, I am glad, so very glad, that I stayed silent. My last thought will be of that embrace, of the delicate-winged longing that hung between us. I am thankful I did not crush it with words.
There is a sound from the mouth of the cave. I tighten my grip on the knife and squint into the darkness. Is that a blacker shadow moving? I blink, but the dimness only deepens.
Then I am certain I hear it: the whisper of a muffled exhalation. I do not wait, but leap forward, knife blade ready. My hands grip cloth and skin; I wrap my fingers around a throat. I draw my knife back to strike.
‘Stop!’
I hesitate. The voice is familiar, but it cannot be . . .
‘Let me go!’ the man wheezes.
And I do. And I fall to the ground.
The knife clatters onto the floor. It is impossible. And yet . . .
‘Pétur?’
There is a cough and the scratch of flint, then a spark in the darkness.
Pétur’s face appears. Like me, he is bruised and bloodied and, when he smiles, I notice that one of his teeth is broken.
‘Let it be known,’ he mutters, ‘that I don’t wish to die by strangling.’
I launch myself at him before I think. I don’t care if he pushes me away. But he wraps his arms around me, as if he, too, is a drowning man, and I am a spar some kindly soul has thrown into a treacherous sea.
When he pulls away, his face is sober. ‘I see you have visited Oddur’s croft.’
I know that he is remembering the other two men on the beach all those years ago. And that Oddur’s murder reveals me as a vicious and violent thug, barely better than the men I have killed. I cannot meet Pétur’s eyes.
But there is no reproach in his voice, only tender concern. ‘Your face . . . Those wounds must be washed.’
I try to wave away his hand, but he draws out a small bottle of liquid – brennevín, by the smell of it – tips some onto his cloak, then dabs at my face. When I flinch, he holds my jaw with one hand. ‘Heaven’s sake, sit still, man.’
Pinioned so, I feel utterly safe.
‘I can’t tell you how I have longed to see you,’ he whispers, so faintly that I wonder if I have imagined it. But his words are the axe that shatters the ice within me. A tear trickles down my cheek. He brushes it away, then touches his finger to his lips.
‘You taste of the sea. And dirt.’ He grins, then gently cleans my wounds.
After he has finished, I use my cloak to clean his injuries. The worst is a livid cut above his left eye. I wash it tenderly – the thought of his pain hurts me.
He notes me wincing. ‘I cut the fingers off the
man who did it.’
I cannot tell if he is serious. I don’t ask.
‘Can you walk far?’ he asks.
I shake my head. ‘The struggle with Oddur tore open the wound in my belly.’ I lift my tunic.
He draws a sharp breath, swallows audibly, then cleans it with the last drops of brennevín. As he wipes, he says, ‘We must leave. You have trampled a path from Oddur’s croft to this cave.’
‘You must leave. I haven’t the strength.’
He nods slowly, then settles himself back on the floor, locks his hands behind his head and closes his eyes.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Waiting to die with you.’
I argue and curse him, calling him a fool and begging him to go. I almost weep as I try to push him from the cave, but it is like shoving the earth itself.
‘I will leave with you, or I will die with you,’ he says. ‘You choose.’
I hold my head in my hands, then exhale slowly and limp to the mouth of the cave.
He claps me on the back. ‘I was beginning to think you’d left your brain in Oddur’s croft, next to his.’ Pétur gives a wicked grin. Then he puts my arm over his back and, together, ruined and hobbling, we stagger up the hill, away from Thingvellir.
‘You are a good man,’ I murmur.
‘I am a devil. Haven’t you heard?’ The smile curls at the edge of his voice.
I stop and turn to face him. ‘Be serious. I am proud to have known you.’
Pétur purses his lips. ‘If you continue to speak like a man on his deathbed, I will have to beat sense into you. Don’t make me strike you, Jón – I am tired.’
As I turn to smile at him, I catch a movement from the corner of my eye. I squint into the distance. Two men, travelling this way.
Pétur follows my gaze. ‘Come. We must move faster.’
By mid-morning my wound throbs. I keep tripping and falling to my knees. Occasionally, we lose sight of our pursuers, but then they reappear. Each time, they are closer.
Finally, Pétur stops. For a moment, I think he will go on without me. But he lifts me, wordlessly, into his arms and continues to walk, cradling me. It must be agony for him. He counts through clenched teeth, as if trying to outstrip the pain.
‘Put me down,’ I gasp. ‘Go on without me.’
He shakes his head.
He has to stop often. Every time, I argue and try to walk, then stagger or double over with pain. Pétur picks me up and carries me, time and again.
And this is love, I realize. This broken-bodied stumble forward, one carrying the other in spite of exhaustion, pain and the glare of the outside world.
In love, every one of us is a cross, every one of us a Christ.
The thought is blasphemous, but I cannot find it in myself to care. I am suddenly awake. After a lifetime of floating frozen under the sea ice, I feel warm and alive, dragging myself forward, and being dragged, through the darkness.
Pétur carries me through the night. When we stop, a grey light is unfurling on the horizon. We can no longer see our pursuers, but they are out there still, closing in with every breath.
Part Seven
Bare is the back of a brotherless man.
Icelandic proverb from Njáll’s Saga
Rósa
Skálholt, December 1686
Rósa reins in Hallgerd at the top of the hill and gazes at the gaping stretch of land that she once called home. It seems smaller; the crofts are shabby and shamefaced.
Páll will have journeyed onwards days ago. When she tries to imagine her future without him, it is like staring out across an ice sheet. Perhaps he will have gone east. Perhaps he will return one day. Perhaps . . .
She closes her eyes and listens to the birds circling overhead. Ravens chattering – they will be ravenous after the freeze, but the thaw will reveal rich pickings.
