Time passes, and the moving days have ended.* Yet still the woman totters down to the beach every morning, wanting to make a journey. Finally some steersman gives up and takes her on board with a curse, puts her ashore by Grótta,* and rows away. She creeps over kelp-grown rocks and sea-beaten stones until she reaches a grassy bank. Well then, she’d crossed over the sea. The mountains of her home, Akrafjall and Skarðsheiði, appeared hazy blue in the distance.
She set out, following the promontory toward the mainland. The spring day was bright and calm, and she walked up the slope at the center of the cape to have a look about. Cottages cowered amidst the tangle down below the flood-line. On the far side of the fjord south of the cape the sun gleamed off the residence at Bessastaðir, where the king’s men held sway; on the cape’s northern side were oblong buildings on low, flat skerries out in the sea and a merchantman at anchor: the trading station of Hólmur.* Distant blue peaks on the mainland flanked smaller mountains whose darkish slopes were patched with strips of green. She walked along the coastline for most of the day, crossing over stony hills and soggy marshland until she came to a river that fell in two brisk branches into a bight, the stream gleaming white and blue in the sun. She knew there wasn’t much chance that she could cross over by her own strength. A foot-steady individual in the prime of his life might have taken off his socks and waded over, but she was an old woman. She decided to sit down and recite a penitential hymn composed by Reverend Halldór from Presthólar. She took a fishtail from her pouch and gnawed on it as she recited the hymn, and drank the river’s blue water from the palms of her hands as she tried to remember what verse came next, because the Lord stipulated that prayers would be granted only when they were said correctly. She took care, moreover, to recite the hymn in the right tone, drawling at every other line and easing off at the end of every verse, sadly, like a finger slipping over a sounding string.
As she finished reciting the hymn a number of men leading a packtrain crossed over from the east, and she begged them tearfully, in Jesus’ name, to take a miserable wretch eastward over the branches, but they answered that there were already enough vagrant old women on the other side. After they were gone she stopped weeping and carried on with her penitential hymn. Then another packtrain arrived from the west, transporting stockfish. She begged them tearfully to help a poor old creature, but they were drunk from brennivín and said that they would beat her senseless with their whips if she didn’t turn around and go back to wherever it was she’d come from. Water splashed over the woman as the packtrain crossed. She stopped weeping and recited more of the hymn.
Early in the evening a shepherd girl from one of the farms west of the river came riding out to tend her sheep on the islet between the branches. The old woman promised to ask God to bless the girl if she would help her cross over. The girl said nothing, but stopped her horse at a convenient knoll. The old woman climbed up behind the girl and they crossed over both branches, then the girl stopped the horse at another knoll and waited while the woman clambered off the horse’s back. The woman kissed the girl farewell and bade God bless her and all her offspring.
Day had passed into night.
On the farms to the west of the heath there were crowds of people everywhere, especially men leading packtrains to the south coast to procure stockfish; some of them had traveled long distances from the east. There were also solitary travelers, wealthy landowners who had business at Bessastaðir or with the merchants in Hólmur, and these took priority with regard to lodging. All sorts of other folk had congregated here as well, especially those who were forced to spend their lives endlessly roving in search of sustenance, which ill luck guaranteed to be always on the other side of the mountain. This group included paralytics and other invalids, poets, branded thieves, eccentrics, half-wits, girls, preachers, hunchbacks, fiddlers, and lunatics. One family came from out east in Rangárvellir, a man and his wife and five children; they’d squandered their livelihood and were on their way to their kinfolk south in Leira in the hope of fish. One of the children was at death’s door. They reported that the carcasses of itinerant vagrants lay scattered before men’s doors throughout the entire countryside to the east. Nineteen thieves had been branded at Rangárvellir in the winter and one hanged.
