From the Mouth of the Whale

by Sjón

  THE RED POISON NEEDLE: a dangerous creature of the shore, slender as a piece of straw. It often lurks in wet seaweed, wriggling and writhing, with jagged stings which can pierce the flesh like a needle. It has been known to cause instant death to young people out gathering seaweed.

  I am swimming. Swimming with strong strokes of my arms, lying just below the surface, the moonlight glittering on my shoulders as they rise briefly from the waves. I turn my head from side to side, breathing in over my left shoulder, breathing out over my right. I kick the water with my feet, sending it foaming about my legs, splashing up from my ankles. I am out in the middle of the fjord, the open sea is ahead; on either side sheer snow-capped mountains tower over stony black beaches. Through the roaring of the sea I hear shouts and yells behind me but I must not slow my pace, I have no time to stop and check how fast the men in the boat are gaining on me. The sea is cold, the current strong, one moment carrying me swiftly forward, the next dragging me many strokes back – I have to know whether I have any chance of reaching shore before them. I stop swimming and tread water for a moment: they are in a trusty eight-oared boat, with a man to every oar and five on the look-out for me, two in the stern and three in the bows, all armed with stones except the fine fellow standing by the mast, balancing easily in spite of the waves. It is this man, Ari Magnússon of Ögur, his fist clenched on a stolen harpoon, who is directing the pursuit. The white breast of my shirt gleams as I roll over on my stomach and start swimming again. I hear a triumphant cry from the boat and a moment later stones begin to rain down around me. One of them hits my right shoulder, bouncing off with a dull thud, but I do not feel it, I am too cold for that. There is only one way to go and that is down. I fill my lungs and dive. Abruptly the world is muted, the strident calls of my pursuers replaced by the underwater hum, the sucking of the waves and my own effortful groans. I dive like an auk, flying through the water with great strokes, like a guillemot beating its wings in the clear shallows on a summer’s morning. Deeper and deeper, though the winter sea is not bright but a murky grey – deeper, yes, ever deeper – until I have dived so deep that the air seeks to burst from my lungs and the surface is now too far away. But instead of releasing my breath, I squeeze my throat tight and continue to swim down, though every muscle is on fire as if struck by a sledgehammer. Then the depths in front of me begin to pale; slowly but surely a feeble grey light is filtering up through the soupy sea, and the lower I swim, the brighter and livelier become the motes that whirl up through the water until they shoot past my eyes like sparks from an anvil, three thousand dazzling suns that sting my face like a sandstorm. I give up, abandon my dive. Righting myself in the water, I open my mouth wide, clamp my fists on my breast and shriek as the air is squeezed from my lungs: ‘Oh Lord, have mercy upon me …’ When the burning salt sea has ballooned out my body, filling me up to the lips, I am overcome by fatigue and begin to sink. I slip down through the watery greyness, as listlessly as a man picking his way through a bank of cloud on his way down a mountain. High above me, the eight turns towards the shore; Ari of Ögur and his war band have given up the chase. Suddenly it is as if a veil has been stripped from my senses. I can see far and wide through the bottle-green depths of the ocean, far out into the Greenland Sea and in along the bottom of the fjord. There, at the foot of the crag in the middle of the bay, right beneath my feet, is the source of the light: a heart the size of a bunting’s egg. It is carved from ebony, polished and girt about by thorns made of horn, with a bronze fire blazing at the top of the join where the two halves fit together – for the ebony heart is half open and inside is the source of light: a tiny crucifix, hung with gilded droplets and stamped with a silver cross. This minute object emits rays so powerful that they illuminate the dreary resting place of the man I have come to find: Peter the Pilot, whose earthly remains lie pinned beneath his sea-smoothed tombstone, a slab of basalt that his murderers threw over the cliff on top of him. His stone-grey hair swirls round his gaping crown where he was struck by the axe, his locks dancing with the deep-sea current like the seaweed entwined among his shattered ribs, which clutches with its weedy many-jointed fingers at the treasure on his gnawed-away breast. He will be able to show this sign at the Pearly Gates on Judgement Day while his tormenters stand empty-handed but for the blood of their victims flowing between their fingers. The moment my feet touch the silt of the seabed, the dweller of the deep stirs. He turns his battered head towards me and bids me good day, although it is past midnight:

  ‘Angetorre!’

