From the Mouth of the Whale

by Sjón

  ‘Just do as I told you and fetch your gear.’

  ‘But what about Sigrídur?’

  The stranger turned and Jónas saw his face for the first time. He backed away. The man had rather a small head with a face that narrowed towards the chin, a moustache and beard, and whiskers growing to the middle of his cheeks. Before his eyes he wore two glass lenses which sat in a frame which was fixed behind his ears. As Jónas leant forward to examine this contrivance more closely, the man shot out his left hand, caught hold of Jónas’s shirt and pulled the island-dweller close. Laying his mouth to his ear, he said quietly:

  ‘Sigrídur is standing in the hut doorway. You’re still caught up in your vision; that’s why you can’t see her.’

  Jónas looked round and saw out of the corner of his eye that it was true. There was nobody standing in the doorway of the hut. He lost his footing, the cramp twisted his guts again and he felt faint. He wanted to lie down, to curl up on the sand. The man tightened his grip on his shirt, held Jónas upright and whispered:

  ‘We’ll make sure she’s still here when you return …’

  With his right hand he opened the neck of Jónas’s shirt and, splaying his fingers, ran his manicured nails quick as a flash along the rib in Jónas’s right side – the fifth, whether one is counting from top or bottom – flaying skin and flesh to the bone, right round to the back where he snapped the rib from the spine, then jerked it vigorously until the front end broke off the cartilage that connected it to the breastbone. Jónas felt no pain in spite of the blood that gushed from the wound and ran along the man’s fingers and down the back of his hand to his wrist. The man brandished the bone under his nose. The rib was fattier than Jónas would have expected: the summer had been kind to him and Sigrídur. He had managed to lure away a nine-week-old seal pup from the colony that bred on the southern side of the island. It had made a good feast. In fact, they had eaten more of it than they meant to and cured less for the winter. Jónas was delighted to see how much of the seal fat had transferred itself from the pup to him.

  The man flung the rib-bone away:

  ‘That’s where you’ll find her!’

  The bone landed in the doorway of the hut and bounced from there into a bed of heather beside the path below, where it came to a standstill. The man released his grip on Jónas and, pulling out a white handkerchief, began to wipe the blood from his hand:

  ‘Hurry up now …’

  Jónas found his footing on the shingle and fumbled at the wound which had already healed, leaving nothing behind but a pink scar and a hollow where the rib had been. Having tied up his shirt points, he hurried to the hut. He stuffed stockings, undershirt, knee breeches, a woollen jersey, hood and mittens into his haversack. Writing instruments, whittling knives, blank pages, a small dice-shaped box of seal-bone and a pocket-sized book went into his satchel. This was all he had for the long journey ahead. He donned his leather hat. The man was standing beside the boat, ready to assist his passenger aboard. Jónas trod the path down to the beach. When he came to where the bone was lying in the heather he could not contain himself. Flinging himself on all fours he pressed hot, tear-soaked kisses on his rib:

  ‘Good and best of wives, my darling mistress, mother of my children, Sigrídur Thórólfsdóttir, may God bless you and protect you in your solitude, in the condition, unnatural to any woman, of living without male guidance … May He keep you and answer your prayers in your widowed state if pirates should take me as their prize … May He strengthen you in your anguish if you learn that I have been forced into servitude through the action of my enemies … May He comfort you if I am stabbed to death by brigands … May He wrap you in His great, merciful embrace should an evil sea serpent wind itself around my vessel and smash it to pieces, killing everyone on board and me as well … May He take pity on us and allow us to meet again in the wide halls of Heaven if, disgusted by mankind’s evil deeds, He decides to destroy His creation while we are still separated by land and sea, while you are here and I am there … May His fatherly countenance watch over you …’

  It grew suddenly dark and drizzle began to fall from the sky. The man ran to Jónas, raised him to his feet and, putting an arm round his shoulders, supported him down to the water’s edge where he helped him on board the boat, settled him amidships and made him hold on to the oar that stood upright there like a mast. With the other oar he pushed off from the landing place. The keel grated on the bottom, the oar-blade creaked. Finally the boat was free, rocking gently on the swell. Pulling in the oar, the man placed it parallel to the keel and took a seat on the stern thwart.