The men from the packtrains had to stand guard over their loads of stockfish wherever they took lodging for the night. Tramps hung about on the footpaths and walls and provided various types of entertainment for anyone who wanted to listen, while the lepers reached out with their bare fingerbones and praised God. One particular fool stood up on a gablehead and performed a dismal routine that he called “The Ballad of Breaking Wind,” and he even charged small change for it. A preacher put on a woman’s riding frock and intoned for his in-laws, in the voice of the bishop of Skálholt and through a hardened cod-gill, the so-called Gospel of Mark in the Midhouses, about two daughters and two casks of whale suet: “. . . whoever dishonors my daughters at Yule will not get to see their glory at East-e-er.” Then he switched to the voice of the bishop of Hólar and sang: “The mouse jumped up to the altar and bit the candle with his long gray tail and his dark red sho-o-oes.” And in his very own voice he chanted:
“Drat it, confound it, and fie,
What a piteous creature am I,
The loon waddles off in retreat,
Flapping on fumbly fe-e-ee-e-eet.”
No one wanted to see or hear the fiddler, so they cut his fiddle strings.
Finally the old woman asked the way eastward over Hellisheiði and said that she was thinking of continuing on that night.
“Where’re you going?” somebody asked.
She said she had a trifle of an errand with the bishop’s wife in Skálholt.
The men stared at her vacantly. One said:
“Didn’t two vagrant old crones die out on Hellisheiði on Easter night earlier this spring?”
Another said: “The bailiffs have forbidden any further transport of beggars eastward over the great rivers.”
A third, who seemed to be a beggar himself, said: “The tightwads to the east are in the mood for murder, my dear lady.”
As evening wore on clouds gathered and it started to drizzle. The woman’s feet were sore. The birds twittered gladly and vigorously in the luminous night and the warm moss covering the lava was so lushly green that it illuminated the mist. The woman walked for so long that in the end her feet were no longer sore, but benumbed. She crept into a small hollow near the path and tried to rub some life back into them, then ate a bit of hardfish and recited a penitential hymn.
“Oh, well then, so what if they did get caught out here on Easter night, the two old dears,” she murmured to herself between verses. “Oh, well no, so that’s the way it was, you poor old creatures.”
In a moment she was fast asleep, her chin resting on her knees.
Toward evening of the next day, when she’d come as far east as the Ölfus River, she found that everything she’d heard south of the heath was true: travel permits were being demanded of dubious individuals at the ferry landing. Waiting in a swarm of terns on a sandbank at the edge of the river were six vagrants, amongst them one corpse. The ferryman said no. One of the vagrants said that he’d tried to beg for milk at the nearest farm, but was told that the salmon were sucking the cows. He said he’d offered to tell a story in exchange, since he was a poet and knew more than a thousand stories, but at this time of year no one was willing to part with even one bowl of skimmed milk, no matter what was being offered in return.
“What would Gunnar of Hlíðarendi have said if he’d seen other such folk?” said the poet. “Or Egill Skallagrímsson?”*
“There was a time when I worked as a silversmith for the gentry,” said a blind old man who was holding the hand of a blue-eyed boy. “Now I have to beg for a fin.”
This comment was somewhat out of place, like most of the things that blind men say, and the entire thread of conversation, if there ever had been one, snapped. The beggars
stared long and silently at the glacier-colored streamwater passing by.
The corpse was of a young girl, and it had been placed neatly on the sandbank, but no one claimed responsibility for it. Someone said that she’d been insane in the life of the living. If one lifted the hair from her forehead one could see that she’d been branded.
“Two ravens have been croaking for a long time east of the river,” said the blue-eyed boy who was leading the blind man.
“The raven is the bird of all the gods,” said the poet. “It was the bird of Óðinn and the bird of Jesus Christ. It will also be the bird of the god Skandilán, who has yet to be born. Whomever the raven rends attains salvation.”
“And the tern?” said the boy.
“The Lord gave all the earth and all the sky to some birds,” said the poet. “Lie down flat on your back like me, young man, and study the flight of the birds for yourself, but do not speak.”
The glacier stream continued to pass by.