  I return his greeting half-heartedly, for my errand here is never a happy one, muttering a low ‘Good evening’.

  My meetings with Peter the Pilot always begin the same way: he shoots out the tip of his black tongue, runs it rapidly round his lips, and says quickly:

  ‘Presenta for mi berrua usnia eta berria bura.’

  I answer sternly: ‘Neither warm milk nor fresh butter will be of any use to you here.’

  He sighs: ‘Long must a dead man wait for a bite to eat …’

  At this point the custom is for me to make the sign of the cross over us and say: ‘May the wait for a seat at Our Father’s table prove short for us,’ thus concluding the formalities. Only this time instead of concurring with the pilot’s words, I take out the little brown bundle of canvas containing the splinters of the Cross and hold it up for him to see before tying it to the cord beside the shining pendant. Peter watches me in silence, waiting until I have finished my task and am sitting on the rock beside him, before beginning to speak:

  ‘I am grieved that Señora Sigrídur is dead, my friend. I offer you my condolences …’

  I mutter my thanks.

  He continues:

  ‘Yet again the blow has fallen on the same trunk, yet again an innocent person has paid with her life for the support that you gave to me and my comrades, yet again you have been made to bleed for your compassion and courage – no doubt you must find it a perverse sort of gratitude and a poor reward for your good deeds to watch that man of blood growing fat in his high office while your loved ones, great and small, are gathered to the earth … Long ago you told me that Señora Sigrídur had praised you for refusing to answer Master Ari Magnússon’s call to arms against us defenceless shipwrecked sailors, and later for writing a true account of the cruel attack by your neighbours who followed the Sheriff of Ögur – saying that by this action you had kept alive the fine upstanding Jónas Pálmason who had captivated her in her youth.’

  ‘Certainly she was more impressed by this than by my famous deed of laying the Snjáfjöll ghost. Why, she called me the Devil’s muck-raker when I exorcised the evil spirit that Reverend Jón had, by his own heartless behaviour, raised up against himself …’

  ‘She was a good and just woman …’

  ‘And unsparing in her sense of justice. No doubt I deserved it.’

  ‘You showed courage by turning your back on the very men who had praised and flattered you most for the exorcism; you heeded the call of justice when you bore witness to the atrocities that the perpetrators were confident men would forget … And by putting your account on paper, you not only recorded the events as they truly occurred, but gave us withered corpses back our vocal cords that the war-frenzied peasants had torn from our throats with their blunt implements … You sided with the slain against their killers, you stood up to the evil … As we will testify on the Day of Judgement when the honourable couple, Señor Jónas and Señora Sigrídur, will be rewarded in full for their charity … Pardon …’

  A crab crawls out of Peter the Pilot’s mouth. He coughs and is about to speak again when another, larger crab crawls out. Peter spits up sand. When the third and largest crab begins to force its way out between his lips, it is clear that my meeting with the pilot is over. I kick against the seabed, shoot up from my dive and surface by the cliffs, where I heave myself out on to the rocks. The grey seawater spurts in spasms from my nose and stomach. I start awake: I am lying head down in bed by the hearth,
vomiting up my half-digested supper. It is still the longest night of the year.

  IV

  (Spring Equinox, 1639)