  The vessel made a south-easterly course into the swiftly falling dusk. They sailed without speaking. After a little while it occurred to Jónas that the wound in the Saviour’s side had been in the same place as that which was formed when Adam’s rib was removed. He was about to open a conversation on the subject but stopped when he saw that the man was nodding off in his seat. They could discuss it later. The dusk deepened. Jónas looked around and noticed that there was a little pennant bound to the top of the oar: a red wing on a white background. It was the handkerchief stained with Jónas’s blood, bearing the man’s handprint.

  The darkness was almost complete when the man stirred and pointed with the toe of his right boot to a long, tapering box which was lashed down firmly in the bow. It emitted a disagreeable rattling croak. He said:

  ‘That’s for Ole Worm …’

  At that the darkness turned pitch black, so black that it can only be compared to the dazzling whiteness that reigned at the outset of Jónas’s vision.

  In early September 1636 Jónas Pálmason the Learned was fetched from Gullbjörn’s Island and conveyed in secret to the south of Iceland. After five days‘ riding he was brought to the trading post of Bakki on the south coast and that same evening put on board a merchant ship which was due to sail on the morning tide. He did not know who was behind his transportation but their treatment of him was gentler than what he had been accustomed to from men in authority, and conditions on board were better than a convict could hope for; instead of being confined in the prison hold he was allowed to sleep with the crew. The whole undertaking was a mystery to him. Back when his trial for the book of sorcery that he had allegedly compiled, and the school of necromancy that he had allegedly run, had resulted in the severest sentence of outlawry, with the proviso that no one was to shelter or assist him in any way, Jónas had tried in vain to leave the country. He had trekked with his wife and children from one end of Iceland to the other, to wherever a ship might put to shore, begging a passage, but no one would take them aboard. Whether this was from fear of carrying a sorcerer or from malice, or else a conspiracy by Jónas’s enemies – who might be able to secure an even harsher penalty, perhaps even death, if he violated the terms of his exile – we shall never know, but this reluctance to allow him to comply with his sentence condemned him to outlawry in his own land for five long years, until without warning or explanation he was carried on board the ship which was now rocking him to sleep on the night swell in Bakki Harbour.

  At first light, as the ship was weighing anchor, another passenger was brought on board. Jónas woke up when a man with a canvas sack over his head was led through the sleeping quarters by two guards in the employ of Prosmund, the Danish governor of Iceland. After ordering the prisoner to sit on the deck diagonally opposite Jónas’s hammock, they removed his shackles and left. The new arrival moaned pitifully and winced as he fiddled with the knot that held the sack firmly in place on his head; his hands, blue from the irons, fumbled helplessly. Jónas rolled out of his hammock and loosed the sack from the man’s head. From beneath the canvas emerged a face with a fair beard and mournful blue eyes. It was his son, Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur Jónasson. Father and son fell weeping and wailing into each other’s arms, and wept together in the cabin for so long that a sailor eventually drove them up on deck, where they wept some more until they had almost wept away the terrifying but compelli
ng sight of the land disappearing below the horizon.

  Father and son sailed the seas and came safely to harbour.

  In those first few hours after he stepped ashore in Copenhagen, Jónas the Learned saw more people than he had hitherto seen in the whole of his life: more aprons, more hats, more boots, more chickens, more pigs, more horses, more wheelbarrows, more dogs, more soldiers, more cannon, more wagons, more roofs, more buildings, more windows, more doors. And also many things he had only ever seen in pictures: windmills and water pumps, towers and market squares, churches and castles, sculptures and friezes, trees and ponds, cobblers and tailors, cheese merchants and muleteers. He tried not to let any of it impinge on his consciousness, tried to ignore all the new buildings, for he longed above all to be carried away by the illusion that he had arrived in the realm of Gormur the Old, the ancient king of the Danes. The feeling had first begun to grow in him when they sighted the Faroe Islands during the voyage. At last Jónas was seeing with his own eyes something he had drawn on those maps of the world that he had been able at times to use as payment for hospitality or provisions when he and Sigga were on the run with their children. But instead of poring over paper, looking down from heaven as if with the eye of the highest flying bird, he himself was on the map. And he was seized by the conviction that when he set foot on Danish soil all roads would be open to him. For Jónas had reached the place where the white background on maps ends – that expanse which the draughtsman feels compelled to decorate with monsters and seahorses and floating polar bears to prevent the eye from growing bored of the ocean – he had reached land in a place that was strangely familiar to him, although hitherto he had known it only as his own handiwork, realised in birch ink and paint; faint, of course, to keep the place names legible. Being accustomed to thinking of the world as a picture that can be folded up and put away in one’s pocket, or a terse geographical treatise by a medieval historian, he had the impression that from where he was now it was but a short hop to all the main sites of history: south to Constantinople and the Holy Land, east to Sweden and Tartary, to Novaya Zemlya and Asia.