She should have left Stykkishólmur sooner, but she had stayed for three nights after Jón fled, trying to summon the courage to tell Egill about Anna’s true fate. Maybe then Jón could return. Briefly, Rósa had imagined she could rewrite the past and the future, simply by telling the truth. She had pictured the quiet marriage she’d once hoped for: the gentle drudgery of daily tasks, of waiting for her husband to return home after a day in the field or at sea. She dreamed of a life that was dull, and uneventful, and safe.
‘Egill would not hear you,’ said Katrín. ‘It would not suit him to find that Jón did not harm Anna. He has ears only for Jón’s guilt.’
And she was right, Rósa knew: Egill had been furious when he discovered Jón had escaped, and had denounced both her and Katrín, refusing to believe that they knew nothing. He even offered to grant Rósa Jón’s croft, which was hers by right anyway, if she told him where Jón had gone. But she kept her lips sealed. Stykkishólmur was nothing but darkness to her now.
After three long, lonely nights, she decided to return to Skálholt. She was going home. To Mamma. She dared not hope that, one day, she might see Páll.
Rósa had tried to persuade Katrín to come with her.
‘My place is here,’ was all she would say.
And in the silence between the words Katrín would not speak aloud was the longing for her daughter, Dora, and the hope that she would return.
Rósa remembered the light in Katrín’s eyes when she learned that Anna had, however briefly, risen from the dead, emerged from the belly of the land like an elf. She knew it was not from Katrín’s hope for Anna alone, but the never-ending longing and the tiny grain of faith that any parent must feel for a missing child.
One day she will return.
So Rósa kissed Katrín’s cheek, saddled Hallgerd and rode south to Skálholt.
At night, she begged for shelter in barns, curling into the mare’s body for warmth. She ate dried fish in the saddle and drank from streams. Under the open eye of the arching curve of the sky, she felt very small and entirely free. It was as if she were watching herself from years hence. She could see the tiny speck of life travelling over the hills, could see her insignificance within that fractured world, the land that could conceal bodies, or spew them up, like a magician’s ruse.
As she travelled, she wondered: would Páll have waited the whole of three days, or would he have gone? Perhaps he would have told her mamma where he planned to travel. Perhaps, if she waited in Skálholt long enough, he would return. The pull of duty she felt towards Jón was an anchor: she was tethered, but secure. The uprooting hurricane of her desire for Páll left her dizzy and exposed.
Dangerous as it was, she couldn’t let him go.
Some loves are deep enough to dive into, deep enough for the total submersion of the self. Around Páll, Rósa knows that the rest of the world becomes a blur of velvet shadows and murky echoes. Yet she also knows that the love that cradles her body would steal into her mouth and nose and throat, filling her lungs until, mid-laughing breath, she would suddenly discover that she had long since drowned and was sitting on the seabed, staring up at the light, but anchored for ever by the size and weight of her longing.
As she travelled south, she ran her fingers over Hallgerd’s mane, and tried not to think.
And now here she is. Home.
And yet it feels so different, as if the shape of everything has changed in her absence. Or as if, like a stone that has been dragged free of the rockface, she has been battered by the suck and pull of the current and, returning to the rock that shaped her, finds herself too broken to locate the space that once enclosed her.
She digs her heels into Hallgerd’s flanks and the mare trots down the hill.
It is early and quiet; she reaches Mamma’s croft unseen.
Sigridúr is still sleeping; her snores fill the small baðstofa. In repose, her face seems old and frail: her mouth sags open and her skin is like crumpled parchment. But her breathing is easy, and her lungs no longer rattle on each inhalation.
Rósa feels a rush of relief and affection. She sits on the edge of the bed that once w
as hers, and presses a kiss into her mother’s wrinkled cheek.
Sigridúr’s eyes flutter open in alarm. Then she gasps and holds out her arms. ‘Rósa!’ she cries. ‘My child, I thought . . .’ And Sigridúr kisses her again and again, her frail hands trembling. ‘Why?’
‘I – I was afraid . . . for you. After the snow.’
There are too many other words and too many stories, but for the moment she closes her eyes and inhales safety. One day she will tell the truth, when she is sure that Sigridúr’s face will not harden – when she can be certain that Mamma will not think her a different person.
Some stories she will not tell. She will choose, day by day, which truths to reveal. And, gradually, the tales she tells will become truth. In this way, she will live with who she has become. She is a woman capable of violence. She is a woman who did what was necessary. She is a woman who has survived.
But the truth isn’t solid, like the earth; she knows that now. The truth is water, or steam; the truth is ice. The same tale might shift and melt and reshape at any time.
At this particular moment, Rósa simply fetches a bowl of meat stew to share, then climbs into bed next to Mamma. They huddle together for warmth, just as they used to.
That afternoon, she goes in search of Páll. Sigridúr said that he had returned days earlier, but that he wouldn’t tell her anything, other than that Rósa was safe.
He is still here! Rósa daren’t allow herself to hope for more than to see his face. But, still, a painful, burning anticipation shifts inside her as she searches for him.
She finds his croft empty, the rooms darkened, as if he has already left. With a lurch, she runs back out into the cold. She calls his name. The sound bounces off the mountains; they are remote and uncaring as she runs towards the river Hvítá, calling for him again and again.
People put their heads out of their crofts, whispering and nudging each other as she runs past; she doesn’t care. Because it is a raw hunger she feels for him. Not love, not want, but need. Like the desire for food, it is uncontainable. And she feels his absence as a blank white space on every breath as she calls for him: as if his name had been written alongside hers on some page in the Sagas, then scrubbed out, so that no trace remained.