  The island rises … It emerges from the deep as the flood tide strips the waters from its shores … Fish flee the dry land, out to the dark depths … Shore birds, newly arrived, follow the ebbing tide, scurrying along the water’s edge, pecking around their feet … The tide-mark retreats rapidly, like a silk glove drawn off a maiden’s hand … A bank of liver-coloured seaweed glitters in the morning sun, swollen and vulnerable … Ever more is revealed of the neck of black bedrock on which the island sits … Seaweed flows down over its shoulders … All around me the world is turning green … Sap is flowing through the plants, swelling their veins … Grass that was dull and muted yesterday now ripples on the island’s head like brilliant green fire … The balmy breeze carries the promise of dandelions yellow as suns … Meanwhile the sea is sucked ever further from the island, swept from the shallows … The sparse white hairs lift themselves on my skull, blowing down over my brow and into my eyes … The breeze is freshening … It is blowing from the east, and just a touch to the south, into Trévík Cove … Conditions will soon be perfect for what is to come … I crawl forward to the edge of the Gold Mound and look over … Today I am hoping to see the island sing, to hear the sound of its form – to confirm that it is a string, pitched in harmony with its Maker … And why should it not be? Everything here was ordered according to the same rules as everything else that came into being in those six days; yes, even here one is in a harmonious place … It is easy to think this way when the wind sounds so gentle that it is hard to know whether the whisperings one hears are snatches of its conversation with the grass or addressed to oneself as it wafts past the ear with a soft, soothing murmur … For it cannot tell the difference between human beings and tiny flowers, as becomes apparent when it blows up a storm … Now, would it be better to stand here or there? At the highest or lowest point? Up on the Gold Mound or down by Gullbjörn’s Cave? Where the island draws breath or where it exhales? But what is that plaintive bleating? I cannot be doing with that … Where is it coming from? Baaaa … I leap up and peer around … A sheep is trapped on its back down by the Elf Knolls … A stranded black sheep … Baaaa … The symphony is about to begin … It must not be ruined by the bleating of a stranded sheep … I run down off the mound, if you can call it running, and ramble through the tussocky dells, if you can call it rambling … I reach the knolls somehow … The sheep is thrashing around on its back, kicking wildly in the air, and glares at me with malignant yellow eyes before trying to strike at me with its cloven hooves … I approach the animal from the side and roll it back on to its legs again … It was its own fault that it got into this mess … What was it doing grazing in a place like this? The sheep lowers its head, grunting angrily as if I were somehow responsible for its plight … There is nothing as wrathful as the glare of a sheep that believes it has a grudge against one; no animal seems to believe as unconditionally as the sheep that we govern the world and that every mishap that befalls it should be laid at our door … The sheep snorts … I snort back … Abandoning the idea of butting me, it bounds away towards the shed … Never mind the music of a whole island, I must make amends for the animal’s behaviour … I clasp my hands over my stomach:

  Hidden the house, the mound is green,

  wherein the hayfield’s treasures sleep.

  Well may you prosper, race unseen,

  now as ever, rewards to reap.

  Hear me, gentle yet potent queen,

  elfin lady, dwelling in the deep,

  be forgiving now, as you’ve always been,

  to an old man and a foolish sheep.

  I hear a voice recite from the mound:

  Welcome, well-spoken one,

  sage and civil-tongued,

  thanks to thee

  and thine I will give,

  a reward in return

  when need requires.