  But the sights that met his eyes were nothing to the assaults on his ears, for everything had its own attendant noise: rattling, cackling, shouting, banging, barking, jingling, neighing, belching, cracking, grunting, whining, clapping, and the thunderous footsteps of man and beast, running, limping, ambling, tramping. To be sure, Jónas could limit his field of vision by walking close behind Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur, eyes fixed between his shoulder blades – which he did despite his son’s constant complaints that he was treading on his heels – but he could not shut out the noise. He could not block his ears since both his hands were full. In one he was carrying a bundle of clothes belonging to their guide, a student from the south of Iceland who in return for help with his luggage was going to show them to a tolerable inn, while in the other he was holding the oblong box which reached from his fist down to his ankle. No, to have muffled the din of the city he would have had to pour wax in his ears.

  Jónas Pálmason the Learned was one of those people whose life is forever turning with the wheel of fortune. He had no sooner reached a safe haven than he was sent straight back out on to the stormy sea, and always in a leakier vessel than the one in which he had arrived. Father and son took rooms at an inn called the Sommerfugl, or Butterfly, which Jónas nicknamed ‘the Summer Snipe’ after the harbinger of summer on his island; a respectable lodging for decent men and a sign that Providence was apparently prepared to handle him and Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur with silk gloves from now on. Indeed, his stay at the inn was so delightful in comparison with his exile on the island or being tossed at sea on the merchant ship that for the first week he could not be persuaded to leave the house but lay all day long in bed, haltingly reading a recent edition of Aesop’s Fables. Besides, he was fairly insulated there from the hubbub of the city. Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur on the other hand dashed all over town, working to resolve their case, which was the purpose of their journey after all: to obtain a royal writ dismissing the charges against them. He went hither and thither among those of their countrymen who he had reason to believe would be well disposed towards him and his father, asking their advice on how best to bring the matter to the attention of the king, for it would take no less than a handwritten, sealed writ from His Majesty King Christian IV to induce the judges of the Icelandic Althing to change their minds. And that was easier said than done. Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur discovered in addition that those responsible for their passage to Denmark were a group of scholars who had grown weary of Ole Worm’s incessant questions about this Jónas the Learned, who the Danish professor was convinced possessed a vast fund of knowledge about the ancient runic alphabet. For six years they had given him the same answer: that little was known of this Jónas beyond the fact that he was continually on the run from the authorities, a condemned man who infected all who came near him with his misfortunes. In the end, however, when Dr Wormius had contrived it so that the University Council was prepared to take up Jónas’s cause, and his son’s too if need be, his Icelandic colleagues could no longer ignore the requests of their brother in academia and personal friend of the king, so they had instigated a whip-round to pay for Jónas’s passage. And they sent Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur with him in the hope that the troublesome father and son would never return to Iceland.