A distended-looking beggar, his liver most likely swollen, had been sitting there on the sandbank with his legs stretched out, looking down between his feet. Now he lifted up his sluggish eyes and said:
“Why silver? Why not gold?”
The blind man answered: “I’ve also worked gold.”
“Why didn’t you say gold then?” asked the distended one.
“I’m more fond of silver than gold,” said the blind one.
“I’m more fond of gold,” said the distended one.
“I’ve noticed that very few people are fond of gold for itself,” said the blind one. “I’m fond of silver for itself.”
The distended man turned to the poet and asked:
“When’s silver ever mentioned in poetry?”
“If you were an unbetrothed maiden,” said the poet, “which would you prefer to marry, one man or thirty whales?”
“Is this supposed to be a riddle, or what?” asked the thicker beggar.
“My girl married thirty whales,” said the poet.
“From evil company, parce nobis domine,”* said an old, ancient-mannered woman, and she turned her back on the men and wandered off.
“She didn’t want me,” said the poet. “And at that time I was at my best. There was a famine then, like now. That same spring thirty whales were washed up on the beaches of a seventy-year-old widower in the countryside.”
“Gold isn’t precious because it’s a better metal than silver,” said the blind man. “Gold is precious because it resembles the sun. Silver has the light of the moon.”
Two important-looking men who crossed over from the east took charge of the blind man and his boy and they were ferried over. One man took charge of the popish old woman and even the distended man turned out to have a leprous brother in Kaldaðarnes. But no one would claim responsibility for the poet, nor for the corpse, nor for the woman come lately from Skagi. She wept for a while and beseeched the farmers in the name of Jesus, but it was useless; they boarded the ferry and the oarsman locked in the oars. Three remained behind, two living, one dead.
The poet said: “You’re new to begging, good woman, if you think that God’s mercy still exists. God’s mercy is the first thing to die in an evil year. What can be done to reduce the tears in Iceland? Not only let beggars be borne across the rivers by oar, but let them glide over the seas on wings.”
The old woman said nothing. She set off up the riverbank, carrying her walking stick and her pouch, thinking that there must be someplace where the bellowing streamwater would be only a little rippling brook, where a child might step over without wetting its feet.
The poet and the corpse were left behind.
6
The old woman’s destination, Skálholt, the episcopal seat and site of the learned school, offers with its throng of turf-covered dwellings an inhospitable welcome to unfamiliar travelers. It was so long into the spring that the mires had dried up. Folk there paid no heed to strangers and did not return the greetings of petty visitors, but passed by without asking the news, like shadows or speechless wraiths in dreams. All the same, it was invigorating to breathe in the vapor that emanated from the place, a blend of smoke from cooking-fires, the odor of fish, and the stenches of manure and refuse. The turf huts numbered, without doubt, in the hundreds, some lopsided and battered, their roofs nearly bare, others burly-looking, with smoking chimneys and grass-grown roofs, practically new. The cathedral towered up and over these scraps of earth and turf, a tarred wooden building with a belfry and tall wedge-shaped windows.
She guessed her way to the bishop’s residence. This was a large, garreted house, also built with turf except for one lime-washed wooden wall facing the church. In this wall was a row of four-paned windows midway up from a comely paved footpath. One could see into the residence from the footpath. Glinting within were tankards and pots made of silver, tin, and copper, elegantly painted chests, and magnificently carved woodwork, but no one was to be seen inside. Double doors closed off the entry—the outer door was weatherworn and ajar, but the inner door was made of select wood and carved with dragons, and had a copper ring at the lock. The windows above the entry were within her arm’s reach, with only two panes in each and brightly colored curtains that came together in the middle of the windows at the top and were drawn out to the sides at the bottom.
Now when the traveler had finally reached her destination and stood on the footpath before the bishop’s residence in Skálholt, with nothing left to do but knock upon the door, something like irresolution came over her; she sat down on the path before the bishop’s windows, her knotty feet stretched forward off the flagstones, her chin sunk down to her chest. She was tired. She sat there unmoving for some time before a woman walked up and asked what she wanted. The old woman lifted her head slowly and extended her hand in a gesture of greeting.