  I bow down before her … Then return to my investigation … I scan the land from the Gold Mound to the cave: in a direct line between them are two rocks, the middle rock and the southernmost rock, then the Elf Knolls where I stand, and the pond, like the stops or keys on a divinely crafted instrument … Below them lies the tunnel through the island, a shaft bored from east to west … Now there will be a great sucking and gurgling as the sea empties from the mouth of the tunnel under the mound, which is covered with water every day of the year except today … The pipe is clear …. A herring gull flies in from the sea on gleaming wing, riding over the island on the easterly breeze; first over the Gold Mound, then over the middle rock, then the southernmost rock, now the Elf Knolls … It is right over my head … I follow its course, spinning on my own axis, catch it reflected in the pond, see how all of a sudden it swoops to the mouth of the cave … What can the bird want there? Ah, yes, there it gains an updraft under both wings, which lifts it in an arc high into the sky where it hovers, its white-feathered breast towards me, brilliant in the morning sun like a dove over the high altar … And now another puff comes from the same lung that elevated the herring gull to the clouds … Invisible lips of air are placed against the Gold Mound … They blow into the pipe … I hold my breath … The blast of air passes through the rock to burst out of the cave mouth on the shore, sounding the first note of the symphony … It is a low note … As if the island were joining in with the song … The ground vibrates beneath my feet … Small birds fly up … The sheep take fright … A newly wakened spider curls into a ball … Seals slide into the sea … The note reverberates long and loud … I close my eyes and my soul begins to vibrate along with it … And I feel a sensation of mingled awe and joy … Then it falls silent as suddenly as it began, the wind drops … I grow cold, my body is covered with gooseflesh, even the taut skin of my leathery scalp … The black sheep stands quite still in the pen, every muscle tensed … He chews uneasily, glaring accusingly at me, as if I have played this noisy trick on him … No, my lad, that bookish old fellow Jónas Pálmason has not the power – though some may think he can twist great forces round his little finger with ease … Look, sheep! Here is one who has amused himself by becoming the plaything of the air: the gull has allowed the noise to carry it still further, still higher, to where its silhouette now circles … The grass begins to whisper again … I start to run; my legs may be decrepit and bent but they will do for a short sprint, such as from here down to the shore … Once there I walk slowly out on to the sand, picking my way prudently over the slippery rocks, taking care not to tread on the slimy seaweed, and station myself where I can see into the cave, bracing myself … Here the sound must surely be loudest … The odour of seaweed carries from the darkness inside, the lapping of pools on the cave floor … Water drops with a hollow sound on the rocks, the weed …. And in some places the plinks have a brighter tone, as if they are falling on something more precious than wet stone … There, the old people say, Gold-Björn’s treasure is supposed to lie hidden … Directly below the Gold Mound itself is the gold that gave him his nickname … A chest full of bright metal … Fire of the sea god Aegir, tears of Freyja, mouth-fee of the Giant Thjazi, and more gold … For a long time I wanted to go in search of it, but no more … I have been deprived of life’s luxuries for so long that gold no longer seems desirable to me unless I can make it myself … But here I have no means to do so … It seems to me that the roof furthest inside the cave is blue with light … There the tunnel dips, running down towards the sea, so it must simply be daylight … The smell of the sea plants grows suddenly stronger … The breeze becomes a gust … It sounds as if black-headed gulls are shrieking in the cave … It is the birds which swarm out by the Gold Mound at the other end of the pipe … I call in reply: ‘Come, wind, come …’ My voice echoes … The gulls fall silent … And the gale replies … A mighty roar hits me, heavy as a waterfall … It fills my senses, bellowing in my ears, parching my eyes with salt, whining in my nose, bellying out my gaping mouth
… I stagger but manage to stay upright … I bend and sway like a blade of grass so that it cannot knock me off my feet … It snatches and tears at my clothes, stretching them over my body … Breeches and coat-tails whine and crack … Then it drops slightly … A little more … A little lower …. And lower still … Then hops abruptly up to the fourth rung again … Sketching a ladder of notes … Leaping up and down the scale … Sometimes it blows gently and calmly … Stopping perhaps for a long pause on a single rung with one airy foot poised, as the other runs wildly up and down the scale … All at once it has three feet, five … It howls and shrieks, murmurs and plains, laments and whistles … There are animal sounds and human speech, whole choirs sing in chorus, whole herds call their names … What a symphony … It is as if the east wind is bringing me all the songs of the Earth at once, bellowing out the saddest dirge together with the most joyous paean … As if he had swept up the news on his journey around the globe, as he passed over continents, wildernesses, forests, nations, farmlands, villages; as he leapt through palaces and houses, under tables and benches, in and out of dark corners, up skirts and down collars … Before sweeping all he has learnt high into the sky – just beneath the ethereal sphere, where the ravens go to gather news of events that have not yet occurred … There he kneaded all the news together into thick bales of cloud which he floated like post bags across the sky, sending them hither and thither, adding to them until they were so swollen with story and incident that they were ready to burst, and then he had to find them a way back into the world again … He rakes together the clouds in the sky, gathering them like a haystack in an embrace so vast that the wind can only just peep over his right shoulder … He heaves the cloud-stack to and fro, keeping a look-out for a suitable place to set it down … Then an islet rises in the north at low tide, with a hole through its middle … The wind opens his jaws wide, stuffs the clouds in his mouth, packing them into his cheeks, knits his brow, stoops down to the islet and lays his mouth to the eastern side … His name is Euros … And he blows … And plays … And blows …