  By dint of telling Jónas that one of the stalls by the harbour had a monkey on display, Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur finally managed to rouse his father’s interest in seeing more of Copenhagen than the inn and its garden. Ever since Jónas had read Aesop’s fable about the monkey and the fox, he had been puzzling over the paradox that the animal which most resembled man should be bested by a four-footed beast with apparently human wits. He now longed to see a monkey with his own eyes, having seen more than enough of foxes. But before Jónas the Learned could abandon his straw mattress for the monkey, the machinery of Fate creaked into action once more; news came to the ears of father and son that their enemies from Iceland had reached Copenhagen before them and already launched a campaign of slander. The fiends had compiled a scroll containing all the vilest and most vicious things that had ever been said or written about Jónas the Learned, largely derived from the polemic by Reverend Gudmundur Einarsson of Stadarstadur, commonly known as the Treatise but described by himself as ‘In versutias serpentis recti et tortuosi, that is, a little treatise against the deceits and machinations of the Devil who works sometimes by straight, sometimes by crooked ways, to ruin the redemption of mankind.’ The juiciest morsels of this stew were highly seasoned with warnings to the Danes not to take pity on a scoundrel like Jonas, let alone permit him entry to the country, or, perish the thought, risk sheltering scum like him in Copenhagen, where Mayor Juren had long been troubled by an obscure but agonising internal complaint for which he had undergone extortionately expensive and painful cures that had achieved little but to keep him hanging on at death’s door. But since it was commonly rumoured that witchcraft lay at the root of his disease, no cost should be spared in tracking down the culprit. In such an atmosphere it proved easy for Jónas’s enemies to sow the seeds of mistrust and ill will towards him. In consequence, one noontide in mid-October a group of constables stormed the inn and arrested Jónas in the name of the king.

  He was dragged before a magistrate at the City Hall where the slanderous scroll against him was read aloud and given credence, despite its mediocre composition – it lacked both tail and hind legs – and Jónas was sentenced to be transported back to Iceland. However, as there would be no ships now until spring, he was to remain in custody until that time. The magistrate paid no heed to Jónas, or rather to Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur on his behalf – since Jónas could not speak a word for the lump in his throat – who explained that he had come to Copenhagen to pursue his rights over a miscarriage of justice that had been perpetrated at the Althing, and, quite apart from that, he was a special envoy with a gift for none other than Olaus Wormius and
his errand had not yet been fulfilled. The learned professor would unquestionably confirm that Jónas was not the dangerous criminal described in the letter. Was the magistrate unaware that he was known as ‘the Learned’? The magistrate did not listen, any more than he had listened to the other defences that Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur pleaded on behalf of his father. In the end, however, it was the gift for the esteemed Rector Ole Worm that decided the matter by lending support to the idea of Jónas’s dubious character, for it was a live Great Auk.

  The creature had already caused alarm among the other guests at the Sommerfugl Inn, being unlike any bird they had ever seen, not only larger and more imposing but with a hoarse voice and a croak like the death rattle of a choking man. For the first few days Jónas had taken the Great Auk down to the dining room with him, placing the oblong box at his side, removing the lid and feeding the bird herring, which was plentiful in this country. The creature liked the food as much as the Danes did, though Jónas himself retched at every mouthful of this fatty inedible muck. After dinner he had permission to air the bird in the back garden. There was no danger of its escaping when he let it out of its cage, since it could not fly and was easy to corner. It was the Great Auk’s evening perambulations that had filled the onlookers with such misgivings; the manner in which the bird, if it was a bird, waddled about among the hens, upright like a mannikin, conjured up ghastly tales from the dark recesses of the mind: tales of people who had been lucky to escape alive from the clutches of witches on Walpurgisnacht, being left dumb, disfigured and a burden to themselves and their families for the rest of their lives, or rather the descriptions of the witches’ corporeal familiars. These were often a mixture of man and beast, not unlike the oddity that stood alone in the hen coop, bathed in moonlight, like a miniature version of a long-nosed witch swathed in a black cloak. For the bird was alone; the hens were all in their house, huddled together trembling, showing an uncanny fear of the malignant-looking visitant. At least the innkeeper’s testimony before the court went something along these lines when he was cross-examined about the conduct of the accused, Jónas Pálmason the Learned, during the fortnight he had stayed at the Sommerfugl Inn. No other witnesses were called; the Icelander was clapped in irons forthwith and transferred to a new and worse place, Gaoler Rasmussen’s House of Correction. There he discovered for himself that Copenhagen is like Lady Luck: capricious to many, but especially to Jónas.