“Vagabonds are not welcome here,” said the other.
The old woman dragged herself up and asked after the bishop’s wife.
“Beggars must report to the steward,” said the churchwoman, a vigorous widow, authoritative and contented, in the prime of her life.
“The bishop’s wife knows me,” said the old woman.
“How could the bishop’s wife know you?” said the churchwoman. “The bishop’s wife does not associate with beggars.”
“God is with me,” said the woman. “And that’s why I can speak to the bishop’s wife in Skálholt.”
“All vagabonds say that,” said the churchwoman. “But I am certain that God is with the rich, not with the poor. And the bishop’s wife knows that if she spoke to wretches then she would have time for nothing else, and the parish of Skálholt would fall to ruin.”
“All the same, she came to my hovel last year and spoke to me,” said the old woman. “And since you think that I’m poor, good madam, whoever you are and whatever you’re called, then let me show you something here.”
She reached into her blouse and drew forth her silver coin, which was wrapped tightly in a kerchief, and showed it to the churchwoman.
“The bishop’s wife is not at home,” said the churchwoman. “She rode west with the bishop, home to her mother to refresh herself after this dreadful spring. They found corpses lying here on the pavements sometimes in the mornings after folk had gotten up for work. She’s not coming back before the middle of the summer, after the bishop has completed his visitation out west.”
The hand holding the coin sank slowly back down and the visitor looked tremblingly at the parishioner. It had been a long journey, and her tongue had gone dry from reciting Reverend Halldór of Presthólar’s penitential hymns.
“They’ve probably finished beheading men at the Alþingi by now,” she said finally.
“Beheading? What men?” asked the churchwoman.
“Poor men,” said the visitor.
“How should I know when miscreants are beheaded at the Alþingi?” said the churchwoman. “Who are you, woman? What do you want? And where did you get that coin?”
&nb
sp; “Where might the aristocrat from Copenhagen be now, the one who came with the bishop to Akranes last year?”
“I suppose you mean Arnas Arnæus, my dear? Where else would he be but with his books at home in Copenhagen? Or maybe you’re one of those women who expects her comforter to arrive on the Bakkaship,* haha!”
“And where is the slender maiden whom he brought last year into our hovel at Rein?”
The churchwoman pointed to the windows over the door and lowered her voice, though this particular subject always worked to loosen her tongue. “If you’re asking about Lady Snæfríður, the magistrate’s daughter, my dear woman, you’ll find her sitting here in Skálholt. Some say she’s betrothed, and even more, that she’s going to have to learn how to mingle with countesses. One thing is certain—they’re teaching her Latin, history, astrology, and other arts far beyond the reach of any other woman who’s lived in Iceland. She herself made it clear this spring that she was expecting a little something to arrive on the Bakkaship, and that there was no way she was going to go west with her sister despite her protests. But the Bakkaship arrived over a week ago and no one has heard anything new. On the contrary—those who were prowling around here late on winter evenings are now riding up and down the pavements here in the bright light of day. And the schoolmaster’s hardly ever sent for anymore. Climb high and fall far. That’s the way the world goes, my dear. I was taught that everything’s best in moderation.”
She led the old woman to the upper floor of the bishop’s residence, to the bower of Snæfríður the magistrate’s daughter, who was sitting there embroidering a girdle, clad in flowery silk. She was extraordinarily slender, with almost no bosom, her golden appearance of the previous autumn having long ago given way to a delicate paleness, though the azure of her eyes was even more vivid than before. Her countenance was joyless, her glance distracted, her lips closed so that her natural smile was denied; indeed, it appeared as if the expressive quality of her mouth had been wiped away by unnatural effort. She looked out from a kind of incredible distance at the grimy, decrepit image of a person who stood in her doorway with an empty pouch and bruised and bloody feet.
Iceland's Bell Page 6
